On July 25, 2025, a Cook County, Illinois, jury returned a verdict in favor of Skadden client CME Group, Inc. and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) in a class action lawsuit brought by individual Class B members of CME Group and CBOT. The traders alleged that CME Group and CBOT breached contractual obligations in their respective certificates of incorporation and eroded the value of their Class B memberships when they opened CME’s Aurora Data Center in 2012 and allowed all market participants to pay a fee to access and connect to the Globex electronic trading platform from the new facility. The plaintiffs argued that the Aurora Data Center constituted a new “trading floor” to which they were entitled exclusive, free access under the terms of the certificates of incorporation established during the demutualizations of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and CBOT, which occurred in 2000 and 2005. The plaintiffs sought more than $2 billion in damages.
After a three-week trial, the jury unanimously rejected the traders’ claims. The jury found that CME Group and CBOT had not violated the commitments made in their certificates of incorporation, nor had they violated the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. In doing so, the jury agreed with CME Group and CBOT that the exclusive trading floor rights and privileges granted to Class B members are limited to traditional open-outcry trading floors and that the traders received valuable Class A shares as part of the demutualizations, which provided traders with an equity stake in CME’s and CBOT’s operations and a means to benefit from electronic trading’s growth.
Albert Hogan, Marcie Lape (Raia), Manuel Cachán and Amanda Brown led the Skadden team.