Jury verdict against Bates White client NFL vacated

Doug Bernheim was retained on behalf of the NFL in In re National Football League’s “Sunday Ticket” Antitrust Litigation. The class plaintiffs, which include residential and commercial purchasers of NFL’s Sunday Ticket package, alleged that the NFL and its teams acted anticompetitively in pooling their television broadcast rights and granting the distribution of the NFL Sunday Ticket package exclusively to DirecTV.

In his June 2024 trial testimony, Dr. Bernheim described the substantial procompetitive benefits associated with the challenged conduct, including a high degree of competitive balance within the NFL and a large number of free over-the-air broadcasts of NFL games available to fans. He also detailed numerous significant deficiencies in the plaintiffs’ liability expert’s analysis, including the expert’s failure to consider the teams’ economic incentives in his envisioned but-for world.

The jury initially awarded class plaintiffs $4.7 billion in damages. Several weeks later, however, US District Judge Philip S. Gutierrez vacated the verdict after finding the plaintiffs’ experts’ testimony proffered at trial unreliable, concluding that the liability expert’s but-for world analysis was not based on a reliable methodology and the damages expert failed to define his “direct-to-consumer” product with enough specificity.

For this engagement, the team had to translate more than 150 TB of data into insights and findings, which required the use of cloud-based infrastructure to perform the initial data processing work. Further, this high-performance environment made two specific analyses feasible, deepening the team’s understanding in a way that could not have been done without cloud tools.