CRA Vice President Dr. Timothy Snail advised counsel to AVX, a large global electronic components manufacturer, and testified at deposition on economic issues related to merits, causation and damages in antitrust litigation in federal court.
The class action litigation involved global manufacturers and suppliers of a wide range of capacitors—electronic components used in electrical circuits for industrial, medical, military, aerospace, automotive, consumer electronics and other applications. Direct purchaser and direct action plaintiffs alleged that numerous capacitor manufacturers engaged in a price-fixing cartel and various bilateral conspiracies, and that these actions resulted in supracompetitive prices and overcharges to purchasers.
Dr. Snail testified that plaintiffs’ expert economists had not established that communications between the defendants were consistent with price fixing, the allegedly conspiratorial communications did not cause price increases and output or capacity reductions, the hypothesized plus factors were not economic evidence of collusion, the experts did not properly account for the likelihood of collusion involving specialized versus commodity products or the amortization of product development costs in prices for the early years of product lifecycles, the experts’ econometric methodologies could not reliably estimate alleged damages and the experts’ methodologies led to contradictory conclusions. Our client settled on favorable terms two weeks into the trial as counsel was to begin cross-examination of an opposing expert economist.
Dr. Snail was supported by a CRA team that included Jarrod Welch, Lisa Stockley, Leslie Koyle, Matthew Hom, Steven Buschbach, Matthew Cormier, Hiyang Tang, Christopher Dalla Riva, and Charlie Palfreyman.
