CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Latham’s
Lauer on Defending False Claims Act Cases
22 Corporate Crime Reporter 8, February 25, 2008
Katherine Lauer has a full time job – defending health care fraud cases.
Lauer is a partner at Latham & Watkins in San Diego.
Since graduating from Michigan Law School in 1988, Lauer has been a white collar defense attorney at Latham.
Does it matter that she was never a prosecutor?
“I don’t think I’m disadvantaged in the sense that I don’t know how to deal with prosecutors or I don’t know how they think,” Lauer told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “I have spent enough time with them on the defense side in many, many hours of negotiated resolutions of really big cases that I probably have as good of a sense of how they approach a case as I would if I were on the prosecution side.”
“But people do wonder – how can you be a white-collar defense lawyer if you weren’t a prosecutor first? There is an expectation that you were a prosecutor. But substantively I don’t think it makes a difference. And from a relationship perspective – I know the same people. I just know them in a different context.”
“But let’s just say that not being a former prosecutor, there is probably a little more to prove than if you are a former prosecutor,” Lauer said.
Lauer spends much of her time defending False Claims Act cases and trying to persuade government prosecutors not to bring a case.
“You try to convince the government not to intervene,” Lauer said. “You know there is an investigation. You know the government is investigating your client. You may or may not know whether there is a whistleblower that is part of the equation. But in any situation, the strategy is to have a dialogue with the folks – whether it is the folks at Main Justice or at the local U.S. Attorneys offices – to have a dialogue. And you try to convince the government’s attorneys that they don’t have a good case, and they don’t want to spend their time or their resources pursuing this action, either because the evidence of liability isn’t very good, or because it would be a tough and novel legal theory, or because they don’t have a very good damages theory, or the damages would be small. There are a lot of different ways that we do it.”
Next month, Lauer will be in Miami, Florida at the American Bar Association’s White Collar Institute.
She’ll be on a panel discussing health care fraud cases.
What comes out of these conferences?
“In white collar practice, in many of the cases, lawyers are chosen through referrals,” Lauer says. “Knowing the people who are out there and being known by the people who are out there is one way we get a whole lot of business. It’s making relationships with other white collar lawyers. When you have 1,000 lawyers there, it is a pretty good opportunity.”
“Now, that said, there is an awful lot of substantive programming at this thing as well,” she said. “So, it’s more than just going out and going to the parties.”
[See Interview with Katherine Lauer, 22 Corporate Crime Reporter 8(11), February 25, 2008, print edition only.]
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