Google’s $700 Million Antitrust Settlement with State Attorneys General Led By Utah

On August 18, 2026, Judge James J. Donato of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California approved a settlement resolving antitrust litigation over Google's Android and Play Store business practices, Utah v. Google, pursuant to which Google will pay $700 million and be bound by certain behavioral commitments. The State of Utah led a bipartisan coalition of 39 Attorneys General in prosecuting the litigation, which grew to 53 Attorneys General at settlement. The $700 million payment is believed to be the largest aggregate antitrust parens patriae recovery in U.S. history.

Beginning in November 2021, three of the firm’s attorneys were engaged as Special Assistant Attorneys General for the State of Utah by the Antitrust and Data Privacy Division of the Attorney General’s Office to play a coordinating role in preparing the case for trial, helping to lead the States’ offensive and expert discovery and manage the States’ document review. Firm attorneys took all or part of 21 fact and expert depositions in the case.

Expert Work & Briefing

Firm principal Brendan Benedict served as the co-chair of the multistate trial team expert committee and the principal point of contact for the States’ economist expert, Dr. Marc Rysman, then the Chair of the Department of Economics at Boston University. Dr. Rysman’s damages model calculated, among other things, damages to consumers from lost app variety resulting from Google’s supracompetitive Play Store commissions, believed to be among the first quantifications of so-called “non-price effects” in an antitrust damages model–as one Susman Godfrey partner put it, an “innovation” for plaintiffs. Brendan drafted the States’ opposition to Google’s motion to exclude Dr. Rysman’s damages testimony and helped prepare Dr. Rysman for his widely covered “hot tub” proceeding on the motion. The States received amicus support from the American Antitrust Institute and economists Steven Berry (Yale), Ariél Pakes (Harvard), and Katja Seim (Yale).

At the hearing, the Court said that Dr. Rysman’s model “sounded perfectly reasonable” and “well-grounded in the literature”; that Dr. Rysman’s “inputs and outputs are relatively straightforward and understandable, [and] they’re all based on the data in the case.” (Hr’g Tr. 70:10-16.) The Court said, “I’m not hearing . . . why a jury should be barred from hearing Dr. Rysman’s presentation.” (Hr’g Tr. 73:14-16.) Bloomberg covered the hot tub and interviewed Judge Donato, noting that Dr. Rysman “appeared to survive Google’s motion.” Before the Court ruled on the motion, the parties settled. For his work in the Play Store litigation, Dr. Rysman was shortlisted for the Global Competition Review’s 2024 award for economist of the year.

Brendan deposed two of Google’s seven expert witnesses and led six fact depositions. He was the primary examiner of Google’s software expert, Dr. Sandeep Chatterjee, and took the States’ portion of the deposition of Stanford professor Dr. Matthew Gentzkow, Google’s expert economist on anticompetitive effects. Brendan was the sole or lead questioner of four Google executives, the former CEO of GetJar, and a Qualcomm executive; he also took the States’ portion of the deposition of a fifth Google witness. And Brendan drafted the States’ two briefs opposing Google’s motions to stay trial or change the schedule, which the Court denied.

Google & Third-Party Discovery

Of Counsel Michael D. Altebrando was the sole examiner for plaintiffs in depositions of executives from Spotify, SoundCloud, and iHeartMedia. In its related trial victory against Google, Epic Games played Michael’s remote deposition of Spotify executive Sandra Alzetta in its case-in-chief. The Google-Spotify deal terms discussed in the Spotify deposition were cited by Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney as one of two standout discoveries at trial, what he called an “astonishing” revelation. Michael also took parts of the depositions of two Google executives and a Motorola witness. And he led a team of States’ attorneys reviewing the more than seven million documents produced in the consolidated cases, for which Everlaw named him the 2023 Rising Star in eDiscovery, noting his “tenacity, ingenuity, and expertise” in that role.  

Then-Of Counsel Bahadur S. Khan, now at the Federal Trade Commission’s Anticompetitive Practices II Division, was the sole examiner for plaintiffs in the depositions of executives from SlideME and TIDAL and was among the questioning attorneys in depositions of two Google witnesses and an Nvidia executive; he also second-chaired the States’ portion of the deposition of Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. Epic Games played clips of Bahadur’s cross-examination of Google's witness Robert Beatty of OCV in its trial win.

Google was represented by Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP; Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP; O'Melveny & Myers LLP; and Kwun Bhansali Lazarus LLP. Third parties subpoenaed or deposed by the firm’s attorneys were represented by Latham & Watkins LLP; Sullivan & Cromwell LLP; Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP; Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Figel & Frederick, PLLC; Morrison & Foerster LLP; Norton Rose Fulbright; and Davis Wright Tremaine LLP.  

The case is Utah v. Google LLC, No. 3:21-cv-05227-JD (N.D. Cal.).