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Maxwell Blecher
Blecher & Collins
Specialty: Antitrust
Law School: USC, 1953
Maxwell Blecher never thought he would become one of the country’s top antitrust attorneys when he attended USC Law School in the mid-1950s. Back then, he just wanted to take an early-morning class and have enough time to get to his part-time job by noon. “The only class offered at 8 a.m. was antitrust. I took it and I got hooked,” he recalled.
Blecher, 65, has been hooked ever since. His firm, Blecher & Collins, has litigated a number of precedent-setting antitrust cases since it was established in 1971.
Blecher and his firm are best known for bringing the Oakland Raiders to Los Angeles after a lengthy legal battle that began in 1978. On behalf of his client, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission, Blecher eventually convinced a federal court that the National Football League’s rule requiring three-quarters of the NFL’s members to approve the relocation of a team into another team’s territory was an unlawful restraint of trade. The ruling enabled the Raiders to move to L.A. and the Coliseum to receive $15 million.
Not long after that, Blecher successfully litigated a similar antitrust case against the National Basketball Association, allowing the Clippers to move to Los Angeles from San Diego.
In the early 1970s, Blecher represented ITT in several lawsuits that helped break up a monopoly of the telephone equipment and service business held by GTE and AT & T.; He also won a major victory in 1995 for a group of independent service companies that sued Eastman Kodak, charging the film giant with violating antitrust law when it stopped selling the companies needed replacement parts for their photocopier equipment.
In recognition of these and other legal victories, the State Bar of California named Blecher the 1998 Antitrust Lawyer of the Year.
A native of Chicago, Blecher graduated from DePaul University in 1953 and from USC Law School in 1953. Then-President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the National Commission for the Review of Antitrust Laws and Procedures, and he served on the commission from 1978 to 1979.
Rebecca Kuzins
