Steve W.
Berman

The Man in the Middle

Class actions across tobacco, automotive, antitrust, college athletics, and emerging technology

I. At the Center

On weekends, Steve W. Berman pulls on a referee’s jersey, hangs a whistle around his neck, and takes the center of a soccer field. A former high-school and college player and coach, he remains a certified referee. He has joked that the objections he hears there differ from those he hears from judges during the week mainly in vocabulary.

Berman’s legal work spans tobacco, automotive, antitrust, consumer, and college-athletics cases. He builds common proof, coordinates lawyers and experts, and shapes remedies that courts and administrators can carry into effect.

That work depends on a practical model of private enforcement. Many injuries are spread among people whose individual claims would be too small to support years of expert discovery. Berman’s firm finances the investigation and litigation, assembles classwide evidence, and carries the cost and risk on contingency. The result is a way to bring claims that might otherwise lack a practical plaintiff into court.

II. The Education of a Plaintiff’s Lawyer

Berman was born in Seattle in 1955 and raised largely in Highland Park, Illinois. His father sold insurance to security guards and police officers, bringing questions of risk, liability, and promised protection into family conversation.

He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1976 and a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1980. He began at Jenner & Block and later practiced at the Seattle firm of Shidler McBroom Gates & Lucas, a predecessor of K&L Gates. Even within a corporate practice, he accepted plaintiff matters, including early Washington sexual-harassment cases.

In 1989, Berman helped obtain a court-approved $700 million settlement for investors affected by the Washington Public Power Supply System bond default. The litigation required his team to organize municipal-financing records, offering materials, and claims involving more than 200 defendants around a failed nuclear-power project.

The decisive turn came after the 1993 E. coli outbreak traced to Jack in the Box restaurants. Berman wanted to represent children who had become seriously ill, but his firm declined the matter. He left with four partners and a group of associates to establish the firm now known as Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro. One of the new firm’s first matters was shareholder litigation arising from the outbreak. It settled for $12 million, and the firm’s discovery work supported separate wrongful-death and injury recoveries pursued by other lawyers. The matter gave the new practice an early demonstration of why an independent plaintiffs’ firm mattered.

III. Smoke

For decades, tobacco defendants had answered individual cases by focusing juries on the smoker’s choices. Berman and other plaintiffs’ lawyers changed the structure of the dispute by representing states seeking recovery of public-health costs. The new plaintiff was the state.

Appointed special assistant attorney general for thirteen states and one of two private-firm leaders directing the recovery actions, Berman pursued consumer-protection, antitrust, and civil RICO claims concerning nicotine addiction, youth marketing, industry disclosures, and Medicaid costs.

The execution matched the scale of the theory. Berman built a centralized database through which twelve lawyers at his firm and more than forty state assistant attorneys general could search industry records. At the Washington trial, he conducted voir dire, delivered the opening statement, and examined witnesses including former Philip Morris research director Dr. William Farone and addiction researcher Dr. Jack Henningfield.

When R.J. Reynolds ran its Winston “No Bull” campaign, Berman commissioned focus groups to test whether the advertising led minors to regard the cigarettes as safer. After Liggett Group broke ranks with the rest of the industry, he pursued access to internal documents bearing on industry knowledge and strategy. Those materials became part of the wider record developed in the state cases.

The 1998 Master Settlement Agreement required continuing payments to the settling states and imposed advertising and marketing restrictions. It also demonstrated that a private firm could commit lawyers, technical systems, experts, and years of work to public enforcement while accepting the financial risk of the litigation.

IV. Building National Cases

As multidistrict and nationwide class litigation expanded, lead-counsel appointments became central to Berman’s practice. Lead counsel directs discovery, selects experts, coordinates common evidence, frames negotiations, and designs a process that can reach people who may never appear in court. Judicial appointment supplies the authority; effective administration determines whether that authority produces usable relief.

In the Toyota sudden-unintended-acceleration litigation, Judge James V. Selna appointed Berman co-lead counsel for the economic-loss class on the court’s own initiative. The case ended in a settlement valued at approximately $1.6 billion, and Selna credited class counsel’s “extraordinary skill and effort.”

When Volkswagen’s diesel emissions deception surfaced in 2015, Hagens Berman filed an early U.S. consumer action and worked with scientists who used portable emissions-measurement systems to test vehicles in real driving conditions. The testing developed evidence about defeat devices without waiting for the government’s technical investigation to conclude.

The Volkswagen proceedings required different remedies for different participants in the same emissions crisis. Owners and lessees needed vehicle-specific choices; dealerships needed a process that addressed inventory and business disruption. The 2.0-liter consumer resolution was valued at $14.7 billion and provided buybacks, approved emissions modifications, and compensation. Berman also served as lead counsel for the dealership class, whose separately approved $1.67 billion settlement included nearly $1.2 billion in cash and additional sales-incentive benefits.

Berman later served on the plaintiffs’ steering committee in Mercedes-Benz diesel-emissions litigation that produced a separate $700 million U.S. consumer settlement.

The approach extended into healthcare. As co-lead counsel in Average Wholesale Price litigation against McKesson, Berman helped secure a $350 million settlement that rolled back benchmark prices for hundreds of brand-name drugs. Discovery in the case also led to governmental follow-on actions recovering more than $600 million. As sole lead class counsel in litigation over Stericycle’s medical-waste disposal contracts, he obtained a $295 million settlement and injunctive relief.

In Enron ERISA litigation, Berman served as co-lead counsel in a $250 million recovery for 24,000 employees. In DRAM antitrust litigation, he helped obtain settlements totaling hundreds of millions of dollars for purchasers alleging that manufacturers had coordinated the supply and pricing of computer memory. Each matter required its own class definition, economic analysis, evidentiary record, and court-supervised distribution process.

V. Payment Cards, E-Books, and Market Competition

In In re Visa Check/MasterMoney Antitrust Litigation, Berman served as co-lead counsel for merchants challenging rules that tied acceptance of Visa and Mastercard debit products to acceptance of their credit cards. The settlement provided $3.3834 billion in compensatory relief and ended the challenged Honor All Cards tying rules. The court valued prospective relief—including unbundled debit acceptance, lower interchange rates, and greater merchant freedom to encourage other payment methods—at $25 billion to $87 billion.

Separate ATM access-fee litigation continued for more than a decade before a court granted final approval in June 2025 to a $197.5 million settlement with Visa and Mastercard.

In the e-books antitrust litigation, Berman filed a consumer case concerning Apple and five major publishers before the Department of Justice brought its parallel action. The claims against Apple were litigated through the Supreme Court. Apple ultimately paid $400 million as part of a total consumer recovery exceeding $560 million.

Berman also served as co-lead counsel in Moehrl and Burnett, antitrust litigation challenging residential real-estate commission rules involving the National Association of Realtors and brokerage companies. Settlements exceeded $1 billion, including $418 million from the NAR, and the agreements changed commission rules prospectively.

VI. College-Athlete Compensation

Berman and co-counsel Jeffrey Kessler spent years challenging NCAA restrictions on athlete compensation. In NCAA v. Alston, Berman examined witnesses and delivered the closing argument in the Northern District of California. In 2021, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld an injunction concerning education-related benefits. The case also produced a $208 million damages settlement.

House v. NCAA, filed in 2020 against the association and its major conferences, moved through the opening created by that work. Final approval came on June 6, 2025. The resolution had two parts: approximately $2.8 billion in damages settlements, with the House defendants agreeing to fund $2.576 billion, and a prospective system permitting participating Division I schools to pay athletes directly under an annual cap that began at roughly $20.5 million per school for the 2025–26 academic year.

The two forms of relief address different periods. The damages compensate athletes for benefits restricted under the former rules. Direct revenue sharing changes the economic system that future athletes enter.

VII. Four Decades of Private Enforcement

Berman’s completed cases span public health, automotive products, financial markets, consumer prices, payment systems, and college athletics. He has repeatedly defined the represented group, developed common proof, financed cases through discovery and trial preparation, and translated results into relief that courts and administrators could deliver.

Co-founder and managing partner of Hagens Berman since 1993, Berman also serves as managing partner of Hagens Berman EMEA LLP in the United Kingdom, extending the firm’s plaintiffs’ practice across borders.

Across four decades, Berman has used litigation to identify governing rules, develop evidence, and require companies to answer claims in court. His cases have produced compensation, disclosed evidence, and changed market rules after the individual case has ended.