Lin Y. Chan

Chan is a partner in Lieff Cabraser’s litigation group focused on antitrust cases against global cartels. She’s been with the firm for eight years. Before attending Stanford University Law School, she spent two years as a union organizer.

“It taught me the power of collective action, which is what we do as class action lawyers,” she said. “My interest in the law is about corporate accountability for wrongdoing. Antitrust is fascinating because our society is based on a free market and competition. But when companies try to break the rules, consumers are harmed.”

Also attractive, Chan said, is the international aspect of the cases she’s involved in. She is lead counsel for the indirect purchaser class suing two major manufacturers and distributors of telescopes. One is based in China; the other in Taiwan. Despite the tense relations between those nations’ governments, the plaintiffs claim the defendants colluded to unlawfully fix or stabilize prices, rig bids and allocate the market and customers to gain an unlawful monopoly in the U.S. market. In re: Telescopes Antitrust Litigation, 5:20-cv-03639 (N.D. Cal., filed June 1, 2020).

Discovery is in progress and a motion to dismiss is in the briefing stage. Chan said the pandemic has raised the question of taking live depositions overseas. “It’s best to do them in person, but travel restrictions and quarantine requirements are a problem.” She and her firm discovered the case, she added, when a telescope retailer sued one of the defendants with a monopolization claim and prevailed. “News of that trial is how we found out about the issue. It was enough to get us investigating.”

The fact that China and Taiwan are at odds hasn’t kept the defendants from colluding as the plaintiffs claim, Chan said.

That was also true regarding the class claims in another case where Chan is Lieff Cabraser’s lead attorney in its work as interim co-lead purchaser counsel for consumers suing over alleged antitrust violations in the lithium-ion battery market. Settlements of more than $113 million have been reached. In re: Lithium-ion Batteries Antitrust Litigation, MDL 2420 (N.D. Cal., transfer order Feb. 6, 2013).

Japan and South Korea, the home nations of most of the defendants, are historical antagonists, but that didn’t deter the battery companies from conspiring to fix prices, the plaintiffs contend. “These international issues don’t necessarily play out on the corporate level. Corporations can surprise you, and not always in a good way.”

Chan’s work in antitrust got a start under the mentorship of the judge she clerked for after law school, the late U.S. District Judge Damon J. Keith of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. “I worked as part of a larger family of law clerks, just as now I am in the collegial antitrust bar,” she said.

--John Roemer