Automotive & Transportation

Few industries live with antitrust the way this one does — and few law firms know it from the inside the way ours does. Steve Cernak, who leads Bona Law’s Detroit office, spent more than 20 years as in-house antitrust counsel at General Motors, ultimately responsible for the company’s global antitrust compliance, merger reviews, and litigation. Jim Lerner, our Director of Litigation, defended automotive component-parts manufacturers in the DOJ’s auto-parts cartel investigations — the largest criminal antitrust investigation in the Justice Department’s history — and the massive class actions that followed. Today, with more than 15 antitrust attorneys, Bona Law counsels manufacturers, suppliers, and joint ventures in the industry and litigates competition disputes across the transportation economy, from trucking labor markets to ambulance monopolies.

Cars, trucks, and the networks that move people and freight are built on exactly the relationships antitrust law polices: rivals collaborating in joint ventures and standard-setting groups, suppliers selling to a handful of powerful buyers, manufacturers distributing through franchised dealers and distributors and mass merchandisers, carriers competing for drivers, and regulated modes operating under exemptions that are narrower than most executives assume. When those relationships work, they are the industry’s greatest strength. When they cross the line — or when a competitor, enforcer, or class-action lawyer says they did — you need counsel who has seen the problem from inside the industry, not just from a law-firm conference room.

Why automotive and transportation companies hire Bona Law

We know where the lines are because we spent our careers drawing them. Antitrust risk in this industry rarely announces itself. It shows up in a benchmarking survey your trade association circulates, a joint development agreement with a rival, a pricing conversation at an industry conference, a dealer or distributor you need to terminate, a hiring practice your competitors share. Our attorneys have handled each of those situations for automotive clients — many of them hundreds of times.

We are antitrust specialists with a bench built for this industry. Bona Law does one thing: competition law. Our attorneys have run the antitrust function inside a global automaker, defended the industry’s biggest cartel investigations, chaired the ABA Antitrust Law Section, and written the treatise on distribution antitrust — and every client, from a global OEM to a single-location distributor to a freight carrier, works directly with us. We also serve as antitrust co-counsel to the many excellent automotive, distributor, and transportation firms whose clients need a specialist alongside them.

We work every side of the industry’s disputes. We counsel manufacturers designing distribution and pricing programs and represent distributors those programs squeeze; we defend companies in cartel investigations and class actions and bring affirmative antitrust claims for businesses harmed by monopolists and government-created monopolies. Sitting in both chairs is how you spot the weakness in a program before a plaintiff does — and the leverage in a claim before a defendant expects it.

The attorneys behind this practice

Steve Cernak is one of the country’s most experienced automotive antitrust lawyers — full stop. Before joining Bona Law, he served as in-house antitrust attorney at General Motors for more than 20 years, ultimately responsible for global antitrust compliance, merger reviews, and litigation — tackling the industry’s hardest antitrust questions and explaining them to everyone from the CEO to factory technicians. He served as divisional general counsel for GM’s aftermarket parts and service divisions, negotiated joint-venture agreements among automotive rivals, and served as virtual general counsel for one of those ventures for more than a decade. After GM, he spent seven years at Schiff Hardin serving automotive, manufacturing, and distribution clients before joining Bona Law’s Detroit office. Steve is the author of the annually updated LexisNexis treatise Antitrust in Distribution and Franchising and a former Chair of the ABA Antitrust Law Section (2024–25). He has taught antitrust at the University of Michigan Law School and other Michigan law schools and has been recognized by Best Lawyers in antitrust law since 2020.

Jim Lerner, the firm’s Director of Litigation, is a global antitrust lawyer with three decades of experience in counseling and litigation at top international antitrust practices including Winston & Strawn, Dewey & LeBoeuf, and Weil, Gotshal & Manges. Before joining Bona Law, he defended manufacturers of automotive component parts in the DOJ cartel investigations and in the In re Automotive Parts direct- and indirect-purchaser MDL class actions asserting price-fixing and bid-rigging claims — representing automotive-parts companies from Japan and Europe in the government investigations, the follow-on class actions, and related private litigation brought by U.S. automobile manufacturers. He has represented clients in many of the most high-profile international cartel matters of the past 25 years.

Pat Pascarella, the firm’s General Counsel and a former in-house antitrust counsel himself, defended a national trucking company in Markson v. CRST International — one of the leading no-poach class actions in the transportation sector. Jarod Bona, the firm’s founder, and Aaron Gott built the country’s leading ambulance-market antitrust portfolio — twelve monopolization actions against California municipalities litigated through the Ninth Circuit, where Aaron argued the consolidated appeal. In addition, Luke Hasskamp argued Western Star Hospital Authority v. City of Richmond, 986 F.3d 354 (4th Cir. 2021), a Section 2 challenge to an exclusive municipal ambulance franchise. And as with every Bona Law matter, the team behind the team is the entire firm.

Representative experience

The matters below are Bona Law engagements. Client names are omitted where the representation is not public.

Joint ventures and information exchanges among automotive rivals. Negotiation and ongoing antitrust counseling on joint-venture agreements, information exchanges, and benchmarking among major automotive original equipment manufacturers and industry groups — including long-running virtual-general-counsel work for automotive joint ventures and the leading industry aftermarket consultant.
Markson v. CRST International, Inc. (C.D. Cal.). Defense of a national trucking company in a Section 1 “no-poach” class action alleging a nationwide conspiracy to suppress driver wages and mobility — one of the leading no-poach matters in the transportation sector.
Trade-association, benchmarking, and standard-setting counseling. Ongoing counseling for automotive-industry consortia and other groups on information exchanges among competitors, meeting protocols, joint government lobbying, and data-exchange structures in the post-safe-harbor enforcement environment — see our counseling and compliance practice.
Pricing and distribution counseling for automotive clients. Minimum advertised price programs, dealer and distributor relations, and distribution-structure counseling for clients including a global automaker and some of its leading suppliers — from both the manufacturer and reseller perspectives.
Antitrust compliance programs. Design, implementation, and assessment of antitrust compliance programs for automotive and other clients — training, policy development, and audit support built on Steve Cernak’s experience running global compliance at a major automaker.
Merger clearance across the transportation economy. HSR filings and merger counseling for clients including a heavy-truck manufacturer, an automotive filtration supplier, and a national freight-forwarding and logistics company, including coordinating cross-border filings with non-U.S. authorities.
The ambulance-monopolization portfolio. Twelve federal antitrust actions against Orange County, California municipalities for monopolizing emergency and non-emergency medical transport, litigated through the Ninth Circuit and to a U.S. Supreme Court certiorari petition; and Western Star Hospital Authority (Metro Health) v. City of Richmond, a Section 2 challenge to an exclusive municipal ambulance franchise.

Where antitrust risk arises in automotive and transportation

Suppliers and OEMs. The auto-parts prosecutions permanently changed the industry’s risk profile: purchasing and sales practices that once felt like relationship management — capacity discussions, cost benchmarking, coordinated responses to RFQs — are now the fact patterns of criminal cases. Today’s pressure points are newer: tariff-driven pricing renegotiations rippling through the supply chain at the same moment, supply-chain collaborations that flirt with coordination, and information exchanges and benchmarking after the agencies withdrew their decades-old safe harbors. As Steve wrote about his GM years: “While covering hundreds of these matters in-house at General Motors, I often said that my role was to use my ‘automotive to antitrust’ decoder ring for the good of both sides” — that decoder ring is what suppliers need before the agency calls.

Dealers, distribution, and the fight over how vehicles are sold. Manufacturer–dealer relationships sit at the intersection of antitrust, state franchise statutes, and contract law: dealer terminations and allocation disputes, group boycotts (a doctrine the Supreme Court built partly on GM’s own dealer network in United States v. General Motors), hub-and-spoke conspiracy claims, incentive programs like the one litigated in Dahl Automotive v. Ford, minimum advertised price and resale-price programs after Leegin, even dealer price gouging in a crisis — and now the direct-sales wars, as EV makers challenge dealer-franchise laws as anticompetitive while dealer associations sue to enforce them.

The aftermarket and right to repair. Steve served as divisional general counsel for aftermarket parts and service divisions at GM and advises in the aftermarket today. Parts distribution, data access for independent repair, and OEM restraints on the service channel can raise refusal-to-deal, tying, market-allocation, and monopolization questions that the expanding right-to-repair movement is again pushing into courtrooms and statehouses. The automotive industry has dealt with right-to-repair issues for decades, as has Steve, including ongoing advice to the leading industry joint effort disseminating necessary repair information.

Trucking, freight, and logistics. Labor-market antitrust arrived in this industry first: Markson v. CRST helped define no-poach class-action risk for carriers, and the agencies’ 2025 guidance keeps driver hiring, wage benchmarking, and non-solicitation practices squarely in enforcers’ sights. Freight brokerages and logistics platforms add pricing-algorithm and information-exchange exposure.

Passenger transportation and mobility. From the DOJ’s successful challenge to the American Airlines–JetBlue Northeast Alliance to California’s attempt to let gig drivers bargain collectively, passenger markets generate collaboration, immunity, and platform questions we write about as they develop. Our ambulance litigation is the deepest portfolio anywhere on government-created transportation monopolies.

Rail and ocean shipping. Transportation’s regulated modes operate under antitrust exemptions that are narrower — and more politically endangered — than most operators assume. As we explained in our survey of lesser-known antitrust exemptions, discussing the Shipping Act: “Under the Act, common carriers can enter into agreements fixing rates, pooling revenues, allocating cargo, and coordinating vessel capacity, provided they file those agreements with the Federal Maritime Commission.” With Congress reexamining the ocean-carrier exemption and the largest rail merger in history under review, shippers and carriers alike need counsel on the filed rate doctrine (born in a railroad rate case), Noerr-Pennington immunity (born in a railroads-versus-truckers fight), exemption boundaries, and merger advocacy — including before the state attorneys general now active in transportation-merger reviews. Steve advises the automotive industry’s leading logistics joint effort as it interacts with both the rail and trucking industries.

How we help

Antitrust counseling and compliance — compliance programs, training, and audits built by someone who ran them at global scale; day-to-day counseling on pricing, purchasing, and distribution questions. Learn more.
Trade associations, benchmarking, and information exchanges — participation protocols, meeting counsel, and data-exchange structures for supplier groups, standard-setting bodies, and industry consortia.
Joint ventures and collaborations — structuring, filing, and serving as ongoing antitrust counsel for ventures among competitors.
Government investigations — DOJ, FTC, and state investigations, grand-jury subpoenas, leniency analysis, and internal investigations, for companies and individual executives.
Antitrust litigation — class-action defense, plaintiff-side monopolization and exclusionary-conduct claims, no-poach and labor-market antitrust, complex commercial litigation, and appeals.
Mergers and acquisitions — HSR strategy, filings, and merger-clearance advocacy, U.S. and cross-border.
Distribution, dealers, and pricing — MAP and resale-price programs, dealer terminations, and franchise-adjacent antitrust disputes. Learn more.
Antitrust co-counsel — specialist support for automotive, dealer-franchise, and transportation firms whose clients face antitrust issues.

Frequently asked questions

Our trade association circulates a benchmarking survey. Is that an antitrust problem? It can be. The agencies withdrew their long-standing information-exchange safe harbors, and DOJ has pursued benchmarking and data-exchange cases aggressively — including in supply-chain industries. The answer depends on what data is exchanged, how current and disaggregated it is, who manages it, and what participants do with it. This is one of the most common questions we answer for automotive suppliers, and it is usually fixable with protocol design rather than abstinence.
We received a DOJ subpoena in a parts investigation. What should we do first? Preserve documents immediately, engage antitrust counsel before responding or talking to anyone (including customers who received the same subpoena), and assess leniency posture early — timing drives everything in cartel investigations. Our attorneys have defended automotive-parts manufacturers through exactly this process, from the first agency contact through resolution.
A manufacturer is terminating our dealership or distributorship. Do we have an antitrust claim? Sometimes — most terminations are lawful, but terminations connected to pricing (a dealer punished for discounting), a competitor’s pressure, or an exclusionary scheme can support Sherman Act claims alongside state dealer-protection statutes.
Can we form a joint venture or development partnership with a competitor? Usually yes, with the right structure and guardrails — automotive rivals collaborate constantly on topics like platforms, batteries, basic R&D, and logistics. The antitrust work is in scoping the venture, insulating competitive decision-making, filing where required, and building information firewalls. Steve Cernak negotiated these agreements among automotive rivals for decades and served as virtual general counsel to such a venture for more than ten years.
Do the antitrust laws even apply to railroads, ocean carriers, and airlines? Mostly yes — the exemptions are narrower than reputations suggest, they are under active political attack and conduct outside a filed agreement or regulatory approval gets full antitrust scrutiny. Shippers harmed by carrier conduct, and carriers structuring alliances, both need the boundaries mapped precisely.

From our writing

Our attorneys write constantly about the doctrines this industry lives with — a sample from The Antitrust Attorney Blog:

For more, browse The Antitrust Attorney Blog and our legal resources library.

Contact us

If your company makes, moves, sells, or services vehicles — or moves anything else — and competition law has become part of your risk landscape, we should talk. Contact us here, or reach us through any of our offices, including Detroit.