Joseph R. Saveri

Joseph R. Saveri is unafraid to dive headfirst into hot new topics in the courtroom, even if it involves the peculiarly named “hot tub” procedure, where experts give concurrent testimony to the judge in a debate format that often bypasses traditional cross-examination from lawyers.

“I don’t know if that shorthand [terminology] is helpful or horrifying, but it’s funny,” he said, noting that the debate was “really enlightening” because the experts’ “disagreement was very narrow and specific, and it could be framed in a way where the parties and the court could really understand what the dispute was about and what needed to be decided and what was important.”

Such a trendsetting debate format that clarified esoteric issues proved beneficial when his firm was sole lead counsel for a class of direct purchasers of capacitors used in electronic devices, purchasers who alleged that the defendants conspired to fix prices. Plaintiffs secured a $165 million settlement, with final court approval in 2023.

Having practiced complex civil litigation for thirty years, Saveri opened his own firm in 2012, which has successfully prosecuted landmark antitrust class actions and other cases, generating more than $4.7 billion in settlements. Particularly proud of the growth of his firm and its embrace of unprecedented cases, Saveri notes that he hired more than 40% of its current workforce during the pandemic in addition to opening a New York City office.

“For a firm of our size and how long we’ve been around, we’ve really become a leader in the plaintiff’s antitrust bar,” he said, highlighting a variety of the firm’s cases, including the antitrust lawsuit regarding Microsoft’s Activision merger as well as the class actions against Ultimate Fighting Championship and Varsity Cheer. “We’ve historically filed cases in areas where other firms or other lawyers had not really developed or filed cases [including drug cases, no-poach employment cases and Section Seven merger enforcement cases]. And now we’re really the leaders in taking on these companies that have come up with these AI models, and we represent coders and writers and graphic artists.”

Over the past year, the film has filed four pathbreaking class action cases, the first of their kind to address the use or misuse of intellectual property by artificial intelligence products such as ChatGPT.

—Kathryn Stelmach Artuso