Service of DT in T-Mobile/Sprint Case to Drag on for 2-3 More Months

Personal service of defendant Deutsche Telekom now is expected to be complete by around June in the class action by seven AT&T and Verizon subscribers to vacate T-Mobile’s 2020 Sprint buy on antitrust grounds, said a joint status report Thursday (docket 1:22-cv-03189) in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois in Chicago. U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin for that reason rescheduled a March 31 status conference to July 19. The inability to serve DT in Germany has kept the case in limbo at least since August, when the court appointed Crowe Foreign Services and its agents to process service on DT through diplomatic channels under the Hague Conference. The latest hitch occurred Feb. 17 when Crowe received a letter from the German court “requiring a new request for service with an additional letter from plaintiffs’ counsel,” said the status report. The additional letter is needed to confirm the plaintiffs aren't pursuing what German law calls “claim splitting,” or pursuing claims that seek recovery that will be split with a state government, it said. The plaintiffs are preparing “the appropriate letter” and soon will retransmit the service materials to the German court, it said. Crowe advises that this process could take roughly two to three months more to complete, it said. The plaintiffs in the class action allege the anticompetitive nature of the T-Mobile/Sprint combination in 2020 caused their own wireless rates to soar post-merger (see 2302060032).