Overview
On November 16, 2023 Global Competition Review quoted Lee Berger in an article titled, "Alcohol retailer challenges FTC ‘overreach’." The article discusses Total Wine’s response to the Federal Trade Commission’s enforcement petition regarding a civil investigative demand in a price discrimination probe into alcohol distributor Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits.
Speaking about the FTC’s document requests, Berger said, "it might be difficult for the court to weigh in on the relevance of FTC’s document requests due to little legal precedent surrounding Robinson-Patman enforcement. The FTC likely views Total Wine’s document production through the use of modern e-discovery practices like technology-assisted review (TAR) that enforcers and companies use to process documents and pick out relevant data points. The commission likely does not view 9,000 documents as a burden because the onus on the retailer is theoretically the same whether the TAR system is spitting out a few hundred documents or millions."
