As a former investigative journalist, I am a natural ally to whistleblowers who find themselves speaking up for integrity in their field or industry. If you are in search of a tough and detail-oriented lawyer adept at translating your field-specific evidence into terms that outsiders can understand, I am the right person.
I graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1999, with a B.A. in Physics and Philosophy. From 2000 to 2014, I was a science journalist. I reported primarily on events in the physics community, but also on scientific fraud. In 2009, I published a book about a condensed matter physics fraud at Bell Labs, then-owned by telecommunications company Lucent Technologies. Many problems documented in my book: including failures by the institution, journals, and collaborators to scrutinize headline-grabbing scientific claims, continue to be depressingly relevant in science today.
By 2015, I had recognized that investigative journalism is not able to have an impact in all fraud cases. Not only corporations, but many organizations that we assume will have a more-moral compass, including universities and healthcare providers, are capable of serious ethical dysfunction. I went to law school to be equipped to tackle egregious cases.
During my J.D. at Boston University School of Law, I completed internships in two government prosecutor offices and a whistleblower firm. Among other cases, I made meaningful contributions to the government investigation into the stem cell research laboratory of Piero Anversa at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, which resulted in the Brigham repaying $10 million in research grant funding that it had received to support Anversa’s research. I also participated in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ opioid investigations into Purdue Pharma, and the preparation of whistleblower complaints against healthcare providers who had received kickbacks or referred patients to their own enterprises, in violation of the Antikickback Statute or Stark laws of the U.S.
After graduating law school in 2018, I served as a whistleblower attorney at two additional firms. My most recent publicly-reported success was a record settlement of $900 million in a pharmaceutical kickback case against Biogen. The government, which had paid for prescriptions written by bribed doctors, received the bulk of these funds, but my former client, Michael Bawduniak, with my former firm, shared in a reward of over $266 million for our work investigating and documenting thousands of improper payments. I was a core member of the team, responsible for maintaining command of more than 1.5 million documents produced in the 10-year litigation, working with experts to enable estimates of the number of prescriptions written by bribed doctors, and conducting pre-trial arguments in Court. The case was notable because we proceeded undaunted even after the government declined to intervene: a rubicon that many whistleblower firms will not cross, but a tradition that I intend to continue for most cases I file.
In 2023, I founded my law firm in Boston, Massachusetts, to focus on pursuing a small volume of high-quality, well-documented False Claims Act and other whistleblower cases.