California Lawyer Features Burke's Participation in White Collar Defense Roundtable

Partner Frank Burke was part of a wide-ranging roundtable discussion among senior defense attorneys and a federal prosecutor on emerging trends in white collar defense which was featured in the March 2014 edition of California Lawyer Magazine. The panel covered trends in residential mortgage backed securities, health care fraud, off-label pharmaceutical marketing, financial industry fraud, and emerging investigation techniques.

Regarding the proliferation of government prosecutions and False Claims Act whistleblower cases in health care and life sciences, Frank noted that “We’ve got a Medicare Fraud Strike Force and the Department of Health and Human Services at the federal level; at the state level we’ve got Medicaid fraud control units…[O]n top of all that you have whistleblowers… So the combination of very active state and federal enforcement and regulatory agencies and whistleblowers has led to a real explosion that I don’t think is going to abate anytime soon. Health care is such a large percentage of the economy.”

Regarding FCPA trends, Frank noted prosecutions of pharmaceutical and medical device makers concerning payments to doctors and hospitals in several foreign countries, and noted: “We’re also seeing more emphasis on prosecutions of foreign companies, which requires finding pieces of U.S. jurisdiction, either by charging them with conspiracy to act with a U.S. company, or perhaps payments that flowed through U.S. bank accounts, or e-mails sent through computers located on U.S. soil.”