Crossover grading

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by benjulmag

One of the things that has guided me well as an attorney is what I call the smell test.

If,

(I) company B is the industry leader and has a publicly stated policy of objectively evaluating all submissions explicitly including submissions of slabbed company A cards;

(II) company B as a matter of internal policy has a policy against crossing over cards in company A's slabs, which policy can be proven;

(III) company B when returning the uncrossed over cards to the submitter states the reason for the refusal to cross over is that the cards are either altered or do not merit the same grade;

(IV) these occurrences occur on a regular basis;

(V) company B's profitability goes down, which decrease can be proven to correlate to company B's internal policy of refusing to objectively evaluate slabbed company A cards in crossover submittals;

Then,

company A has an actionable claim for damages against company B.

And to go further, if company B can be proven to have similar policies with similar results against all the other TPG companies in the market, such that that the end result is company B is left as the only TPG company in the industry,

Then

there are antitrust implications.


Let me worry about whether what I state to be fact can be proven. Assuming they can, I believe the conclusions I have drawn stand a very good chance of being correct if tested.

All I can go on is all the years of practice I have had including many antitrust cases some pretty high profile. I would personally value that more than your smell test -- antitrust law can be very technical -- but whatever. If you think you know more about antitrust law than I do, cool. PS in your (V) you have the wrong company's profitability going down (I think anyhow). You might want to fix that. If you truly meant to say B, then you haven't articulated any theory of harm to A, have you? Not that any of that matters really to the question.

Kinder, gentler version of above -- just because big company A does something to hurt small company B, even badly hurt it, it doesn't necessarily implicate the antitrust laws. It might, but there are lots of reasons it might not. It's a very complex subject that even the Supreme Court struggles with at times.