Advocates for Justice

The federal government spent roughly 14% of its overall expenditures on Medicare in 2014. Included in those costs were significant money paid to rehabilitation companies and skilled nursing facilities to provide rehabilitation and care services to seniors. Given the massive amount of money being spent on those services, there is also an increasing amount of fraud, abuse and deception occurring, where dishonest providers are seeking to line their pockets with taxpayer dollars.

Currently pending before the Supreme Court is an important False Claims Act case, Universal Health Services v. United States ex rel. Escobar. The complaint in the case alleges that Universal Health Services knowingly hired unlicensed, unqualified and unsupervised non-medical professionals to provide mental health services in violation of Massachusetts’ Medicaid rules. The company then billed the state and federal governments as if those services had actually been provided by professionals. The misconduct had tragic consequences. According to the complaint, after seeking mental health services and receiving inadequate care from untrained non-professionals, a seventeen year old girl suffered a fatal seizure and died. When her parents discovered Universal Health Services’ failures, they sued under the False Claims Act.

There have been significant changes to the California Code of Civil Procedure, all of which center on one unifying theme: judicial efficiency. Below are brief discussions of the changes to procedural statutes regarding demurrers, 998 offers, and summary judgment motions. 

Effective January 1, 2016, Assembly Bill (AB) 1509 prohibits employers from retaliating against an employee who is a family member of a whistleblower. Specifically, the bill “extend[s] the protections of these provisions…to an employee who is a family member of a person who engaged in, or was perceived to engage in, the protected conduct.” 

A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute on mandatory arbitration, compiling data from five years and over 1,200 cases administered by the American Arbitration Association, found that employees subject to mandatory arbitration agreements achieve lower rates of success and lower recoveries than similar claims adjudicated in federal and state courts.  Thus, employers who require arbitration as a condition of employment are able to decrease the potential consequences of later illegal or discriminatory conduct.  The study is available online here.

Attorneys who litigate in Federal Court need to be aware of the recent amendments to the FRCP, which went into effect on December 1, 2015, in particular changes to  Rule 26, which governs the “duty to disclose” information in discovery.

The federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (“FDCPA”) provides significant protections to debtors, and allows claims to be brought individually or on behalf of a class.

Often in class actions brought against debt collectors under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (“FDCPA”), some absent class members will be subject to state court judgments obtained (often wrongfully) by the debt collection defendant. The question often arises as to whether those individuals can still be part of the class, or whether their inclusion in an FDCPA action is barred by the Rooker-Feldman doctrine. In the Ninth Circuit, at least, Rooker-Feldman does not apply in such circumstances.  

Under most federal and state False Claims Act statutes, successful relators are entitled to a percentage “of the proceeds of the action or settlement of the claim.” Unfortunately, in some cases, the government tries to twist this language to prevent whistleblowers from receiving a share of all of the proceeds of their cases. Whistleblowers and their attorneys should fight such efforts.

On December 21, 2015, Judge Ronald M. Whyte of the Federal Court for the Northern District of California appointed Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, LLP. (“CPM”) lead counsel for the indirect purchasers in a class action alleging that a number of companies illegally conspired to inflate the prices consumers and businesses paid for resistors.