• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Guttman, Buschner & Brooks

  • Home
  • Areas of Practice
    • High Impact Litigation
    • Whistleblower and False Claim Cases
    • Employment Litigation and Civil Rights – Employees
    • Employment Counseling and Litigation – Employers
    • Dispute Resolution and Investigation
    • Corporate Governance
  • Successes
  • Articles
  • Attorneys
    • CLE Seminars featuring GBB Lawyers
    • Justin S. Brooks
    • Traci L. Buschner
    • Judge Nancy Gertner (Ret.)
    • Dan Guttman
    • Reuben A. Guttman
    • Dr. Caroline Poplin
    • Elizabeth H. Shofner
    • Aaron Welo
  • Amicus
  • Videos
  • Contact Us
    • Twitter
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn

Staff

October 20, 2020 By Staff

CLE: Covid-19 Whistleblower and Qui Tam CLE: Collecting Evidence & Making the Claim

On Demand: Learn the latest on Mastering Bad Faith & Covid-19 Litigation with this convenient, 24/7 On-demand Seminar & Complimentary Podcast. Register to obtain CLE & MCLE credit, online access to complete course & reference materials, and attend this on-demand seminar. YOU MAY LISTEN FROM ALMOST ANY TYPE OF COMPUTER OR IPOD. ACCESS TO THE RECORDING AND MATERIALS DOES NOT EXPIRE.

Benefits:

Over the past two decades, nearly $30 billion has been recovered through Qui Tam cases under the False Claims Act. The demand for attorneys in this surging area has become even stronger as the federal government has spent over $6 trillion in response to the rapid spread of the Coronavirus, or Covid-19. As it becomes apparent that some recipients of the funds are not adhering to requisite protocols, there is an immediate need for attorneys to represent clients in this lucrative area of law. There is also a tremendous need for attorneys fluent in class action litigation & defenses for parallel matters stemming from Qui Tam claims. In particular, attorneys must be fluent on complaints, defenses, litigation strategies, discovery and government incentives, among others. The faculty for this seminar features three of the nation’s leading authorities in this practice. Registration includes online access to course and reference materials.

Agenda:

Covid-19 Whistleblower and Qui Tam CLE: Collecting Evidence & Making the Claim:

a. Legal Issues involving the Coronavirus/Covid-19

b. Earning Fees from Whistleblower, Qui Tam and False Claims Actions

c. Filing Winning Complaints

d. Latest Developments in Qui Tam & Whistleblower Claims

e. Obtaining Large Rewards through Government Incentives

f. Key Procedural Distinctions in Retaliation Claims

g. Overcoming & Responding to Defenses

h. Effective Use of Key Documents & Evidence

i. Cutting-edge Strategies in False Claim Cases

j. Ethical Issues

k. Parallel Class Actions

l. Class Certification

Recorded Question & Answer Session

Biography of Seminar Faculty:

1. Reuben Guttman is a founding member of Guttman, Buschner & Brooks PLLC. His practice involves complex litigation and class actions. He has represented clients in claims brought under the Federal False Claims Act, securities laws, the Price Anderson Act, Department of Energy statutes and regulations, the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN), Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and various employment discrimination, labor and environmental statutes. He has also tried and/or litigated claims involving fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, antitrust, business interference and other common law torts. The International Business Times has called Mr. Guttman “one of the world’s most prominent whistleblower attorneys.” He has served as counsel in some of the largest recoveries under the False Claims Act. Mr. Guttman served as lead counsel in a series of cases resulting in the recovery of more than $30 million under the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act. Mr. Guttman is the author and/or editor of numerous articles, book chapters, and technical publications and his commentary has appeared in Market Watch, American Lawyer Media, AOL Government, Accounting Today, and the Jerusalem Post. In addition to his writings, Mr. Guttman has testified before committees of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate on the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act (AHERA). In 1992, he advised President-elect Clinton’s transition team on labor policy and worker health and safety regulation. Mr. Guttman earned his law degree at Emory University School of Law, where he has been appointed as a Senior Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the Emory University School of Law Center for Advocacy and Dispute Resolution and has been a Team Leader for the school’s Trial Techniques Program.

2. Shauna Itri is a Partner at Seeger Weiss LLP, where she has been leading litigation teams in complex fraud cases in both state and federal courts for over a decade. Her nationwide practice has focused on representing plaintiffs in various settings including securities and consumer class actions; antitrust; and cases involving patient harm. Shauna also has extensive experience representing whistleblowers in False Claims Act lawsuits, and tax and securities whistleblowers with claims under the IRS and SEC whistleblower programs. Ms. Itri is a nationally recognized speaker and has published numerous articles on representing whistleblowers and litigating Qui Tam claims. She served on the litigation teams working on the multi-billion-dollar lawsuits brought against BMW, General Motors, Ford Motors, and Mercedes for allegedly disguising the actual emission levels of their diesel engine cars. The settlement figure in these cases make them the largest auto-related consumer class-action settlement in U.S. history. Ms. Itri was a member of trial team of False Claims Act case which settled for $120 million, in two cases that alleged that a defendant defrauded the government by providing kickbacks to nursing homes. Ms. Itri was part of a litigation team that worked extensively with the Department of Justice and State Attorneys General across the nation representing whistleblowers in a series of False Claims Act cases against drug companies for fraudulent Medicaid and Medicare drug pricing which has led to more than $3 billion in recoveries. She is a graduate of Stanford University and Villanova University.

3. Jennifer A. Riley is a Partner at Seyfarth Shaw LLP, where she defends companies facing class actions, collective actions, pattern or practice lawsuits, and other types of representative proceedings, ranging in size from dozens to tens of thousands of claims. For nearly two decades, Ms. Riley has defended companies faced with significant complex litigation matters. As such, she works on the forefront of the developing law in an ever changing arena. Ms. Riley regularly develops strategies for navigating some of the largest challenges faced by corporate America today and counsels employers confronted with a range of complex employment law theories that span from claims of discrimination or sexual harassment to myriad types of alleged wage & hour violations. She is a regular speaker and presenter regarding developments in the law and challenges on the horizon. Ms. Riley has extensive litigation experience. She has represented clients facing bet-the-company cases in a wide range of complex civil litigation matters in federal and state courts across the country. Ms. Riley has served as trial counsel in federal court bench trials, jury trials, and arbitration proceedings. She has successfully defended a multitude of actions by securing dismissal, defeating class or collective action certification, prevailing on summary judgment, and structuring and securing approval of complex and multiparty settlements and consent decrees. Ms. Riley also routinely counsels employers to navigate thorny employment issues, including through investigations and terminations. she is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.

CLE Credit: Rossdale CLE is a national leader in attorney education and has trained thousands of attorneys, paralegals, and other legal professionals.

Learn more at https://www.mcssl.com/store/legalresourcesinc/catalog/product/29aaead722c8417dabf0b37b00a97efe

October 10, 2020 By Staff

What the Gov’t Can Still Do to End Pandemic

By Caroline Poplin, MD, JD
Of Counsel and Medical Director

When it comes to the coronavirus, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there are two things we can and should do to fight the virus without locking down the country again, even though we are now way behind the starting line. The bad news? Success requires action from the federal government.

Provide Essential Equipment

First, government must ensure adequate supplies of tests (including swabs and reagents), and standard personal protective equipment by invoking the Defense Production Act (DPA). It appears that the ventilator shortage has been resolved, at least for now, by the one-time use of the DPA for one contract — with General Motors — and medical advances in treating the virus that reduce the need for ventilators.

However, the dire shortage of tests, and slow turnaround times, are a continuing problem as the virus surges again. As recently as last month, the federal government was planning to close seven testing sites in Texas — including in two hotspots, Houston and Dallas — at the end of June. After serious bipartisan pushback from the state, the feds agreed to a 2-week extension for five of the sites.

The ongoing shortage means tests are limited to patients with symptoms, or a doctor’s note — those we could presume would be positive. But the people we really need to test are pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers who might be shedding virus while going about as usual in their communities for up to 2 weeks. That is why we need lots more tests ASAP, so we can test the asymptomatic people in a hotspot, especially as cases climb in 39 states.

We also need to remove barriers to testing. Currently, uninsured people have to pay market price for the test, and are supposed to self-quarantine for 2 weeks, regardless of whether that costs them 2 weeks’ pay or even their jobs. Instead, COVID-19 tests and treatment should be free and available to all, without penalty or citizenship questions.

The president’s insistence that the virus will just “go away” soon, his obsession with optics (such as keeping official case numbers low by limiting tests, without, of course, affecting the true incidence of disease), his bald lie that 99% of cases are “harmless,” and his effort to distance himself from blame for the catastrophe, have all made the problem worse.

The fact that the U.S. is also still short of personal protective equipment (PPE) — N-95 masks, face shields, gowns, gloves, and eye protection for all those who need them — is outrageous and dangerous. As of July 13th, more than 780 healthcare workers had died of COVID-19, a tragic loss for the individuals and their families, but also for Americans who needed their care to recover.

To solve this problem, the federal government (FEMA, perhaps) should have ordered a massive supply of PPE from domestic manufacturers, using the DPA, which President Trump has used hundreds of thousands of times to order vital military products. It should have negotiated a fair price — cost plus maybe 5% profit — then sold the supplies at cost to whoever needed them. The process would be completely transparent, with no unseemly profiteering.

Instead, the process for obtaining PPE has been chaotic and corrupt: states find themselves bidding against one another and the federal government, hospitals have seen supplies they ordered seized by the federal government. A more expensive, ineffective, unaccountable process is hard to imagine. Meantime, the number of cases is soaring.

Protect Essential Workers

Because of the continuing shortage of PPE, it has largely been limited to hospitals and nursing homes where there are already known COVID patients. But the best way to reduce the spread of the virus is to test, and provide PPE, where outbreaks are most likely. That includes places in which people are breathing hard or cannot work at a distance, such as at large manufacturing plants with fast assembly lines where work stations are close together. Whenever people look carefully at such places — meat processors, chicken processors, warehouses like those run by Amazon — we find outbreaks. Protection of workers is necessary for them, of course, but also for us.

Many essential workers must work just to make ends meet. If the plant reopens and they are offered a job and decline for any reason — including fear of illness — workers lose their unemployment benefits. If they are forced to self-quarantine, they are not paid. If they complain, they are fired. So they come in even if they are sick. Because President Trump has declared these businesses essential, state and local authorities cannot easily close them down for cleaning. And many owners refuse to release any information to workers or the authorities: how many workers are sick, how many have died, or who they are.

Doesn’t this sound like working conditions of a century ago — workers forced to risk their lives for a pittance to goose the profits of wealthy owners who risk nothing and can easily afford to pay for PPE and change the configuration of work stations? Upton Sinclair described such conditions in the meat-packing industry in “The Jungle,” published in 1905.

Such activities by employers are illegal now. In the early part of the last century, states passed workers’ compensation laws, requiring employers to compensate workers for injuries and illnesses contracted at work. In 1935, Congress passed the Labor Relations Act, a key New Deal measure which required companies to bargain about wages and working conditions with workers elected by unions. Over the years, unfortunately, anti-union employers have found ways — in Congress and the courts — to water down these protections, but they are still good law.

In 1970, Congress passed, and President Nixon signed, the Occupational Safety and Health Act to specifically address worker safety on the job, and created an agency (OSHA) to enforce it and issue standards to address specific problems. Employers’ responsibilities under the act include providing a safe workplace and finding and correcting safety and health problems. That sounds clear enough, doesn’t it? However, as a government lawyer for 10 years (FDA, Environmental Protection Agency), I learned that success of laws like these requires agencies like OSHA to promulgate well-reasoned regulations, to provide the regulated community with details, and to vigorously enforce compliance.

The agency lays out the responsibilities of employers in its pamphlet, “Workers’ Rights“: “Employers have the responsibility to provide a safe workplace. Employers MUST provide their employees with a workplace that does not have serious hazards and must follow all OSHA safety and health standards [boldface original]. Employers must find and correct safety and health problems.”

Under the Trump administration, not only has OSHA failed to issue regulations to protect workers from this particularly contagious virus, but instead has assured employers that “good faith efforts” are enough. Worse, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is demanding a 5-year liability shield for all employers in the bill he is now negotiating in the Senate. That tells me that some employers will fail to take necessary measures (“Too expensive! Impractical!”) unless they are held legally responsible for preventing COVID in the workplace. By contrast, the House bill passed in May would require OSHA to put issue an emergency safety standard to protect workers.

The Bad News

When it comes to the coronavirus, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there are two things we can and should do to fight the virus without locking down the country again, even though we are now way behind the starting line. The bad news? Success requires action from the federal government.

Provide Essential Equipment

First, government must ensure adequate supplies of tests (including swabs and reagents), and standard personal protective equipment by invoking the Defense Production Act (DPA). It appears that the ventilator shortage has been resolved, at least for now, by the one-time use of the DPA for one contract — with General Motors — and medical advances in treating the virus that reduce the need for ventilators.

However, the dire shortage of tests, and slow turnaround times, are a continuing problem as the virus surges again. As recently as last month, the federal government was planning to close seven testing sites in Texas — including in two hotspots, Houston and Dallas — at the end of June. After serious bipartisan pushback from the state, the feds agreed to a 2-week extension for five of the sites.

The ongoing shortage means tests are limited to patients with symptoms, or a doctor’s note — those we could presume would be positive. But the people we really need to test are pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers who might be shedding virus while going about as usual in their communities for up to 2 weeks. That is why we need lots more tests ASAP, so we can test the asymptomatic people in a hotspot, especially as cases climb in 39 states.

We also need to remove barriers to testing. Currently, uninsured people have to pay market price for the test, and are supposed to self-quarantine for 2 weeks, regardless of whether that costs them 2 weeks’ pay or even their jobs. Instead, COVID-19 tests and treatment should be free and available to all, without penalty or citizenship questions.

The president’s insistence that the virus will just “go away” soon, his obsession with optics (such as keeping official case numbers low by limiting tests, without, of course, affecting the true incidence of disease), his bald lie that 99% of cases are “harmless,” and his effort to distance himself from blame for the catastrophe, have all made the problem worse.

The fact that the U.S. is also still short of personal protective equipment (PPE) — N-95 masks, face shields, gowns, gloves, and eye protection for all those who need them — is outrageous and dangerous. As of July 13th, more than 780 healthcare workers had died of COVID-19, a tragic loss for the individuals and their families, but also for Americans who needed their care to recover.

To solve this problem, the federal government (FEMA, perhaps) should have ordered a massive supply of PPE from domestic manufacturers, using the DPA, which President Trump has used hundreds of thousands of times to order vital military products. It should have negotiated a fair price — cost plus maybe 5% profit — then sold the supplies at cost to whoever needed them. The process would be completely transparent, with no unseemly profiteering.

Instead, the process for obtaining PPE has been chaotic and corrupt: states find themselves bidding against one another and the federal government, hospitals have seen supplies they ordered seized by the federal government. A more expensive, ineffective, unaccountable process is hard to imagine. Meantime, the number of cases is soaring.

Protect Essential Workers

Because of the continuing shortage of PPE, it has largely been limited to hospitals and nursing homes where there are already known COVID patients. But the best way to reduce the spread of the virus is to test, and provide PPE, where outbreaks are most likely. That includes places in which people are breathing hard or cannot work at a distance, such as at large manufacturing plants with fast assembly lines where work stations are close together. Whenever people look carefully at such places — meat processors, chicken processors, warehouses like those run by Amazon — we find outbreaks. Protection of workers is necessary for them, of course, but also for us.

Many essential workers must work just to make ends meet. If the plant reopens and they are offered a job and decline for any reason — including fear of illness — workers lose their unemployment benefits. If they are forced to self-quarantine, they are not paid. If they complain, they are fired. So they come in even if they are sick. Because President Trump has declared these businesses essential, state and local authorities cannot easily close them down for cleaning. And many owners refuse to release any information to workers or the authorities: how many workers are sick, how many have died, or who they are.

Doesn’t this sound like working conditions of a century ago — workers forced to risk their lives for a pittance to goose the profits of wealthy owners who risk nothing and can easily afford to pay for PPE and change the configuration of work stations? Upton Sinclair described such conditions in the meat-packing industry in “The Jungle,” published in 1905.

Such activities by employers are illegal now. In the early part of the last century, states passed workers’ compensation laws, requiring employers to compensate workers for injuries and illnesses contracted at work. In 1935, Congress passed the Labor Relations Act, a key New Deal measure which required companies to bargain about wages and working conditions with workers elected by unions. Over the years, unfortunately, anti-union employers have found ways — in Congress and the courts — to water down these protections, but they are still good law.

In 1970, Congress passed, and President Nixon signed, the Occupational Safety and Health Act to specifically address worker safety on the job, and created an agency (OSHA) to enforce it and issue standards to address specific problems. Employers’ responsibilities under the act include providing a safe workplace and finding and correcting safety and health problems. That sounds clear enough, doesn’t it? However, as a government lawyer for 10 years (FDA, Environmental Protection Agency), I learned that success of laws like these requires agencies like OSHA to promulgate well-reasoned regulations, to provide the regulated community with details, and to vigorously enforce compliance.

The agency lays out the responsibilities of employers in its pamphlet, “Workers’ Rights“: “Employers have the responsibility to provide a safe workplace. Employers MUST provide their employees with a workplace that does not have serious hazards and must follow all OSHA safety and health standards [boldface original]. Employers must find and correct safety and health problems.”

Under the Trump administration, not only has OSHA failed to issue regulations to protect workers from this particularly contagious virus, but instead has assured employers that “good faith efforts” are enough. Worse, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is demanding a 5-year liability shield for all employers in the bill he is now negotiating in the Senate. That tells me that some employers will fail to take necessary measures (“Too expensive! Impractical!”) unless they are held legally responsible for preventing COVID in the workplace. By contrast, the House bill passed in May would require OSHA to put issue an emergency safety standard to protect workers.

The Bad News

Unfortunately, the Republican party decided years ago that the federal government should be made so small that, per Grover Norquist, he could drown it in the bathtub. The president treats the government like an extension of the Trump Organization: he can do as he pleases — squeeze it for money, reward his friends, and punish his enemies. At the same time, he is not responsible for anything. No Republican will stop him.

Instead, Republicans are certain that everything can be handled more efficiently (at least more profitably!), by private enterprise operating in a totally deregulated free market.

Really??

Now we know.

The Good News

The federal government has the authority, the mandate, and the resources to ultimately defeat COVID19, although it will cost more — in money and in lives — than if we had had a responsible government in January 2020.

But, alas, it appears we must wait for relief until January 2021.

Caroline Poplin, MD, JD, is an attorney and internist in Bethesda, Maryland. She is a former staff internist for the National Naval Medical Center, and currently practices medicine part-time at the Arlington Free Clinic in Virginia. She is also of counsel at Guttman, Buschner & Brooks, a law firm which pursues Medicare and Medicaid fraud.

September 21, 2020 By Staff

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was all I wanted to be

I was in my late 20s, attending a conference for women lawyers in the 1970s. I sat in the front row of a large auditorium for the keynote address. The speaker was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union Women’s Rights Project. I was mesmerized.

She was all that I wanted to be. To devote one’s life to the fight for civil rights, to use legal skills to effect justice, better yet to make a difference — I could think of nothing greater. And I was not alone; generations of civil rights lawyers looked to emulate her.

Ginsburg’s vision of gender equality was decades ahead of her time. It went beyond just empowering women to compete for “men’s” roles. While stereotypes distorted women’s view of what was possible, they also impeded men, no less trapped in gender-based assumptions. Equality meant that both sexes should be free to assume all of society’s roles without preconceptions. My son can be a caregiver; my daughter can be an executive. When the school administrators wanted Ginsburg to come to school to discuss her son’s misconduct, she famously said, “This child has two parents.”

Her record as an advocate before the Supreme Court was outstanding; she argued six cases before the court, winning five. If she had done nothing else in her life, that alone would have been an extraordinary legacy.

While she continued to be animated by her life’s passion for equality when she joined the court, she was not the “activist” caricature some in the media have portrayed her to be. She was anxious to avoid upending precedent, determined to be respectful of the opinions of her colleagues. She believed in incremental legal change and emphasized the limited role that a court plays in a constitutional democracy.

In Ginsburg’s understanding, courts have a critical role to play in identifying new understandings of the Constitution, but they must do so by “measured motions.” They are part of a dialogue with other organs of government and with the people as well. She was critical of the reasoning in Roe v. Wade, because it had accomplished too much too soon. She was, as the New York Times’s Linda Greenhouse described at the time of her confirmation, a “judicial-restraint liberal.”

She would apply the court’s precedents but take pains to situate them in their social and historical context. A Ginsburg decision would tirelessly recount the history of gender-based classifications, the “stunningly anachronistic” generalizations about men and women, as she described them, that were embedded in the law.

When, shortly after she joined the court, she wrote the majority opinion requiring that women be admitted to the all-male Virginia Military Institute, her analysis was classic Ginsburg: a lengthy description of the school, its prestige, its role in preparing men and only men for high-status roles in government and industry. In cases challenging affirmative action programs, she would recite the data that showed the persistence of racial inequity in housing, education and employment, the lingering effects of “centuries of law-sanctioned inequality.” She prefigured today’s debate about systemic discrimination.

Ginsburg brought her own experiences to bear, insisting that legal rules be understood in “the realities of the workplace,” a reality she understood well. When a Supreme Court majority rejected Lilly Ledbetter’s pay discrimination claim because she had sued too late, Ginsburg dissented, teaching her colleagues about how pay discrimination, unlike discrimination in promotions or hiring, was hidden from view; Ledbetter sued as soon as she found out about it. Goodwin Liu, a justice on the California Supreme Court and a former Ginsburg clerk, has said that when Ginsburg was recounting Ledbetter’s story, she was also telling her own.

Her judicial influence has to be measured not simply in the decisions she authored, but also in the decisions of her colleagues and lower-court judges, I among them. It extends to areas far beyond gender and race discrimination, including cases about access to justice, disability discrimination, the right to counsel.

Ginsburg was a reluctant dissenter, concerned about the moral weight of a decision when the court did not speak in a single voice. But in recent years, her role changed with the court’s shifting membership. She dissented more and more — when the majority gutted the Voting Rights Act or enabled businesses to opt out of contraceptive coverage for employees based on a broad religion-based exemption. She dissented when the majority spoke paternalistically about women who felt compelled to end a pregnancy in the second trimester.

In 2013, years after that conference at which I first heard her speak, I gave the Ruth Bader Ginsburg address at the New York City Bar Association. The justice introduced me, with an unforgettable sense of humor and warmth. Afterward, she sent me a gift, not a fancy academic treatise, but a signed book of her late husband’s recipes, with a moving note. If I published my talk, she wanted to make certain that I included the story about Sadie, my mother. That story? Even though I had graduated Yale Law School, Sadie wanted me to take the Triborough Bridge toll taker’s test – just in case!

September 10, 2020 By Staff

Star lawyer attacks Danish giant: Patients were bribed with money and gifts

Armed with a top American lawyer, a former Novo Nordisk boss in the US makes a number of serious accusations against the Danish pharmaceutical company, which is accused of having used illegal sales methods, which must have cost American society a fortune. Novo is also accused of bribing patients.

Top lawyer Reuben Guttman is called one of the world’s most prominent whistleblower lawyers and now represents a former Novo Nordisk manager in the US in a lawsuit in which the Danish pharmaceutical group is accused of, among other things, using bribes and violating ethics for profit. Photo: GBBlegal.com

August 26, 2020 By Staff

NITA Podcast: Best Practices for Remote Hearings

with Judge Amy Hanley and D.C. civil litigator Reuben Guttman to talk about how to get it right in video and telephonic hearings.

In Episode 8 of the podcast, we are joined by Kansas District Court Judge Amy Hanley and D.C. civil litigator Reuben Guttman to talk about how to get it right in video and telephonic hearings. The disruptions caused by the covid pandemic have suddenly moved the courtroom into your dining room, and our guests are sharing their best do’s and don’ts from their respective positions on and before the bench. The Honorable Amy Hanley is based in Lawrence, Kansas, and presides over a civil, domestic, and criminal docket for the Seventh Judicial District of Douglas County. In his class action and complex civil litigation practice, Reuben Guttman has become one of the most prominent whistleblower lawyers in the world. Topics6:04    Constitutional and statutory constraints9:12    Preparing your client 11:20  Judges’ expectations13:40  Putting clients at ease15:08  Courtroom transition to online 16:51  Views from the bench18:33  Creating formality23:17  Equal time 29:25  Exhibits and judge preferences31:43  Presenting exhibits33:45  Making a court record35:25  Recording the hearing36:44  Communicating with client40:25  Witness sequestration41:42  Confidentiality issues43:26  Public Zoom hearings46:00  Closing advice48:20  Technology’s impact on the law49:07  Signature “softball”Quotes“If your judge doesn’t have the protocol [for remote hearings], don’t be afraid to ask for it. A little secret that I’ll let you in on is that judges love it when counsel does that work for us. You might be better suited to draft and propose a protocol due to your familiarity with the technology or because you know the witnesses and exhibits that need to be used. And we love it when you do that work for us ahead of time and send in a draft that we can use as a starting point.” Judge Amy Hanley“It’s important to get [clients] to appreciate what it’s going to look like, what they’re going to look like, in the courtroom and to have them to appreciate that maybe the judge might actually pose a question to them directly, to rehearse some of that so they’re not surprised. If you’re sitting next to somebody, it’s a lot easier to tap them and say, ‘It’s ok, don’t worry about it. Answer the question,’ but remotely, I mean, there’s an intuitive sense of fear: ‘Oh, my God, I’m not prepared for this.’ So, the idea is that you want to make sure whether you’re putting your client on from prison or jail, or whether you’re putting your client on from a hospital room, you want to make sure that at least they understand what the possibilities are, in preparing them. I call it inoculation, inoculation against the possibilities that may give them anxiety.” Reuben Guttman

Learn more here.

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Go to page 1
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 5
  • Go to page 6
  • Go to page 7
  • Go to page 8
  • Go to page 9
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 29
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Information

  • Where to Start
  • Whistleblower Information
  • Federal & State False Claims Acts
  • Protecting Whistleblowers
  • CLE for Attorneys

Law Flash

UPMC, head of cardiothoracic surgery will pay $8.5M to feds to settle lawsuit

"Patients don’t know their doctors are serving two masters." UPMC, a renowned cardiothoracic surgeon there and a physicians group will pay the federal government $8.5 million to settle a lawsuit … [Read More...] about UPMC, head of cardiothoracic surgery will pay $8.5M to feds to settle lawsuit

Footer

Guttman, Buschner & Brooks PLLC

Washington DC Office NEW!
Embassy Row District
1509 22nd Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20037
Phone: 202-800-3001



Pennsylvania Office: New!
450 N. Narberth Avenue
Suite 102
Narberth, PA 19072
(610) 547-9556
On Demand CLE: Reuben Guttman, and Professor JC Lorepresent CLE covering topics in their book, Pretrial Advocacy, Wolters Kluwer-NITA (2021).”
To learn More
More about the book here
More CLEs by GBB Attorneys

Articles

CLE: Demand Letters and Pre-Complaint Settlement

UPMC, head of cardiothoracic surgery will pay $8.5M to feds to settle lawsuit

The Travesty of The US News Rankings: How Legal Education Should Be Measured

More Articles

Copyright © 2023 · Guttman, Buschner & Brooks PLLC
Disclaimer