NEW YORK – In a blog post for Reuters late last week, reporter Alison Frankel provided additional details on what she referred to as “one of the most inexplicable cases of improper lawyer conduct I’ve ever seen.” At the heart of the misconduct is antitrust attorney Gary Friedman, who co-led a long-running case for merchants suing American Express over inflated swipe fees.

According to news reports and court filings, Freidman supplied proprietary information about retailers in his case, as well as a confidential expert witness report, to a lawyer for MasterCard in a similar case, Keila Ravelo, with whom he has a longtime friendship.

Communications between the two have been under scrutiny since February, when outside attorneys became suspicious after uncovering some potentially problematic documents, according to Frankel’s article. A late February hearing in the MasterCard case revealed that Ravelo’s files contained confidential materials from the parallel Amex case, at least some of which had been supplied by Friedman. Retailers, who log contested the settlement in the MasterCard and Visa case, and a proposed injunction-only settlement in the Amex, have since demanded more information about the potential improper disclosures between the lawyers. That information has since amounted to more than 10,000 pages of emails, texts and hard copy files, many of which have still not been made public due to claims of confidentiality.

According to Frankel, “the big question, of course, is whether Friedman and Ravelo’s apparently improper conduct will impact either the MasterCard or Amex settlements … [but] we won’t know for a while whether Friedman damaged the Amex case by giving confidential documents to his friend.”