Anna T. Pletcher

SAN FRANCISCO - Anna T. Pletcher, an antitrust partner who joined O'Melveny & Myers LLP in 2019, has been an investment banking analyst, a federal prosecutor and a candidate for Marin County district attorney.

Her varied career is rooted in her Puerto Rican family and her status as the first member to graduate from college. "My father was a small-business man who struggled," she said. "He told me to go learn about business. And my mom said to go to Wall Street. So I started my professional career on the trading floor for J.P. Morgan."

Next came a stint as an assistant chief of the Department of Justice's antitrust division and an assignment as special assistant U.S. attorney in the major crimes unit in San Francisco. She received three department awards for outstanding work as a prosecutor.

"My legal career has been about making change in public service at a large scale," Pletcher said. She ran for district attorney "after I got involved in local politics through the PTA and my chairmanship of the Marin Women's Commission. I saw an opportunity to do better in the area of rape kit exams."

Despite an endorsement by then- Attorney General Xavier Becerra, Pletcher lost. "But the woman who did win adopted my position," she said.

Her antitrust work at O'Melveny, she said, puts her "here in San Francisco at the center of a historically strong antitrust bar doing aggressive, cutting-edge cases in, for example, labor market cases in the tech industry. No-poach cases are fascinating legally and I'm involved in a lot of counseling with concerned clients."

Pletcher attained a major win as co-lead counsel defending a former poultry industry CEO in three criminal antitrust trials over claims he was part of an alleged seven-year industry-wide conspiracy to fix prices and rig bids regarding broiler chicken products. U.S. v. Penn, 1:20-cr-00152 (N.D. Colo., filed June 2, 2020).

"We got a fantastic result," she said. Juries deadlocked in two of the trials, which involved 16 million government-produced documents and dozens of witnesses. On the third try, prosecutors narrowed the defendant list to five and refined the evidence; even so, the decisive acquittal came after just over a day of deliberations. Pletcher led the direct examination of the expert economist on behalf of the joint defense group.

"This was only the third criminal antitrust case known where an economics expert was allowed to testify," Pletcher said. "He explained the rationale for company executives to talk to each other. When he testified, I could see the jury sit up and listen."