Henry, et al. v. Brown University, et al. – 568 Cartel Antitrust Litigation Moves Forward as the Court Denies the Defendant Universities’ Summary Judgment Motion

Berger Montague, a leading national plaintiffs’ law firm, along with co-counsel Freedman Normand Friedland and Gilbert Litigators & Counselors, scored a major win in Henry, et al. v. Brown University, et al. – 568 Cartel Antitrust Litigation. The federal district court for the Northern District of Illinois denied in its entirety a summary judgment motion filed by the five elite university defendants who have not settled the case. These remaining defendants are Cornell, Georgetown, MIT, Notre Dame, and the University of Pennsylvania. The case may now proceed to trial. The case has been brought by a proposed class of more than 200,000 former students of seventeen elite private universities alleged to have illegally colluded on a formula for financial aid.

“The students are pleased that the Court foiled yet another attempt by the five remaining university defendants to block a jury trial in this case,” said Eric L. Cramer, Chairman of Berger Montague and a lead lawyer on the case. “We have compelling evidence that these elite schools perpetrated a twenty-year conspiracy to harm their own students by colluding in violation of the antitrust laws to reduce financial aid.”

The lawsuit alleges that seventeen universities—as members of what was then called the 568 Presidents Group—conspired for more than twenty years to reduce competition between them and thereby artificially inflate the amount students paid to attend these schools. Plaintiffs presented evidence to the Court showing that all seventeen defendants used a shared “methodology” (referred to by these defendants as the “Consensus Approach”) and agreed upon “principles” to calculate the financial need of approximately 200,000 students. Plaintiffs’ economic expert, Dr. Hal Singer, computed damages to the Class amounting to $685 million using an economic model that the Court has deemed reliable. Berger Montague and its co-lead counsel have already obtained almost $320 million in settlements from twelve of the seventeen defendants in this antitrust class action.

The federal district court for the Northern District of Illinois denied the motion for summary judgment on the grounds that there are genuine disputes of material fact regarding multiple key issues that require a trial to resolve, including: the existence of an antitrust violation under the Sherman Act; the definition of the relevant market in which these schools compete; and whether the statute of limitations barred claims going back to 2003. Citing several contemporaneous internal documents that the Plaintiffs extracted from Defendants during discovery in the case, the Court concluded that a “jury reasonably could find that the 568 Group created the Consensus Approach at least in part to avoid bidding wars, that members were expected or required to adhere to the approach, and that they did in fact partially implement it.”

The Court’s ruling means that the case can now go to trial, currently scheduled to begin in November 2026. A decision by the Court on whether the proposed class of students will be certified remains pending. Read more about the case at www.bergermontague.com/568.

Berger Montague is one of the nation’s preeminent law firms focusing on complex civil litigation, class actions, and mass torts in federal and state courts throughout the United States. With more than $2.4 billion in 2025 post-trial judgments alone, the Firm is a leader in the fields of complex litigation, antitrust, consumer protection, defective products, environmental law, employment law, securities, and whistleblower cases, among many other practice areas. For over 55 years, Berger Montague has played leading roles in precedent-setting cases and has recovered over $50 billion for its clients and the classes they have represented. Berger Montague is headquartered in Philadelphia and has offices in Chicago; Malvern, PA; Minneapolis; San Diego; San Francisco; Toronto, Canada; Washington, D.C., and Wilmington, DE.