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Staff

January 14, 2019 By Staff

Former Federal District Court Judge Nancy Gertner Joins Guttman, Buschner & Brooks LLC

WASHINGTON — Former U.S. District Court Judge and current Harvard Law School lecturer Nancy Gertner has joined one of the nation’s leading whistleblower and complex litigation boutique firms, Guttman, Buschner & Brooks (GBB), as of counsel.

Lawyers at Guttman, Buschner & Brooks, with offices in Washington, D.C., Bala Cynwyd, PA, and Wilmington, DE, have represented whistleblowers in cases returning nearly $6 billion to Federal and State governments. In July of 2017, on the eve of trial, the firm settled a non-intervened False Claims case with Celgene for $280 million. Shortly thereafter, the firm settled a non-intervened False Claims Act case against Humana after defeating Humana’s motion for summary judgment.

Appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994 to the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Judge Gertner (Ret.) brings decades of experience in employment discrimination, dispute resolution, and civil rights, among her many areas of expertise.

Judge Gertner is a graduate of Barnard College and Yale Law School where she was an editor on The Yale Law Journal. She received her M.A. in Political Science at Yale University and has been an instructor at Yale Law School, teaching sentencing and comparative sentencing institutions, since 1998. In September of 2011, Judge Gertner retired from the federal bench and joined the faculty at Harvard Law School.

Traci Buschner, GBB’s managing partner said, “We are frankly honored to have Nancy join our firm – she is a woman of boundless integrity, wit and empathy. Her life’s work is – and continues to be – a powerful testament to lawyers seeking to make the world a better place for all. We look forward to fighting alongside her in important cases that deserve attention.”

Beginning her career first as a Clerk for Chief Judge Luther Swygert of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, then as one of the few women criminal defense and civil rights lawyers of her time, Judge Gertner is a fierce advocate for her clients and a trailblazer in the industry.

Judge Gertner said, “I am delighted to be of counsel to GBB. Their whistleblower practice matches my public interest concerns, and their advocacy is creative and superb.”

GBB is a boutique firm with a diverse group of attorneys, including a former Congressman, a former Commissioner of the OSHA Review Commission, a law professor who is a national expert on complex litigation and trial practice, a former attorney with the FDA and the EPA who also holds a medical license and continues to practice, and former federal law clerks and prosecutors.

The firm has offices in Washington, DC, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. In addition to the recent Celgene and Humana litigations, attorneys at the firm represented the lead whistleblower in U.S. ex rel. McCoyd v. Abbott Labs, which involved the recovery of $1.6 billion for the government; one of several whistleblowers bringing FCA cases against GlaxoSmithKline in 2012, which resulted in the recovery of $1.04 billion (U.S. ex rel. Graydon v. GSK); one of the whistleblowers bringing FCA cases against Pfizer which resulted in the recovery of $2.3 billion (U.S. ex rel. DeMott v. Pfizer); the lead whistleblowers in U.S. ex rel. Sandler and Paris v. Pfizer, which resulted in recovery of $257.4 million; the lead whistleblower in U.S. ex rel. Szymoniak v. Bank of America, which resulted in the recovery of $95 million; three of the whistleblowers FCA cases against a large hospital chain (U.S. ex rel. Doghramji v. CHS), which resulted in the recovery of $98 million; the lead whistleblower in U.S. ex rel. Kurnik v. Amgen, which resulted in the aggregate recovery of $30 million from Amgen, Inc., Omnicare, and PharMerica Corp.; and the whistleblower in U.S. ex rel. Abrahamsen v. Hudson Valley, which resulted in a recovery of $5.5 million to the federal government and state government. More information on GBB can be found at www.gbblegal.com.

Announcement available on-line here.

January 14, 2019 By Staff

Judge Nancy Gertner (Ret.)

Judge GertnerJudge Nancy Gertner (Ret.)
Of Counsel

(202) 800-3001
ngertner@gbblegal.com

Judical Appointment
U.S. District Court Judge for the District of Massachusetts (1994 – 2011)

Education
Yale Law School
Barnard College

Admissions
United States District Court, MA
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
United States Supreme Court

Practice Areas
Employment Discrimination
Civil Rights

Honors & Awards
Thurgood Marshall Award, 2008
Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award, 2014
The Lelia J. Robinson Award, 2012
Arabella Babb Mansfield Award, 2012
Hennessey Award for Judicial Excellence
The Morton A. Brody Distinguished Judicial Service Award
Honorary Degree, Doctor of Laws, Brandeis University

January 3, 2019 By Staff

Whistleblower lawyers to Grassley: Make Barr commit to False Claims cases

A coalition of academics, public interest groups and lawyers who represent whistleblowers sent a letter Thursday to outgoing U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, calling on the Iowa Republican to protect one of his own signature pieces of legislation, the False Claims Act, when Attorney General nominee William Barr comes before the Senate later this month in confirmation hearings.

As I reported Wednesday, Barr has previously called the FCA, which offers a bounty to private whistleblowers who file fraud suits on behalf of the U.S. government, an unconstitutional “abomination.” As the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 1989 – three years after Senator Grassley and others in Congress overhauled the FCA to spark prosecution of fraud against the U.S., Barr wrote an opinion highlighting what he considered to be constitutional violations in the law’s whistleblower provisions. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected some constitutional challenges to the FCA in a unanimous ruling in 2000, but Barr said in 2001 that he still considered the law unconstitutional.

Read the full article here.

December 27, 2018 By Staff

Optimizing regulatory compliance enforcement in a global economy

With regional offices of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Atlanta is not just a center of international trade, it is also a center for compliance enforcement.

With the growth of multinational corporations whose businesses are not defined by geographic boundaries, government agencies and their regional offices that enforce compliance must leverage limited resources to maintain a watchful eye and enforce the laws. Today, this may mean collection of evidence abroad.

The notion of leveraging resources to enforce compliance is not new. In the 1960s and 1970s when our nation passed sweeping legislation proscribing discrimination and protecting the environment, citizens suit provisions were bolted into these laws so that average taxpayers could initiate litigation where government regulators failed to take action. And of course, at a state level, a myriad of consumer protection statutes now provides citizens with the right to seek enforcement of substantive law.

Consistent with our tradition of citizen involvement in compliance enforcement, the United States has laws that, under limited circumstances, allow whistleblowers to take action even where they have not been personally aggrieved.

Federal and State False Claims Acts allow citizens to bring suit in the name of the government where they have information that the government has sustained economic injury through fraudulent or other types of wrongful conduct.

Under the Dodd Frank Amendments to Federal Securities laws, citizens can now report claims of securities fraud to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The IRS has regulations allowing whistleblowers to bring information about tax cheats to the attention of that agency.

Under the FCA, Dodd Frank and the IRS provisions, whistleblowers are incentivized and thus compensated for their efforts with a bounty where their information or litigation leads to government recovery.

Under the False Claims Act alone, the government has recovered billions of dollars, but more importantly FCA litigation has surfaced information about the honesty of the drug industry, the quality of care provided at nursing homes, the safety of public transportation systems, and the integrity of products integral to our nation’s defense.

In an era where consumer products are manufactured abroad and shipped into domestic ports of entry like Atlanta, and drug trials necessary to secure FDA approval are often conducted abroad with little immediate supervision from the Food and Drug Administration, whistleblowers have become a mainstay of compliance enforcement. They bring forward original information or analysis, technical expertise, and through knowledge of language and culture, the ability to report wrongdoing that would otherwise go undetected.

Yet, at the same time whistleblowers add value, there is a need to ensure that whistleblowers do not flood the agencies and the courts with claims that are not properly documented and pegged to a cognizable legal violation.

Last year, for example, the SEC received thousands of whistleblower complaints but secured relief on less than 10. While many of these complaints may lack merit, some may be falling by the wayside because of a lack of understanding on the part of the whistleblower of what the SEC needs, and failures in communications and investigation by all concerned about the strengths and weakness of these cases.

There is a need to create a better relationship between whistleblowers, their counsel, and government regulators, to the common end that serious harm to the U.S. consumers can be exposed and deterred.

Earlier this month, Emory University School of Law convened a conference of whistleblower counsel and senior government regulators as part of a first step in helping these groups focus the relationship to better enforce compliance in a global economy. This was the first of what may be many dialogues that the Law School’s Center for Advocacy and Dispute Resolution hopes to convene with these parties.

How should claims be investigated before they are brought to government regulator attention? What types of claims are of interest to the government and important for establishing compliance precedent? How can government make better use of whistleblowers and their counsel? These types of issues were vetted by conference panelists.

As little as a decade ago, such a conference would be unprecedented. Yet, the world has changed markedly. Our regulatory bodies must monitor relationships across the globe while electronic communication has exponentially expanded the sea of information from which proof of wrongdoing must be culled.

In this new era, leveraging the resources of whistleblowers is consistent with a legal tradition that for more than a century has depended on the role of average citizens in enforcing the law.

By Paul Zwier and Reuben Guttman

Also, available on line at AJC.com

December 21, 2018 By Staff

Class Action Settlement Calls for Testing of Almost 20,000 South Carolina Prison Inmates for Hepatitis C

COLUMBIA, S.C., Dec. 21, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — A proposed partial settlement of a civil rights class action lawsuit has received preliminary approval from a Federal Court here in South Carolina; it will provide Hepatitis C testing to all current and future inmates incarcerated in the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC).

According to the terms of a proposed agreement in Russell Geissler et al. v. Bryan P. Stirling et al., almost 20,000 current inmates will be tested along with future inmates of the SCDC.

The United States District Court for the District of South Carolina has set a fairness hearing on the settlement for February 12, 2019 at 11:00 AM in the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina in Columbia. That hearing has been scheduled by United States Senior District Court Judge, Margaret Seymour.

The settlement does not waive personal injury claims and the litigation will go forward with regard to claims for the treatment of Hepatitis C. The partial settlement was the result of significant fact discovery including document production and depositions.

The class is represented by Christopher Bryant of Yarborough Applegate LLC located in Charleston, SC and Reuben Guttman of Guttman, Buschner & Brooks PLLC in Washington, D.C. Justin Brooks, Traci Buschner, Caroline Poplin MD/JD, and Paul Zwier of Guttman, Buschner & Brooks PLLC also worked on the litigation.

Counsel representing the class praised opposing counsel for working toward this partial resolution marking an inroad toward addressing a public health crisis.

National statistics show that nearly 17 percent of nation’s inmate population has Hepatitis C, a bloodborne pathogen which can lead to death. Prior to the litigation, the SCDC had failed to test inmates for the disease, leaving them without the full awareness necessary to prevent its transmission.

The litigation will continue as plaintiffs press for the treatment of those who already have the disease. Today, several medications exist to treat and cure the condition.

“This is a terrific result, but we still have our work cut out for us to complete the litigation. This is not just a prison health issue; it’s a public health issue,” said Christopher Bryant, counsel for the class.

“This is a win for all citizens of the State of South Carolina and elsewhere. Treating inmates in prisons before they re-enter society is the type of prevention that will save lives and and save precious healthcare dollars,” said class counsel, Reuben Guttman.

Guttman, Buschner & Brooks PLLC is a nationally recognized boutique complex litigation law firm; in the healthcare area alone it has represented whistleblowers under the False Claims Act in cases which have returned over $5.5 billion to government treasuries. More information about the firm and its members can be found at gbblegal.com.

Yarborough Applegate LLC is a plaintiff’s law firm primarily focused on catastrophic personal injury, including traumatic brain injuries, dram shop/drunk driving cases, trucking cases, and wrongful death. More information on the firm, representative results, and its members can be found at yarboroughapplegate.com.

 

Also available on line here.

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