Joe Tabacco

Joseph J. Tabacco, Jr., the founding partner of Berman DeValerio’s San Francisco office, actively litigates antitrust, securities fraud, commercial and other complex matters. Tabacco is a primary point of contact for many of Berman DeValerio’s institutional clients, including the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and the Offices of the Attorneys General of Michigan and other states.

Since entering private practice in the early 1980s, Tabacco has served as trial or lead counsel in numerous antitrust and securities cases. Prior to 1981, Tabacco served as senior trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, in both the Central District of California and the Southern District of New York.

Since 2008, Tabacco has served as an independent member of the Board of Directors  of Overstock.com, a publicly traded company internet retailer.  He is Chair of the Board’s Corporate Governance Committee and also serves as a member of the Board’s  Audit and Compensation Committees.  He also frequently lectures and authors articles on securities and antitrust law issues and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Tabacco is a former teaching fellow of the Attorney General’s Advocacy Institute in Washington, D.C., and has served on the faculty of ALI-ABA on programs about U.S.-Canadian business litigation and trial of complex securities cases. Founded in 1982, Berman DeValerio consists of 33 attorneys in California, Florida and Massachusetts.

Jennifer Duncan Hackett has experience in all aspects of complex antitrust, commercial, and financial services litigation, and has been instrumental in trials, international arbitrations, settlement negotiations, and federal appeals. Hackett also has provided antitrust compliance counseling in a variety of scenarios and advises clients on all aspects of premerger notification, including Hart-Scott-Rodino filings and gun-jumping issues. Hackett’s practice involves a wide range of litigation, antitrust counseling, and appellate matters, including representation of opt-out plaintiffs and defendants in antitrust and financial services cases, premerger notification advice and assistance with Hart-Scott-Rodino filings, antitrust and litigation analysis in the financial services sector, international arbitration in the pharmaceutical/life sciences arena, and litigation in various complex contractual dispute cases.

Hackett pepresents Freddie Mac and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation as Receiver for 38 Closed Banks in the LIBOR antitrust litigation.  She was a member of the trial team, including oral arguments and proffering witnesses, in ZF Meritor LLC, et al. v. Eaton Corporation, U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, which obtained a liability verdict for plaintiffs in a bifurcated antitrust trial involving monopolization and exclusive dealing issues. She was principally involved in drafting of appellate briefs submitted in the Third Circuit regarding liability and damages issues. After a successful appeal in the Third Circuit, the case was remanded for a damages trial, and settled on the eve of trial for $500 million, one of the largest antitrust settlements in recent years. She was principally involved in drafting of appellate briefs submitted to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a contractual dispute involving liability issues arising out of a helicopter crash in California. Argued the appeal before the Court of Appeals (Columbia Helicopters Inc. v. Carson Helicopters, Inc.).

Jeffrey Leitzinger is an expert in the economics of markets, market pricing, competitive analysis, and regulation. Over the past 30 years as an economic consultant, he has provided expert testimony in many different forums. His research has been used in connection with congressional legislation and tax and royalty policy, as well as corporate policy decisions by Fortune 500 companies.

 

Jeffrey I. Shinder is one of the premier antitrust litigators and payments industry specialists in the United States. He specializes in leading the prosecution of bet-the-industry multibillion-dollar litigation and has successfully handled numerous high-profile antitrust cases that have resulted in industry-wide reforms while also recovering billions of dollars of damages for his clients.

Jeff was on the lead counsel team in In re Visa Check/MasterMoney Antitrust Litigation — a matter resulting in a settlement valued at over $3 billion and reforms that were valued by the district court between $25 billion and $87 billion. He was co-lead counsel for Discover in its Sherman Act Section 1 action against Visa and Mastercard, which resulted in a $2.75 billion settlement. Jeff is currently the lead counsel for a merchant opt-out group challenging Visa’s and Mastercard’s core rules, which has defeated numerous summary judgment motions, bringing these cases to the brink of trial.

Jeff also has a substantial agency and regulatory practice, with deep involvement in many of the agency investigations into the payments and technology sectors over the past 20 years. In that capacity, Jeff has appeared numerous times before the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general and European competition authorities. Jeff served as a special counsel to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission from 2001 to 2003, where he worked on the Rambus case, one of the leading standard-setting cases in the technology sector.

While widely known for his experience in payments, Jeff also has extensive experience counseling clients and litigating cases in financial services, sports, auto parts, technology, media and retail, among other industries.

In 2024, Chambers USA named Jeff one of the nation’s leading antitrust lawyers.

Before joining Shinder Cantor Lerner, Jeff was the managing partner of the New York office at Constantine Cannon LLP, as well as the head of the antitrust practice.

Dr. James Langenfeld is a managing director at BRG, based in Washington, DC. He provides economic analyses and expert testimony for litigation, regulatory actions, and economic policy in a wide variety of industries.

This work involves types of matters including antitrust, damages, class actions, labor, mergers, statistical analyses, and regulation’s impact on firms and consumers. He also serves on the editorial board of several professional journals and has published numerous articles in journals and books on diverse topics in applied economics and econometrics.

Over his 30-year career, he has held positions as managing director at other consulting firms, Director in the Bureau of Economics of the Federal Trade Commission, and Senior Economist at General Motors.

J. Douglas Richards is Managing Partner of Cohen Milstein’s New York office and a partner in its antitrust practice group.  Mr. Richards has extensive expertise in class action practice and commercial litigation relating to diverse trade regulation issues, including antitrust and commodity regulation as well as related issues of patent law.  Prior to joining Cohen Milstein in 2009, Mr. Richards served as head of the antitrust practice groups at two other leading class action law firms, and prior to that as Deputy General Counsel of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where he received a Special Service Award for exemplary accomplishment.  His general preeminence in legal practice has been recognized by the leading peer review organizations, including by being named one of 22 Antitrust “Litigation Stars” nationally by Benchmark Plaintiff Litigation, by New York Super Lawyers (2012, 2011) and by receiving the highest available peer ranking from Martindale-Hubbell.  He has written extensively about class actions, having twice authored chapters for books edited by the American Antitrust Institute covering complex issues of class action practice, as well as various law reviews and other publications.  Leading antitrust organizations frequently recognize his expertise by inviting him to speak on wide-ranging issues of substantive antitrust law, civil procedure and class actions.

Harry First is the Charles L. Denison Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, Director of the law school’s Competition, Innovation, and Information Law Program, and Co-Director of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy. From 1999-2001 he served as Chief of the Antitrust Bureau of the Office of the Attorney General of the State of New York. Professor First’s teaching interests include antitrust, regulated industries, international and comparative antitrust, business crime, and innovation policy. He is the co-author of law school casebooks on antitrust (with John Flynn and Darren Bush) and on regulated industries (with John Flynn), as well as the author of a casebook on business crime, and the author of numerous articles involving antitrust law. Professor First has twice been a Fulbright Research Fellow in Japan and has served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Tokyo.

Professor First’s most recent scholarly work in antitrust has focused on various aspects of antitrust enforcement and theory, including “Your Money and Your Life: The Export of U.S. Antitrust Remedies” (in “Global Competition Law and Economics,” Stanford Univ. Press, forthcoming), “Antitrust’s Democracy Deficit” (Fordham Law Review, 2013), and two chapters in “The Design of Competition Law Institutions” (Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), one dealing with the United States, the other dealing with Japan. Along with Andrew Gavil of Howard University School of Law, he is currently completing a book titled Microsoft and the Globalization of Antitrust Law: Competition Policy for the Twenty-First Century, to be published by MIT Press. First is also the author of a casebook on business crime and a recently published article, “Business Crime and the Public Interest: Lawyers, Legislators, and the Administrative State” (University of California Irvine Law Review, 2012).

Professor First is a contributing editor of the Antitrust Law Journal, foreign antitrust editor of the Antitrust Bulletin, a member of the executive committee of the Antitrust Section of the New York State Bar Association, and a member of the advisory board and a Senior Fellow of the American Antitrust Institute.

George Slover is senior counsel for competition policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, as well as CDT’s general counsel. His previous positions include lead antitrust counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, attorney-advisor in the Legal Policy Section of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, advisor to the Antitrust Modernization Commission, chief legislative counsel and parliamentarian at House Judiciary, and most recently senior policy counsel at Consumer Reports, where he was lead advocate on antitrust and competition policy, in addition to working on a range of other consumer protection policy issues. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute. He holds a J.D. from the University of Texas Law School and a master of public affairs from the LBJ School.