Visa and Justice Department lawyers are battling over the pace of discovery in the government’s antitrust lawsuit, accusing each other of unreasonable behavior as the litigation nears its two-year mark.
With an Oct. 16 deadline looming to finish fact discovery, both sides have asked a federal judge to revise the court’s schedule for adjudicating the 2024 lawsuit, which alleges that Visa operates an illegal monopoly in the U.S. debit card market.
“Visa has not meaningfully engaged” with the government’s efforts since early July to schedule employee depositions, DOJ lawyer Michele Trichler wrote in a letter Friday to U.S. District Judge John Koeltl, who is overseeing the case in New York City.
Trichler further accused the card network of “dilatory behavior” and “gamesmanship” in scheduling depositions.
Three days prior, Visa attorney Kieran Gostin had asked the court to extend the October deadline, noting that the parties agreed an extension would be appropriate, “but they disagree as to the proper length and terms for such an extension.”
No trial date has been set, although it is likely to be in 2028 based on the current case schedule.
In a response order Tuesday, Koeltl noted that the parties’ letters are “riddled with explicit and implicit accusations of unreasonableness,” referring the matter to Magistrate Judge Sarah Cave to rule on a revised discovery deadline.
Cave has scheduled an Aug. 28 hearing.
The DOJ brought the case against Visa in September 2024 under former Attorney General Merrick Garland, during President Joe Biden’s administration, with President Donald Trump’s administration carrying it forward. The government argues that the company has carved out an illegal monopoly in the debit card market. Visa has denied those allegations.
In a letter to Koeltl on Monday, the card network said there are about 150 depositions to complete for the DOJ and related private plaintiff lawsuits that are proceeding in tandem with the U.S. litigation.
Some of the delays are related to the DOJ’s “extremely broad and burdensome” document requests to Visa as part of the discovery process, wrote Gostin, a partner with the law firm Wilkinson Stekloff.
Another factor is an expanding list of Visa witnesses the DOJ wants to depose, with the current count at 48, “and it refuses to rule out asking for more,” Gostin wrote, adding that the government had doubled its request for Visa employees in the prior two weeks.
Visa has turned over about 5.7 million documents and will have more by the end of August, with “a team of over 150 attorneys” using technology to review the documents produced to the government, the company said.
Each side has been allotted 255 hours to depose witnesses, with 15 depositions completed and another 20 either scheduled or proposed, Visa said in its Aug. 11 letter.
