Paramount agreed to a request from 12 states to tie its federal antitrust case to a pre-existing lawsuit filed by Paramount+ subscribers.

The move means the states’ challenge to the $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery will likely end up before Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, a Biden appointee who is already overseeing the earlier lawsuit.

Martínez-Olguín, whose courtroom is in Oakland, worked for the National Immigration Law Center and the ACLU Immigrant Rights Project before being nominated to the court in 2023.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta led the state coalition that filed the lawsuit Monday in the Northern District of California. The states are also seeking a temporary restraining order and a court order preventing the merger from closing. No hearing has yet been scheduled on that motion.

On Monday, Bonta’s office filed a motion to tie the case to a lawsuit filed in April by Paramount+ subscribers who alleged the merger would harm competition and raise prices. The state argued that it would be more efficient for a judge to consider both claims.

“We like that judge,” Bonta told The Town podcast on Monday. “The fact that the judge is already aware, is thinking about this, thinking about its impacts, we like that.”

Paramount filed a motion Tuesday joining the states’ request. A Paramount spokesman declined to comment.

Martínez-Olguín is scheduled to hold a hearing Thursday on the underwriters’ motion for a preliminary injunction and on Paramount’s motion to dismiss the underwriters’ lawsuit.

Earlier Tuesday, the states’ case was randomly assigned to Judge P. Casey Pitts, another Biden appointee who, though a private attorney, represented the Writers Guild of America in its fight over agency packaging fees in 2019. The WGA is among the lawsuit’s strongest supporters. Pitts, whose courtroom is in San Jose, probably won’t have the case for long.

Pitts is already overseeing another high-profile antitrust action that has several parallels to the Paramount-Warner Bros. lawsuit. In that case, 12 states and the District of Columbia seek to block the $14 billion merger of Hewlett Packard Enterprises and Juniper Networks, which Trump’s Justice Department approved last year.

In January, Pitts rejected the states’ motion to halt the merger pending the outcome of the challenge, finding that the two companies had already spent several months integrating their operations. A final decision on that case is still pending.

In the WGA lawsuit, Pitts was part of Altshuler Berzon’s legal team that accused WME of charging studios illegal fees for including clients in projects. In that case, he faced Jeffrey Kessler, the powerful litigator now leading Paramount’s defense of the Warner Bros. merger.

The WGA won a war of attrition in that case, and WME and other agencies eventually agreed to waive packaging fees and divest themselves of their content production entities.