Daniel L. Warshaw

Sherman Oaks

Plaintiff’s Side Class Action & Complex Litigation

Daniel L. Warshaw and partners keep it small at their plaintiff class action boutique, Pearson Warshaw, LLP — except for their outsize wins.

With a dozen or so lawyers, the emphasis is on quality, not quantity. “We take very few cases,” founding partner Warshaw said. “It’s just our business model and we’re very selective. Some folks, and God bless ’em, file everything they can find and win or lose. We are more cautious and conservative in terms of the type of cases we take.”

An example was the $185 million deal with Major League Baseball to settle a complaint over low pay by some 23,000 minor league players. Senne v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball et al., 3:14-cv-00508 (N.D. Cal., filed Feb. 7, 2014).

On the negative side, when Pearson Warshaw launched the litigation in 2014, it was the size of the foe. “We knew this was a bet the farm case in the sense that we’d have to go all the way with them because it changed their business model,” Warshaw said. “We also knew they had unlimited resources, and that is why we had to put our seat belts on and dig in and litigate for almost 10 years.”

On the plus side: A minor league player, Garrett Broshuis, got fed up with low pay and went to law school. Then he developed the case while at the complex litigation firm Korein Tillery LLC, which partnered with Pearson Warshaw to proceed with the complaint.

“His inside baseball knowledge helped advance our learning curve as the litigation progressed,” Warshaw said. “The other side literally played hardball, but we had our secret sauce in our little firm’s talent at litigating efficiently in a war against an unlimited checkbook.”

Headed for trial this fall in Chicago is what Warshaw describes as one of the largest antitrust class actions in the U.S. It accuses major poultry producers of conspiring to crowd out small competitors, restraining trade. Pearson Warshaw represents a direct purchaser class. In re: Broiler Chicken Antitrust Litigation, 1:16-cv-08637 (N.D. Ill., filed Sept. 2, 2016).

And that’s just one of what Warshaw called “the protein cases”—he has another, in federal court in Minnesota, over similar claims regarding pork producers. In re: Pork Antitrust Litigation, 0:18-cv-01776 (D. Minnesota, filed June 28, 2018).

In March 2023, the court certified three classes of plaintiffs, including Pearson Warshaw’s direct purchaser class.

–Tori Richards