Congratulations are in order for NITA faculty member and author Reuben Guttman, who successfully represented whistleblowers and the federal government in a False Claims Act filing against a Boston teaching hospital for allowing its urology department chair to book simultaneous surgeries and for billing Medicare for procedures performed by his unsupervised medical residents. Reuben, a founding member of the D.C. law firm of Guttman, Buschner & Brooks PLLC, was part of the legal team that negotiated a $12.3 million settlement for the whistleblowers.
The case involved Dr. David Samadi, a “celebrity urologist” specializing in robotic prostate surgeries. The high volume of Dr. Samadi’s procedures at Northwell Health of New York’s teaching facilities was the subject of 2017 investigation by the Boston Globe, which spurred whistleblowers to file lawsuits against the surgeon and hospital.
In a comment to The Legal Advocate, Reuben remarked, “If you think about FRE 401 as not distinguishing between direct and circumstantial evidence, the task of putting together a complex fraud case like this one is less daunting. These cases are just like a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle where you don’t have the picture on the cover of the box to guide you but do have an evolving theory for guidance.”
Reuben serves as faculty at NITA deposition programs in Seattle and Atlanta and trial skills programs in D.C. He is co-author of the United States ex rel. Rodriguez v. Hughes, et al. case files, which involve a whistleblower in the defense industry. Reuben and co-author J.C. Lore are currently writing Pretrial Advocacy, a new textbook that will be published by NITA in late 2020.
Source: https://www.nita.org/blogs/reuben-guttman-represents-whistleblowers