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John M. Ross is a partner of Cooper, White & Cooper LLP. Mr. Ross's litigation and counseling practice emphasizes issues concerning competitive business tactics, product distribution, and communication law, but includes insurance coverage, as well as eminent domain. Mr. Ross principally represents clients in the communications industry, particularly newspapers, broadcast television, telephone utilities, and cable television. He also has significant experience representing insurance companies, water utilities, maritime concerns, and hotel owners and developers. Mr. Ross's experience includes trials and injunction proceedings concerning misappropriation of trade secrets, product distribution, monopolization issues under the antitrust laws, and appellate proceedings in California's Supreme Court and intermediate appellate courts, as well as in the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In 1997, Mr. Ross coordinated our client's very extensive response to a "second request" by the Antitrust Division, acting under the Hart-Scott-Rodino merger review statutes, for documents and testimony concerning a telecommunications acquisition. In 1996, Mr. Ross represented clients who were subpoenaed as potential targets of a grand jury convened by the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, but who ultimately were not charged. Mr. Ross also represented telephone local exchange carriers in extended proceedings in 1996 in which the California Public Utilities Commission established universal service and other rules under which competition will be introduced into local telephone service. Mr. Ross's earlier cases include a civil and criminal horizontal price fixing action brought by the California Attorney General against two petroleum jobber-dealers. Summary judgment for our client was granted in 1993 in the civil action, leading to disposition of the criminal action. The year before, he achieved a favorable settlement for the San Francisco Chronicle in an action alleging that its advertising rates violated the below-cost prohibitions, and other provisions, in California's Unfair Practices Act. In 1994 Mr. Ross obtained a jury verdict in an eminent domain action which more than doubled the government's appraisal of the fair market value of our client's property. | 