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00;00;00;00 - 00;00;25;23
Jonathan Porter
Welcome to another episode of Husch Blackwell’s False Claims Act Insights podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Porter. On our last episode, Cormac Connor told us about an announcement from DOJ leadership about False Claims Act dismissals. That’s a big deal. So for those who missed it, DOJ dismissals last year went from around six per year up to around 25, I think 25 dismissals last year.
00;00;25;25 - 00;00;48;23
Jonathan Porter
And that may not seem like a big jump, but it’s a really important jump because, as our regular listeners know, declined qui tams can be a bear to litigate. And so if DOJ is going to step in and start dismissing more declined qui tams, that’s something that we need to know about. And so today on the podcast, we’re going to unpack dismissed qui tams a little bit more than the last episode.
00;00;48;24 - 00;01;12;15
Jonathan Porter
Talk about what goes into a good pitch to ask DOJ to dismiss declined qui tams, why DOJ dismisses declined qui tams, everything like that. Because this is a really big deal for False Claims Act enforcement and little spoiler alert it doesn’t go the way a lot of people think it goes. A lot of people have a misperception about how and why declined qui tams are dismissed by DOJ.
00;01;12;16 - 00;01;29;17
Jonathan Porter
So we’re going to unpack all of that today on the podcast. Joining me to talk about dismissed qui tams is my Husch Blackwell colleague, Tanner Cook. Tanner’s been on the podcast a ton, and I’ve introduced him every single time. And so hopefully our listeners know him very well by now. But Tanner is one of my favorites in the firm.
00;01;29;20 - 00;01;45;08
Jonathan Porter
He’s a senior associate in our St. Louis office and a very valuable member of our False Claims Act working group. And so Tanner, I’m thrilled that you’re coming back on the podcast today to talk to our listeners about DOJ dismissing qui tams.
00;01;45;10 - 00;01;55;12
Tanner Cook
Yeah. Thanks, Jonathan. As always, it’s a pleasure to be on this podcast. It’s always great collaborating with you, whether on our cases or on thought leadership like this. So I’m really looking forward to the discussion.
00;01;55;15 - 00;02;07;13
Jonathan Porter
Thanks, Tanner. So I previewed in the open that these things don’t go the way some people think they go. And so Tanner, once you start us off by giving us the big picture of what DOJ looks for in dismissals.
00;02;07;16 - 00;02;29;14
Tanner Cook
Yeah. So at a high level, DOJ will intervene in and dismiss qui tams that somehow abuse the process. But that means something a little different than what us lawyers typically mean when we say abuse the process, right? Ordinarily, when we think of an abusive process, we think of someone bringing a lawsuit for an improper purpose or disregarding important procedural requirements, things like that.
00;02;29;19 - 00;02;53;22
Tanner Cook
And the qui tam dismissal context, the abusive process seems something more like undermining the purpose of the FCA. So, qui tams that are candidates for DOJ dismissals are typically those that actively work against the government’s interests in one way or another. And that makes sense when you think about it, considering that the entire purpose of the FCA’s key provisions are for private regulators to further the government’s interests.
00;02;53;25 - 00;03;13;24
Tanner Cook
So if they’re hurting the government’s interests, that’s all the more reason for the government to step in and intervene. Now, one thing that I want to clarify is that when we’re talking about undermining the government’s interest, it’s not so much that the lawsuit is bad or has bad facts or is poorly pleaded. That’s typically not enough to get DOJ interested in intervening to dismiss the case.
00;03;13;26 - 00;03;31;17
Tanner Cook
In fact, the prevailing wisdom is that DOJ will typically let questionable facts proceed as declined qui tams. Because the case is truly without support, the court will likely just dispose of it at the pleading stage or at summary judgment anyways. On the other hand, if it turns out that the case actually does have support, the government stands to benefit.
00;03;31;18 - 00;03;51;01
Tanner Cook
So when we’re looking at qui tam dismissals by DOJ, we’re looking at certain defined criteria that focus on whether the suit is undermining the government’s interests or initiatives in those criteria. You know, as we’re going to discuss, are laid out in what’s called the Granston memo, which is a 2018 memorandum from former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Michael Granston.
00;03;51;08 - 00;04;16;04
Tanner Cook
Those criteria can be kind of categorized as follows. So first you’ve got curbing meritless qui tams. And that might sound like it’s in tension with what I just said about questionable suits not being candidates for dismissal. But we’ll explain actually why those aren’t in tension. Second, that DOJ focuses on preventing opportunistic or parasitic items data. Third, focuses on preventing interference with agency policies and programs.
00;04;16;07 - 00;04;41;11
Tanner Cook
Fourth, it focuses on controlling litigation brought on behalf of the government. Fifth, it focuses on safeguarding classified information or national security interests. Sixth, it focuses on preserving government resources. And seventh, it focuses on addressing egregious procedural errors. So that’s kind of the universe of criteria for qui tam dismissals. The memo indicates that that’s not an exhaustive list, but in practice, those are the ones that really come into play.
00;04;41;18 - 00;05;02;02
Jonathan Porter
Thanks to enter, any great lawyer knows how to roadmap stuff and you just gave us an excellent roadmap. So thanks for that. The big point that I want people to understand up front, Tanner, is you don’t go to DOJ and say, look, we think our facts are better than their facts, at least under the Granston memo, DOJ is not going to dismiss a qui tam just because you think that your facts are a little bit better than their facts.
00;05;02;04 - 00;05;23;28
Jonathan Porter
DOJ, their policy is to look for some actual impropriety, something wrong with the qui tam itself that the courts might not necessarily pick up on? Because the way DOJ thinks, if you think you’re going to win on the merits, okay, then go to the courts and have and win on the merits. There’s something different about DOJ saying, no, we’re going to we’re going to do something that the courts aren’t designed to do.
00;05;23;29 - 00;05;39;03
Jonathan Porter
We’re going to step in and look at the process. And so that’s the big thing, that people mess that up all the time. I can tell you when I was at DOJ, how many times people came to me asking, hey, we want you to do dismiss this qui tam because, you know, we think that we’re right. That’s really not what it's designed for.
00;05;39;03 - 00;06;00;03
Jonathan Porter
You got to fit your request into one of these categories. And so let’s start by talking about some examples of these categories that you just excellently wrote. Not for us. And so again we’re taking these directly from the Granston memo. In the first one that we want to talk about is allegations that facially lack merit. So Tanner, you talked about the tension between these two things.
00;06;00;03 - 00;06;03;11
Jonathan Porter
Why don’t you explain this category for us?
00;06;03;13 - 00;06;28;11
Tanner Cook
Yeah, absolutely. So I'll try to break this down in a way that makes sense, because they do appear to be at odds with each other. Right. If the government wants to curb meritless qui tams, but it’s saying it won’t dismiss just because a case is meritless. So we'll try to make sense of that. So this category is not for cases where the relator fails to satisfy the rule on B hide and pleading standard, or cases where there’s a good chance that the relator’s claims are barred by the public disclosure bar.
00;06;28;16 - 00;06;56;02
Tanner Cook
It's not any of the cases where the defendant simply has a good merits defense. These are cases that, on their face, don't allege something that fits within the facts. So in philosophical terms, it’s what we would call a category error, which is when you assign something to a category to which it does not belong. And the best example of this is when a relator names a government agency or official as a defendant, or a DOJ has dismissed, qui tams against the Federal Reserve, for example.
00;06;56;02 - 00;07;17;24
Tanner Cook
And and that’s because we’re looking for fraud on the government, right? Not fraud by the government. The government is not a proper defendant and have cases. So another example that’s somewhat related is when the relator’s allegations do not involve any federal funds, or the misuse of federal funds is an essential ingredient of FCA claims. So if that’s lacking, it’s just it’s simply not enough to suit.
00;07;17;27 - 00;07;39;17
Tanner Cook
Finally, DOJ will occasionally dismiss qui tams when its own investigation finds conclusive evidence that the qui tam allegations were factually incorrect. That’s exceedingly rare, and it’s different than just telling DOJ, hey, we’re going to be able to prove that our facts are right and we didn’t do anything wrong. DOJ is not going to take that assurance. Right. But if DOJ conducts its own investigation, right.
00;07;39;17 - 00;07;50;20
Tanner Cook
If there’s a a parallel investigation that’s ongoing and they find conclusive evidence, sometimes they might step in to intervene. So hopefully that resolves any confusion over what is meant by curbing meritless qui tams.
00;07;50;28 - 00;08;08;07
Jonathan Porter
Thanks, Tanner. And you mentioned the philosophical approach. I appreciate that you’re way ahead of me when it comes to those types of things. But no, I think what our listeners should know here is this is for just a really obvious, glaring problem. There have been key terms that and name presidents before. That's really not what key terms are designed to do.
00;08;08;07 - 00;08;25;05
Jonathan Porter
So that's what we're talking about here is something that's super obvious or something where when DOJ looks at it, it is like an X or not X situation. And if you’re going to bring a qui tam and say this person was never licensed as a physician, and they’re they’re doing all this stuff and you run an investigation, find Walker.
00;08;25;05 - 00;08;41;18
Jonathan Porter
Well, they’ve always been licensed, so they’re just wrong for some reason. That’s the type of thing. First of all, hopefully the DOJ is going to the relator and saying, you missed this. Why don’t you just dismiss this on on your own? But if they’re not going to that’s where DOJ would step in because it is super clear this is not something that should proceed as a qui tam.
00;08;41;18 - 00;09;00;28
Jonathan Porter
So that’s what that means. And then Tanner, thanks for resolving the tension because I think some people may read that and say, okay, well, if I can convince DOJ that there’s no merit in then proceeding, then that’s something. But it’s very different. It’s very different from what we may think of as not meritorious. So so the next category is what the Granston memo calls parasitic qui tams.
00;09;00;28 - 00;09;01;26
Jonathan Porter
One of those.
00;09;01;29 - 00;09;23;11
Tanner Cook
So parasitic key items are those that simply duplicate a preexisting government investigation and that provide no useful information beyond what the government already knows. So an example of this would be there was one where DOJ dismissed a qui tam against a financial institution where the government had been investigating this institution for years. It was already pretty far in a settlement negotiations.
00;09;23;17 - 00;09;46;04
Tanner Cook
And the rationale here makes sense, right? The government does not want to share its recovery with the relator, who really contributes nothing besides filing the lawsuit. To that end, you’ll also see DOJ dismisses claims as parasitic when relator’s file a bunch of qui tams against the same defendant. And so what the government is trying to do here is limit its obligation to share its recovery with the relator.
00;09;46;07 - 00;10;07;05
Tanner Cook
For our listeners out there, as you recall, right relator’s get up to a third of the government’s recovery in non-intervened qui tams. And so, you know, the government doesn’t want to share a third of its recovery when the relator is really doing nothing besides filing a lawsuit. So that’s the rationale behind dismissing what the Princeton memo refers to as parasitic qui tams.
00;10;07;07 - 00;10;23;23
Jonathan Porter
Thanks, Tanner. And this really does happen. So when agents are investigating qui tams or False Claims Act allegations that weren’t started by qui tam, they’ll go out and they’ll interview people. And it’s not unusual for someone who gets interviewed to turn around and contact a lawyer and file a qui tam saying, I’m going to get a piece of this myself.
00;10;24;01 - 00;10;45;28
Jonathan Porter
And a lot of times they really are successful. What’s going on here? I think, Tanner, is that what the Granston memos saying is? Look, if they’re in advanced negotiations, if we’re, like about to sign up and someone files a qui tam and it’s not really right for them to go and just grab 15% of all of those funds when they didn’t really do anything, they didn’t really advance the investigation beyond what was already agreed to.
00;10;45;28 - 00;11;07;03
Jonathan Porter
So that’s what this is. But I’ll tell you, it does still happen where people will file qui tam after they get wind of an investigation, and they’ll still get to share in it. But that’s our job, is to try to figure out, does this cross some sort of line that Granston memo talks about. And so Tanner moving on the Granston memo also counsels DOJ to dismiss qui tams that interfere with agency policies and programs.
00;11;07;05 - 00;11;08;23
Jonathan Porter
Tanner. Tell us about that category.
00;11;08;25 - 00;11;34;15
Tanner Cook
So this is an interesting category, and it’s the one that I see invoked most often. And in briefing on this issue here, DOJ looks for qui tams that essentially try to second guess what government agencies have done. Government agencies often get second guessed. That’s not uncommon, but DOJ is sensitive to relator’s using the qui tam process to do that right, especially when it puts the agencies in a position of having to defend the propriety of their actions.
00;11;34;23 - 00;11;57;09
Tanner Cook
In short, DOJ doesn’t want judges, or even worse, jurors running roughshod over agency decision making. An example of this is the Sequoia Orange case, in which a relator tried to file a qui tam that sought to force the Department of Agriculture to change its regulations in the citrus industry. A similar example is the Wolf Creek case. The Sequoia Orange one is mentioned in the Granston memo.
00;11;57;09 - 00;12;21;11
Tanner Cook
The Wolf Creek one is a fairly recent and kind of highly talked about case, but in Wolf Creek, the relator alleged the NASA contracting officers didn’t vet proposals from contractors before approving them, and DOJ dismissed this because the qui tam provisions are not meant to make sure that government officers are doing their jobs properly, right. They don’t want outsiders really having a say on that.
00;12;21;14 - 00;12;44;25
Tanner Cook
So there are other, more tangible examples besides this. Sometimes or later suit does not just second guess an agency’s decision, but actively interferes with the agency’s efforts to fulfill its functions and obviously, in those cases, DOJ is highly incentivized to intervene in and dismiss those cases. So I think that’s why we see this category talked about so much in briefing, because it does seem to be the most compelling, right?
00;12;44;25 - 00;12;54;24
Tanner Cook
If a relator is getting in the way of an agency’s functions and at the same time purporting to act in that agency’s interests, that’s a problem. And DOJ will want to correct that.
00;12;54;24 - 00;13;17;16
Jonathan Porter
Yeah. Like you said, this is probably the one that we see the most. And it’s because this one is a really fascinating concept within the False Claims Act. There are a lot of situations where there are government actors who know what’s going on. And the question is, what do we do with that? You see, the lot of the contracting space where you’ve got contracting officers and they’re making determinations in real time.
00;13;17;22 - 00;13;37;06
Jonathan Porter
What do we do with this? And there’s a lot, a lot of qui tams and a lot of false claims about cases that really come down to what are the government know, why did they know it? And should this government person have done something differently in response to all of this? And it gets really sticky when essentially you’re using the qui tam process to make a big change within the government.
00;13;37;06 - 00;13;54;12
Jonathan Porter
And so that’s where this comes in, trying to figure out, okay, are NASA contracting officers doing enough to vet something? That’s a really hard thing because you're saying that the contractor committed fraud. Remember, the False Claims Act is for knowing fraud. How in the world did the contractor commit fraud because the NASA contracting officer didn’t do his or her job.
00;13;54;12 - 00;14;07;29
Jonathan Porter
So that’s what this is getting at. And this I’ll tell you, this is the one that is most interesting to me because it’s a really big deal for a lot of our clients. So I’m moving right along. The next category that we want to talk about is controlling litigation. So what does that mean.
00;14;08;01 - 00;14;34;06
Tanner Cook
Oftentimes letters will name a ton of defendants right. We’ve seen this in qui tams where there’s multitude of doctors or hospital systems, things like that. And everyone who has litigated cases knows that it’s very difficult sometimes impossible, to try a case with hundreds of separate defendants. So when DOJ identifies fraud that is more limited than the relator thinks, DOJ will sometimes dismiss the defendants who are on the periphery of the fraud.
00;14;34;10 - 00;14;55;14
Tanner Cook
And that’s to make it easier for DOJ to focus on the main players. So an example of this is in 2002, a relator brought a case against companies involved in purported natural gas royalties fraud involving natural gas produced from federal lands. But the relator named 300 defendants. So what DOJ did was intervene as to some of those, but not others.
00;14;55;20 - 00;15;18;16
Tanner Cook
And then when the relator wanted to pursue it against the rest, DOJ realized it would be impossible to actually litigate the case with all of these defendants, some of which it had intervened on, some of which it did not. So it dismissed the ones where it had not intervened and that was to make it more manageable to really focus on the defendants that DOJ thought it had a solid case against, and that it could streamline its pretrial efforts.
00;15;18;18 - 00;15;34;29
Jonathan Porter
Thanks Tanner. And this is one that I don't think is invoked very often because I think relators by now understand, if you’re going to litigate this, you absolutely can’t go to trial against 300 defendants. That’s a really hard, hard thing to do. Even if you’re going to bifurcate and all that stuff. That’s a hard that’s a hard thing.
00;15;35;04 - 00;15;54;16
Jonathan Porter
Relators now I think understand if you’re going to name 50 defendants and DOJ is going to cut it to four, good. Let’s roll with that. I think relators understand that that’s the way to go. So the Granston memo also says to dismiss qui tams that risk classified information and national security interests. This one sounds interesting. Tell us about this one.
00;15;54;23 - 00;16;16;18
Tanner Cook
Yeah. So this is one that I don’t see come up that often. You know, kind of for obvious reasons here. But I think it’s intuitively the most compelling reason. So sometimes qui tams involve government contractors who engaged in highly confidential matters or whose work was vital to national security. And prosecuting cases involving these issues raise a lot of challenges for the government, right?
00;16;16;18 - 00;16;35;16
Tanner Cook
There are certain tools that make it easier in criminal cases, but with civil FCA cases, with relators, and with the public right of access, the analysis is quite a bit different. So DOJ will weigh the risks and rewards of qui tams involving national security or classified information. And it’s going to dismiss the ones that that things are too risky.
00;16;35;18 - 00;17;00;14
Tanner Cook
Right. So there was a case, you know, almost 20 years ago now against a major defense contractor where DOJ dismissed after determining that the national security interest outweighed the relator’s right to go forward with the case. And so it’s a pretty high level of a government agency involved. The national security really depends on this contractor. The risk of losing that contractor because of an FCA judgment is just too much compared to the benefit of a recovery there.
00;17;00;14 - 00;17;25;12
Tanner Cook
So this one makes a lot of sense, right? The government is obviously interested in safeguarding confidential information and ensuring national security. So whenever that gets put at risk, DOJ is going to look closely at that cost benefit analysis of what are we likely to recover if the relator suit goes forward versus what are the downsides here? Are we going to be putting an essential national security contractor out of business, and then we suddenly don’t have what we need to defend the nation.
00;17;25;12 - 00;17;27;21
Tanner Cook
So that’s going to be the analysis there at DOJ.
00;17;27;23 - 00;17;52;22
Jonathan Porter
Yeah. And the analysis is a super simple balancing act here. I mean, it really DOJ is not going to just let egregious fraud go just because there's some national security interest. But the juice has got to be worth the squeeze. If DOJ looks at this and says this is really not a very good qui tam, and we would have to do a lot in order to preserve our national security interest and all this confidential stuff, they're not going to do it, but if it's egregious, they will do it.
00;17;52;23 - 00;18;10;11
Jonathan Porter
They just want to make sure that it’s worth it. But you don’t see this very often. This would require a borderline case involving a lot of effort DOJ would need to go through in order to preserve the confidential information. So next we’ve got preserving government resources. This one fascinates me. Tell us about this one.
00;18;10;13 - 00;18;29;08
Tanner Cook
Yeah. So this is one that’s often invoked. And it doesn’t really gain much traction until the case goes on. Right. So the idea here is that even when DOJ declines to intervene in the qui tam, there are still some potentially tremendous resources that either DOJ or the affected agency may need to invest while the qui tams go forward.
00;18;29;08 - 00;19;09;16
Tanner Cook
So when you have qui tams that depend on actions or decisions by government actors, you know, perhaps in the context of materiality, discovery can be a real burden for the government, right? The agencies often have to respond to requests for documents. Occasionally they have to provide a representative who’s going to sit for deposition. So DOJ, according to the Granston memo should dismiss qui tams when the burden of monitoring or participating in the litigation outweighs the expected gain and we talked about one of those cases already, the Sequoia Orange case, where the USDA citrus industry regulations were involved, and their DOJ said that the burden of seeking discovery into USDA officials mindsets in terms of
00;19;09;16 - 00;19;32;03
Tanner Cook
how they set regulations of the citrus industry, DOJ characterized that burden as enormous. Similarly, in the Wolf Creek case that we talked about the discovery into the NASA contracting officer’s knowledge or intention when they were entering and proving these contracts and entering into these agreements. It was going to be incredibly time consuming, and it was going to distract those officials from their more pressing duties of carrying out their jobs there.
00;19;32;03 - 00;19;56;04
Tanner Cook
So, like I said, this is one it’s tough to invoke at the outset of a case. Right, because DOJ doesn’t really know how much of a burden that there’s going to be. But as the case goes on and it becomes more and more burdensome for DOJ or the affected agency, you know, that might be an avenue for kind of reopening these discussions with DOJ and saying, look, as you can see, this is taking a lot of time away from the agency and doing what they’re supposed to do.
00;19;56;11 - 00;20;00;21
Tanner Cook
We think that the burdens are clearly outweigh the benefits here. And you should consider dismissing.
00;20;00;28 - 00;20;25;02
Jonathan Porter
Yeah, that’s exactly right, Tanner. I think what DOJ is looking for on this one is something really, really, really egregious. I mean, the fact that a couple of witnesses are going to need to be deposed or that they’ll need to respond to some discovery is really not enough. That’s really not what DOJ is looking for. I’ll tell you, DOJ really doesn’t want to be seen as not willing to put in the work when the work is needed to rectify knowing fraud, they’ll do the work.
00;20;25;05 - 00;20;44;05
Jonathan Porter
This is getting to a level where there’s an entire agency, and their entire decision making up to the highest levels are being scrutinized, and that’s where I think this would kick in. I think this is a pretty rare one, but it’s still one that could be a big deal to some agencies. I think DOJ time is really they’re going to be willing to put in the work.
00;20;44;05 - 00;21;03;07
Jonathan Porter
The question is, are you going to have to like shut down an agency in order to litigate this case? And that’s where this comes into play. And so, Tanner, we got one more. And the final one, again, this is a rare one. This is egregious procedural errors. So Tanner tell us about that. And then close this out by offering your thoughts on what we should know about this process as a whole.
00;21;03;11 - 00;21;25;02
Tanner Cook
Yeah. So egregious procedural errors. Read the focus here is really on that that word egregious. So as I mentioned at the outset, failing to satisfy nine B and naming the wrong defendant, that sort of stuff is not going to be in a procedural error the DOJ is going to care about. But the ones that DOJ will care about are the procedural errors that hinder the government's own efforts to investigate and police fraud.
00;21;25;07 - 00;21;47;23
Tanner Cook
And so this is, you know, rare because most of the time relators do the proper things and they don’t commit these sorts of egregious errors. But that’s not always the case. Right? So in 2013, there was a case where the relator ignored DOJ’s request to have the key term that served on DOJ or the complaint itself, and ignored DOJ’s request to have the relator disclose facts to DOJ.
00;21;47;26 - 00;22;07;28
Tanner Cook
All of this is required by the FCA and the relator, for whatever reason, just didn’t want to comply. And those things matter because if DOJ doesn't have what it needs, it can’t perform its investigation during the seal period. Right. As our listeners probably recall, a qui tam gets filed under seal. DOJ investigates, decides whether or not it wants to intervene.
00;22;08;03 - 00;22;28;01
Tanner Cook
And so when DOJ can’t do that investigation, that obviously is going to be a problem and going to lean in favor of dismissal. Other things that you can imagine sometimes relators violate the seal period. Right. They’ll serve a complaint that should be under seal, and that can really impact DOJ ability to investigate, because then the defendant is on notice of this.
00;22;28;01 - 00;22;47;06
Tanner Cook
And the investigation is trickier when the defendant’s aware of what’s going on. So in those instances, actually even the court can theoretically dismiss the case under its power. And certainly DOJ could intervene in the case and dismiss as well. So an overall takeaway on this issue, it has to be a procedural error that’s really going to get in the way of the government doing their job.
00;22;47;09 - 00;23;14;03
Tanner Cook
And Jonathan, to your question about closing us out here, the big thing that I think is the takeaway here is that DOJ isn’t looking to dismiss weak cases. They’re looking to dismiss wide cases, right? Cases that, for one reason or another, have a fundamental flaw. That means they either don’t fit into the FCA, they’re actually going to frustrate the purposes of the FCA, or they’re actually going to make it harder for the government, whether it’s DOJ or affected agencies, to do their jobs.
00;23;14;03 - 00;23;37;02
Tanner Cook
That’s really what DOJ is looking for. And it’s going to be interesting, you know, going forward. As you mentioned, dismissals are up for the first time in recent memory. It’s interesting because that coincides with what appears to be pretty aggressive FCA enforcement from the government. So it’s possible we’ll see more qui tam dismissals because the government is taking the more active role in FCA prosecution.
00;23;37;02 - 00;23;41;03
Tanner Cook
So it’s interesting, you know, how those work in tandem and we’ll see where things go from there.
00;23;41;06 - 00;23;54;24
Jonathan Porter
Thanks, Tanner. That’s excellent wisdom. Both on this one and throughout the episode. And so Tanner thanks for coming on the podcast and telling our listeners about this growing and very important issue for a lot of people who are under investigation. Tanner, thanks for coming on the podcast.
00;23;54;26 - 00;23;56;27
Tanner Cook
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
00;23;56;27 - 00;24;23;04
Jonathan Porter
To close, this is a big deal because as Tanner said, qui tams are through the roof. Record number of qui tams filed last year. And that means a lot of companies are now under investigation or about to find themselves under investigation. And so if there’s a qui tam that crosses a line and that is defense counsel’s job is to go to the government and explain why the qui tam is flawed, not weak, flawed. Flawed in a way that meets the strictures of the Granston memo.
00;24;23;04 - 00;24;43;09
Jonathan Porter
And so we’re going to continue to talk about on this podcast all the different things that we need to know as we’re defending these, the False Claims Act. I’ve said this a number of times, is, to me the most one of those fascinating areas in which to practice. And it’s a pleasure to practice with such a talented team here at Husch Blackwell and Tanner, I’m grateful that you’re such a critical part of that team.
00;24;43;09 - 00;24;50;06
Jonathan Porter
But to our listeners, we hope you’ll continue to listen to us and we’ll see you next time.