Cooley Team Secures Another Win for National Association of Realtors
Washington, DC – August 21, 2023 – Cooley, alongside a team from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, secured a summary judgment victory for the National Association of Realtors (NAR) in a high-stakes antitrust case brought against NAR and Zillow. Ethan Glass, partner and chair of Cooley’s antitrust & competition practice, led the team advising NAR.
REX, a real estate startup, brought the case against NAR in March 2021, alleging that changes made to Zillow’s website under multiple listing service rules “unfairly hide certain listings, shrinking their exposure and diminishing competition among real estate brokers,” which in turn caused about $1 billion in harm to REX.
NAR’s motion for summary judgment stated that “it remains undisputed that the agreement between NAR, MLSs and Zillow to ‘segregate, conceal, and demote’ REX’s listings on Zillow’s website never happened, [and] the changes to Zillow’s website did not harm competition.”
On August 16, 2023, US District Judge Thomas Zilly granted NAR’s motion for summary judgment and removed NAR as a party in the suit, while denying REX’s motion for partial summary judgment.
The victory earned the team a Litigator of the Week accolade in The American Lawyer’s Litigation Daily column.
Cooley previously represented NAR in a case setting aside the Department of Justice’s demands to walk back from a proposed settlement in January 2023, which also earned the team a Litigator of the Week accolade.
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