U.S. Supreme Court,
Government
Jun. 15, 2023
U.S. Supreme Court issues important decision on False Claims Act knowledge requirement
The Court's decision is notable for its articulation of "reckless disregard," the lowest of the FCA's scienter standards. What, for instance, would a qui tam plaintiff be required to plead to show that a defendant was "conscious of a substantial and unjustifiable risk" that a claim was false? What constitutes a "substantial and unjustifiable risk"? These will be critical questions at both the pleading stage and beyond.
Matthew D. Benedetto
Partner
WilmerHale
co-chair of the False Claims Act Practice
Phone: (213) 443-5300
Email: matthew.benedetto@wilmerhale.com
USC Law School; Los Angeles CA
Davina Pujari
Partner
WilmerHale LLP
Phone: (628) 235-1136
Email: davina.pujari@wilmerhale.com
Davina co-chairs the firm's Environment and Natural Resources Group and leads the Environmental Crimes and Investigations practice. She has more than 25 years of experience as a trial attorney in environmental and criminal law matters in both state and federal court.
In the past decade, the Supreme Court’s rate of unanimous decisions has trended downward. But resisting that trendline is the Court’s recent False Claims Act (FCA) jurisprudence, which gave us unanimous decisions in four major cases since 2015: Kellogg Brown & Root v. United States ex rel. Carter, involving the FCA’s first-to-file bar, State Farm Fire & Casualty Co. v. United States ex rel. Rigsby, which ...
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