A federal judge in Delaware has dismissed legal research startup ROSS Intelligence’s remaining antitrust claim against Thomson Reuters.

As reported by Bob Ambrogi on his excellent LawSites blog (Federal Court Dismisses ROSS Intelligence’s Remaining Antitrust Claim Against Thomson Reuters, available here), the dismissal of the claim (that Thomson Reuters violated federal antitrust law by unlawfully tying its search tool to its public law database in order to maintain its dominance in the overall market for legal search platforms) brings an end to ROSS’s counterclaims against Thomson Reuters (TR) in the continuing federal court litigation between the two parties. Still to be decided in the case are TR’s claims that ROSS violated its copyrights by unlawfully copying TR’s legal materials in order to use them to train its own AI-driven legal research platform.

Those claims were scheduled to have gone to trial last month, but the trial was continued at the eleventh hour, leaving the copyright issues yet to be decided.

After TR first brought its copyright lawsuit against ROSS in May 2020, ROSS filed a counterclaim asserting that TR was violating federal antitrust law by maintaining monopolistic and anticompetitive control over the legal research market.

In 2022, Judge Leonard P. Stark — who previously presided over the case as a U.S. district judge in Delaware before becoming a judge of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit– dismissed a portion of ROSS’s antitrust claims, but he allowed the tying claim to move forward.

That claim alleged that TR violated Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act by unlawfully tying its search tool to its public law database in order to maintain its dominance in the overall market for legal search platforms.

However, in the ruling issued Friday, the judge who replaced Judge Stark in the case, 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephanos Bibas, sitting by designation in the U.S. District Court in Delaware, granted TR’s motion for summary judgment on the tying claim, concluding that ROSS had failed to back up its allegations with sufficient evidence.

ROSS’s theory was that the Westlaw caselaw database is a standalone product that many consumers want to buy, but that TR will sell it only when it is packaged with Westlaw’s search tools, which ROSS alleged was a separate product.

“In other words, Ross claims that Thomson Reuters forces people to buy its Westlaw search tools if they want to use its caselaw database,” Judge Bibas explained.

To establish an unlawful tying arrangement, Judge Bibas said, ROSS would have to show that the products are, in fact, separate, and then would have to define the relevant market for those products in order to show an improper use of power in that market.

ROSS failed to establish either of these facts, Judge Bibas ruled.

Bob discusses more about the case and the ruling here, including analysis from one of the experts on behalf of ROSS that was “so lacking” that it failed to meet the standards for the admissibility of an expert opinion under under Federal Rule of Evidence 702 and Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharms., Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 592–93 (1993).

So, what do you think? Are you surprised that the court dismissed ROSS Intelligence’s remaining antitrust claim against Thomson Reuters? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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