BIO
Mr. Schmidt has been litigating sophisticated commercial disputes and class actions for 35 years. He is admitted to the bar in New Jersey, New York and in the United States Supreme Court. He has represented clients in class actions nationwide. Mr. Schmidt is both a tenacious advocate for his clients and a creative problem solver. He has won cases on motions, at trial and on appeal. His  diligence, perseverance, attention to detail and innovative thinking have enabled him to settle seeming intractable disputes out of court. Mr. Schmidt has litigated many cutting-edge legal issues, changing the law to benefit not only his clients, but society overall.

NOTABLE CURRENT AND PAST CASES

                                                      --  Mr. Schmidt has been appointed co-lead counsel in Patane v. Nestle Waters North America, Inc., in the United Stated District Court for the District of Connecticut, on behalf of millions of consumers and eleven individual plaintiffs from eight states, in a false advertising and consumer fraud case alleging that Poland Spring brand bottled water is not genuine "spring water" but, rather, ordinary groundwater. The plaintiffs seek to recover $1 billion in price premiums that the class has overpaid for Poland Spring Water since 2004 and to enjoin the defendant from continuing to mislabel the product as spring water.

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                                                       --  Mr. Schmidt is co-lead counsel in Roberts v. AT&T Mobility LLC, in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, a consumer fraud class action asserting that AT&T Mobility has overcharged millions of customers for "unlimited data" wireless service plans because the company secretly "throttles" and limits those subscribers' access to data once they use 5 GB (or sometimes less) per month.  

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                                                     --  Mr. Schmidt was the lead lawyer for the plaintiff tenants in the landmark New York state court class action, Roberts v. Tishman Speyer Properties, L.P. There, on behalf of 22,000 current and former tenants of New York City's largest residential apartment complex, Manhattan's Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village, Mr. Schmidt convinced New York's two highest courts that the state agency responsible for administering the City's rent stabilization laws had wrongly permitted landlords to deregulate thousands of apartments that had been receiving New York City tax breaks, thereby overcharging the tenants who rented those apartments or forcing them to leave their homes if they could not pay the illegally high deregulated rents. Mr. Schmidt and his co-counsel ultimately settled the case for $173 million in cash and rent reductions, the largest tenant recovery in U.S. history, and re-stabilized the 11,000 apartment unit complex for years to come. The precedent Mr. Schmidt set has since been used throughout the City to prevent landlords from overcharging tenants and evicting families from their homes for failing to pay illegally high rents.

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                                                 --  Mr. Schmidt represented a garment center retailer, several affiliated clothing manufacturers, and their common owners in Dresses for Less, Inc. v. CIT Group/Commercial  Services, an antitrust action in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, as well as in a parallel lender liability action pending in New York Supreme Court. The plaintiffs had been driven out of business when a group of lenders to the garment industry, called "factors," agreed simultaneously to stop extending credit to the plaintiffs' businesses, an apparent illegal "group boycott" under the antitrust laws. The case was settled on confidential terms, but it had the effect of ending the factors' 80-year old practice of meeting secretly twice a week to make joint credit decisions about their common clients, a practice that federal prosecutors had tried unsuccessfully to end in the 1970s.

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Apple iPhone Apps Antitrust Class Action -- Mr. Schmidt drafted the complaint accusing Apple of monopolizing the market for iPhone apps that was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in the landmark 2019 case Apple Inc. v. Pepper. The Court ruled that the proposed class of iPhone owners who had bought apps at Apple's App Store were proper "direct purchaser" plaintiffs who had standing to sue Apple to recover any amounts they overpaid for apps due to Apple's having cornered the entire market for iPhone apps and preventing app manufacturers from selling their products anywhere other than in Apple's App Store.

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Google Unfair Trade Practice Litigation -- Mr. Schmidt investigated and prepared the complaint in a class action lawsuit alleging that Google unlawfully used the "Search App" it installs on all Android mobile phones to place free advertisements on other businesses' websites without the website owners' consent, unjustly depriving those businesses of advertising fees and otherwise impairing the value of their websites and business. The case, Best Carpet Values, Inc. v. Google LLC, is pending in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.