Michael D. Hausfeld

In 2008, Ed O'Bannon was standing in a friend's living room when he recognized the player wearing number 31 for UCLA in a college basketball video game. The avatar had his height, skin tone and left-handed shot, though it did not carry his name. He had neither authorized the use nor been paid for it. Michael D. Hausfeld represented him in the lawsuit filed the following year, challenging the NCAA rules that prevented schools from negotiating payment for the commercial use of an athlete's name, image or likeness.

The antitrust case concerned the schools' collective agreement to set that payment at zero. At the June 2014 trial, Hausfeld asked economist Roger Noll to show why there was a market for players' identities. Noll pointed to schools selling jerseys bearing the numbers of prominent quarterbacks. Hausfeld's questioning connected those sales to a licensing market in which the athletes were barred from receiving payment.

Judge Claudia Wilken found that the restraint was commercial and that less restrictive alternatives existed, including scholarships covering the full cost of attendance. The case required evidence about what colleges bought from athletes, what they sold to broadcasters and fans, and whether the compensation limit was needed to preserve college sports. Hausfeld's team contested the NCAA's claim of "amateurism" within that economic record.

Teachers, Clients and Collective Claims

Hausfeld earned his law degree at the George Washington University's National Law Center in 1969. He studied constitutional law with Jerome Barron, professional ethics and social justice with Monroe Freedman, and corporate law with Henry Manne. He credits Jerry Cohen with shaping his professional character and integrity, remembering his mentor as "a person and a lawyer of great distinction with a mastery of common sense."

Early in his career, Hausfeld argued and tried a pioneering case establishing that sexual harassment was discrimination prohibited by Title VII. His later clients included Native Alaskans whose subsistence way of life was damaged by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. He also helped negotiate the $176 million Texaco racial-discrimination settlement, then the largest resolution of its kind, which addressed the company's employment practices as well as compensation.

Over more than five decades, he has represented people in antitrust, civil-rights, environmental, sports and international human-rights disputes. Consumers facing cartel overcharges, families seeking wartime assets and athletes subject to common compensation rules brought different claims, but each required a way to examine shared conduct and obtain relief reaching more than one person.

Reconstructing Wartime Accounts

In the Holocaust victim-assets litigation against Swiss banks, Hausfeld helped lead work to reconstruct accounts and transactions obscured by war, banking secrecy and the passage of half a century. Many original depositors had died. Survivors and heirs brought fragments — a name, a city, a family account of money placed somewhere safe before deportation. The banks' records could be missing or incomplete, and some accounts had been closed with their balances absorbed by the institutions. The claims required connecting the surviving information to assets that had not been returned to their owners or families.

Payments under the settlement ultimately totaled approximately $1.29 billion and reached more than 458,000 victims and heirs in the United States and more than eighty other countries. The litigation also reconstructed financial histories that families had been unable to recover for themselves. Hausfeld subsequently represented Poland, the Czech Republic, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia in multinational negotiations over Nazi-era slave and forced labor. In his account of those talks, hundreds of participants sometimes took part, representing victims with different interests across Europe. His restitution work received the B'nai B'rith Humanitarian of the Year Award and the Simon Wiesenthal Center's award for distinguished service.

Enforcing the Sports Judgment

Hausfeld personally argued the O'Bannon merits appeal in the Ninth Circuit in March 2015. That September, the court affirmed antitrust liability and the injunction permitting schools to provide scholarships up to the full cost of attendance. The NCAA's rules were subject to the Rule of Reason: the claimed benefits needed evidentiary support, and the court had to consider a less restrictive way to achieve them. A ceiling below the legitimate cost of attending college restricted compensation more than those benefits required.

A related Electronic Arts settlement created a $40 million fund for athletes whose likenesses had appeared in video games. In 2018, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the statutory fee award in O'Bannon, recognizing the class's substantial success in obtaining enforceable relief.

Later cases applied antitrust law to further limits on athletes' compensation. In 2021, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld relief against NCAA restrictions on education-related benefits in NCAA v. Alston. The House settlement approved in June 2025 provided multibillion-dollar compensation and a framework for direct payments from schools to athletes. These were separate proceedings, following O'Bannon's application of antitrust scrutiny to compensation rules rather than an exemption based on the NCAA's description of its mission.

A Transatlantic Practice

Hausfeld founded his firm in 2008 as a transatlantic plaintiffs' practice. He described its commitments as social and economic justice pursued with the highest professional integrity, and stated the principle: "Global wrongs must be accountable to global rights." Its recoveries include the $2.67 billion Blue Cross Blue Shield subscriber settlement, more than $2.3 billion in foreign-exchange benchmark cases and hundreds of millions of dollars in LIBOR litigation. Those proceedings examined practices affecting many subscribers or market participants at once.

In a 2019 interview, he described the foreign-exchange work as requiring an understanding of unequal access to information, its effect on market prices and the consequences for tens of thousands of transacting parties. He also distinguished U.S. and European rules on monopolization, dominance and collective litigation, which could require different approaches to conduct affecting both markets.

Hausfeld now serves as Chair Emeritus in the firm's Washington office. The American Bar Association's antitrust section gave him a lifetime achievement award in 2022, and he has written extensively on private enforcement and competition policy. At GW, he has taught as an adjunct, served on the Dean's Advisory Council and hired students as interns. He also helped secure a $5.1 million cy pres award that endowed a center for competition law at the university.