In re: Disposable Contact Lens Antitrust Litigation, 15-md-02626 (M.D. Fla.)
As court-appointed co-lead counsel, Robins Kaplan LLP reached settlements in excess of $118 million on behalf of U.S. contact lens purchasers, resolving an expansive antitrust class action against the four dominant manufacturers and the largest nationwide distributor of contact lenses.
The firm filed one of the first class action complaints in March 2015, alleging a conspiracy by Johnson & Johnson, CooperVision, Alcon, Bausch + Lomb, and wholesale distributor ABB Optical Group to stifle competition from discount retailers and fix prices in the $4 billion contact lens market serving 40 million Americans. Plaintiffs allege that defendants illegally imposed minimum retail prices for many popular brands of contact lenses, and that in doing so, they violated federal antitrust laws, as well as state consumer protection and antitrust laws.
Robins Kaplan achieved an ice-breaker settlement with CooperVision, Inc. in February of 2018, and a $10 million follow-on settlement with Bausch & Lomb, Inc. in August of 2019, both of which received final approval in 2020. In December of 2018, plaintiffs were granted class certification, and in November of 2019, plaintiffs defeated defendants’ motions for summary judgment. In August of 2020, Robins Kaplan and its co-leads settled with ABB for $30.2 million, which received final approval in June of 2021. In March of 2022, days before trial was scheduled to begin, Robins Kaplan reached settlements totaling $75 million with the final two defendants—Johnson & Johnson Vision Care and Alcon Vision—which received final court approval in October of 2022 and resolved the long-running antitrust class action in its entirety.
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