Insights

Washington – August 21, 2025: The 2026 edition of The Best Lawyers in America® has recognized 49 Crowell & Moring lawyers as Best Lawyers and 33 lawyers as Best Lawyers: Ones to Watch. The publication also named partner Jason Murray as Lawyer of the Year for Antitrust Law in Los Angeles.

Chicago – August 06, 2025: Crowell & Moring today announced that a group of 16 highly regarded health care litigation partners is joining the firm, together with their team, and led by accomplished trial attorney Martin J. Bishop. The strategic combination creates one of the largest health care practices in the country and expands the firm’s ability to provide clients across the industry with the full spectrum of litigation, investigations, regulatory, transactional, and recovery capabilities. The team joins from Reed Smith, where Bishop served on the firm’s executive committee.

On September 25, 2025, the Northern District of Texas granted plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment in Humana v. Becerra, vacating CMS’s 2023 Final Rule regarding risk adjustment data validation (RADV) audits. In the litigation, Humana challenged CMS’s decision in the Final Rule to not continue applying a Fee-for-Service (FFS) adjuster to its RADV audit methodology.

CMS is well underway in initiating and conducting its Risk Adjustment Data Validation (RADV) audits of Medicare Advantage (MA) organizations for PY 2019, and PY 2020 audit notices are likely to arrive by the end of September. The timing for subsequent PY audits is less clear, but notices will likely be coming soon given CMS’s announced plans to complete all remaining audits by early 2026, including all contracts for PY 2020 and beyond. This approach marks a significant deviation from the agency’s prior policy of reviewing only a fraction of contracts and at a much slower pace.