Bay Area Litigator Named Among California’s Elite Antitrust Lawyers

For making merger trial history, Bay Area partner Al Pfeiffer earned a place on the Daily Journal’s coveted Top Antitrust Lawyers in California honor roll. Launched in 2020 by California’s legal newspaper of record, the Daily Journal awards program annually spotlights the Golden State’s most impressive competition practitioners — those who achieve consistent, impactful results for their clients as well as lead their firms and the broader antitrust community into the future.

A member and former Global Co-Chair of Latham’s renowned Antitrust & Competition Practice, as well as a former Vice Chair of the firm’s Litigation & Trial Department, Pfeiffer scored a string of high-profile victories, including an important and historic win for California-based GRAIL, a healthcare company focused on saving lives and improving health by pioneering new technologies for early cancer detection.

Following a four-week trial, conducted before the special administrative court of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in spring 2021, Pfeiffer led the Latham trial team which persuaded the presiding Administrative Law Judge to rule in favor of GRAIL and its acquirer, Illumina – marking the first time the FTC’s administrative law judge has ever ruled against the FTC in a merger challenge. This historic trial victory for GRAIL will help to speed to market the company’s life-saving cancer detection technology.

In his Daily Journal profile, Pfeiffer offered this best practice: “The key to what we do is to always find a way to make, what can be, very complicated economic concepts intuitive and understandable. That’s the key to everything.”