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Setting the Record Straight – Fighting Fraud and Representing Whistleblowers with Bob Thomas ’70
Bob Thomas ’70 shared his knowledge with the Calvert community on November 9 with his talk, “Setting the Record Straight – Fighting Fraud and Representing Whistleblowers.”
Bob founded the practice which eventually became the Whistleblower Law Collaborative in 2003 to represent whistleblowers in qui tam actions under the False Claims Act. “In a lot of ways, it was an outgrowth of my stint as a prosecutor.”
Bob expounded on the history of the False Claims Act, which was initially conceived in 1863. “It was actually Abraham Lincoln’s idea, and the genesis was that during the Civil War, profiteers in the defense industry were ripping off the union government right and left. They were selling weapons that didn’t fire, they were selling uniforms that would melt when it rained, they were selling lame horses, and basically it was free pickings – you could sell anything to the war department, what we now call the Pentagon. Lincoln came up with a way to incentivize insiders to let us know how we’re being ripped off. [T]his law was created to provide a financial incentive for whistleblowers to alert the government to fraud.”
Bob also illustrated how work with whistleblowers is different from more traditional forms of practicing law, as well as how they screen clients, criminal cases that run along their civil cases, and what inspired him to become a professor at Boston University Law School.
Bob has been practicing law since 1986 in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Boston. For the last 18 years, he has represented whistleblowers with his friend and partner, Suzanne Durrell.
Bob served as an assistant United States attorney for the District of Maryland from 1989 to 1997, focusing primarily on prosecuting white-collar fraud and environmental crimes. He was awarded the EPA Bronze Medal for contributing to the prosecution of the criminal Clean Water Act case of U.S. v. Wilson and IGC, a case of national importance concerning the enforcement of the Clean Water Act in federally protected wetlands.
Starting in 1997 from the private sector, Bob undertook a unique assignment as part of a team of former federal prosecutors to investigate and eradicate mob corruption in labor unions.
Bob is a 1985 cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School and magna cum laude graduate of Princeton University. Upon graduation from law school, he served as a judicial law clerk for federal District Judge Walter E. Black, Jr. He joined the Washington, D.C. law firm of Covington & Burling as an associate and later joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Maryland in 1989.
To watch a recording of the talk, click here.
Calvert School is a coed independent lower and middle school.
