February 21, 2025
The competition team at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC helped secure settlements worth hundreds of millions of dollars last year for groups of home sellers, mixed martial arts fighters, poultry plant workers and others, earning a spot among the 2024 Law360 Competition Groups of the Year.
Among other noteworthy work, Cohen Milstein’s competition group has helped a class of home sellers to win settlement awards totaling more than $1 billion with the National Association of Realtors and major brokerages over real estate industry rules governing broker commissions.
The largest of the deals was a $418 million settlement with the trade association inked in March 2024 and finalized in November.
The suit alleged that commission rules caused sellers to overpay by requiring them to pay the fees of brokers working for both the buyer and the seller on a deal. The National Association of Realtors settlement calls for rule changes that are meant to create more competition for buyer-side brokers and to make the process more transparent.
Benjamin D. Brown, co-chair of Cohen Milstein’s competition practice and the firm’s managing partner, told Law360 the case is important because the purchase or sale of a home is the largest transaction most people ever engage in.
“The opportunity to create a more competitive market for broker services is a chance to really make an impact on people’s lives,” Brown said.
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Cohen Milstein is representing processing plant workers who accused the country’s largest chicken and turkey producers of fixing wages by exchanging competitively sensitive information, including through the data firm Agri Stats Inc. The workers have now settled with all the processors allegedly involved, including Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., Perdue Farms Inc. and Tyson Foods, for a total of around $398 million.
In another case, the firm is representing beef and pork plant workers accusing processing companies and Agri Stats of suppressing wages at red meat facilities. Workers have reached $200 million in settlements, including $127.2 million in deals with Tyson Foods and JBS USA Food Co. inked last year.
Brent W. Johnson, co-chair of Cohen Milstein’s competition group, told Law360 he loves doing antitrust work and getting consumers back money that has been essentially stolen by corporations breaking the rules. But, he said, representing the plant workers has also been rewarding in a different way.
“The greatest privilege that I’ve had practicing law is representing those workers, getting money back for folks that they should have been paid, especially when they’re in really, really difficult jobs,” Johnson said. “Our body of work over the last number of years in the antitrust labor area is second to none.”
Cohen Milstein is also representing mixed martial arts fighters who reached a $375 million settlement last year with the Ultimate Fighting Championship over allegations that it underpaid match participants. Brown said the average recovery is “going to be meaningful, in many instances life changing” for the fighters, making the outcome extremely rewarding.
“We’re dealing with a population of folks who work really hard,” he said. “In the case of UFC fighters, they literally took a beating doing their jobs, and because of antitrust violations, they were paid less than they would have in a competitive market.”
Brown said Cohen Milstein has played a seminal role in the rise of antitrust wage cases generally, noting past work on cases involving nurses and workers in the tech industry, and said the firm has long made it a priority to represent workers who have been shortchanged.