Chris Wheeler litigates high-stakes civil cases, with a focus on antitrust and healthcare antitrust.

Chris’s healthcare antitrust expertise spans both conduct and merger cases. In the landmark antitrust class action against Sutter Health, the dominant hospital system in Northern California, Chris led the Farella team that, along with the California Attorney General and co-counsel, obtained a $575,000,000 settlement and historic injunctive relief on behalf of a certified class of California employers, government entities, and union trusts. The settlement represented the largest all-cash settlement in the history of California state court. Chris was named a “California Lawyer Attorney of the Year” by the Daily Journal and received the American Antitrust Institute’s Outstanding Antitrust Litigation Achievement in Private Law Practice award for his work on Sutter Health. 

State attorneys general across the nation have recognized Chris’s healthcare antitrust expertise, retaining him in connection with both merger and conduct cases. The Rhode Island Attorney General retained Chris to lead the antitrust investigation of the $4 billion merger between the two largest health systems in Rhode Island.  Following the Attorney General’s administrative decision denying the merger, the transacting parties abandoned the proposed transaction. Chris has represented, and is representing, multiple other state attorneys general in confidential healthcare antitrust conduct and merger investigations across the nation. 

Chris’s antitrust litigation experience extends beyond health care, and it includes representing antitrust defendants.  He has represented clients in antitrust litigation in the technology, real estate, entertainment, automotive, and steel rebar industries. Chris is Editor-in-Chief of the leading California antitrust treatise, California Antitrust and Unfair Competition Law. He is past chair of the Antitrust and Business Regulation Section of the Bar Association of San Francisco, and he serves as an advisor to the Executive Committee of the Antitrust and Unfair Competition Section of the California Lawyers Association. 

Chris brings an economics and market regulation background to his antitrust practice. During the 2008-2009 U.S. financial crisis, Chris served as vice president and deputy director of the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, where he led one of the first investigations into the regulatory failures contributing to the crisis. He began his career at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. 

Chris has represented clients in a wide range of commercial and other disputes involving the following other areas of law: contracts and business torts; insurance coverage; securities law; intellectual property and trade secrets; administrative and political law; partnership law; bankruptcy; trusts and estate; landlord-tenant law; products liability; employment law; and legal ethics and malpractice.

Chris has prosecuted and tried to verdict a number of criminal cases as a “loaner” Assistant District Attorney in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. As a Bar Association of San Francisco’s Federal Pro Bono Project participant, he maintains an active pro bono practice. Chris has represented an indigent family in an unlawful detainer action, a victim of elder abuse, a family-run business in an ERISA action, and a legal services organization. He has won political asylum for refugee families, including a Laotian Hmong veteran of the CIA “secret army” and his wife and three generations of survivors of the Liberian civil war. 

Chris serves on the Executive Committee of the Harvard Law School Association and he is a past president of the Harvard Law School Association of Northern California.