Senior Assistant Attorney General Kathleen Foote joined the California Department of Justice’s antitrust unit as a deputy attorney general in 1988, and has been its Antitrust Chief since 2001. Litigation brought on behalf of the Attorney General under her leadership includes successful state law challenges to tying arrangements and resale price maintenance schemes, and a ground-breaking federal challenge to asserted antitrust exemption of an employer profit-sharing agreement in California v. Safeway, for which she received California Lawyer magazine’s Lawyer of the Year award in 2011. Her team played a lead role in the Microsoft remedies case, and more recently in the TFT-LCD and DRAM Indirect Purchaser multistate cases. She has led the State’s merger enforcement efforts in numerous industries including gasoline, banking, publishing and healthcare. Her post-settlement work in Levi-Strauss established a research institute on healthcare markets, and in Hartford Fire Ins. V. California an institute on public sector risk management, and she has pioneered the development of best practices for cy pres distributions in other major consumer settlements.
Kathleen is currently chair of the multistate Antitrust Task Force of the National Association of Attorneys General, which coordinates joint multistate and state-federal investigations and litigation. She was the 2013 recipient of AAI’s Alred E. Kahn Award for Antitrust Achievement, and was named 2013 Antitrust Attorney of the Year by California State Bar’s Antitrust and Unfair Competition Law Section.
