The NFL has tried (with, at times, some success) to persuade the courts that the Sunday Ticket antitrust class action should be dismissed. The latest paperwork filed by the league focuses on the manner in which a jury in a Los Angeles federal court came up with its $4.7 billion verdict.
In the NFL’s renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law, which PFT has obtained and reviewed, the league focuses heavily on the failure of the jury to adopt the financial methodology proposed by the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses and, in turn, the jury’s decision to come up with its own calculation as to the damages suffered by the two classes in the litigation — more than 500,000 commercial establishments and more than 2.4 million residential customers.
For any civil case, the plaintiff must first prove liability on the part of the defendant. Then, the plaintiff must show the extent to which the conduct of the defendant caused economic harm. Thirty eight years ago this month, a jury found that the NFL had violated antitrust laws as to the USFL, but that the USFL had proven no damages. The verdict, then, was one dollar.
Coincidentally (or not), the NFL’s latest filing in the Sunday Ticket case specifically requests at page ii of its latest motion that the court “reduce the irrational and improper damages award to nominal damages of $1.”
In this case, the plaintiffs offered two possible models for determining the financial losses resulting from the NFL requiring DirecTV to overcharge for Sunday Ticket. The NFL argues that the jury ignored those formulas and instead came up with its own.
The NFL contends that the jury took the list price for the basic Sunday Ticket package in 2018 and 2019 ($294) and subtracted $102.74, which according to the NFL was the average price actually paid by residential subscribers during the class period. The jury then, under the NFL’s argument, multiplied the difference of $191.26 by the number of commercial subscribers and residential subscribers in the…
Source link : https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nfl-attacks-jurys-basis-coming-003517484.html
Author : ProFootball Talk on NBC Sports
Publish date : 2024-07-10 00:35:17
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