Complaint Against Table Saw Manufacturers For Alleged Conspiracy To Boycott Safety Technology Can Proceed
The Fourth Circuit decided earlier today that a complaint filed by the company that created an “active injury mitigation technology” meant to prevent certain hand and finger injuries on table saws that alleges antitrust violations against the largest table saw manufacturers can go forward. The contentious 2-1 ruling reverses a district court judge’s grant of the manufacturers’ motion to dismiss. The court ruled that the plaintiff has in fact alleged enough to suggest a plausible agreement by the manufacturers to engage in a group boycott of the plaintiff’s technology, which was offered for sale to each of the defendant manufacturers more than a decade ago.
The complaint alleged that the manufacturers agreed among themselves to keep the product out of the market and that by doing so, it would remain plausible to contend that the technology was not viable in future product liability lawsuits. The district court had found that the plaintiff failed to adequately allege an agreement to boycott the technology, but the Fourth Circuit disagreed. The Fourth Circuit emphasized that this case was still at the motion to dismiss stage and that the the lower court applied a standard much closer to “probability” than “plausibility.”
Judge Wilkinson’s lengthy dissent takes issue with the majority’s reasoning: “It is disappointing that such a skimpy complaint pressing such anticompetitive ends should be allowed to traduce the Twombly standard and coopt antitrust law for the precise monopolistic purposes that the Sherman Act was designed to prevent. The fallout will disable American companies from the most innocuous to the most productive. If the complaint had spun even a remotely plausible narrative of impermissible collusion, I should have been the first to wave it through the Twombly gates.” In Judge Wynn’s concurring opinion, he describes the dissenting opinion as “engag[ing] in breathtaking judicial activism.”
