Phillips & Cohen LLP

Phillips & Cohen attorney Stephen Hasegawa - a partner at our San Francisco office - underscores the unique value of whistleblowers at George Mason Law & Economics Center’s recent panel on False Claims Act enforcement. Akin Gump's Robert Salcido gives the defense perspective. See entire discussion: https://vimeo.com/319982143

Phillips & Cohen partner Claire Sylvia examines recent developments in False Claims Act litigation alongside John R. Thomas and Stuart Delery today at @federalbar's Qui Tam Conference in DC.

US whistleblower laws have extraordinary, global reach, as one of our cases that settled this week showed. Phillips & Cohen represented a UK resident who allege...d in a False Claims Act lawsuit that UK clothing retailer Pure Collection evaded customs duties when shipping its products to the US. Pure Collection and its CEO paid more than $900,000 to the US government to settle the case, and our whistleblower client received an award equaling 18% of the total recovery. See more

A South Carolina jury decided on Wednesday that the former CEO of Health Diagnostics Laboratory and the owners of its marketing partner, BlueWave, are liable fo...r Medicare fraud. The allegations were made in three separate whistleblower lawsuits, one of which was brought by Phillips & Cohen. The total trebled liability for the case was $51.2 million plus additional penalties to be determined by the court later.

How do whistleblower lawyers and the DOJ work together to litigate False Claims Act lawsuits? This afternoon, P&C partner Jeffrey Dickstein will explain on a panel at the ACI Advanced Forum on False Claims and Qui Tam Enforcement.

Phillips & Cohen partner Peter Chatfield analyzes what a judge got wrong in his decision to use a recent Supreme Court decision to vacate a $348 million jury ve...rdict in a whistleblower case against Nursing home chain Consulate Health Care. Chatfield says the judge should have looked at not whether the government is paying these claims, but whether it’s lawful for the government to be paying these claims.

Phillips & Cohen is pleased to announce that Edward H. Arens has been named a partner. Ned is based in our San Francisco office, where he’ll continue to represent whistleblowers in False Claims Act cases and in whistleblower claims made to the SEC and IRS.

Phillips & Cohen partners Claire Sylvia and Erika Kelton are teaching the next generation of lawyers at UC Berkeley School of Law, Boalt Hall how to advocate for and protect whistleblowers this semester in their class, Whistleblower Law: Deterring Fraud Against the Government. Berkeley is one of few law schools in the US with a course dedicated to whistleblower law. https://www.law.berkeley.edu/php-pr/courses/coursePage.php

The importance of whistleblowers in stopping Medicare fraud and other kinds of fraud against the government is clear from the latest stats on False Claims Act r...ecoveries. In fiscal year 2017, $3.4 billion of the $3.7 billion (92%) recovered by the federal government was due to whistleblower cases. That doesn’t include the millions recovered by states. See more

John Phillips, a key architect of the modern-day False Claims Act and founding partner of Phillips & Cohen, will return to the firm as a partner after serving as US Ambassador to Italy during the Obama administration. We’re very excited to have him back!

Phillips & Cohen’s Sean McKessy spoke with Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) about a Supreme Court challenge to Dodd-Frank’s protections for internal... whistleblowers, and the potential drawbacks for employers if employees begin to doubt the value of internal reporting channels. "If a company truly wants to encourage internal reporting, it should make clear in its programs that it will not retaliate against those who report internally and it will not litigate against employees who do so," he said.

Long thought to be the SEC’s quiet little sibling, the CFTC - U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission is ready to make its mark. Phillips & Cohen’s Erika Kelton writes in Forbes about the new report that says the agency is expected to reward $45M to whistleblowers in FY2018.