Assistant AG William Baxter reportedly dismissed the 13-year U.S. v. IBM antitrust case the same day he finalized the AT&T breakup (January 1982)

United States v. IBM, filed in 1969, ran nearly 13 years before Assistant Attorney General William Baxter dismissed it as "without merit" in January 1982. By the same-day account, Baxter dismissed the IBM case on the exact day he also finalized the consent decree breaking AT&T into seven regional carriers — the two largest U.S. antitrust actions of the era, resolved in opposite directions (one dropped, one enforced with the largest breakup under the Sherman Act), by the same official, on the same day. By the time it was dropped, the IBM suit had reportedly consumed more than 300 lawyers and generated 2,500 depositions and 66 million pages of documents.

The same-day sequencing has two secondary attestations: Reason magazine (Michael McMenamin, "The Antitrust Fraud," Oct. 1982) notes in passing that on the day of the IBM dismissal "Baxter, of course, was in Washington that day announcing the antitrust settlement with AT&T"; and Wikipedia's William Baxter entry states it directly ("On that same day, he dismissed as 'without merit' a seemingly endless, thirteen-year-old suit against IBM, which had employed more than 300 lawyers and generated 2,500 depositions and 66 million pages of documents"), citing Michael Weinstein's New York Times obituary of Baxter (Dec. 2, 1998 — not yet read here) and former FTC Commissioner Thomas B. Leary's 2002 prepared remarks. The case-size figures (300+ lawyers, 2,500 depositions, 66 million pages) appear only in the Wikipedia/obituary chain, not in the Reason article. The two accounts also disagree slightly on the suit's age: Reason (contemporary) calls it a "12-year-old action," the obituary-derived passage "thirteen-year-old" (filed Jan. 17, 1969, dismissed Jan. 1982 — just under 13 years, so both roundings are defensible). Neither chain is a DOJ primary record. A Federal Judicial Center history page confirms the AT&T settlement terms were agreed "in January 1982" but gives no exact date and does not mention IBM.

Flag — [unverified-quant — needs primary]. Per the vault's sourcing floor (00-meta/specs/sources.md), specific dates and specific counts both require Tier 1-2 sourcing; a surprising, load-bearing coincidence like this one is exactly the case the floor means to catch, even though it clears a lower bar for ordinary historical claims. The same-day sequencing currently rests on Tier 3-4 secondary accounts; the lawyer/deposition/page figures rest on a single Tier 4 chain (Wikipedia → unread NYT obituary / Leary remarks). Verification is routed at question-verify-baxter-ibm-att-same-day-dismissal; the note stays seedling until a DOJ or contemporary primary record is read.

This is the case John Cullinane calls a myth-generator in claim-cullinane-called-ibm-unbundling-software-industry-origin-myth; see also claim-ibm-market-share-fell-during-antitrust-suit-price-strategy for what allegedly happened to IBM's market position while the suit was pending. A 2026-07-24 follow-up session independently corroborated the same-day sequencing and surfaced two further complications: see claim-att-case-dismissed-august-1982-not-january-complicates-same-day-narrative (the AT&T case's own judicial dismissal came seven months later) and claim-time-1982-attributes-66-million-pages-to-ibm-spinoff-suits-not-doj-case (the 66-million-page figure may not describe this case at all).