April 04, 2016 09:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–In a jury verdict announced by its lawyers today, a small cigar company called Trendsettah USA, Inc. won $44,446,482 in damages against Swisher International, the world’s largest cigar manufacturer. Lawyers from Gaw | Poe LLP, the San Francisco-based firm that represented Trendsettah, announced the award. One of the firm’s partners, Mark Poe, declared the verdict “a gratifying result for our clients and our firm, especially in the fact that the jury unanimously agreed with us on all four claims we had brought to trial.”
“Although the pertinent section of the Sherman Act uses the term ‘monopoly’, it is not limited to monopolies in the traditional sense”
Trendsettah and Swisher had entered into a manufacturing contract in January 2011, under which Swisher was to manufacture cigarillos—a type of small cigar—for Trendsettah, which Trendsettah was then to sell under its own brand name, “Splitarillos.” In the lawsuit, Trendsettah alleged that the explosive growth of the Splitarillos brand over its first year-and-a-half in business began to eat away at the market share of Swisher’s own “Swisher Sweets” brand. At that point, Trendsettah alleged, Swisher began to purposefully refuse to fulfill Trendsettah’s orders, slowly starving it out of business. At the same time, Swisher encouraged its sales reps to disparage Splitarillos in the marketplace, intentionally mis-filled Trendsettah’s orders for Splitarillos, and then imposed an arbitrarily low cap on the total number of Splitarillos it would manufacture each month, the lawsuit alleged.
