August 29, 2025
Cohen Milstein’s nationally recognized antitrust practice group recently secured a $375 million antitrust settlement benefiting more than a thousand mixed martial arts fighters who had accused promoter Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) of unlawfully achieving market dominance that locked them into unfair, low-paying contracts.
U.S. District Judge Richard F. Boulware granted final approval to the deal on February 6, 2025, six months after saying he wanted a deal that would return “life changing” money to the Plaintiffs. Litigated over more than a decade, the antitrust class action showcases Cohen Milstein’s ability to achieve justice for its clients by outmaneuvering and outlasting deep-pocketed corporate defendants.
The settlement in Le, et al. v. Zuffa LLC (dba UFC), et al., 15-cv[1]01045-RFB-BNW (D. Nev.), covers more than 1,100 fighters who competed in UFC-promoted MMA bouts taking place or broadcast in the United States from December 16, 2010 to June 30, 2017.
Comparing their victory to “the end of a very, very long fight count,” Nate Quarry, one of the six original Le plaintiffs, told an interviewer that he and other plaintiffs broke into applause when the judge announced his approval. “Knowing that we get to split hundreds of millions of dollars between over eleven hundred fighters, that is an amazing feeling,” he said.
Under the settlement, Plaintiffs’ attorneys said 35 fighters should receive more than $1 million, about 100 fighters will get more than $500,000, and most of the remaining fighters in the class will be allocated amounts of between approximately $50,000 and $250,000. According to the Plan of Allocation, the minimum individual recovery is $15,000.
Fighters who have participated in UFC bouts since July 1, 2017 continue to litigate a second antitrust class action, Kajan Johnson, et al. v. Zuffa, LLC, which was filed in 2021 by Cohen Milstein and its fellow co-lead counsel.
Quarry, who has been vocal about the physical and financial toll caused by his championship MMA fighting career, said he and other Plaintiffs will continue the legal fight until the rules are changed for current and future MMA fighters. “… [O]ur goal from the very beginning was to hopefully get some monetary relief for the fighters that had been just horribly shortchanged. But then also we wanted to change the sport,” he said.
In certifying the Le class in 2023, Judge Boulware said plaintiffs had established that UFC parent company Zuffa had “willfully engaged in anticompetitive conduct to maintain or increase their market power.”
“Due to this anticompetitive, coercive conduct, fighters were trapped by Zuffa’s exclusionary contracts and their restrictive terms, creating a situation in which Zuffa had unfettered power and opportunity to suppress fighters’ compensation,” the judge wrote..
Dating from at least 2010, Plaintiffs alleged that UFC’s anticompetitive behavior allowed it to retain more than 80% of all revenue generated by MMA events in the U.S., while paying UFC fighters a fraction of what they would earn in a competitive marketplace. That percentage remained unchanged despite the explosive growth of Zuffa, which promoter Dana White and brothers Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta purchased for $2 million in 2001 and sold 15 years later for roughly $4 billion.
According to Judge Boulware, Plaintiffs established that UFC achieved its market power through anticompetitive means like buying and shutting down rival companies and “locking up” fighters into unfavorable and exclusionary three- or four-bout contracts. Fighters had no ability to negotiate terms, since UFC was effectively their only potential employer. And while UFC could drop fighters without explanation, the contracts barred the fighters from going elsewhere.
Moreover, UFC strong-armed fighters into signing new contracts before the old ones expired through its power to match them with unfavorable opponents in their remaining bouts, making the contracts “effectively perpetual,” the judge said.
As Nate Quarry put it in a 2024 interview: “They just get blacklisted, they get cut. They get put on the undercard. They are given opponents that aren’t going to be a good match up for them … The UFC is very vindictive. You’re either with the company or you’re against it.”