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.

Washington – June 26, 2025: Crowell & Moring has been recommended in eight practice areas in the 18th edition of the Legal 500 United States. In addition, partner Daniel Forman, co-chair of the firm’s Government Contracts Group, has been named to the Legal 500’s “Hall of Fame” for Government Contracts.

Washington – August 15, 2024: The 2025 edition of The Best Lawyers in America® has recognized 42 Crowell & Moring lawyers as "Best Lawyers" and 29 lawyers as “Ones to Watch.”

On July 2, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Division and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) jointly announced the formation of a False Claims Act (FCA) Working Group. This new initiative underscores a coordinated federal enforcement strategy focused on identifying and addressing fraud in federally funded health care programs, particularly Medicare Advantage and Medicaid managed care. The announcement comes days after Matthew R. Galeotti, Head of DOJ’s Criminal Division, announced the results of the “largest coordinated health care fraud takedown in the history of the Department of Justice”  and the creation of a “Health Care Fraud Data Fusion Center” comprised of data specialists that will “break down information silos, using coordinated data analysis to enable our investigative teams to quickly identify and dismantle emerging fraud schemes.” Taken together, these announcements demonstrate the DOJ’s effort—in both civil and criminal divisions—to strengthen its collaboration with HHS to investigate and prosecute health care fraud.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced on January 27, 2020 that Practice Fusion, a health information technology (IT) vendor, has entered into a civil settlement and deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) worth $145 million that resolves civil investigations led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Vermont, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, and the Civil Division’s Commercial Litigation Branch of main justice, as well as a criminal investigation led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Vermont (collectively, the “Government”). The agreement is yet another in a series of civil False Claims Act and Anti-Kickback Statute enforcement actions involving EHR vendors. However, the criminal kickback allegations against Practice Fusion notably focus on the financial relationships between EHR vendors and pharmaceutical manufacturers rather than those with providers, and demonstrate the Government’s view of how those relationships could potentially impact a provider’s clinical decision making. The DPA and new focus on clinical decision support (CDS) alerts within EHR software products should put vendors, manufacturers, and providers alike on notice of the potential consequences if faced with aggressive enforcement in this developing area of health information technology, and the need to take proactive steps to ensure that financial arrangements involving the development of EHR capabilities reflect practices compliant with health care fraud and abuse laws.

Crowell & Moring Partners Kelly Hibbert and Jed Wulfekotte, and Senior Counsel Janet Walker, members of the firm's Health Care Practice Group, will be speaking at this year's ABA National Managed Care Institute, which will be taking place in person at Greenberg Traurig December 14-15th in Washington, D.C. (CLE offered for both presentations.)

Join us for this year’s Health Care Ounce of Prevention Seminar (HOOPS), a webinar series where our experienced practitioners will provide insight into a number of exciting topics. This year’s seminar will focus on topics such as Remote Health Care and Telemedicine, Mental Health Parity, Health Care Litigation, and Health Care Trends for 2022. 

In this episode, hosts Joe Records and Payal Nanavati talk to Kelly Hibbert and Jed Wulfekotte about how Medicare plan sponsors and Medicaid Managed Care Organizations can structure an affirmative recovery program to prevent and detect fraud, waste, and abuse -- among other things.