Insights & News

If anyone wondered which white-collar crime issues would attract special Department of Justice interest during the Trump administration, they now have a tentative answer. In July 2017, 412 individuals in 41 different parts of the country were charged with $1.3-billion worth of health care fraud schemes involving false billings to Medicare and Medicaid, as well as overprescribing opioids and other dangerous narcotics. In a parallel action undertaken at the same time, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched suspension actions against 295 individual providers including doctors, nurses and pharmacists. The medical profession, hospitals and pharmacies, and the pharmaceutical […]

Title IX is a federal law dating back to 1972 that prohibits discrimination based on gender in providing access to facilities and programs at schools that receive funding from Washington. It also bans all forms of sexual violence, mandating an investigation that can lead to suspension or expulsion from school, and even the possibility of criminal charges being brought by police. The process for handling a Title IX violation varies from one school to another because they are not a criminal proceeding. However, when an allegation is made, schools and other education programs must launch an “independent investigation” into whether […]

Many employment contracts contain restrictive covenants designed to govern what a person may – or, most often, may not – do after they leave a company. Traditionally these non-compete restrictions were used mostly with senior executives, sales people who possessed account lists, and key individuals with access to confidential trade secrets and proprietary designs or processes. But as companies widen the use of these restriction-laden employment agreements to include middle managers and even office or manufacturing staff who possess no truly confidential information, courts in various jurisdictions have wither modified such clauses or thrown them out entirely. In some states […]