A federal judge in Delaware has dismissed the claim by now-shuttered legal research startup ROSS Intelligence that Thomson Reuters violated federal antitrust law by unlawfully tying its search tool to its public law database in an effort to maintain dominance in the overall market for legal search platforms.
The ruling concludes ROSS’s counterclaims against Thomson Reuters (TR) in the ongoing litigation between the two parties. TR’s claims that ROSS infringed its copyrights by unlawfully copying TR’s legal materials for training its own AI-driven legal research platform are still pending. The trial on these issues, originally scheduled for last month, was continued.
TR initially filed its copyright lawsuit against ROSS in May 2020. In response, ROSS counterclaimed, alleging that TR was maintaining monopolistic and anticompetitive control over the legal research market. In 2022, Judge Leonard P. Stark, then presiding over the case, dismissed a portion of ROSS’s antitrust claims but allowed the tying claim to move forward.
The remaining tying claim contended that TR’s actions violated Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. ROSS argued that the Westlaw caselaw database was a standalone product that many consumers desired independently of Westlaw’s search tools.
However, in the latest ruling issued Friday, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas, sitting in the U.S. District Court in Delaware by designation, granted TR’s motion for summary judgment. Judge Bibas concluded that ROSS had not provided adequate evidence to support its allegations.
To prove an unlawful tying arrangement, ROSS needed to demonstrate that the products were separate and to define the relevant market. Judge Bibas found that ROSS failed on both fronts. The judge noted that ROSS did not demonstrate sufficient consumer demand to purchase the products separately nor provide conclusive evidence that consumers would want to do so.
Judge Bibas also dismissed ROSS’s analogy between online legal databases and printed books, stating that printed books included search tools, albeit less sophisticated than modern digital tools.
Even if ROSS had proven the tying arrangement, the judge stated that the lack of a defined market would fail the claim. Expert witness James Ratliff’s testimony on market definition was deemed inadequate and did not meet the admissibility standards under Federal Rule of Evidence 702 and Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharms., Inc.