Kathleen Foote is a Senior Assistant Attorney General at the California Department of Justice (San Francisco). She joined the California Department of Justice’s antitrust unit as a deputy attorney general in 1988, and has been its Antitrust Chief since 2001. Litigation brought on behalf of California Attorney General under her leadership includes successful state law challenges to tying arrangements and resale price maintenance schemes, and a ground-breaking federal challenge to asserted antitrust exemption of an employer profit-sharing agreement in California v. Safeway, for which she received California Lawyer magazine’s Lawyer of the Year award in 2011. Her team played a lead role in the Microsoft remedies case, and more recently in the TFT-LCD and DRAM Indirect Purchaser multistate cases.
She has led the State’s merger enforcement efforts in numerous industries including gasoline, banking, publishing and healthcare. Her post-settlement work in Levi-Strauss established a research institute on healthcare markets, and in Hartford Fire Ins. V. California an institute on public sector risk management, and she has pioneered the development of best practices for cy pres distributions in other major consumer settlements. Kathleen is currently chair of the multistate Antitrust Task Force of the National Association of Attorneys General, which coordinates joint multistate and state-federal investigations and litigation. She serves on the Advisory Board of the American Antitrust Institute and has been named recipient of its annual Alfred Kahn Award for Antitrust Achievement for 2013.
She is co-chair of the ABA Section of Antitrust Law’s State Enforcement Committee, and is a past Executive Committee member of the California State Bar’s Antitrust and Unfair Competition Law Section. From 1981 until 1987 Kathleen was Associate Dean at University of San Francisco School of Law. Prior to teaching, she spent three years as an associate attorney with the San Francisco law firm of McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen (now Bingham). She earned her undergraduate degree from Radcliffe in 1967 and her law degree from USF in 1975.
