Live Nation Fights to Move Antitrust Case to D.C.; Preserve Document Access

Live Nation Entertainment is pushing to see the Department of Justice’s massive antitrust lawsuit against it and Ticketmaster moved to Washington, D.C., and keep key corporate officers — including antitrust czar Dan Wall — able to access all discovery files in legal filings made in recent days. The entertainment giant has already sought to have many portions of the case dismissed entirely, but is clearly pursuing multiple angles of attack against the sprawling lawsuit seeking to break it up after more than a decade of allegations of anticompetitive and monopolistic behavior.

Judge Arun Subramanian has already issued his ruling on the second matter – proposing a two-tiered access system or case-related documents, preserving the right of Wall and Kimberly Tobias (Live Nation’s SVP of Litigation) to participate in the corporation’s defense alongside external counsel while restricting their access to certain documents that could provide them with confidential information about Live Nation’s competition. He left it to the DOJ and Live Nation to sort out the specifics, setting a deadline for today (Thursday, July 25) for those to be worked out or the court will work it out for them based on their sticking points.

He has not issued any ruling on the change of venue request, but in his ruling regarding the confidentiality, he reminded both parties that “discovery needs to get going in this case, because the March 2, 2026 trial date is set in stone.”

DOJ, Live Nation Dispute Wall and Tobias Access to Sensitive Documents

Dan Wall has long been the architect of Live Nation Entertainment’s legal defense of its business practices related to competition. The antitrust expert was outside counsel for LNE at Lathan & Watkins (which, not coincidentally, is one of the firms litigating this DOJ case) for years before retiring from that firm and going in-house at LNE in 2023 as it became apparent that the government intended to take action. But he and Tobias, who is also a corporate officer at the company in addition to representing it in legal matters, cannot be trusted to keep secret certain information provided to the DOJ by LNE’s competition in its investigation that led up to the lawsuit being filed.

Live Nation naturally wishes its core in-house legal team to have full access to all aspects of the case, and has indicated it doesn’t mind there being some restrictions on what they can see. But the DOJ told the court that Live Nation “caveat their proposal with a broad loophole that renders [the restrictions] meaningless.”

The company argued in its filing that it is “unfair and unnecessary” to bar their two corporate officers from accessing confidential documents from LNE’s competitors, because “the materials designated confidential are usually the most important.” They say that Wall has “no operational or business responsibilities relating to Live Nation’s business outside of his role as a legal advisor” and therefore it shouldn’t matter that he accesses confidential materials from that company’s competition alleging antitrust abuses.

Reality shows this to be a questionable claim at best – Wall has become Live Nation’s chief cheerleader and public affairs face for its antitrust defense. He has authored multiple articles on the company’s website outlining how its business practices are perfectly legal, and how competitors are trying to weaponize public opinion to spur antitrust action. He has given multiple interviews, expressing the views coming from the highest level of corporate decision-making, having worked side-by-side with Live Nation’s senior management since 2009.

The ruling thus far seems to be an effort to appease both sides – allowing Wall and Tobias to be a part of the litigation, but keeping in place the ability to restrict their access to certain documents by the government. Efforts to overly restrict access will be viewed with skepticism, according to the ruling.

“Anyone producing documents should be mindful of the limited nature of the highly confidential designation,” Judge Subramanian wrote. “Any abuse of this designation will not be tolerated. It if turns out that vast swaths of the record are improperly designated highly confidential, the court will step in.”

The full ruling can be read here (PDF opens in new window)

Live Nation Argues Case is Rehash of Consent Decree and Must Be Moved to D.C. Court

In its complaint arguing that Live Nation and Ticketmaster operate as an unlawful monopoly, the DOJ has argued that the 2010 consent decree it agreed to when the companies merged “failed to restrain Live Nation and Ticketmaster from violating other antitrust laws in increasingly serious ways.” Live Nation’s legal team argued that the terms of that consent decree – which its clients were found to have violated in multiple ways when it was extended in 2019 – require that the antitrust case be returned to the original court where that decree was agreed to, in Washington.

Effectively, they say, the DOJ’s case is a rehash of the consent decree itself, rather than anything new implied by the multiple violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act the government is arguing have taken place since the companies merged.

“This lawsuit seeks a profound modification of the [2010 consent] decree: unwinding the merger that it expressly allowed,” its motion reads, in part. “Plaintiffs, most of whom are parties to the decree, ask the court to do so based on allegations of misconduct that in some respects are squarely regulated by the decree, and more broadly on a theory about the merger’s competitive impact that is directly at odds with the findings on which the decree is predicated.”

Since, they say, the DOJ knew about much of the conduct they now say violates antitrust law when the consent decree was agreed to and again when it was extended years later, they have no argument that this is new information. That means the DOJ has no right to pursue this as a separate legal action, and instead must bring the case back to the Washington D.C. to effectively re-negotiate the consent agreement for a third time.

The full motion to transfer the case to Washington D.C. can be read here (PDF opens in new window).