Eric L. Cramer

The Fight Outside the Octagon

The fighters said the contracts were the real opponent. Beginning in 2014, elite mixed-martial-arts athletes challenged the exclusive deals, acquisitions, and related practices they alleged had suppressed competition for their services and held down their pay. The cases were consolidated against Zuffa, the company operating the UFC — and Eric L. Cramer helped lead them.

The record he helped direct was enormous: more than 775,000 documents totaling over three million pages, tens of thousands of text messages, subpoenas to more than fifty third parties, layers of expert economic analysis, and a seven-day class-certification hearing. In August 2023, the court certified a Bout Class covering qualifying UFC fighters from December 16, 2010 through June 30, 2017. In January 2024, it denied summary judgment and set the certified case for trial.

With trial approaching, Cramer helped secure a revised $375 million fund devoted entirely to the certified Le class — $40 million above the earlier combined proposal — and final approval issued in March 2025. The fighters answered: of 1,121 eligible athletes, 1,088 submitted claims. By March 31, 2026, $237,386,515.53 had gone out to 984 claimants in forty-four countries.

Chicken Houses Built to Spec

In the broiler-grower cases, the certification opinion described the arrangement plainly: integrators supplied the chicks and the feed, collected the grown birds, and sent them for processing, while growers supplied the land, the buildings, the equipment, the utilities, and the labor. The buildings could be designed to an integrator's specifications — tying a grower's capital investment to the very company setting the contract terms.

Growers alleged that the integrators exchanged compensation information and agreed not to recruit one another's growers, and the claims connected Sherman Act and Packers and Stockyards Act theories to contracts, compensation data, and communications involving Tyson, Pilgrim's Pride, Perdue, Koch Foods, and Sanderson Farms. Cramer helped direct a record exceeding two million documents and tens of millions of pages, transactional data on more than 650,000 flocks, and more than eighty depositions. The court certified a nationwide litigation class in May 2024.

The related settlement class covered growers compensated for broiler grow-out services from January 27, 2013 through December 31, 2019.

Settlements with all five defendants totaled $169 million — $21 million from Tyson, $14.75 million from Perdue, $15.5 million from Koch, $17.75 million from Sanderson, and $100 million from Pilgrim's, finally approved in January 2025 with pro rata distribution authorized. The Pilgrim's terms went further than money: for five years, enforcement of covered arbitration clauses and class-action waivers was restricted, pairing the common fund with continuing contractual protection for growers.

Diesel by the Gallon

At independent truck stops, the challenged fleet-card terms worked transaction by transaction — recurring percentage-based charges and restrictions on discounts, surcharges, and steering customers toward other payment programs. Across years of diesel sales, those provisions could shape a merchant's operating costs at every pump.

In Marchbanks Truck Service v. Comdata, Cramer served as class counsel, connecting the anti-steering, most-favored-nation, no-surcharge, and related provisions to merchants' recurring costs and presenting both monetary and forward-looking relief for approval. The settlement created a $130 million fund — $100 million from Comdata and Ceridian and $10 million each from Love's, Pilot, and TravelCenters — for eligible truck stops and retail fueling facilities that paid percentage-based charges directly to Comdata during the settlement period.

The court granted final approval in July 2014. The agreement also delivered five years of covenants restricting specified anti-steering and fee-MFN provisions, permitting surcharging under defined conditions, and requiring supporting point-of-sale functionality and pump disclosures.

The Price of a Financial-Aid Formula

In Henry v. Brown University, students alleged that participating universities used a shared financial-aid methodology while failing to satisfy the statutory exemption's need-blind conditions — reducing competition in financial aid and raising students' net price. Cramer led Berger Montague's work translating financial-aid formulas, admissions policies, university data, and classwide economic analysis into a coordinated antitrust record, and developing the university records and student-level proof needed for certification, settlement, and distribution.

Settlements with twelve universities totaled $319.25 million: an initial $284 million from ten schools, $16.75 million from Caltech, and $18.5 million from Johns Hopkins. The court authorized the first distribution from the initial fund on July 2, 2026, and payments began later that month, with the administration coordinating school-specific eligibility periods, exclusions, notice records, allocation, and payment controls under court supervision.

From Reactors to Markets

Cramer graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, spent his law-school summers in environmental public-interest work, and cut his teeth on litigation concerning nuclear facilities. His early nuclear-facility work required translating technical scientific evidence for judges and juries; his antitrust cases apply the same evidentiary skill to economic models, market data, and classwide proof.

He joined Berger Montague in 1995, became chairman in January 2019, co-chairs the firm's antitrust department, and works from its Philadelphia headquarters.