Is It the End for Qui Tam? Reuters and Law360 Feature Commentary From Craig Margolis and Christian Sheehan

White Collar Defense & Investigations partner Craig Margolis was quoted in the Reuters article, “Legal Fee Tracker: Whistleblower lawyers could lose big in False Claims Act fight,” as well as in the Law360 article, “Novel FCA Decision Amplifies Voices of Whistleblower Critics,” which also includes commentary from partner Christian Sheehan. The articles cover a Florida federal judge’s recent ruling regarding qui tam relators. The ruling marks the first time a court has found the False Claims Act’s qui tam clause unconstitutional.

According to the article, the decision paves the way for the issue to potentially reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Margolis noted that “False Claims is not going to go away, but qui tam could.” If the justices curb or eliminate the qui tam provision, it will inevitably increase the burden on the U.S. Department of Justice to handle FCA cases, but “the sky's not going to fall, no matter how much we as defense attorneys might wish that it would,” he continued. There will still be hundreds of DOJ attorneys dedicated to pursuing FCA cases, he added, and the government is likely to recruit more attorneys to pursue fraud cases if it loses support from the relators’ bar.

Sheehan told Law360 that despite its novelty, the judge’s decision was a “careful, well-reasoned, thorough decision that engages substantively with the counterarguments that were made.”

Read the Reuters article, “Legal Fee Tracker: Whistleblower lawyers could lose big in False Claims Act fight.”

Read the Law360 article, “Novel FCA Decision Amplifies Voices Of Whistleblower Critics” (subscription required).