Ashley M. Bauer is a partner in the San Francisco office of Latham & Watkins and a member of the firm's Litigation & Trial Department. She is a local Co-Chair of the firm's Women Enriching Business (WEB) program, and is a member of the firm's local Training and Career Enhancement and Mentoring Committees.
Ms. Bauer has a wide range of experience in federal and state litigation and private arbitration, including antitrust litigation and cartel investigations, white collar criminal defense, and class action litigation.
Her antitrust practice includes regulatory investigations and the civil class action cases that typically follow. She has represented companies in cases involving alleged violations of state and federal antitrust laws brought by direct and indirect purchasers, including claims of price-fixing, market allocation, monopolization, and unfair competition.
Ms. Bauer also has extensive experience as global coordinating counsel on matters involving price-fixing investigations and private damages actions before regulators and courts in the US, Canada, Europe, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, South Korea, Singapore, and Australia.
Prior to joining the firm, Ms. Bauer served as a law clerk to Judge Robert E. Coyle, US District Judge, Eastern District of California.
Ms. Bauer's experience includes representing:
- Singapore Airlines Cargo in class action defense against allegations of anticompetitive conduct in the air cargo industry.
- Singapore Airlines in a class action filed in the US District Court of the Northern District of California alleging anticompetitive conduct in the passenger air transport industry.
- StarKist Co. in a multidistrict litigation consolidated in the US District Court for the Southern District of California. Plaintiffs are several large grocery stores, as well as putative nationwide classes of direct or indirect purchasers of packaged seafood products who allege StarKist conspired with other packaged seafood products producers to fix the prices for packaged seafood products and assert violations of Section 1 of the Sherman Act and various state antitrust and consumer protection laws.
- Lundbeck Inc. (now Ovation Pharmaceuticals), as trial counsel in Federal Trade Commission v. Ovation Pharmaceuticals, a merger-to-monopoly case in which the government sought divestiture and more than US$100 million in disgorgement. After trial, the district court entered judgment for Ovation on all claims. Ms. Bauer also represented Ovation Pharmaceuticals on appeal. The district court’s decision was affirmed by the Eighth Circuit in 2011.
- Avery Dennison Corporation in its defense against consumer class action complaints alleging anticompetitive conduct in the labelstock industry.
- A mining company as trial counsel in an arbitration resulting from an elemental mercury spill in northern Peru.