Frances Murphy

Morgan Lewis

Last summer, Morgan Lewis competition partner Frances Murphy won what was undoubtedly one of the stand-out cases of 2020. Murphy secured a landmark victory for her client, Sainsbury’s, against credit card business Visa Europe over multilateral interchange fees, or ‘swipe fees’.

The appeal was one of the most significant antitrust cases in the UK to date and tested the circumstances in which the English courts are bound by judgments from Europe. The Supreme Court ruled that the fixing of interchange fees over many years was indeed an unlawful infringement of competition law.

This judgment will have significant implications, potentially resulting in billions in damages and retailers lining up to be compensated for the unlawful charges they have incurred. Murphy has been involved in this long-running case for many years, with the most recent of those coinciding with her role as managing partner of Morgan Lewis’s London office.

On her watch, the office has continued to grow both in headcount and revenue and indeed registered a record year to September 2019, the most recent period for which data is available. A busy 2020 indeed, with no sign of things slackening off this year.