Eric L. Cramer

On February 6, 2025, dozens of fighters were in Judge Richard F. Boulware II’s courtroom in Las Vegas when he gave final approval to a $375 million settlement of their antitrust case, and the room erupted in applause. “It feels like we’ve been in a long fight camp for 12 years,” said Nate Quarry, one of the named plaintiffs. “We got knocked down a few times and yet somehow at the end, our hand is being raised.”

Quarry, Cung Le, Jon Fitch, Brandon Vera, Luis Javier Vazquez and Kyle Kingsbury had sued Zuffa, the company that ran the UFC, beginning in December 2014, alleging that its exclusive contracts, its acquisitions of rival promotions and related practices had suppressed competition for fighters’ services and held down their pay. Berger Montague was one of three firms serving as co-lead class counsel, and Cramer led its team with Michael Dell’Angelo and Patrick Madden. The record ran to more than 775,000 documents totaling over three million pages, tens of thousands of text messages and subpoenas to more than fifty third parties, and seven witnesses testified at the evidentiary hearing on class certification.

On August 9, 2023, the court certified a class of fighters who competed in UFC bouts in the United States from December 16, 2010 to June 30, 2017. On January 18, 2024, it denied summary judgment and set the case for trial that April. The settlement agreement followed on September 26, 2024, and Cramer signed the motion for its preliminary approval. Of 1,121 eligible fighters, 1,088 filed claims. By March 31, 2026, $237,386,515.53 had been distributed to 984 of them in forty-four countries, more than 70 percent by electronic transfer.

Chicken Houses Built to Spec

In the chicken industry the processing companies, called integrators, supply the chicks and the feed and collect the grown birds; the growers supply the land, the houses, the equipment, the utilities and the labor. The houses can be built to an integrator’s specifications, tying a grower’s capital to the company that sets the contract terms.

Growers who sued in 2017 alleged that Tyson, Pilgrim’s Pride, Perdue, Koch Foods and Sanderson Farms had exchanged confidential information about grower pay and agreed not to recruit one another’s growers, in violation of the Sherman Act and the Packers and Stockyards Act. Berger Montague was co-lead counsel in the consolidated case in the Eastern District of Oklahoma, with Cramer one of the lead lawyers for the class, and the record grew to more than two million documents and tens of millions of pages, transaction data on more than 650,000 flocks and more than eighty depositions. The court certified a nationwide litigation class in May 2024.

Between 2021 and 2024 the five companies settled for a combined $169 million: $21 million from Tyson, $14.75 million from Perdue, $15.5 million from Koch, $17.75 million from Sanderson and, in July 2024, $100 million from Pilgrim’s. The court approved that last settlement on January 7, 2025, and authorized pro rata distribution to growers paid for grow-out services from January 27, 2013 through December 31, 2019. Pilgrim’s also agreed that for five years it would restrict its enforcement of covered arbitration clauses and class-action waivers against growers.

Diesel by the Gallon

Independent truck stops that accepted Comdata’s fleet card paid the company percentage-based fees on the transactions at their pumps. In Marchbanks Truck Service v. Comdata, a class of 6,500 independent truck stops and other retail fueling facilities alleged that anti-steering provisions in their Comdata contracts kept them from directing drivers toward other payment programs and inflated those fees, and that Comdata and its parent, Ceridian, had agreements with TravelCenters of America, Pilot and Love’s under which the chains would not compete with Comdata’s card in exchange for a large fee advantage. Berger Montague was co-lead counsel, and Cramer led the case with Andrew C. Curley.

The settlement created a $130 million fund, $100 million from Comdata and Ceridian and $10 million each from Love’s, Pilot and TravelCenters, and the court granted final approval in July 2014. For five years Comdata also had to restrict specified anti-steering and fee most-favored-nation provisions, permit surcharging under defined conditions, and support it with point-of-sale functionality and disclosures at the pump.

From Reactors to Markets

Cramer graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and cum laude from Harvard Law School. He spent his law-school summers in environmental public-interest work and began his litigation career in cases concerning nuclear facilities, presenting technical scientific evidence to judges and juries. He joined Berger Montague in 1995, became its chairman in January 2019 and co-chairs its antitrust department.

The Price of a Financial-Aid Formula

Beginning in January 2022, in Henry v. Brown University, former students sued seventeen universities that had belonged to the 568 Presidents Group, named for the section of a 1994 law that let colleges admitting students without regard to financial need agree on common principles for awarding aid. The students alleged that the schools had not in fact admitted every student need-blind, so the exemption did not protect them, and that their shared “consensus methodology” had reduced aid and raised the net price students paid. Cramer has led Berger Montague’s work in the case, building the record from financial-aid formulas, admissions policies, university data and classwide economic analysis.

Ten of the schools settled for a combined $284 million: Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, Northwestern, Rice, the University of Chicago, Vanderbilt and Yale. Caltech’s $16.75 million and Johns Hopkins’s $18.5 million brought the total to $319.25 million. In January 2026 the court denied the remaining universities’ motion for summary judgment, and in June 2026 Judge Matthew F. Kennelly certified a class of tens of thousands of former students to pursue their claims against the five schools that had not settled: Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Notre Dame and Georgetown. The plaintiffs’ economist, Hal Singer, computed classwide damages of $685 million. “Winning class certification is a significant milestone for tens of thousands of former students,” Cramer said.

On July 2, 2026, Judge Kennelly approved the distribution of the ten schools’ settlement fund, and on July 20 payments began going out to former students by bank transfer, PayPal, Zelle and Venmo, with paper checks to follow by July 24.