March 1, 2022. Partner Renée Brooker was profiled in the March/April 2022 edition of Washington Lawyer, the official publication of the District of Columbia Bar. In the Member Spotlight article, Ms. Brooker described how she chose a career in law, her experience as an assistant director in the Department of Justice’s Civil Division, her working partnership with Eva Gunasekera, and her transition to private practice representing whistleblowers. Regarding her work representing whistleblowers under the qui tam provision of the False Claims Act, Ms. Brooker says,
I like having a big impact, or feeling like I do. You bring one case, and it can change an entire industry. That’s the point of the False Claims Act–not just to recover the misspent money, but to create a deterrent for the rest of the industry.
We call the False Claims Act a public/private partnership because the government depends upon the whistleblowers to bring to their attention what is happening. The Facebook whistleblower did just that; she opened up our eyes into how Facebook is operating.
We need people in industry to bring that inside knowledge of what fraud is taking place.