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MICHAEL J. FLANNERY has nearly twenty years of experience successfully representing plaintiffs in complex antitrust, consumer fraud, securities and civil rights class actions before state and federal courts across the country. Mr. Flannery concentrates his practice on complex class action litigation on behalf of small businesses and individuals hurt by antitrust price fixing, consumers hurt by fraudulent business practices, defrauded investors and victims of race, sex and other civil rights discrimination.
Prior to joining Cuneo Gilbert & LaDuca, Mr. Flannery worked at three of the most successful plaintiffs' firms in the country, first in Washington, D.C., then in San Diego, California and most recently in St. Louis, Missouri.
Mr. Flannery has served and continues to serve a leadership role in numerous complex class action matters, including the following examples:
- Mr. Flannery served as class counsel in the Penn Grade crude oil antitrust litigation on behalf of small crude oil producers in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, who alleged price fixing among three defendants. (Lazy Oil, Co. v. Witco, Corp., Quaker State Corp. and Pennzoil Products, Co., et al., No. 94-110 (Western District of Pennsylvania)). The case resulted in a $19 million dollar settlement.
- Mr. Flannery served as one of the lead counsel in the In re Compact Disc Antitrust Litigation, MDL No. 1216 (Central District of California), which alleged a price-fixing scheme amongst the major record companies on the price of compact discs sold to small music stores. The case resulted in a settlement of over $47 million dollars.
- Mr. Flannery served as a member of the lead counsel team that prosecuted the securities fraud action against Hollywood Video (Murphy v. Hollywood Entertainment Corp., et al., No. 95-CV-1926 (District of Oregon)) alleging securities fraud against the company, its executives and the company's auditor. The case resulted in a settlement of $15 million dollars.
- Mr. Flannery served as a member of the lead counsel team that prosecuted In re NASDAQ Market-Makers Antitrust Litigation, MDL No. 1023 (S.D.N.Y.), where a class of investors alleged that the NASDAQ market-makers set and maintained wide spreads pursuant to an industry-wide conspiracy in one of the larges and most important antitrust cases in recent memory. After over three years of intense litigation, the case was settled for a total of $1.027 billion dollars, at the time the largest antitrust settlement ever.
- Mr. Flannery served as a member of the lead counsel and trial teams that prosecuted the Restricted Earnings Coach Antitrust litigation on behalf of one of the three classes of college coaches alleging price fixing against the National Collegiate Athletic Association (Hall v. NCAA, No. 94-CV-2392 (District of Kansas)). On May 4, 1998, a federal court jury in Kansas City, Kansas returned verdicts in favor of the three classes for more than $70 million dollars. The case was later settled on appeal to the 10th Circuit for $54 million dollars.
- Mr. Flannery served as co-lead counsel in both state and federal antitrust litigation against Microsoft, including his work as one of the five federal co-leads in In re Microsoft Antitrust Litigation, MDL No. 1350 (District of Maryland). As one of the federal co-leads, Mr. Flannery coordinated and managed over 150 separate antitrust suits brought against Microsoft alleging illegal antitrust conduct with respect to Microsoft's computer operating system. The federal and state litigation resulted in settlements worth hundreds of millions of dollars to consumers across the nation.
- Mr. Flannery served as co-lead counsel in In re K-Dur Antitrust Litigation, MDL No. 1419 (District of New Jersey), in a case alleging that Schering-Plough Corporation entered into illegal agreements with two generic drug manufacturers to keep generic versions of K-Dur off the market, thereby injuring consumers and others who were forced to pay artificially inflated prices for the brand name drug.
- Mr. Flannery served on the executive committee of In re Buspirone Antitrust Litigation, MDL No. 1410 (Southern District of New York), where individual consumers and third party payers alleged that Bristol-Myers Squibb had illegally kept a generic version of Buspar, an anti-anxiety medication, off the market. The case resulted in a $90 million dollar cash settlement. In the course of settlement negotiations, Mr. Flannery was specifically appointed to represent the interests of consumers in allocating portions of the settlement funds amongst the various groups who were injured.
- Mr. Flannery served on the executive committee in the Entran II product defect litigation, which settled for over $324 million dollars (Galanti v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., No. 03-CV-209 (District of New Jersey)). In connection with this settlement, Mr. Flannery worked closely with Jon Cuneo and Charles LaDuca, who were co-lead counsel in the matter.
- Mr. Flannery served as co-lead counsel on behalf of classes of Hispanic and female employees of the Regents of the University of California working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico (Longmire v. Regents of the University of California d/b/a Los Alamos National Laboratory, No. 03-CV-1404 (District of New Mexico)). Plaintiffs alleged that LANL discriminated against female and Hispanic employees in terms of pay, promotion, educational opportunities and other terms and conditions of employment. The case resulted in a $12 million dollar cash settlement for the affected employees.
- Mr. Flannery is serving as co-lead counsel in a case challenging the strip search practices and policies of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (Roadhouse v. LVMPD, No. 09-CV-33 (District of Nevada)).