LOS ANGELES — When Silicon Valley’s biggest companies face a trial they cannot afford to lose, they call Robert Van Nest. California is now talking to him about taking the other side of the table.
Van Nest, a partner at Keker, Van Nest & Peters, met with California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office on Friday to discuss representing the state, and potentially others, in a lawsuit to block Paramount’s $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, The Hollywood Reporter reported, citing sources familiar with the talks. No final decision has been made, but a filing is expected within roughly a month, with New York, Colorado, Oregon, Nevada, Washington, Connecticut and Tennessee among the states discussing joining.
The hire under discussion is the story. States send a different signal when they retain a courtroom heavyweight than when they issue investigative subpoenas, and Van Nest’s resume reads like a syllabus of modern tech litigation: lead counsel for Google in the Oracle software case the Supreme Court decided on fair use, current counsel for OpenAI in copyright suits, Netflix’s regular in patent fights, and the lawyer who got Qualcomm’s antitrust loss reversed on appeal. Bringing him in says California intends to try this case, not merely posture about it.
He would walk into a stacked opposing aisle. Paramount’s defense is led by Jeffrey Kessler, among the most prominent antitrust litigators in the country, alongside Makan Delrahim, who ran the Justice Department’s antitrust division in Donald Trump’s first term. The company, in a statement, said it continues to engage constructively with regulators including state attorneys general and is prepared to address legitimate, clearly articulated antitrust concerns, while adding that it does not believe any aspect of the transaction raises such concerns.
Bonta’s office said only that the Paramount acquisition remains an active investigation with no updates to share. The restraint is tactical rather than indifferent. California set aside $14.3 million for antitrust litigation earlier this year, citing the retreat of federal enforcement, and Bonta has said publicly that the merger is not a done deal. The states are examining theatrical distribution, streaming and news, with one source telling the trade that what is happening at CBS now would only deepen once CNN joins the same owner.
That CBS reference lands on a specific record. Since David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance took control, the network has fired veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley after he accused new leadership of dismantling the franchise, and 130 journalists led by Dan Rather have demanded Ellison protect the program’s editorial independence. The states’ theory treats news consolidation not as a cultural complaint but as a market harm, which is the version a court can act on.
The state suit would open a fourth regulatory front. Britain’s competition authority opened a formal probe of the deal on Tuesday with an August 7 deadline, Brussels has its own July 7 decision date, and the US Justice Department’s review continues in Washington. The states’ calculation, openly stated in budget documents, is that the federal review under this administration cannot be counted on to do the blocking, so the blocking must be done by someone else.
The history between these parties sharpens the irony. Delrahim, now defending the deal, sued to block AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner in 2018 on behalf of the United States and lost. Van Nest, who has spent a career keeping tech giants out of liability, would be arguing that a media giant is too big to permit. Antitrust law has not changed much since 2018. The politics of who enforces it has changed completely.
What no one involved will yet say is what the complaint would actually allege, which markets it would lead with, or whether the coalition holds at eight states or shrinks when filing day arrives. Van Nest could still decline the engagement. The merger’s closing clock, meanwhile, keeps running against every deadline except the courts’.
Hollywood has spent a year asking whether anyone would actually stand in front of this deal. The answer taking shape is not the Justice Department. It is a state, a budget line, and a trial lawyer the defendants usually hire first.
