MasterCard has instructed Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer to defend a £14bn claim brought by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan over unlawful interchange fees.

The payment processing giant put its lucrative defence out to tender earlier this month, with Herbert Smith Freehills and Jones Day also understood to have applied.

The Lawyer revealed Freshfields was pitching hard for the defence, having run a number of similar cases for Visa in the past.

Jones Day partner Nick Cotter has represented MasterCard in a number of parallel cases brought against it in the High Court by high street retailers.

Now MasterCard has instructed Freshfields competition partner Jon Lawrence on its defence.

The claim will be filed in early September and will be the highest value claim ever brought before the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT). Quinn Emanuel partners Boris Bronfentrinker and Kate Vernon will apply to the CAT to have the case heard as a class action on behalf of around 65 million customers.

The pair have instructed Monckton Chambers’s Paul Harris QC and Brick Court Chambers’ Marie Demetriou QC. The claim is being funded by third-party litigation funder Gerchen Keller Capital, which is putting up a pot of £40m for the case.

The mass challenge follows a European Commission ruling that MasterCard infringed EU law by imposing charges known as interchange fees on the use of its credit and debit cards. It then lost a decade-long legal battle in the European Court of Justice in 2014, with judges ruling MasterCard abused its dominant market position by charging the anti-competitive rates.