Daniel McCuaig

Dan McCuaig is a partner at Cohen Milstein and a member of the Antitrust practice. He represents a broad range of plaintiffs in civil litigation, with a focus on class actions and antitrust litigation.

Immediately prior to joining Cohen Milstein, Mr. McCuaig was a trial attorney in the Antitrust Division at the U.S. Department of Justice for more than a decade, where he led investigation and litigation teams in both criminal and civil matters related to price fixing, bid rigging, anticompetitive mergers, and other antitrust law violations. 

As a criminal prosecutor at the DOJ, Mr. McCuaig led the investigation and prosecution of antitrust, fraud, and obstruction of justice claims against corporations and individuals. He was the principal trial lawyer in related plea hearings, sentencings, and before grand juries, and successfully generated significant charges and guilty pleas. Even while carrying out his prosecutorial duties, Mr. McCuaig continued to provide his expertise on major Antitrust Division civil actions, such as its successful challenge to the proposed merger between Anthem and Cigna—in which Mr. McCuaig cross-examined Anthem expert economist Robert Willig at trial.

While a civil litigation trial lawyer at the DOJ, Mr. McCuaig oversaw the government’s investigation into the e-books price fixing conspiracy litigated in In Re Electronic Books Antitrust Litigation (S.D.N.Y.), involving Apple and five major publishers, and played a principal role in the government's successful trial of Apple. Leading up to that trial, Mr. McCuaig coordinated with foreign enforcement agencies, 33 state attorneys general, and private plaintiffs’ counsel, and negotiated consent decrees with all publisher defendants. More generally, Mr. McCuaig investigated competitive effects of proposed mergers in media, sports, real estate, and tangential industries, as well as potential anticompetitive effects of non-merger activity in the same industries, and negotiated divestitures and consent decrees to remedy anticompetitive aspects of mergers and non-merger activities.   

Prior to his work with the DOJ, Mr. McCuaig was counsel at a prestigious international white collar and corporate defense firm, where, in addition to civil antitrust defense work, he focused on telecommunications disputes before the FCC, state public service commissions, and state and federal courts.

He is regularly sought to speak on antitrust and class certification panels and has been repeatedly recognized by Lawdragon as one of the nation's "500 Leading Plaintiff Financial Lawyers."

Currently, Mr. McCuaig is litigating the following notable matters:

• Iowa Public Employees Retirement System et al. v. Bank of America Corp. (S.D.N.Y.): Cohen Milstein is co-counsel in this groundbreaking putative class action, in which investors accuse Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, and other Wall Street investment banks of conspiring to thwart the modernization of, and preserve their dominance over, the $1.7 trillion stock loan market.
• In Re: Da Vinci Surgical Robot Antitrust Litigation (N.D. Cal.): On September 24, 2021, the Court appointed Cohen Milstein Interim Co-Lead Counsel in this consolidated antitrust class action against Intuitive Surgical, Inc. Plaintiffs allege that Intuitive engages in an anticompetitive scheme under which it ties the purchase or lease of its must-have, market-dominating da Vinci surgical robot to the additional purchases of (i) robot maintenance and repair services and (ii) unnecessarily large numbers of the surgical instruments, known as EndoWrists, used to perform surgery with the robot—a violation of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act.
• Pacific Steel Group v. Commercial Metals Company (N.D. Cal.): Cohen Milstein represents Pacific Steel Group, a steel rebar fabricator, in challenging the lawfulness of an agreement extracted by one of the world’s largest steel companies (CMC) from the world's only manufacturer of steel rebar micro mills to refuse to build a micro mill for Pacific Steel in any location that could threaten CMC's rebar monopoly in Southern California or otherwise allow Pacific Steel to become a more formidable competitor in the downstream rebar fabrication market.

Mr. McCuaig is the co-author of Telecommunications Convergence Overview (with William T. Lake and Thomas P. Olson), 698 PLI/Pat 9 (May 2002), and the author of Halve the Baby: An Obvious Solution to the Troubling Use of Trademarks as Metatags, 18 J. Marshall J. Computer & Info. L. 643 (Spring 2000).

Mr. McCuaig received his B.A., summa cum laude, from The George Washington University. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He received his J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School, where he was a Senior Editor and the Treasurer of the Harvard Negotiation Law Review.

Mr. McCuaig was a judicial clerk to The Honorable Algenon L. Marbley of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio (Columbus).