John Playforth Named Litigator of the Week for NFL Victory

John Playforth was named a Litigator of the Week in AmLaw Litigation Daily for his role as counsel to the National Football League (NFL) in antitrust litigation regarding DirecTV’s “Sunday Ticket.” Plaintiffs alleged the league conspired to inflate the price of the “Sunday Ticket” package. John was part of a team of litigators that secured a ruling from a federal judge in Los Angeles excluding the plaintiffs’ experts and knocking out knocking out a $4.7 billion jury verdict.

In a Q&A interview about the victory, John discussed the firm’s work with AmLaw, saying that “the on-site Covington team focused on the legal aspects of the case during trial, including trial briefing, jury instructions and ensuring we had a Rule 50(a) motion that was ready to go when the presentation of evidence was complete. More generally, and especially as the case progressed to trial, the expert work and the legal briefing were two of the areas in which Covington … collaborated most closely, and those were the areas that ultimately proved decisive.”

John also spoke about the origins of the firm’s representation of the NFL in the “Sunday Ticket” case. “Covington has defended the NFL against antitrust challenges for many years,” he said. “I represented the League along with my partners Gregg Levy and Derek Ludwin in two earlier antitrust litigations against the League, including the American Needle case, and we have defended the NFL in the Sunday Ticket litigation since the first cases were filed in 2015.”