MTO Receives Law360’s 2025 Competition Practice Group of the Year Award 

Munger, Tolles & Olson has been recognized as one of Law360’s 2025 Competition Practice Groups of the Year. The annual awards honor attorney teams in 30 distinct practice areas that were behind litigation wins and major deals that resonated through the legal industry over the last year.  

In a Law360 interview, Partners Kuruvilla Olasa and Justin Raphael reflected on the group’s work, emphasizing both the pace and complexity of the matters the team has handled.  

For example, MTO, along with the Washington State Office of the Attorney General, obtained a permanent injunction against the $24.6 billion merger of the Kroger and Albertsons grocery chains, which would have been the largest supermarket merger in U.S. history. “We’ve done merger cases before, and it exemplifies our ability to get up to speed, learn a case and bring a case to trial in a short period of time,” said Kuru, adding that trying and winning such cases remains a highlight for the team.  

Law360 also featured MTO’s role in securing a significant summary judgment win for BNSF Railway in a multidistrict litigation that was pending for nearly two decades and involved more than 110 related cases and 380 plaintiffs. “It was nice to be able to show the court that our client was right,” Kuru said. “The conspiracy allegations just didn’t hold together, and we got a pretty resounding win there.” 

Justin noted that the firm’s work demonstrates an ability to represent both sides of the “v”. “We really view ourselves and our group as a bunch of antitrust litigators who have antitrust expertise, but also bring the litigation skills to bear,” he said. “[W]e know what it takes to present an antitrust issue, especially a novel one, to a court.” 

Read Munger, Tolles & Olson’s Law360 profile. (Subscription may be required)