Irving Scher
Hausfeld (New York)
Of Counsel
Irving Scher is Senior Counsel at Hausfeld (New York). Irv is considered an antitrust icon, with many decades of extensive experience in counseling and all phases of antitrust, marketing, and trade practice litigation and appeals, often as lead counsel in multi-party matters. He has been lead defense counsel in numerous class actions and FTC and government enforcement agency investigations across a wide range of industries, involving trade associations, buying groups, airlines, retailers and manufacturers of apparel, automobiles, automotive products, grocery and toiletry products, non-prescription drugs, electronic products, recorded music, and book and magazine publishers. Irv has served for many years as an Adjunct Professor at NYU Law School, teaching an advanced antitrust course. He is a former Chair of both the American Bar Association (ABA) and New York State Bar Association (NYSBA) Antitrust Sections, a long-time member of the Advisory Board of the Bloomberg/BNA Antitrust & Trade Regulation Report, and was co-chair for more than 20 years of the annual Practicing Law Institute antitrust program. He regularly lectures on antitrust matters at ABA and NYSBA Antitrust Section meetings and conferences. Irv is editor and co-author of Antitrust Adviser, a Thomson Reuters two-volume practical reference treatise, author of Living With the Robinson-Patman Act, a Bloomberg/BNA Corporate Practice Series Portfolio, and was a Vice Chair of the editorial board of the ABA’s Antitrust Law Developments desk book. Irv has been listed for many years in Chambers Global, Competition/Antitrust, and in Chambers USA Guide, where he was lauded as one of only six national antitrust “senior statesmen” in 2015 and 2016. He also is listed in The Best Lawyers In America, Litigation, and in 2015 was named “Lawyer of the Year,” Antitrust Law, New York City. He was the recipient of a World’s Leading Competition Lawyer Award in the Euromoney Expert Guide, 2008, and is listed in Super Lawyers magazine, NY Metro Super Lawyers (2006-2016) and International Who’s Who of Business Lawyers. He is a former student of the Columbia Law School and of the City College of NY.
Distinctions
Nominee, 2022 Antitrust Writing Awards: Business, Unilateral Conduct
Nominee, 2021 Antitrust Writing Awards: Business, Private Enforcement
Nominee, 2019 Antitrust Writing Awards: Business, Procedure
Nominee, 2018 Antitrust Writing Awards: Business, Private Enforcement
Nominee, 2017 Antitrust Writing Awards: Business, Private Enforcement
Linked authors
Debashish Bakshi
Hausfeld (San Francisco)
Kyle Bates
Hausfeld (San Francisco)
Katie R. Beran
Hausfeld (Philadelphia)
Sara Berger
Hausfeld (London)
Ginevra Bicciolo
Hausfeld (London)
1203 | Events
Articles
1328 Bulletin
68
Pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) are intermediaries paid by health care insurers to manage their prescription benefits programs. Today, PBMs not only negotiate the prices charged by pharmaceutical manufacturers to the insurers, but they also have enormous influence on which drugs are prescribed (...)
32
In July 2021 President Biden issued a landmark Executive Order on Competition. “The heart of American capitalism,” the President explained, “is a simple idea: open and fair competition.” But he also warned that “capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation.” He stressed that (...)
120
After many years of debate and previous failed attempts, on January 13, 2021, the Competitive Health Insurance Reform Act (“CHIRA”) was passed into law, having obtained unanimous consent in both the House of Representatives and Senate last fall. The new Act repeals the 1945 McCarran-Ferguson (...)
51
On February 24th, a Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled unanimously that a District Court should not have dismissed a monopolization and tying arrangement suit brought against Comcast by Viamedia, a supplier of advertising services to cable companies and other television content (...)
63
Robinson-Patman Act decisions are rare. This often is because legitimate complaints against a supplier providing favorable pricing to a complaining customer’s competitors either are settled out of court or prior to a decision on the merits. So it is of interest when a price discrimination suit (...)
36
On May 13th, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, affirmed the Ninth Circuit’s decision denying a motion to dismiss a consumer class action claiming that Apple monopolized the after-market in its sales of iPhone software applications (hereinafter “apps”) by charging app developers a 30% fee (...)
74
Introduction Few would argue with the proposition that antitrust indirect purchaser class actions in the U.S. raise more difficult questions of commonality, impact, and manageability than direct purchaser class actions, even though there may have been harm sustained at both levels. Accordingly, (...)
706
“Anti-steering” is the practice by which a credit card company prohibits a merchant from encouraging consumer cardholders to use another credit card company’s card. On June 25, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its highly anticipated decision in Ohio v. American Express Co., which dismissed 5-4 an (...)
31
Cases in which vertical restraints are challenged under Section 1 of the Sherman Act often require proof that the defendant has “market power”—the power “to force a purchaser to do something that he would not do in a competitive market,” which usually takes the form of a seller’s ability “to raise (...)
38
In an unsigned summary order in Wacker v. JP Morgan Chase & Co., a Second Circuit panel (Judges Cabranes, Pooler and Lynch) overturned dismissal of an antitrust suit brought by a group of precious metals traders and a hedge fund alleging that JP Morgan unlawfully monopolized the market for (...)
109
On September 15, 2016, the European Commission (“Commission”) published a Preliminary Report on its E-Commerce Sector Inquiry (“Preliminary Report”), presenting the outcome of over 1.800 responses received from manufacturers, retailers, e-commerce marketplaces, price comparison tools, payment (...)
