# Auremont Vale — Recent Lawyer Profile Before/After Audit **Generated:** September 15, 2026 **Scope:** 81 profiles. This set consists of every published `profiles` post with a manual editorial manifest reviewed on or after September 12, 2026, plus Eve H. Cervantez and Rafey S. Balabanian, which were completed in the same pass without a body edit. **Before definition:** the complete profile body whose SHA-256 matches the `current_content_sha256` recorded by the earliest recent manifest. **After definition:** the complete profile body currently stored in WordPress when this audit was generated. For verification-only profiles, before and after are identical. **Model attribution warning:** the site manifests record editor labels, timestamps and hashes but do not reliably encode the underlying ChatGPT model. The entries explicitly marked `GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff` are the profiles handled after the conversation handoff at Matthew W.H. Wessler. Earlier/parallel entries are not independently assigned to GPT-6 Pro by the site evidence, even where conversation history indicates an earlier model phase. **How to use this file:** the voice-risk flag is triage, not a verdict. `HIGH` means the later edit materially rewrote literary/editorial narration and should be compared against the before version before reuse. `Useful correction confidence = HIGH` means the later version contains factual/currentness material that should generally be preserved even if the earlier prose is restored. ## Priority merge guidance - **Strongest restoration candidates:** Claudia Center; R. Joseph Barton; Mary Kathryn Nagle; Eve Hill; Noreen Farrell; Riyaz Kanji. - **Highest-confidence keep-the-new-facts / restore-the-old-voice candidates:** Claudia Center, Eve Hill, R. Joseph Barton, Mary Kathryn Nagle, Noreen Farrell, Riyaz Kanji. - **Mostly additive/currentness edits:** Matthew W.H. Wessler, Danielle Lang, Rachel Geman, James J. Pizzirusso, E. Michelle Drake, Katrina Carroll, Norman E. Siegel, Tina Wolfson, Amy E. Keller. - **Verification-only in the GPT-5.6 continuation:** Rebecca S. Williford, Jameel Jaffer, Eve H. Cervantez, Rafey S. Balabanian. ## Summary table | # | Profile | Model/phase | Voice-flattening concern | Useful-correction confidence | |---:|---|---|---|---| | 1 | Jeffrey Erez | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **LOW** | | 2 | Jeremy P. Robinson | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **MEDIUM** | | 3 | Robert M. Horkovich | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 4 | John C. Clune | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 5 | Katrina Carroll | GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff | **LOW** | **HIGH** | | 6 | Matthew W.H. Wessler | GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff | **LOW** | **HIGH** | | 7 | Omar C. Jadwat | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 8 | Karen Tumlin | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 9 | Hina Shamsi | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **MEDIUM** | | 10 | Ben Wizner | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 11 | Joseph M. Sellers | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 12 | Kimberley Motley | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 13 | David Sanford | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 14 | Cyrus Mehri | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 15 | Daryl D. Parks | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 16 | Deuel Ross | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 17 | Pamela S. Karlan | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 18 | Gerald Singleton | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 19 | Bryan A. Stevenson | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 20 | Christine E. Webber | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 21 | Kelly M. Dermody | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **MEDIUM** | | 22 | Amal Clooney | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **MEDIUM** | | 23 | Sharon McGowan | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 24 | Julia Kaye | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 25 | Susan Talcott Camp | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 26 | Trina Realmuto | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 27 | Cecillia D. Wang | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 28 | Sherrilyn A. Ifill | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 29 | Alec Karakatsanis | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 30 | Alphonse A. Gerhardstein | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 31 | Constance Rice | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 32 | Mitchell Garabedian | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 33 | Janet L. Goldstein | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 34 | Marcella Auerbach | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 35 | David J. Caputo | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 36 | Michael Ronickher | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 37 | Kenneth J. Nolan | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 38 | Julie Keeton Bracker | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 39 | Suzanne E. Durrell | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 40 | Robert M. Thomas Jr. | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 41 | Claire M. Sylvia | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 42 | Colette G. Matzzie | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **MEDIUM** | | 43 | Lee Gelernt | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 44 | Eric R. Havian | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **MEDIUM** | | 45 | Shelley R. Slade | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 46 | Andre M. Mura | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 47 | Deepak Gupta | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 48 | Nathan Freed Wessler | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 49 | Allison M. Zieve | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 50 | Michael D. Hausfeld | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **LOW** | | 51 | Abha Khanna | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 52 | Danielle Lang | GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff | **LOW** | **HIGH** | | 53 | Rebecca S. Williford | GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff | **NONE** | **NONE** | | 54 | Jameel Jaffer | GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff | **NONE** | **NONE** | | 55 | Marlan B. Wilbanks | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **LOW** | | 56 | Mary Louise Cohen | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **LOW** | | 57 | Thomas M. Greene | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** | **HIGH** | | 58 | Pamela M. Pressley | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 59 | John W. Houghtaling II | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 60 | Amanda L. Riddle | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 61 | Frank M. Pitre | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 62 | William F. “Chip” Merlin Jr. | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **LOW** | | 63 | Andrew N. Friedman | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 64 | Brian Wolfman | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 65 | Noreen Farrell | GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff | **MEDIUM** | **HIGH** | | 66 | Riyaz Kanji | GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff | **MEDIUM** | **HIGH** | | 67 | Mary Kathryn Nagle | GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff | **HIGH** | **HIGH** | | 68 | Rachel Geman | GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff | **LOW** | **HIGH** | | 69 | James J. Pizzirusso | GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff | **LOW** | **HIGH** | | 70 | E. Michelle Drake | GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff | **LOW** | **HIGH** | | 71 | Norman E. Siegel | GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff | **LOW** | **HIGH** | | 72 | Tina Wolfson | GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff | **LOW** | **HIGH** | | 73 | Amy E. Keller | GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff | **LOW** | **HIGH** | | 74 | R. Joseph Barton | GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff | **HIGH** | **HIGH** | | 75 | Claudia Center | GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff | **HIGH** | **HIGH** | | 76 | Mark D. Rosenbaum | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 77 | Eve Hill | GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff | **MEDIUM-HIGH** | **HIGH** | | 78 | Mary L. Bonauto | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 79 | Shannon Price Minter | Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded | **REVIEW** | **HIGH** | | 80 | Eve H. Cervantez | GPT-5.6 Sol continuation — verification only | **NONE** | **NONE** | | 81 | Rafey S. Balabanian | GPT-5.6 Sol continuation — verification only | **NONE** | **NONE** | ## Full before/after narratives ## 1. Jeffrey Erez — `3505` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **LOW** — Recent manifest reads primarily as stylistic/structural editing; expert should compare before/after closely. - **Before hash:** `58bac77a5f4d3e097286fc59fd7f62089da80214411f2a5ac812cc0bb5b00174` - **After/current hash:** `c605beb5a1f6f3c48826918f3d94a962d9fc89df34092ffe2c35bc68b2493352` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900004356 (2026-08-12 20:51:30 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 3 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 17**: Keep attribution to the arbitration panel and all findings; remove the parenthetical disclaimer about FINRA regulatory findings. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 17**: Keep attribution to the arbitration panel and all findings; remove the parenthetical disclaimer about FINRA regulatory findings. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 6**: Preserve the structured note’s economic terms and risks; replace the instruction that terms cannot be read in isolation with their actual combined effect. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 17**: Keep attribution to the arbitration panel and all findings; remove the parenthetical disclaimer about FINRA regulatory findings. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 6**: Preserve the structured note’s economic terms and risks; replace the instruction that terms cannot be read in isolation with their actual combined effect. ### BEFORE #### Jeffrey Erez Investor-Side Litigation · FINRA Arbitration · Structured Notes · Hearing Practice > “This is a strong message to Stifel and other broker-dealers that if you don’t enforce industry and compliance rules, there will be accountability. ##### Jeffrey Erez: Complex Products, Complete Records Two families. Two arbitration panels. Sixty-eight hearing sessions in all. Jeffrey Erez and Stefan Apotheker represented separate investor families in FINRA proceedings against Stifel, and the results redrew the outer boundary of what a retail customer can recover in the forum. Deluca produced a $14,266,061 award. Jannetti produced a $132,522,260 award — the largest retail-customer award in FINRA arbitration history — supported by written findings that walked step by step to punitive damages, and Erez then carried that award through federal court until it bore the force of a judgment. ##### The Products and the Account Records A structured note fuses a debt obligation with a return tied to one or more reference assets, and its promise depends on the path those assets travel during the note’s life. Some notes pay a contingent coupon only while a reference asset holds above a stated level; some can be called away before maturity, ending the income just when it matters most. The coupon, barrier, call, maturity, reference-asset, and principal-protection terms cannot be read in isolation, because the same provisions that define the potential return also determine the precise moment principal becomes exposed to loss. FINRA has warned that structured notes can be far harder to evaluate than traditional bonds, and it requires broker-dealers to train their representatives, explain how a complex product may behave across different markets, assess suitability, and supervise every recommendation. In an investor case, those duties become questions of proof. Product documents establish the contractual terms. Account statements and concentration data establish activity and exposure. Messages, recorded calls, adviser testimony, and supervision records establish what customers were actually told — and what supervisors actually knew. Erez builds his cases where those three layers of evidence meet. The Deluca and Jannetti claims were filed days apart in May 2023 and proceeded on separate tracks. Both concerned structured-note recommendations by the same former Stifel adviser, Chuck A. Roberts. Erez and Apotheker represented the investors in each proceeding, before panels of independent public arbitrators selected through the forum, with FINRA administering the cases while the arbitrators alone heard the evidence and decided the awards. ##### Deluca: Thirty Hearing Sessions Louis and Elizabeth Deluca and their company, UBS, Inc., asserted fiduciary-duty, supervision, fraud, contract, and Florida securities-law claims arising from their structured-note investments. Before the merits hearing, Erez and Apotheker represented the claimants in prehearing conferences before a single arbitrator and the full panel, and they marshaled the product, recommendation, account, and supervisory evidence into a coherent presentation. The panel then sat for thirty hearing sessions across eleven dates in July and August 2024 — and because FINRA’s fee schedule caps a session at four hours, that count reflects a sustained, weeks-long evidentiary campaign. On October 3, 2024, the three arbitrators awarded $1,998,311 in compensatory damages to Louis and Elizabeth Deluca and $2,067,125 to UBS, Inc., including statutory interest through June 30, 2023 — and then added $9 million in punitive damages under Florida law and common law. The stated award totaled $14,266,061 before additional interest on the compensatory sums. The panel also denied with prejudice Roberts’s request to remove the customer dispute from his registration record, so the outcome specified relief across compensatory, punitive, and record-related categories, resolving every pleaded cause of action after thirty sessions of proof. ##### Jannetti: Thirty-Eight Hearing Sessions David Jannetti had sold his business and moved from New York to Miami, and he and his children Sarah Lyn, Adam, and Leah asserted six causes of action against Stifel concerning structured-note investments. Erez and Apotheker represented the family before an all-public panel in Boca Raton. The case proceeded through thirty-eight hearing sessions on nineteen dates between October 2024 and January 2025. At its center sat auto-callable contingent-coupon notes linked to a biotechnology exchange-traded fund and to individual technology stocks — instruments whose income could vanish and whose principal could evaporate the moment the reference assets fell through their barriers. The March 12, 2025 award did something FINRA awards rarely do: it explained itself. The panel found overconcentration in structured notes and in narrow industries, the use of leverage, failures of heightened supervision, misleading text messages sent outside required recordkeeping channels, and a branch manager who did not know that Roberts required heightened supervision at all. It found that Stifel chose not to send an overconcentration letter after a telephone call even though the firm’s own notes did not show that concentration had ever been discussed. The panel concluded that Stifel had actual knowledge of the wrongfulness of the conduct and of the high probability of injury, and intentionally continued the course that caused the damage. It found that the firm placed its financial interest ahead of the clients’ interests and permitted inaccurate terminology in texts offering custom notes. Those written findings — findings by the arbitration panel, not regulatory findings by FINRA — supplied the stated foundation for punitive damages. ##### The Jannetti Award: $132,522,260 Compensatory damages totaled $26,504,292 across the four family members. Punitive damages totaled $79,512,876 — three times the compensatory award. Together with attorneys’ fees and costs, the panel’s stated award reached $132,522,260, with Florida statutory interest running on the compensatory damages from the award date until payment. The written findings tied account concentration, leverage, supervision, off-channel communications, and branch management directly to the punitive-damages decision, giving the award an internal architecture built to withstand review. Erez’s team then carried that arbitral record into federal court. ##### Federal Confirmation The Jannettis petitioned the Southern District of Florida to confirm the award on March 12, 2025 — the very day it issued — and Erez remained counsel of record throughout the federal proceeding, defending the family’s award against Stifel’s vacatur arguments under the Federal Arbitration Act. The briefing carried the arbitral result into a forum capable of entering judgment, awarding prejudgment interest, and giving the relief full judicial force. On February 6, 2026, Magistrate Judge Eduardo I. Sanchez recommended confirmation, denial of Stifel’s vacatur petition, and prejudgment interest, concluding that the panel had neither exceeded its authority in awarding punitive damages nor denied Stifel due process. On March 24, 2026, District Judge Darrin P. Gayles reviewed the disputed portions anew, adopted the recommendation in full, confirmed the award, denied vacatur, and granted the post-award interest. The federal order gave judicial force to the $132,522,260 arbitral award and its written findings. After confirmation, the Jannettis sought a separate final judgment stating the award and accrued interest in fixed dollar amounts. From the initial FINRA claim through nineteen hearing dates, confirmation briefing, and post-award enforcement, Erez never left the case. ##### Erez Law Erez founded Erez Law in Miami and devotes his entire practice to securities arbitration and litigation for investors. His work in Deluca and Jannetti spanned product terms, account reconstruction, adviser and supervision records, panel hearings, written punitive findings, and federal confirmation — the full arc from complex product to enforceable judgment. Across the two separate records, Erez and Stefan Apotheker managed different witness sequences, different damages presentations, and different enforcement decisions, because the separate timelines demanded them. Erez remained with each family from the first filing through the applicable enforcement stage, preserving continuity while keeping each client’s evidence and remedies separately attributable — the discipline that lets two records, tried apart, each stand on its own. He graduated cum laude from McGill University in 1993 and earned his law degree cum laude from the University of Miami in 1996. He was admitted to the Florida Bar in 1997 and is also admitted in the Southern and Middle Districts of Florida. Erez speaks French and Hebrew. ###### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founder and managing partner, Erez Law PLLC - **Practice:** Investor-side securities arbitration and litigation, including FINRA disputes and structured-note cases - **Representative matters:** Deluca v. Stifel and Jannetti v. Stifel - **Bar:** Florida, admitted 1997 - **Federal admissions:** U.S. District Courts for the Southern and Middle Districts of Florida - **Education:** McGill University, B.A., cum laude; University of Miami School of Law, J.D., cum laude - **Languages:** French and Hebrew ###### Contact Erez Law PLLC 1 SE 3rd Avenue, Suite 1670Miami, FL 33131 305-728-3320info@erezlaw.com Official profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Jeffrey Erez Investor-Side Litigation · FINRA Arbitration · Structured Notes · Hearing Practice > “This is a strong message to Stifel and other broker-dealers that if you don’t enforce industry and compliance rules, there will be accountability. ##### Jeffrey Erez: Complex Products, Complete Records Two families. Two arbitration panels. Sixty-eight hearing sessions in all. Jeffrey Erez and Stefan Apotheker represented separate investor families in FINRA proceedings against Stifel, and the results redrew the outer boundary of what a retail customer can recover in the forum. Deluca produced a $14,266,061 award. Jannetti produced a $132,522,260 award — the largest retail-customer award in FINRA arbitration history — supported by written findings that walked step by step to punitive damages, and Erez then carried that award through federal court until it bore the force of a judgment. ##### The Products and the Account Records A structured note fuses a debt obligation with a return tied to one or more reference assets, and its promise depends on the path those assets travel during the note’s life. Some notes pay a contingent coupon only while a reference asset holds above a stated level; some can be called away before maturity, ending further coupon payments. Coupon, barrier, call, maturity, reference-asset and principal-protection terms together determine the potential return and the point at which principal becomes exposed to loss. FINRA has warned that structured notes can be far harder to evaluate than traditional bonds, and it requires broker-dealers to train their representatives, explain how a complex product may behave across different markets, assess suitability, and supervise every recommendation. In an investor case, those duties become questions of proof. Product documents establish the contractual terms. Account statements and concentration data establish activity and exposure. Messages, recorded calls, adviser testimony, and supervision records establish what customers were actually told — and what supervisors actually knew. Erez builds his cases where those three layers of evidence meet. The Deluca and Jannetti claims were filed days apart in May 2023 and proceeded on separate tracks. Both concerned structured-note recommendations by the same former Stifel adviser, Chuck A. Roberts. Erez and Apotheker represented the investors in each proceeding, before panels of independent public arbitrators selected through the forum, with FINRA administering the cases while the arbitrators alone heard the evidence and decided the awards. ##### Deluca: Thirty Hearing Sessions Louis and Elizabeth Deluca and their company, UBS, Inc., asserted fiduciary-duty, supervision, fraud, contract, and Florida securities-law claims arising from their structured-note investments. Before the merits hearing, Erez and Apotheker represented the claimants in prehearing conferences before a single arbitrator and the full panel, and they marshaled the product, recommendation, account, and supervisory evidence into a coherent presentation. The panel then sat for thirty hearing sessions across eleven dates in July and August 2024 — and because FINRA’s fee schedule caps a session at four hours, that count reflects a sustained, weeks-long evidentiary campaign. On October 3, 2024, the three arbitrators awarded $1,998,311 in compensatory damages to Louis and Elizabeth Deluca and $2,067,125 to UBS, Inc., including statutory interest through June 30, 2023 — and then added $9 million in punitive damages under Florida law and common law. The stated award totaled $14,266,061 before additional interest on the compensatory sums. The panel also denied with prejudice Roberts’s request to remove the customer dispute from his registration record, so the outcome specified relief across compensatory, punitive, and record-related categories, resolving every pleaded cause of action after thirty sessions of proof. ##### Jannetti: Thirty-Eight Hearing Sessions David Jannetti had sold his business and moved from New York to Miami, and he and his children Sarah Lyn, Adam, and Leah asserted six causes of action against Stifel concerning structured-note investments. Erez and Apotheker represented the family before an all-public panel in Boca Raton. The case proceeded through thirty-eight hearing sessions on nineteen dates between October 2024 and January 2025. At its center sat auto-callable contingent-coupon notes linked to a biotechnology exchange-traded fund and to individual technology stocks — instruments whose income could vanish and whose principal could evaporate the moment the reference assets fell through their barriers. The March 12, 2025 award did something FINRA awards rarely do: it explained itself. The panel found overconcentration in structured notes and in narrow industries, the use of leverage, failures of heightened supervision, misleading text messages sent outside required recordkeeping channels, and a branch manager who did not know that Roberts required heightened supervision at all. It found that Stifel chose not to send an overconcentration letter after a telephone call even though the firm’s own notes did not show that concentration had ever been discussed. The panel concluded that Stifel had actual knowledge of the wrongfulness of the conduct and of the high probability of injury, and intentionally continued the course that caused the damage. It found that the firm placed its financial interest ahead of the clients’ interests and permitted inaccurate terminology in texts offering custom notes. The arbitration panel’s written findings supplied the stated foundation for punitive damages. ##### The Jannetti Award: $132,522,260 Compensatory damages totaled $26,504,292 across the four family members. Punitive damages totaled $79,512,876 — three times the compensatory award. Together with attorneys’ fees and costs, the panel’s stated award reached $132,522,260, with Florida statutory interest running on the compensatory damages from the award date until payment. The written findings tied account concentration, leverage, supervision, off-channel communications, and branch management directly to the punitive-damages decision, giving the award an internal architecture built to withstand review. Erez’s team then carried that arbitral record into federal court. ##### Federal Confirmation The Jannettis petitioned the Southern District of Florida to confirm the award on March 12, 2025 — the very day it issued — and Erez remained counsel of record throughout the federal proceeding, defending the family’s award against Stifel’s vacatur arguments under the Federal Arbitration Act. The briefing carried the arbitral result into a forum capable of entering judgment, awarding prejudgment interest, and giving the relief full judicial force. On February 6, 2026, Magistrate Judge Eduardo I. Sanchez recommended confirmation, denial of Stifel’s vacatur petition, and prejudgment interest, concluding that the panel had neither exceeded its authority in awarding punitive damages nor denied Stifel due process. On March 24, 2026, District Judge Darrin P. Gayles reviewed the disputed portions anew, adopted the recommendation in full, confirmed the award, denied vacatur, and granted the post-award interest. The federal order gave judicial force to the $132,522,260 arbitral award and its written findings. After confirmation, the Jannettis sought a separate final judgment stating the award and accrued interest in fixed dollar amounts. From the initial FINRA claim through nineteen hearing dates, confirmation briefing, and post-award enforcement, Erez never left the case. ##### Erez Law Erez founded Erez Law in Miami and devotes his entire practice to securities arbitration and litigation for investors. His work in Deluca and Jannetti spanned product terms, account reconstruction, adviser and supervision records, panel hearings, written punitive findings, and federal confirmation — the full arc from complex product to enforceable judgment. Across the two separate records, Erez and Stefan Apotheker managed different witness sequences, different damages presentations, and different enforcement decisions, because the separate timelines demanded them. Erez remained with each family from the first filing through the applicable enforcement stage, preserving continuity while keeping each client’s evidence and remedies separately attributable — the discipline that lets two records, tried apart, each stand on its own. He graduated cum laude from McGill University in 1993 and earned his law degree cum laude from the University of Miami in 1996. He was admitted to the Florida Bar in 1997 and is also admitted in the Southern and Middle Districts of Florida. Erez speaks French and Hebrew. ###### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founder and managing partner, Erez Law PLLC - **Practice:** Investor-side securities arbitration and litigation, including FINRA disputes and structured-note cases - **Representative matters:** Deluca v. Stifel and Jannetti v. Stifel - **Bar:** Florida, admitted 1997 - **Federal admissions:** U.S. District Courts for the Southern and Middle Districts of Florida - **Education:** McGill University, B.A., cum laude; University of Miami School of Law, J.D., cum laude - **Languages:** French and Hebrew ###### Contact Erez Law PLLC 1 SE 3rd Avenue, Suite 1670Miami, FL 33131 305-728-3320info@erezlaw.com Official profile --- ## 2. Jeremy P. Robinson — `3812` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **MEDIUM** — Manifest history contains at least one substantive correction/addition. - **Before hash:** `295337f728cc0e70dc4d94d96788fc6bbc181a0d0d9b30fac3d6d6e166e19f8b` - **After/current hash:** `9f50b577fe07cb1f1d8ba33339c46edc51536c22076c3c8a4a9dd5c5ffe8bea4` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900004689 (2026-08-23 06:29:33 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 23**: Preserve the allegations, restored claims and Supreme Court disposition; remove the no-merits-holding disclaimer. ### BEFORE #### Jeremy P. Robinson Securities Fraud · Appeals · Jury Proof · Corporate Governance ##### Trial Judgments, Offerings, and Corporate Remedies Robinson has worked on a shareholder judgment won before a jury and affirmed on appeal, large debt-offering and custody-bank settlements, merger and derivative recoveries, and the appellate preservation of investor claims at the highest level. His matters have continued through verdict, judgment, appeal, settlement administration, and distribution. ##### Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Jeremy P. Robinson was an integral member of the Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann team that tried shareholder contract claims challenging the Net Worth Sweep — the 2012 amendment requiring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to transfer their entire quarterly net worth to the federal government, in perpetuity. The litigation ran for more than a decade. The D.C. Circuit revived part of the action in 2017; the district court upheld the implied-covenant claims in 2018; and three shareholder classes were certified in 2021 after substantial discovery. A first trial in 2022 ended without a verdict, and the team returned in the summer of 2023 to try the claims again. The second jury unanimously found that the Federal Housing Finance Agency had breached the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing and awarded the three classes $612.4 million. With prejudgment interest for one class, the district court entered a final judgment of $812.05 million in March 2024, then denied the defendants’ request to overturn it, finding ample evidence behind the jury’s conclusion. On July 24, 2026, the D.C. Circuit affirmed the judgment in full, rejecting the government’s argument that Collins v. Yellen foreclosed the shareholders’ implied-covenant claim and holding that the Net Worth Sweep had violated the reasonable expectations of shareholders. Of the many lawsuits challenging the Net Worth Sweep, this action produced the only successful cause of action. Robinson’s involvement extended across dismissal, remand, class certification, trial, post-trial motions, and the appellate defense of the final judgment. ##### Citigroup’s Forty-Eight Offerings The Citigroup bond litigation covered forty-eight offerings of bonds and preferred securities issued between 2006 and 2008 — the very years the financial system strained toward crisis. Arkansas Teacher Retirement System and Louisiana Sheriffs’ Pension and Relief Fund were among the represented retirement funds, and BLB&G served as court-appointed bond counsel. Robinson held a lead role as the investor team defeated dismissal efforts and developed evidence concerning mortgage assets, reserves, structured investment vehicles, offering documents, issuance dates, and contractual terms. Discovery included more than seventy depositions. After more than four years of litigation, the parties agreed to a $730 million cash settlement for purchasers across the forty-eight debt and preferred offerings — among the largest recoveries ever achieved for purchasers of debt securities. The offering materials, mortgage exposures, issuance dates, and contractual terms were central to the class structure and the recovery, because forty-eight distinct offerings demanded a framework that honored each one. ##### Foreign Exchange at BNY Mellon Robinson served as case leader in the Bank of New York Mellon foreign-exchange securities litigation led by Oregon public funds. Plaintiffs alleged that the custody bank described its foreign-exchange service as free and favorably priced while assigning customer transactions at unfavorable daily rates and concealing the related legal and business risks from shareholders. The record crossed customer transactions, internal communications, whistleblower actions, state and federal enforcement, company statements, and market disclosures. Robinson organized that evidence around what BNY Mellon told investors and how the market received corrective information, carrying the securities theory through discovery. The district court approved a $180 million cash settlement in October 2015. Four rounds of distribution between 2017 and 2020 fully disbursed the fund to eligible investors. BNY Mellon and Citigroup involved different financial systems: one centered on a custody bank’s recurring foreign-exchange service, the other on capital raised through public debt and preferred offerings. Robinson held leading responsibility in both, locating the investor disclosure within a complex business process and carrying the theory from discovery to court-supervised resolution. ##### Allergan, Freeport-McMoRan, and Viacom In the Allergan litigation arising from an alleged insider-trading scheme surrounding a hostile tender offer, Robinson helped secure a $250 million settlement on the eve of trial. Freeport-McMoRan derivative litigation produced a $153.75 million resolution, and a Viacom stockholder action challenging the Viacom-CBS merger produced a $122.5 million recovery. Those proceedings addressed different asserted injuries — trading affected by alleged insider conduct, alleged corporate overpayment, and merger consideration — and each required its own transaction record, fiduciary theory, class or derivative procedure, trial preparation, approval terms, and remedy. The Allergan and Viacom recoveries went to stockholder classes, while the Freeport-McMoRan derivative resolution addressed the corporation’s claim. ##### Facebook and Appellate Practice Robinson is one of the BLB&G partners leading the investor team, with Salvatore J. Graziano and Hannah Ross, on behalf of the Public Employees’ Retirement System of Mississippi in In re Facebook Securities Litigation. The case concerns alleged misrepresentations about misuse of user data and users’ control over personal information. Shareholders allege that risk statements described misuse as a hypothetical possibility even though the Cambridge Analytica incident had already occurred. The Ninth Circuit restored the investor claims, and in 2024 the Supreme Court dismissed the writ of certiorari as improvidently granted. The dismissal added no merits holding; it left the Ninth Circuit ruling standing and returned the case to the district court with the investors’ claims intact. Robinson is admitted in New York and Ontario. He earned an LL.M. from Columbia Law School after receiving his law degree from Queen’s University, and an early year working with barristers and judges in London gave him a working fluency in another court system. He is a partner in BLB&G’s New York office and has litigated securities and governance matters for more than two decades in federal, state, Delaware, and appellate courts. His docket has included federal securities appeals, contract claims arising from government conservatorship, public debt offerings, custody-bank transactions, mergers, derivative actions, stockholder remedies, and settlement administration. ##### Claims Through Judgment and Distribution Robinson has helped preserve investor claims through Supreme Court review, supported a unanimous jury result through an affirmed final judgment, organized proof across forty-eight debt offerings and years of foreign-exchange transactions, and secured relief for stockholder classes and corporations. His work has extended from pleading and discovery through judgment, approval, appeal, and distribution. ###### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner, Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann LLP - **Practice:** Securities fraud, governance, derivative, and stockholder litigation - **Appellate record:** Affirmed Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac shareholder judgment - **Representative matters:** Fannie/Freddie, Facebook, Citigroup, BNY Mellon, Allergan, Freeport-McMoRan, and Viacom - **Education:** Columbia Law School, LL.M.; Queen’s University Faculty of Law, LL.B. ###### Contact Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann LLP 1251 Avenue of the AmericasNew York, NY 10020 212-554-1492jeremy@blbglaw.com Official profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Jeremy P. Robinson Securities Fraud · Appeals · Jury Proof · Corporate Governance ##### Trial Judgments, Offerings, and Corporate Remedies Robinson has worked on a shareholder judgment won before a jury and affirmed on appeal, large debt-offering and custody-bank settlements, merger and derivative recoveries, and the appellate preservation of investor claims at the highest level. His matters have continued through verdict, judgment, appeal, settlement administration, and distribution. ##### Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Jeremy P. Robinson was an integral member of the Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann team that tried shareholder contract claims challenging the Net Worth Sweep — the 2012 amendment requiring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to transfer their entire quarterly net worth to the federal government, in perpetuity. The litigation ran for more than a decade. The D.C. Circuit revived part of the action in 2017; the district court upheld the implied-covenant claims in 2018; and three shareholder classes were certified in 2021 after substantial discovery. A first trial in 2022 ended without a verdict, and the team returned in the summer of 2023 to try the claims again. The second jury unanimously found that the Federal Housing Finance Agency had breached the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing and awarded the three classes $612.4 million. With prejudgment interest for one class, the district court entered a final judgment of $812.05 million in March 2024, then denied the defendants’ request to overturn it, finding ample evidence behind the jury’s conclusion. On July 24, 2026, the D.C. Circuit affirmed the judgment in full, rejecting the government’s argument that Collins v. Yellen foreclosed the shareholders’ implied-covenant claim and holding that the Net Worth Sweep had violated the reasonable expectations of shareholders. Of the many lawsuits challenging the Net Worth Sweep, this action produced the only successful cause of action. Robinson’s involvement extended across dismissal, remand, class certification, trial, post-trial motions, and the appellate defense of the final judgment. ##### Citigroup’s Forty-Eight Offerings The Citigroup bond litigation covered forty-eight offerings of bonds and preferred securities issued between 2006 and 2008 — the very years the financial system strained toward crisis. Arkansas Teacher Retirement System and Louisiana Sheriffs’ Pension and Relief Fund were among the represented retirement funds, and BLB&G served as court-appointed bond counsel. Robinson held a lead role as the investor team defeated dismissal efforts and developed evidence concerning mortgage assets, reserves, structured investment vehicles, offering documents, issuance dates, and contractual terms. Discovery included more than seventy depositions. After more than four years of litigation, the parties agreed to a $730 million cash settlement for purchasers across the forty-eight debt and preferred offerings — among the largest recoveries ever achieved for purchasers of debt securities. The offering materials, mortgage exposures, issuance dates, and contractual terms were central to the class structure and the recovery, because forty-eight distinct offerings demanded a framework that honored each one. ##### Foreign Exchange at BNY Mellon Robinson served as case leader in the Bank of New York Mellon foreign-exchange securities litigation led by Oregon public funds. Plaintiffs alleged that the custody bank described its foreign-exchange service as free and favorably priced while assigning customer transactions at unfavorable daily rates and concealing the related legal and business risks from shareholders. The record crossed customer transactions, internal communications, whistleblower actions, state and federal enforcement, company statements, and market disclosures. Robinson organized that evidence around what BNY Mellon told investors and how the market received corrective information, carrying the securities theory through discovery. The district court approved a $180 million cash settlement in October 2015. Four rounds of distribution between 2017 and 2020 fully disbursed the fund to eligible investors. BNY Mellon and Citigroup involved different financial systems: one centered on a custody bank’s recurring foreign-exchange service, the other on capital raised through public debt and preferred offerings. Robinson held leading responsibility in both, locating the investor disclosure within a complex business process and carrying the theory from discovery to court-supervised resolution. ##### Allergan, Freeport-McMoRan, and Viacom In the Allergan litigation arising from an alleged insider-trading scheme surrounding a hostile tender offer, Robinson helped secure a $250 million settlement on the eve of trial. Freeport-McMoRan derivative litigation produced a $153.75 million resolution, and a Viacom stockholder action challenging the Viacom-CBS merger produced a $122.5 million recovery. Those proceedings addressed different asserted injuries — trading affected by alleged insider conduct, alleged corporate overpayment, and merger consideration — and each required its own transaction record, fiduciary theory, class or derivative procedure, trial preparation, approval terms, and remedy. The Allergan and Viacom recoveries went to stockholder classes, while the Freeport-McMoRan derivative resolution addressed the corporation’s claim. ##### Facebook and Appellate Practice Robinson is one of the BLB&G partners leading the investor team, with Salvatore J. Graziano and Hannah Ross, on behalf of the Public Employees’ Retirement System of Mississippi in In re Facebook Securities Litigation. The case concerns alleged misrepresentations about misuse of user data and users’ control over personal information. Shareholders allege that risk statements described misuse as a hypothetical possibility even though the Cambridge Analytica incident had already occurred. The Ninth Circuit restored the investor claims, and in 2024 the Supreme Court dismissed the writ of certiorari as improvidently granted. That disposition left the Ninth Circuit ruling standing and returned the case to the district court with the investors’ claims intact. Robinson is admitted in New York and Ontario. He earned an LL.M. from Columbia Law School after receiving his law degree from Queen’s University, and an early year working with barristers and judges in London gave him a working fluency in another court system. He is a partner in BLB&G’s New York office and has litigated securities and governance matters for more than two decades in federal, state, Delaware, and appellate courts. His docket has included federal securities appeals, contract claims arising from government conservatorship, public debt offerings, custody-bank transactions, mergers, derivative actions, stockholder remedies, and settlement administration. ##### Claims Through Judgment and Distribution Robinson has helped preserve investor claims through Supreme Court review, supported a unanimous jury result through an affirmed final judgment, organized proof across forty-eight debt offerings and years of foreign-exchange transactions, and secured relief for stockholder classes and corporations. His work has extended from pleading and discovery through judgment, approval, appeal, and distribution. ###### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner, Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann LLP - **Practice:** Securities fraud, governance, derivative, and stockholder litigation - **Appellate record:** Affirmed Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac shareholder judgment - **Representative matters:** Fannie/Freddie, Facebook, Citigroup, BNY Mellon, Allergan, Freeport-McMoRan, and Viacom - **Education:** Columbia Law School, LL.M.; Queen’s University Faculty of Law, LL.B. ###### Contact Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann LLP 1251 Avenue of the AmericasNew York, NY 10020 212-554-1492jeremy@blbglaw.com Official profile --- ## 3. Robert M. Horkovich — `900000144` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `17b33d8e1d5e4df9484ad9988570024288f31d8073e70c8f4203daec06877bb3` - **After/current hash:** `54668d6eb1ed102b0e254476d4c953cdf50bbe8473e0bb9b57d57ba0c8878294` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900000296 (2026-08-01 04:16:13 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 5**: State Horkovich’s participation directly while preserving the environmental and policy-reconstruction record. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 7**: Preserve the cumulative indemnity, defense-cost and interest recoveries and two Supreme Court decisions; remove source narration and the one-verdict disclaimer. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 8**: Keep the public settlement amount, carriers, date and cleanup purpose; remove source-verification narration. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 11**: Preserve the Fuller-Austin verdict, pretrial settlements and later resolution; state the results directly. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 12**: Remove the instruction about how the settlements and verdict should be read; keep the sequence and practical effect. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 14**: Replace the reported-result framing with the actual evidence used in coverage litigation. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 17**: Preserve the Weyerhaeuser court appearances and results; remove biography and calendar verification narration. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 19**: Keep other trial clients and liability categories without the biography framing. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 20**: State the practice’s policyholder commitment directly. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 21**: Retain the effect of state supreme court decisions without reported-record framing. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 23**: Preserve the current role, admissions and cumulative career total; remove source-account and credit disclaimers. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 25**: Preserve the current subjects and writing/teaching role; remove practice-material source narration. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 5**: State Horkovich’s participation directly while preserving the environmental and policy-reconstruction record. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 7**: Preserve the cumulative indemnity, defense-cost and interest recoveries and two Supreme Court decisions; remove source narration and the one-verdict disclaimer. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 8**: Keep the public settlement amount, carriers, date and cleanup purpose; remove source-verification narration. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 11**: Preserve the Fuller-Austin verdict, pretrial settlements and later resolution; state the results directly. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 12**: Remove the instruction about how the settlements and verdict should be read; keep the sequence and practical effect. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 14**: Replace the reported-result framing with the actual evidence used in coverage litigation. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 17**: Preserve the Weyerhaeuser court appearances and results; remove biography and calendar verification narration. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 19**: Keep other trial clients and liability categories without the biography framing. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 20**: Preserve exclusive policyholder representation and its effect on discovery and strategy; remove the firm-source narration. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 21**: Retain the effect of state supreme court decisions without reported-record framing. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 23**: Preserve the current role, admissions and cumulative career total; remove source-account and credit disclaimers. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 25**: Preserve the current subjects and writing/teaching role; remove practice-material source narration. ### BEFORE #### Robert M. Horkovich Insurance Recovery · Complex Coverage Trials · Policyholder Counsel ##### Reconstructing the Coverage Tower Robert Horkovich’s major policyholder matters begin where ordinary claim files break down—across decades of policies, dozens of carriers, successive liabilities, and losses that cannot be understood one year at a time. ##### A contaminated site and decades of insurance The Stringfellow Acid Pits litigation arose from a hazardous-waste site in Riverside County, California. Cleanup obligations developed across years, agencies, owners, and alleged sources of contamination. Government records describe a site that threatened groundwater and demanded a long public remediation effort. For the State of California, insurance recovery required matching that environmental history to liability policies issued in earlier decades, locating surviving contracts, and establishing which defense and indemnity promises responded. Robert Horkovich served in the policyholder trial team described by Anderson Kill. A long-tail loss does not fit naturally inside one policy year. Contamination may begin during one period, migrate during another, and produce governmental demands much later. Dozens of carriers can raise different notice, trigger, allocation, exclusion, and defense-cost positions. The policyholder’s task is to reconstruct a continuous risk history from contracts that were written and stored as separate annual promises. Anderson Kill’s biography reports trial victories followed by two California Supreme Court decisions favorable to the State’s coverage position. It attributes recoveries of $172 million in indemnity, $60 million in defense costs, and $14 million in prejudgment interest to the full Stringfellow effort. Those cumulative figures encompass a long sequence of rulings and settlements rather than one verdict. In 2005, the California Attorney General separately announced a $93 million settlement with ten insurers, then described as the largest environmental insurance settlement received by the state. The government release explains that the money would help address Stringfellow cleanup costs. It independently confirms a major segment of the recovery while giving public purpose to numbers reported in the firm biography. Horkovich’s role in Stringfellow illustrates the core craft of complex insurance recovery. He had to make a coverage tower built across companies and years function as a coherent source of payment for one evolving liability. The environmental case captures the method: reconstruction turns archived policies into a present remedy. It also gives negotiators a usable map of each insurer’s place in the remaining program. ##### An asbestos verdict built from policy history Fuller-Austin presented another long-tail coverage problem, this time involving asbestos liabilities. Anderson Kill reports that Horkovich’s team obtained a jury verdict of $188,793,014 against Lloyd’s and other insurers. The firm also records more than $190 million in settlements with fourteen carriers before trial, followed by settlement of the verdict. The sequence required counsel to preserve leverage across the program: each resolution changed the remaining carrier landscape, the evidence needed at trial, and the amount still at stake. The pretrial settlements and verdict should be read together. Each insurer occupied a different place in the policy history and could assess risk separately. Resolving fourteen positions narrowed the trial while generating recovery before a jury was selected. The remaining verdict then tested the evidence and legal theories against carriers that chose to continue. Asbestos coverage requires translation between underlying claims and insurance years. Disease can emerge long after exposure, products may span decades, and liabilities can involve completed operations, aggregate limits, and successor entities. Policy language changes over time. A trial lawyer must give jurors enough structure to understand the tower without allowing its complexity to become a reason no carrier pays. Horkovich’s reported result demonstrates that complexity can be organized into verdict form. Witnesses establish corporate and policy history. Experts address allocation and damages. Underlying claim data gives scale to the liability. The documents must show which promises were made and how the asserted losses attach to them. The trial becomes an accounting of risk as well as a contest over contract language. The Fuller-Austin matter also shows aggregate litigation skill used for policyholders. An interpretive win was one step toward collecting across a coverage program that had to fund actual liabilities. The work linked disputed policy language to the asbestos liabilities for which the insured sought coverage. Horkovich’s record joins favorable rulings, settlements, and verdicts into that recovery function. ##### Coverage law made through repeated trials The Weyerhaeuser insurance litigation involved environmental and other long-tail claims under a multiyear coverage program. Horkovich’s biography credits the matter with two Washington Supreme Court decisions favorable to the policyholder and two trial victories. The Washington Courts calendar confirms his appearance for Weyerhaeuser in a Supreme Court proceeding, anchoring his role in the public record. Years of coverage litigation made the appellate rulings operational rather than abstract: each answered a question that affected allocation, proof, negotiation, or the next trial stage. A coverage program can produce several controlling questions over time. Trigger rules, allocation, defense obligations, settlement treatment, and proof of loss may reach appellate courts at different stages. A policyholder can prevail on one issue and still need another trial to translate the rule into dollars. Horkovich’s Weyerhaeuser work spanned that full cycle. His biography lists other trial victories for Textron, the Port of Seattle, and additional corporate and public policyholders. The matters cover environmental liabilities, products, construction, and institutional losses. Each involved a coverage structure with enough policies, carriers, or underlying claims to make a single ordinary adjustment inadequate. Anderson Kill states that its insurance recovery group represents policyholders rather than insurers. That alignment shapes discovery and strategy. Counsel can argue for the coverage the insured purchased without balancing a defense-side book of carrier clients. The policyholder-only orientation remains decisive even at corporate scale: Horkovich represents the insured side of the insurance promise. The reported state-supreme-court decisions are part of the recovery architecture. Favorable precedent can make later carriers reassess settlement, narrow trial issues, and establish rules for other insureds. Horkovich’s work shows policyholder appellate law developing from cases that still demanded extensive factual trials before and after the legal question was answered. ##### From archived policies to present payment Horkovich is Anderson Kill’s firm managing shareholder in New York and a trial lawyer in its insurance recovery practice. The firm lists admissions in New York and Maryland and reports more than $8 billion in settlements and judgments obtained for clients over his career. That cumulative amount is the organization’s current account and reflects many teams, clients, courts, and negotiated resolutions. His policyholder work also includes service as insurance counsel to the United Nations and matters for governmental entities. Public and international institutions can possess unusually layered programs, sovereign or statutory constraints, and records distributed across offices and years. The same reconstruction discipline applies, but governance and public accountability add another dimension to settlement authority and use of proceeds. Current insurance recovery has extended into cyber events, PFAS liabilities, civil unrest, business interruption, directors-and-officers claims, and other emerging losses. The firm’s practice materials show Horkovich writing and teaching on these subjects. New risks change the facts; the essential policyholder work remains locating the responsive promise, preserving notice, and assembling evidence across the full program. Stringfellow, Fuller-Austin, and Weyerhaeuser reveal why trials remain important even in a settlement-heavy practice. A credible path to verdict gives carriers a reason to resolve their layer. A favorable appellate rule can unlock another stage of negotiation. Recovery is often cumulative, built by moving one issue or carrier at a time until the coverage tower contributes as a whole. Horkovich’s record is ultimately about making old promises usable. Policies written years before a loss matures can appear disconnected from the liabilities now demanding payment. His work reconnects them through chronology, contract language, trial proof, and precedent. When the reconstruction succeeds, an archive of annual policies becomes what the policyholder bought: a present source of defense and indemnity. ###### At a Glance - **Current role:** Firm Managing Shareholder, Anderson Kill P.C. - **Practice:** Insurance recovery for corporate and governmental policyholders - **Selected public-entity matter:** State of California Stringfellow coverage litigation - **Selected trial result:** $188,793,014 Fuller-Austin jury verdict reported by the firm - **Admissions:** New York and Maryland ###### Contact ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Robert M. Horkovich Insurance Recovery · Complex Coverage Trials · Policyholder Counsel ##### Reconstructing the Coverage Tower Robert Horkovich’s major policyholder matters begin where ordinary claim files break down—across decades of policies, dozens of carriers, successive liabilities, and losses that cannot be understood one year at a time. ##### A contaminated site and decades of insurance The Stringfellow Acid Pits litigation arose from a hazardous-waste site in Riverside County, California. Cleanup obligations developed across years, agencies, owners, and alleged sources of contamination at a site threatening groundwater. For the State of California, insurance recovery required matching that environmental history to liability policies issued in earlier decades, locating surviving contracts, and establishing which defense and indemnity promises responded. Robert Horkovich served on the policyholder trial team. A long-tail loss does not fit naturally inside one policy year. Contamination may begin during one period, migrate during another, and produce governmental demands much later. Dozens of carriers can raise different notice, trigger, allocation, exclusion, and defense-cost positions. The policyholder’s task is to reconstruct a continuous risk history from contracts that were written and stored as separate annual promises. The Stringfellow litigation produced trial victories and two California Supreme Court decisions favorable to the State’s coverage position. Across its rulings and settlements, the effort recovered $172 million in indemnity, $60 million in defense costs, and $14 million in prejudgment interest. In 2005, the California Attorney General announced a $93 million settlement with ten insurers, then the state’s largest environmental insurance settlement. The proceeds would help pay Stringfellow cleanup costs. Horkovich’s role in Stringfellow illustrates the core craft of complex insurance recovery. He had to make a coverage tower built across companies and years function as a coherent source of payment for one evolving liability. The environmental case captures the method: reconstruction turns archived policies into a present remedy. It also gives negotiators a usable map of each insurer’s place in the remaining program. ##### An asbestos verdict built from policy history Fuller-Austin presented another long-tail coverage problem, this time involving asbestos liabilities. Horkovich’s team obtained a jury verdict of $188,793,014 against Lloyd’s and other insurers after securing more than $190 million in settlements with fourteen carriers before trial. The verdict was later settled. Each resolution changed the remaining carrier landscape, the evidence needed at trial, and the amount still at stake. Each insurer occupied a different place in the policy history and assessed its own litigation risk. Resolving fourteen positions narrowed the trial while generating recovery before a jury was selected. The verdict then tested the evidence and legal theories against carriers that continued. Asbestos coverage requires translation between underlying claims and insurance years. Disease can emerge long after exposure, products may span decades, and liabilities can involve completed operations, aggregate limits, and successor entities. Policy language changes over time. A trial lawyer must give jurors enough structure to understand the tower without allowing its complexity to become a reason no carrier pays. Witnesses established corporate and policy history, experts addressed allocation and damages, and underlying claim data showed the scale of liability. The documents connected the insurers’ promises to the asserted losses, making the trial an accounting of risk as well as a contest over contract language. The Fuller-Austin matter also shows aggregate litigation skill used for policyholders. An interpretive win was one step toward collecting across a coverage program that had to fund actual liabilities. The work linked disputed policy language to the asbestos liabilities for which the insured sought coverage. Horkovich’s record joins favorable rulings, settlements, and verdicts into that recovery function. ##### Coverage law made through repeated trials The Weyerhaeuser litigation involved environmental and other long-tail claims under a multiyear coverage program. Horkovich appeared for Weyerhaeuser in the Washington Supreme Court during litigation that produced two favorable decisions there and two trial victories. Each ruling affected allocation, proof, negotiation or the next trial stage. A coverage program can produce several controlling questions over time. Trigger rules, allocation, defense obligations, settlement treatment, and proof of loss may reach appellate courts at different stages. A policyholder can prevail on one issue and still need another trial to translate the rule into dollars. Horkovich’s Weyerhaeuser work spanned that full cycle. Horkovich’s trial record includes victories for Textron, the Port of Seattle, and other corporate and public policyholders. Those matters involved environmental liabilities, products, construction, and institutional losses across complex programs of policies and carriers. Anderson Kill’s insurance recovery group represents policyholders exclusively. That alignment shapes discovery and strategy around obtaining the coverage the insured purchased, including in large corporate and public-entity programs. Favorable state supreme court decisions gave later carriers reasons to reassess settlement, narrowed trial issues and established rules for other insureds. Horkovich’s appellate work developed from cases requiring extensive factual trials before and after the legal questions were decided. ##### From archived policies to present payment Horkovich is Anderson Kill’s firm managing shareholder in New York and a trial lawyer in its insurance recovery practice. He is admitted in New York and Maryland. His matters have produced more than $8 billion in settlements and judgments for clients across his career. His policyholder work also includes service as insurance counsel to the United Nations and matters for governmental entities. Public and international institutions can possess unusually layered programs, sovereign or statutory constraints, and records distributed across offices and years. The same reconstruction discipline applies, but governance and public accountability add another dimension to settlement authority and use of proceeds. Horkovich writes and teaches about insurance recovery for cyber events, PFAS liabilities, civil unrest, business interruption, directors-and-officers claims and other emerging losses. Those matters require locating responsive policies, preserving notice and assembling evidence across the coverage program. Stringfellow, Fuller-Austin, and Weyerhaeuser reveal why trials remain important even in a settlement-heavy practice. A credible path to verdict gives carriers a reason to resolve their layer. A favorable appellate rule can unlock another stage of negotiation. Recovery is often cumulative, built by moving one issue or carrier at a time until the coverage tower contributes as a whole. Horkovich’s record is ultimately about making old promises usable. Policies written years before a loss matures can appear disconnected from the liabilities now demanding payment. His work reconnects them through chronology, contract language, trial proof, and precedent. When the reconstruction succeeds, an archive of annual policies becomes what the policyholder bought: a present source of defense and indemnity. ###### At a Glance - **Current role:** Firm Managing Shareholder, Anderson Kill P.C. - **Practice:** Insurance recovery for corporate and governmental policyholders - **Selected public-entity matter:** State of California Stringfellow coverage litigation - **Selected trial result:** $188,793,014 Fuller-Austin jury verdict reported by the firm - **Admissions:** New York and Maryland ###### Contact --- ## 4. John C. Clune — `900000363` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `118c297ee821eeb3ca1106e2593f3d99490dd643987d969bf5bc369e380be0e8` - **After/current hash:** `4a097d00dc6633238d1dfbc3d79a82b6b068ebb1562391a3bb64eb7de8e526f2` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005553 (2026-08-01 05:47:51 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 6**: Replace the warning about interchangeable roles with a direct account of his distinct government and victim-representation work. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 8**: Remove the editorial eligibility defense and explain how his sports-law practice informs survivor and athlete representation. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 10**: Replace a heading framed around absent findings with the actual negotiated outcome of the Baylor action. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 12**: Remove instructions against interpreting the settlement as a verdict while retaining counsel, confidentiality, date, and resolution. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 14**: State the settlement outcome directly and remove the paragraph's instructions about what the profile may claim. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 15**: Replace the warning about the absence of appellate precedent with a substantive transition between the two institutions and claims. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 17**: Preserve the Arizona representation and settlement while removing the generic no-final-liability-verdict warning. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 19**: Describe the appellate holding and remand affirmatively instead of repeating warnings about what the court had not decided. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 20**: Credit his precise amicus role directly and remove the instructions restricting credit for the appellate result. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 21**: Preserve the distinct clients and roles without editorial instructions about preventing substitution or attribution. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 25**: Retain the separate operational status of the settlement components and remove commentary about inaccurate descriptions. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 26**: Retain the dated pending posture and attribution of the objectors' economic argument while removing editorial disclaimers. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 27**: Replace the profile's inclusion justification with a closing account of the substantive connection among his cases. ### BEFORE #### John C. Clune Title IX · Sports Law · Sexual-Abuse Litigation ##### When Institutional Control Reaches Beyond Campus John Clune's record links victim-rights work, university notice cases, an amicus role in an en banc Title IX ruling, and a pending challenge to the allocation of NCAA back pay. ##### From prosecution to civil victim rights Clune began his career as a criminal prosecutor and served as Chief Deputy District Attorney for Colorado's Fifth Judicial District. He later co-founded the Rocky Mountain Victim Law Center and served as its first legal director. Those positions placed him first inside criminal enforcement and then in a nonprofit role devoted to enforcing the participatory rights of crime victims. A prosecutor represents the government and must exercise public charging discretion. A victim-rights lawyer represents the person whose statutory interests may diverge from the government's choices. The transition matters because it changes the client, the requested relief, and counsel's obligations. Clune's biography documents experience on both sides of that institutional boundary without treating prosecution and survivor representation as interchangeable. His current practice includes sexual-abuse litigation, Title IX, sports disputes, disciplinary proceedings, athlete safety, and institutional governance. These fields overlap when a school or governing body controls access to competition, receives reports about misconduct, and decides how to investigate or discipline. They remain doctrinally distinct: Title IX, tort law, contract, association rules, and crime-victim statutes supply different elements and remedies. Clune chairs Hutchinson Black and Cook's Sports Law Group. The role includes representation of athletes, coaches, universities, and others, while the survivor matters evaluated here are plaintiff-side or objector-side. That broader practice does not convert him into civil defense counsel for purposes of this profile. Inclusion rests on the documented survivor and female-athlete matters, each identified by his exact role. The public-service background explains the recurring question in his civil work: which institution had authority to act after receiving information about risk or unequal treatment? The answer depends on notice, control, and the remedy authorized by the applicable law. Later Baylor, Arizona, and NCAA matters apply that question to universities and organized sports rather than to a prosecutor's office. ##### A Baylor settlement without public findings A former Baylor University student sued after alleging that football players sexually assaulted her and that the university maintained a culture and response system that exposed women to violence. The complaint sought to connect her individual experience to alleged institutional practices, including notice, reporting, discipline, and the influence of the football program. Baylor disputed the broader characterizations of its conduct. Clune and Chris Ford represented the plaintiff. CBS reported in 2017 that Baylor and the former student settled the case on confidential terms. The agreement ended that civil action without a trial. It therefore cannot be described as a verdict that Baylor violated Title IX or as a public damages award. The filing allegations and the settlement remain separate propositions. Title IX damages litigation required proof beyond the underlying assault. The plaintiff had to establish the educational institution's own responsibility under the governing notice, authority, and deliberate-indifference rules. Evidence about prior reports, who received them, what corrective power each official held, and how the university responded could determine whether the institution faced liability for making a student vulnerable to further harassment. Settlement altered the procedural balance. The plaintiff obtained a negotiated resolution and avoided the uncertainty and exposure of trial. Baylor avoided a merits adjudication while accepting the agreement's obligations. Confidentiality limits public evaluation of consideration, releases, and nonmonetary terms. Accurate treatment therefore identifies the parties, claims, counsel, and resolution but states no undisclosed amount or admission. The Baylor matter documents Clune's role in institutional sexual-assault litigation, yet it supplies no published appellate rule. That rule-centered part of the record appears in later University of Arizona litigation. There, a separate plaintiff's appeal required the Ninth Circuit to define when a university may exercise sufficient control over a student and an off-campus context for Title IX liability. ##### The off-campus control question in Arizona Clune was part of the team representing Lida DeGroote in a Title IX action against the University of Arizona arising from alleged abuse by a football player. The firm reported that the parties reached a public settlement in 2020 after the court concluded that the record could permit trial on aspects of the institutional-response claim. Settlement ended DeGroote's case without a final liability verdict. Mackenzie Brown brought a separate action concerning later violence by the same player. The district court entered summary judgment for the university. Sitting en banc in 2023, the Ninth Circuit reversed and remanded. It held that a reasonable factfinder could find substantial university control over both the student and the off-campus context, as well as the required actual knowledge and deliberate indifference on the summary-judgment record. The en banc court did not enter judgment for Brown. Reversal meant that the university was not entitled to judgment as a matter of law on the record viewed in Brown's favor. The decision articulated five requirements for a damages claim involving student-on-student harassment and returned the case for further proceedings. Factual disputes and remaining defenses continued after the appellate ruling. Clune did not serve as Brown's plaintiff counsel in that appeal. The opinion lists him among counsel for amici National Women's Law Center and thirty-one additional organizations. An amicus brief may assist a court on legal context and consequences, but the party's lawyers control the appeal and the client record. The profile therefore credits Clune with an amicus role rather than the en banc victory itself. The distinction between DeGroote and Brown is central. Clune's team represented DeGroote and obtained a settlement. In Brown, he participated for amici in an appellate case that defined institutional control beyond campus boundaries. Together, the matters show direct survivor representation and rule-focused appellate advocacy, while the role labels prevent one form of work from being substituted for the other. ##### A pending Title IX objection to NCAA back pay In January 2025, Clune, Ashlyn Hare, and Rebecca Peterson-Fisher objected for ten female athletes to the proposed settlement in House v. NCAA. The underlying antitrust settlement created a multibillion-dollar past-damages fund and a forward-looking framework for direct athlete payments. The objection was limited to past damages and argued that the allocation formula undercompensated women in violation of Title IX. The district court approved the settlement in June 2025 over the objections. Several female athletes then appealed. Their counsel argued that schools and conferences could not distribute institutional compensation under a formula that reproduced historical gender disparities. Settlement proponents responded that the Title IX dispute did not belong in the antitrust case and that the appeal delayed payments to a much larger athlete class. The appeal has different effects on the agreement's two principal components. Public reporting states that back-pay damages remain paused while appellate review continues. The forward-looking revenue-sharing system was permitted to begin. That division matters because describing the entire settlement as blocked would be inaccurate, while describing it as fully implemented would conceal the stayed damages distribution challenged by the female athletes. The Ninth Circuit consolidated the final-approval appeals under several case numbers, and briefing was completed by early 2026. The reviewed docket tracker listed no oral argument through July 31, 2026. The profile therefore states no appellate outcome. It also does not apply the objectors' asserted $1.1 billion disparity as an adjudicated fact; that amount remains part of their legal and economic argument. Clune is a Colorado lawyer whose current practice joins Title IX, sports, and survivor representation. His documented record includes confidential settlement work, a public Arizona settlement, an amicus role in an en banc control decision, and counsel responsibility in a pending NCAA allocation appeal. The basis for inclusion is the sequence of exact roles and procedural postures, ending with an unresolved question about institutional payment duties. ###### At a Glance - **Current role:** Member and Chair of the Sports Law Group, Hutchinson Black and Cook - **Practice:** Title IX, sports disputes, survivor representation, and civil-rights litigation - **Prior public service:** Former chief deputy district attorney and first legal director of the Rocky Mountain Victim Law Center - **Selected appellate work:** Amicus counsel in Brown v. Arizona; counsel to objecting female athletes in House v. NCAA - **Education and admission:** University of Iowa, B.A.; Gonzaga University, J.D.; Colorado and listed federal courts ###### Contact ### AFTER / CURRENT #### John C. Clune Title IX · Sports Law · Sexual-Abuse Litigation ##### When Institutional Control Reaches Beyond Campus John Clune's record links victim-rights work, university notice cases, an amicus role in an en banc Title IX ruling, and a pending challenge to the allocation of NCAA back pay. ##### From prosecution to civil victim rights Clune began his career as a criminal prosecutor and served as Chief Deputy District Attorney for Colorado's Fifth Judicial District. He later co-founded the Rocky Mountain Victim Law Center and served as its first legal director. Those positions placed him first inside criminal enforcement and then in a nonprofit role devoted to enforcing the participatory rights of crime victims. Clune’s prosecution work involved public charging decisions on behalf of the government. As a victim-rights lawyer, he represented people seeking to enforce their own statutory interests in criminal proceedings. That experience gave him a working knowledge of both public enforcement and individual representation. His current practice includes sexual-abuse litigation, Title IX, sports disputes, disciplinary proceedings, athlete safety, and institutional governance. These fields overlap when a school or governing body controls access to competition, receives reports about misconduct, and decides how to investigate or discipline. They remain doctrinally distinct: Title IX, tort law, contract, association rules, and crime-victim statutes supply different elements and remedies. Clune chairs Hutchinson Black and Cook’s Sports Law Group, representing athletes, coaches, universities, and others in organized sports. His survivor and female-athlete cases draw on that knowledge of institutional rules, disciplinary authority, and the allocation of resources. The public-service background explains the recurring question in his civil work: which institution had authority to act after receiving information about risk or unequal treatment? The answer depends on notice, control, and the remedy authorized by the applicable law. Later Baylor, Arizona, and NCAA matters apply that question to universities and organized sports rather than to a prosecutor's office. ##### A confidential resolution at Baylor A former Baylor University student sued after alleging that football players sexually assaulted her and that the university maintained a culture and response system that exposed women to violence. The complaint sought to connect her individual experience to alleged institutional practices, including notice, reporting, discipline, and the influence of the football program. Baylor disputed the broader characterizations of its conduct. Clune and Chris Ford represented the plaintiff in the action, which Baylor and the former student resolved through a confidential settlement in 2017. Title IX damages litigation required proof beyond the underlying assault. The plaintiff had to establish the educational institution's own responsibility under the governing notice, authority, and deliberate-indifference rules. Evidence about prior reports, who received them, what corrective power each official held, and how the university responded could determine whether the institution faced liability for making a student vulnerable to further harassment. The settlement gave the plaintiff a negotiated resolution and brought the civil action to a close on confidential terms. The Baylor case placed the university’s response to reported sexual violence at the center of the litigation. Clune’s later University of Arizona work addressed institutional authority in another setting: a school’s control over a student and the off-campus context in which abuse occurred. ##### The off-campus control question in Arizona Clune was part of the team representing Lida DeGroote in a Title IX action against the University of Arizona arising from alleged abuse by a football player. The parties reached a public settlement in 2020 after the court concluded that the record could support trial on aspects of the institutional-response claim. Mackenzie Brown brought a separate action concerning later violence by the same player. The district court entered summary judgment for the university. Sitting en banc in 2023, the Ninth Circuit reversed and remanded. It held that a reasonable factfinder could find substantial university control over both the student and the off-campus context, as well as the required actual knowledge and deliberate indifference on the summary-judgment record. The en banc decision articulated five requirements for a damages claim involving student-on-student harassment. Its reversal of summary judgment returned Brown’s case to the district court for further proceedings under that framework. Clune appeared in Brown as counsel for amici National Women’s Law Center and thirty-one additional organizations, contributing appellate advocacy on the scope of a university’s responsibility for student-on-student harassment. The Arizona matters brought together two parts of Clune’s practice: direct representation of DeGroote through settlement and amicus advocacy in Brown on institutional control beyond campus boundaries. ##### A pending Title IX objection to NCAA back pay In January 2025, Clune, Ashlyn Hare, and Rebecca Peterson-Fisher objected for ten female athletes to the proposed settlement in House v. NCAA. The underlying antitrust settlement created a multibillion-dollar past-damages fund and a forward-looking framework for direct athlete payments. The objection was limited to past damages and argued that the allocation formula undercompensated women in violation of Title IX. The district court approved the settlement in June 2025 over the objections. Several female athletes then appealed. Their counsel argued that schools and conferences could not distribute institutional compensation under a formula that reproduced historical gender disparities. Settlement proponents responded that the Title IX dispute did not belong in the antitrust case and that the appeal delayed payments to a much larger athlete class. Back-pay damages remain paused during the appeal, while the forward-looking revenue-sharing system was permitted to begin. The female athletes’ challenge concerns the allocation of the past-damages fund. The Ninth Circuit consolidated the final-approval appeals, and briefing was completed by early 2026. As of July 31, 2026, oral argument had yet to be listed. The objectors argue that the allocation leaves a $1.1 billion disparity in compensation for female athletes. Clune’s practice joins Title IX, sports, and survivor representation across universities and organized athletics. The Baylor and Arizona settlements, his amicus work in Brown, and the NCAA allocation appeal each turn on an institution’s authority over the people and resources within its reach. ###### At a Glance - **Current role:** Member and Chair of the Sports Law Group, Hutchinson Black and Cook - **Practice:** Title IX, sports disputes, survivor representation, and civil-rights litigation - **Prior public service:** Former chief deputy district attorney and first legal director of the Rocky Mountain Victim Law Center - **Selected appellate work:** Amicus counsel in Brown v. Arizona; counsel to objecting female athletes in House v. NCAA - **Education and admission:** University of Iowa, B.A.; Gonzaga University, J.D.; Colorado and listed federal courts ###### Contact --- ## 5. Katrina Carroll — `900004878` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW** — New Google privacy section plus office-address correction; old narrative largely untouched. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Google Bulk Sensitive Data Rule litigation and verified office address correction. - **Before hash:** `9d159e03723ae98fe12777c04e5aed3808f746f77db2afd3b57e24a3fd78c265` - **After/current hash:** `1b44f363e09a4ee17ac1d80785890c66b1a6f9f7712ca8b1070cf520f0b783b7` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900004900 (2026-08-31 02:44:52 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 16**: Remove the appended warning about later proof while preserving the pleading-stage standing holding and remand. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **New section: Browsing Data in the Ad Auction**: Add Carroll's current role in the consolidated Google Bulk Sensitive Data Rule privacy litigation because it is a material 2026 continuation of the profile's data-chain theme and includes a court-appointed interim class-leadership role. - `rewrite` — **Contact card office address**: Replace the former Carroll Shamberg Washington Street office address with the firm's current 200 N. LaSalle, Suite 1650 address verified on its live website. ### BEFORE #### Katrina Carroll Data Privacy · Biometric Privacy · Consumer Fraud · Class Actions > “ Every case is a proverbial David and Goliath situation, and I relish the fight. ##### Consent Across the Data Chain Katrina Carroll litigates what platforms do after a user supplies a photograph or other personal data, and builds class relief around notice, consent, access to court, and the uses that follow. ###### After the Upload Katrina Carroll’s privacy cases begin with an ordinary exchange: a person posts a video, verifies a profile photograph, or pays for a meal with a card. The legal work follows the information after that moment. A platform may analyze an image, retain a template, or share data through systems the user cannot inspect. A breach may expose an identifier long after the original transaction. Carroll’s cases test whether the platform gave notice, obtained informed consent, limited use and retention, and provided a remedy for the people affected. Carroll is the founding partner of Carroll Shamberg in Chicago and has practiced class-action law for 25 years. She earned her bachelor’s degree in political science, with honors, from Northwestern University in 1997 and her J.D. from Seton Hall University School of Law in 2000. She is admitted in Illinois and New Jersey and before the United States Courts of Appeals for the Third and Seventh Circuits. ###### The TikTok Record The federal court overseeing In re TikTok, Inc., Consumer Privacy Litigation appointed Carroll as one of three co-lead counsel in September 2020. The consolidated complaint alleged that TikTok collected and used personal information, including biometric data, without sufficient notice and consent. During the settlement review, a source-code expert retained by Carroll and another member of the plaintiffs’ leadership examined the app’s iOS and Android code and relevant server code for two weeks. The leadership group used that technical work to prepare written discovery and deposition questions. Carroll helped negotiate the resolution and presented the major oral arguments for the plaintiffs. The settlement established a $92 million fund and included measures directed at the data practices alleged in the complaint. The court granted final approval in July 2022 and entered final judgment the following month. The settlement covered a nationwide class and a separate Illinois subclass, with payments allocated differently to reflect their different statutory claims. ###### Photo Verification at Bumble The Bumble litigation concerned a feature intended to confirm that a dating profile belonged to a real person. Users were prompted to take a photograph while making a specified gesture. The plaintiff alleged that Bumble used facial-recognition technology to collect biometric information through that process without the notice, written consent, retention policy, and deletion schedule required by the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaint applied those duties to data allegedly derived from the safety feature. Carroll served as co-lead counsel in the litigation. The parties established a $40 million settlement fund for Illinois users of the Bumble and Badoo applications, and the court granted final approval. The alleged biometric processing occurred after a user supplied the verification image. The plaintiffs’ claims attached BIPA’s notice, consent, retention, and deletion duties to the additional information allegedly produced during verification. ###### Standing After a Breach Carroll also represented a plaintiff in Lewert v. P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, Inc., an early federal data-breach appeal. P.F. Chang’s announced that payment-card data had been stolen from its system. One named plaintiff alleged fraudulent transactions, the cost of credit monitoring, and the time required to address the breach. The other alleged time spent monitoring his card statements and credit report. The district court dismissed the consolidated case for lack of Article III standing. In 2016, the Seventh Circuit reversed and remanded. At the pleading stage, the court held that increased risks of fraudulent charges and identity theft were concrete enough to support suit because the alleged theft had already occurred. It also recognized time and money spent addressing fraud and protecting against identity theft as present injuries when tied to an imminent risk. The opinion returned the consolidated case to district court for further proceedings while leaving proof of the allegations for the merits. ###### A Consumer Practice of Her Own Carroll founded Carroll Shamberg around data-privacy, consumer-fraud, and product-liability class actions. She also serves on the advisory board of Loyola University Chicago School of Law’s Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies and on Law360’s Products Liability Litigation Editorial Advisory Board. Her description of the work is blunt: “Every case is a proverbial David and Goliath situation, and I relish the fight.” In the TikTok, Bumble, and P.F. Chang’s matters, her work has included technical investigation, appellate briefing, oral argument, and remedies defined for nationwide or statewide classes. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner, Carroll Shamberg LLC - **Practice:** Data privacy, biometric privacy, consumer fraud, product liability, and class-action litigation - **Selected matters:** In re TikTok, Inc., Consumer Privacy Litigation; Dzananovic v. Bumble, Inc.; Lewert v. P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, Inc. - **Education:** Seton Hall University School of Law, J.D.; Northwestern University, B.A., with honors ##### Contact Carroll Shamberg LLC 111 West Washington Street, Suite 1240Chicago, Illinois 60602 katrina@csclassactions.com Official profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Katrina Carroll Data Privacy · Biometric Privacy · Consumer Fraud · Class Actions > “ Every case is a proverbial David and Goliath situation, and I relish the fight. ##### Consent Across the Data Chain Katrina Carroll litigates what platforms do after a user supplies a photograph or other personal data, and builds class relief around notice, consent, access to court, and the uses that follow. ###### After the Upload Katrina Carroll’s privacy cases begin with an ordinary exchange: a person posts a video, verifies a profile photograph, or pays for a meal with a card. The legal work follows the information after that moment. A platform may analyze an image, retain a template, or share data through systems the user cannot inspect. A breach may expose an identifier long after the original transaction. Carroll’s cases test whether the platform gave notice, obtained informed consent, limited use and retention, and provided a remedy for the people affected. Carroll is the founding partner of Carroll Shamberg in Chicago and has practiced class-action law for 25 years. She earned her bachelor’s degree in political science, with honors, from Northwestern University in 1997 and her J.D. from Seton Hall University School of Law in 2000. She is admitted in Illinois and New Jersey and before the United States Courts of Appeals for the Third and Seventh Circuits. ###### The TikTok Record The federal court overseeing In re TikTok, Inc., Consumer Privacy Litigation appointed Carroll as one of three co-lead counsel in September 2020. The consolidated complaint alleged that TikTok collected and used personal information, including biometric data, without sufficient notice and consent. During the settlement review, a source-code expert retained by Carroll and another member of the plaintiffs’ leadership examined the app’s iOS and Android code and relevant server code for two weeks. The leadership group used that technical work to prepare written discovery and deposition questions. Carroll helped negotiate the resolution and presented the major oral arguments for the plaintiffs. The settlement established a $92 million fund and included measures directed at the data practices alleged in the complaint. The court granted final approval in July 2022 and entered final judgment the following month. The settlement covered a nationwide class and a separate Illinois subclass, with payments allocated differently to reflect their different statutory claims. ###### Browsing Data in the Ad Auction In 2026, Carroll represented plaintiff Nicole McGrath in consolidated litigation over Google’s real-time-bidding advertising system. The related complaints allege that Google intercepted and tracked information about Americans’ browsing activity and transmitted that information through its advertising auctions to entities owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction of the People’s Republic of China, in violation of the federal Bulk Sensitive Data Rule that took effect in April 2025. The Northern District of California consolidated the related actions in June 2026. Carroll was admitted to represent McGrath in July, and on August 27 the court appointed Carroll Shamberg, Milberg, and Justice Jagher London & Millen as interim co-lead class counsel. The litigation remains at an early stage; the appointment gives the plaintiffs’ leadership responsibility for the consolidated complaint, discovery, case management, and any settlement discussions. ###### Photo Verification at Bumble The Bumble litigation concerned a feature intended to confirm that a dating profile belonged to a real person. Users were prompted to take a photograph while making a specified gesture. The plaintiff alleged that Bumble used facial-recognition technology to collect biometric information through that process without the notice, written consent, retention policy, and deletion schedule required by the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaint applied those duties to data allegedly derived from the safety feature. Carroll served as co-lead counsel in the litigation. The parties established a $40 million settlement fund for Illinois users of the Bumble and Badoo applications, and the court granted final approval. The alleged biometric processing occurred after a user supplied the verification image. The plaintiffs’ claims attached BIPA’s notice, consent, retention, and deletion duties to the additional information allegedly produced during verification. ###### Standing After a Breach Carroll also represented a plaintiff in Lewert v. P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, Inc., an early federal data-breach appeal. P.F. Chang’s announced that payment-card data had been stolen from its system. One named plaintiff alleged fraudulent transactions, the cost of credit monitoring, and the time required to address the breach. The other alleged time spent monitoring his card statements and credit report. The district court dismissed the consolidated case for lack of Article III standing. In 2016, the Seventh Circuit reversed and remanded. At the pleading stage, the court held that increased risks of fraudulent charges and identity theft were concrete enough to support suit because the alleged theft had already occurred. It also recognized time and money spent addressing fraud and protecting against identity theft as present injuries when tied to an imminent risk. The opinion returned the consolidated case to district court for further proceedings. ###### A Consumer Practice of Her Own Carroll founded Carroll Shamberg around data-privacy, consumer-fraud, and product-liability class actions. She also serves on the advisory board of Loyola University Chicago School of Law’s Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies and on Law360’s Products Liability Litigation Editorial Advisory Board. Her description of the work is blunt: “Every case is a proverbial David and Goliath situation, and I relish the fight.” In the TikTok, Bumble, and P.F. Chang’s matters, her work has included technical investigation, appellate briefing, oral argument, and remedies defined for nationwide or statewide classes. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner, Carroll Shamberg LLC - **Practice:** Data privacy, biometric privacy, consumer fraud, product liability, and class-action litigation - **Selected matters:** In re TikTok, Inc., Consumer Privacy Litigation; Dzananovic v. Bumble, Inc.; Lewert v. P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, Inc. - **Education:** Seton Hall University School of Law, J.D.; Northwestern University, B.A., with honors ##### Contact Carroll Shamberg LLC 200 N. LaSalle, Suite 1650Chicago, Illinois 60601 katrina@csclassactions.com Official profile --- ## 6. Matthew W.H. Wessler — `900005094` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW** — Additive Supreme Court currentness section; prior voice largely untouched. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Current Anderson v. Intel Supreme Court briefing/argument posture. - **Before hash:** `f778650baf5e091f38a49263b8d6df8801b944d5768c2afb89e0098fa00ec1e2` - **After/current hash:** `1c701b9b835633c340a1f7192bffb0aad71e47ee840a1064fdba660f3b04632b` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005488 (2026-09-11 18:12:09 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 3 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 12**: Remove the redundant merits-stage caveat while retaining the exact arbitration holdings, cases, and effect on borrowers' claims. - `restructure` — **Sulyma opening and professional background**: Replace the generalized two-words introduction with the actual record and Wessler's proof distinction while retaining the complete result, biography and practice formation. - `rewrite` — **Borrowing, antitrust and worker appeals**: Keep all named cases and legal terms while separating prospective waiver, delegation, asserted sovereign immunity, patent-listing injury and pre-certification jurisdiction. - `restructure` — **Professional service and pesticide advocacy**: Retain the award, AAJ, unions, professional teaching, commentary and all original brief examples, then give the immunity statement its documented April 2026 context. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **New final section: A Second Intel Question**: Add Anderson v. Intel Corporation Investment Policy Committee because it is a material current Supreme Court continuation of Wessler's ERISA practice, is fully briefed and set for October 6, 2026 argument, and postdates the earlier same-day full profile review. ### BEFORE #### Matthew W.H. Wessler Appellate Advocacy · Consumer Rights > “Chemical companies like Monsanto … have gone to the courts, state legislatures, and the U.S. Congress to seek immunity… ##### Two Words, Thousands of Retirements Plaintiff-side Supreme Court, class-action, worker, and consumer appeals — Principal, Gupta Wessler, Washington, D.C. A whole category of claims can live or die on the meaning of two words. In the winter of 2019, the two words were "actual knowledge," and the category was fiduciary-breach claims brought by workers whose retirement plans had been mismanaged. ERISA gives participants six years to sue over a fiduciary breach — unless they had "actual knowledge" of it, in which case the window shrinks to three. Intel argued that a plan participant acquires that knowledge the moment the plan emails him a disclosure, whether or not he ever opens it. Under that reading, the mere delivery of dense documents would start the clock running against claims the participant never truly knew existed. Matthew W.H. Wessler stood at the Supreme Court lectern for Christopher Sulyma, a former Intel engineer, and argued that "actual" means actual. In February 2020 the Court agreed, unanimously. Intel Corp. Investment Policy Committee v. Sulyma held that the shortened limitations period requires proof the plaintiff was in fact aware of the relevant information. Sending a disclosure alone would not start the three-year clock. The decision preserved time to bring fiduciary-breach claims under a law that safeguards the retirement savings of tens of millions of plan participants. ###### The Route Through Both Bars After Williams College and Cornell Law School, Wessler clerked for Judge Richard L. Nygaard of the Third Circuit and Judge William E. Smith of the District of Rhode Island, then practiced at Williams & Connolly in Washington. He served on the Obama campaign's sensitive-litigation team during the era's election-law battles. During six years at Public Justice, the national public-interest firm, he spearheaded the organization's Supreme Court practice and built a docket devoted to workers, consumers and access to the courts. When he joined Deepak Gupta's appellate firm, it took his name too. As a principal of Gupta Wessler, splitting his time between Washington and Boston, he litigates ERISA, arbitration, payday lending, antitrust, preemption and civil procedure. His cases address whether workers can recover retirement losses, borrowers can challenge unlawful debts, and consumers can obtain the benefits of competition or pursue their claims in court. ###### Dismantling the Rent-a-Tribe Wessler challenged online lenders charging triple-digit interest rates that had structured themselves around entities affiliated with Native American tribes. Their arbitration provisions sought to prevent borrowers from invoking federal or state law against them: disputes would be resolved, if at all, in a forum applying only tribal law, with the protections of usury statutes and federal consumer law prospectively waived. In Gibbs v. Haynes Investments and Gibbs v. Sequoia Capital Operations, Wessler won Fourth Circuit decisions refusing to enforce those arbitration mechanisms and allowing borrowers' federal claims to proceed — rulings that reached even the venture investors behind the lending platforms. In Williams v. Medley Opportunity Fund II, the Third Circuit likewise refused to enforce a prospective waiver of federal statutory rights in another high-cost lending scheme. These decisions allowed thousands of borrowers to pursue their claims, leaving the merits for further litigation. Wessler argued that an arbitration clause may select a forum but cannot extinguish the statutory rights a borrower would assert there. ###### Insulin, Labels, and the Price of Immunity In In re Lantus Direct Purchaser Antitrust Litigation, Wessler helped persuade the First Circuit to revive claims that a drugmaker's conduct around its blockbuster insulin had unlawfully delayed competition — restoring a challenge to practices affecting what people with diabetes pay for the medicine they need. In Molock v. Whole Foods Market, he prevailed in the D.C. Circuit in a class-action jurisdiction fight with implications for nationwide worker claims. His Supreme Court briefing has supported injured plaintiffs in Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. v. Albrecht and the Roundup litigation in Hardeman v. Monsanto, and addressed arbitration's boundaries in Henry Schein v. Archer & White Sales. As pesticide manufacturers have pursued shields from failure-to-warn liability in courtrooms, statehouses, and Congress alike, Wessler has publicly challenged their efforts to secure immunity from the obligation to warn people about the dangers of a product. ###### The Standard and the People Under It The Pound Civil Justice Institute honored Wessler with its Appellate Advocacy Award in 2020, citing excellence in appellate advocacy on behalf of plaintiffs. He serves as outside appellate counsel to the American Association for Justice, represents national labor unions including the SEIU and the American Federation of Teachers, teaches fellow practitioners through professional programs, and appears regularly as a commentator when the courts take up the procedural machinery of civil justice. Wessler's appeals address how "actual knowledge," delegation, sovereign immunity, prospective waiver, and antitrust injury affect retirement accounts, loan obligations, drug prices, and access to court. ###### At a Glance - **Current role:** Principal, Gupta Wessler - **Practice:** Appellate Advocacy · Consumer Rights - **Education:** Williams College; Cornell Law School - **Location:** Washington, D.C. and Boston, Massachusetts ###### Contact Gupta Wessler Professional profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Matthew W.H. Wessler Appellate Advocacy · Consumer Rights > “Chemical companies like Monsanto … have gone to the courts, state legislatures, and the U.S. Congress to seek immunity… ##### What the Participant Actually Knew Plaintiff-side Supreme Court, class-action, worker, and consumer appeals — Principal, Gupta Wessler, Washington, D.C. Christopher Sulyma, a former Intel engineer, alleged that his retirement plans had put too much money into hedge funds and private equity. Intel's plan administrators had made disclosures available online and sent emails directing participants to them. Sulyma had visited the benefits website, but testified that he did not remember reading the disclosures and had been unaware of those investments. When Matthew W.H. Wessler represented him at the Supreme Court, the question was whether access to the information alone gave Sulyma "actual knowledge" of it. For fiduciary-breach claims, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, known as ERISA, ordinarily allows six years. Its three-year period applies after the participant gains "actual knowledge," which Wessler's brief distinguished from mere access to a disclosure. Emails and website records could be evidence of knowledge; making information available did not establish, as a matter of law, that the recipient knew its contents. The brief argued that "actual" meant real awareness, not information a participant should have learned. Wessler argued the case on December 4, 2019. In February 2020, the Court unanimously held in Intel Corp. Investment Policy Committee v. Sulyma that disclosure alone did not start the three-year clock. Defendants could still prove awareness through testimony or circumstantial evidence; the ruling did not make a participant's denial conclusive. It preserved the distinction Congress had drawn between the ordinary period and the shorter one in a statute protecting the retirement savings of tens of millions of participants. ###### Building a Plaintiffs' Appellate Practice Wessler graduated from Williams College and Cornell Law School, clerked for Judge Richard L. Nygaard of the Third Circuit and Judge William E. Smith of the District of Rhode Island, and practiced at Williams & Connolly in Washington. He also served on the Obama campaign's sensitive-litigation team. During six years at Public Justice, he led its Supreme Court practice and represented workers and consumers in cases concerning retirement benefits, arbitration and access to the courts. When he joined Deepak Gupta's appellate firm, it became Gupta Wessler. He is a principal working across its Washington and Boston offices, with a practice encompassing ERISA, payday lending, arbitration, antitrust, preemption and civil procedure. He works with trial lawyers on appeals concerning retirement losses, unlawful debts, competition and the ability to pursue claims in court. ###### The Rights Available in Arbitration In Williams v. Medley Opportunity Fund II, Wessler argued for Christina Williams and Michael Stermel, whose three online loans carried annual interest rates ranging from about 497 to 715 percent. Their agreements with AWL, a tribally owned lender, required disputes to be decided under tribal law, excluding the federal and state protections the borrowers sought to invoke. They sued the lender's holding company and several directors, alleging violations of Pennsylvania law and the federal racketeering statute. The defendants invoked a delegation clause assigning questions about the arbitration agreement's enforceability to the arbitrator. Wessler and co-counsel Michael Quirk challenged that clause as well as the rest of the agreement: an arbitrator restricted to tribal law could not apply the federal protections needed to assess the waiver. In July 2020, the Third Circuit held that the prospective waiver made the agreement, including its delegation clause, unenforceable. The borrowers could continue their claims. That month, Wessler and his colleagues also prevailed in the Fourth Circuit in Gibbs v. Haynes Investments and Gibbs v. Sequoia Capital Operations. Those cases concerned Virginia borrowers charged triple-digit interest and investors alleged to have financed or supported tribal lending operations. The lenders asserted sovereign immunity; the appeals addressed the investors' attempts to enforce arbitration. The court rejected provisions that prevented borrowers from pursuing federal statutory remedies. The decisions opened a route for thousands of borrowers to challenge their debts without treating a choice of arbitration as consent to surrender the underlying rights. ###### Competition and Uncertified Claims In In re Lantus Direct Purchaser Antitrust Litigation, Wessler helped challenge Sanofi's use of a patent listing to delay competing insulin products. Listing a patent in the FDA's Orange Book could enable the manufacturer to trigger a thirty-month pause in approval of a rival product. The challenged patent covered a drive mechanism used inside an injection pen, not the drug for which the listing had been submitted. The purchasers' claimed antitrust injury was paying inflated prices because competition had been delayed. In February 2020, the First Circuit revived that claim without deciding the damages ultimately due. In Molock v. Whole Foods Market, he argued for employees alleging that the company had manipulated a bonus program and deprived them of wages. Whole Foods sought dismissal of proposed class members outside the District of Columbia for lack of personal jurisdiction. The D.C. Circuit held in March 2020 that the request was premature: before certification, the unnamed members were not parties to the action. The ruling preserved the workers' ability to seek a nationwide class without deciding every jurisdictional question that might arise after certification. ###### Advocacy Beyond the Named Client The Pound Civil Justice Institute gave Wessler its Appellate Advocacy Award in 2020 for his work on behalf of plaintiffs. He serves as outside appellate counsel to the American Association for Justice, represents national labor unions including the SEIU and the American Federation of Teachers, and teaches practitioners through professional programs. He also comments publicly on civil-justice questions. His Supreme Court briefing has supported injured people in Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. v. Albrecht and Hardeman v. Monsanto, and addressed arbitration in Henry Schein v. Archer & White Sales. In April 2026, he was counsel of record for the American Association for Justice and Public Justice in their amicus filing in Monsanto v. Durnell. Wessler publicly connected the pesticide manufacturer's courtroom position to efforts in state legislatures and Congress to obtain immunity from failure-to-warn liability. The organizations argued that Missouri's warning obligation was consistent with the manufacturer's federal duties, and asked the Court to preserve the injured person's right to pursue a state-law remedy. ###### A Second Intel Question Wessler is counsel of record for Intel retirement-plan participants in Anderson v. Intel Corporation Investment Policy Committee, another ERISA dispute involving the company's use of hedge funds and private equity. The participants allege that the plan fiduciaries invested imprudently. After the Ninth Circuit required them to identify a meaningful benchmark to support an inference of imprudence, Wessler's petition asked the Supreme Court to decide whether ERISA imposes that pleading requirement on underperformance-based duty-of-prudence claims. The Court granted review on January 16, 2026. Wessler filed the petitioners' merits brief on April 23 and their reply on August 3. The case is set for argument on October 6, 2026. Unlike Sulyma, which asked when a participant actually knows enough to trigger ERISA's shorter limitations period, Anderson concerns what a participant must plead at the outset to state a prudence claim. ###### At a Glance - **Current role:** Principal, Gupta Wessler - **Practice:** Appellate Advocacy · Consumer Rights - **Education:** Williams College; Cornell Law School - **Location:** Washington, D.C. and Boston, Massachusetts ###### Contact Gupta Wessler Professional profile --- ## 7. Omar C. Jadwat — `900005345` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `067e92a29618bf483271f274a0d2740c12f4c89976cc36f5ecce6b659b52adc4` - **After/current hash:** `f59d031e4468403a74e7a42df496bcb54a302b77f9c843a20e1aeac15f0bb5a5` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005470 (2026-09-11 17:18:06 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 3 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 14**: Retain the precise preliminary injunction and constitutional ground while removing the appended warning about other proceedings. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 25**: Preserve vacatur, mootness, and counsel responsibility while removing the redundant no-view-on-the-merits disclaimer. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 47**: State the revocation and agency instructions directly while removing the warning against treating the executive action as a judicial victory. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 54**: Replace a disclaimer separating records and victories with the actual entry-versus-removal distinction drawn by the decision. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Opening overnight work and family evidence**: Add the contemporaneously documented overnight lawsuit, collaborators and plaintiffs' declarations so Jadwat's work and the people affected become visible early. - `rewrite` — **Successive orders and procedural sequence**: Consolidate repeated order-feature, mootness and revocation explanations while retaining every country, exception, legal argument, advocate and existing outcome. - `rewrite` — **Quotation selection and institutional attribution**: Preserve the existing quotation once in the hero, state its argument directly in the body, and clarify IRAP's plaintiff role in the Maryland proceedings. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Argument preparation and published family reflection**: Use Jadwat's May 7 interview for his approach to public pressure and the significance he described for Muslim relatives overseas. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Current role and RAICES appellate work**: Add the verified 2002 fellowship, Jadwat's actual appellate brief role, Gelernt's argument and the favorable statutory judgment and class certification. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Opening overnight work and family evidence**: Add the contemporaneously documented overnight lawsuit, collaborators and plaintiffs' declarations so Jadwat's work and the people affected become visible early. - `rewrite` — **Successive orders and procedural sequence**: Consolidate repeated order-feature, mootness and revocation explanations while retaining every country, exception, legal argument, advocate and existing outcome. - `rewrite` — **Quotation selection and institutional attribution**: Preserve the original quotation and its argument in the narrative, add a distinct short interview excerpt that reveals Jadwat's approach to argument, and clarify IRAP's plaintiff role. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Argument preparation and published family reflection**: Use Jadwat's May 7 interview for his approach to public pressure and the significance he described for Muslim relatives overseas. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Current role and RAICES appellate work**: Add the verified 2002 fellowship, Jadwat's actual appellate brief role, Gelernt's argument and the favorable statutory judgment and class certification. ### BEFORE #### Omar C. Jadwat Immigrants’ Rights · Constitutional Litigation > “Putting a new coat of paint on the Muslim ban doesn’t solve its fundamental problem. ##### The Purpose Across Three Orders The first directive named seven countries. The second removed Iraq and rewrote its exceptions. The third followed a worldwide review and imposed different restrictions on eight countries. Omar Jadwat’s litigation asked what changed with each new instrument—and whether the constitutional purpose revealed by the sequence remained legally visible. On January 27, 2017, Executive Order 13769 suspended entry for ninety days from seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. It also paused the refugee program for 120 days, suspended Syrian refugee admission indefinitely, and directed future refugee preferences toward certain religious minorities. The order took effect immediately. Visa holders, refugees, families, universities, resettlement organizations, and employers encountered one national directive through individual journeys already underway. The first lawsuits therefore joined constitutional structure to concrete relationships: a person abroad, a relative inside the country, an approved refugee, a school awaiting a student. The text invoked national security and deficient information from designated countries. The challengers placed that text beside campaign statements, transition-period proposals, and the order’s religious-preference provision. The legal question became whether facial immigration language insulated a policy whose origin, sequence, and operation pointed toward religious disfavor. Omar Jadwat served as counsel in the International Refugee Assistance Project litigation and argued the Maryland injunction and the first en banc Fourth Circuit appeal. The organizations and individuals were represented by a larger team that included the ACLU, ACLU of Maryland, National Immigration Law Center, IRAP, and additional counsel. The government replaced the first order within six weeks. Its revised country list, refugee provisions, exceptions, and effective date became the subject of the next injunction proceedings. ###### The Second Order Removes Iraq Executive Order 13780 arrived on March 6. Iraq left the country list. The indefinite Syrian-refugee suspension and express religious-minority preference disappeared. The new order delayed its effective date, exempted lawful permanent residents, and limited the entry pause to Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The replacement preserved a ninety-day entry restriction and 120-day refugee pause while adding categorical exceptions and case-by-case waivers. It supplied country-specific explanations and described the pause as time for improved screening and information review rather than a permanent nationality bar. Jadwat said, “Putting a new coat of paint on the Muslim ban doesn’t solve its fundamental problem.” The challengers argued that the revised text had to be read alongside the statements, sequence, and decisions that produced it. On March 16, Judge Theodore Chuang enjoined Section 2(c), the six-country entry restriction. The court treated the plaintiffs’ injuries and the public record as sufficient for preliminary relief on the Establishment Clause claim, while leaving the remaining provisions and later merits proceedings for separate analysis. The government invoked the President’s statutory authority over entry and responsibility for foreign affairs and security. It emphasized the revised order’s country categories, removed provisions, and waivers. ###### Purpose Before Thirteen Judges The government appealed, and the Fourth Circuit heard the case en banc on May 8, 2017. Jadwat presented the argument for the IRAP appellees before thirteen active judges. He asked the court to evaluate the administration’s statements, timing, design choices, and the relationship between its announced objective and the restrictions it selected. The revised wording was part of that inquiry. The government urged a narrower judicial frame. The order classified by nationality rather than religion, addressed countries Congress and prior administrations had already treated as security concerns, included a temporary review period, and called for deference to a presidential judgment at the intersection of entry and national security. On May 25, the en banc court affirmed the central injunction in a 10–3 ruling. Chief Judge Roger Gregory’s majority concluded that the challengers were likely to succeed because the record supported the inference that the order’s stated national-security rationale operated as the means for a predominantly religious purpose. The appeal drew on the affected individuals’ declarations and the work of the ACLU, ACLU of Maryland, National Immigration Law Center, IRAP, and their co-counsel. Jadwat presented that record at the en banc hearing. ###### Expiration Before Argument On June 26, the Supreme Court allowed part of the revised order to operate while granting review. The interim rule preserved the injunction for people with a credible claim of a bona fide relationship to a U.S. person or entity and permitted restrictions against others while the merits remained pending. The second order contained its own expiration date. Section 2(c) expired on September 24, 2017, the same day the President issued a third instrument. The object scheduled for Supreme Court argument had therefore ceased to govern entry before the Justices reached the merits. On October 10, the Court vacated the Fourth Circuit judgment and directed dismissal of the challenge as moot. Its order expressly stated no view on the merits. Jadwat remained counsel of record for the IRAP respondents. Vacatur removed the en banc judgment’s precedential force. The third policy required a new challenge to its own text and operation. Counsel continued to present the injuries and purpose evidence as the administration revised the policy. Expiration ended the pending challenge to Section 2(c), while the new proclamation required additional pleadings and another request for relief. ###### The Third Instrument Proclamation 9645 followed a worldwide review. It imposed varying entry restrictions on Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. Iraq received enhanced screening measures without the same entry restrictions; Sudan left the list; North Korea and Venezuela entered it. The proclamation exempted lawful permanent residents and other categories, distinguished among immigrant and nonimmigrant visas, created case-by-case waivers, and required continuing country review. Its architecture was more differentiated and administratively developed than either executive order. On October 17, the Maryland district court enjoined large portions of the proclamation for people with bona fide U.S. relationships. The court evaluated the worldwide review and revised provisions while finding that the public record still supported preliminary Establishment Clause relief. Jadwat was among the lawyers who argued the Maryland challenge to the third instrument. His public response again focused on continuity across revision. The legal filing, however, still had to confront every feature the government identified as new: country-specific findings, added non-Muslim countries, exemptions, waivers, and periodic reassessment. The government relied on the global review and differentiated restrictions. It pointed to Iraq’s treatment, Sudan’s removal, the subsequent removal of Chad, and the exceptions accompanying the entry limits. ###### A Different Advocate, the Same Record The Fourth Circuit heard the third-order appeal en banc on December 8, 2017. Cecillia Wang presented the argument for the appellees. Jadwat joined the brief as part of the IRAP counsel team. On February 15, 2018, the court affirmed the injunction by a 9–4 vote. The majority examined the proclamation’s predominantly Muslim country coverage, the history preceding each version, public statements, and the administration’s asserted national-security process. The majority treated the worldwide review as relevant but insufficient to extinguish the purpose claim before final adjudication. It read the third proclamation as the latest part of one sequence whose origin and continued public explanation remained open to judicial examination. The dissenters and government emphasized institutional competence and facial legality. Entry decisions depend on classified information, diplomatic cooperation, document reliability, overstay rates, and threat assessment. Courts lack the Executive’s information and should hesitate before displacing a formally neutral policy supported by a worldwide review. Jadwat then served as counsel of record for the IRAP respondents in Supreme Court case No. 17-1270. The IRAP respondents filed a memorandum while their judgment awaited review alongside the separate Hawaii litigation. The Court heard no separate oral argument in IRAP. ###### What Hawaii Upheld Trump v. Hawaii arose from the Ninth Circuit case. At the April 25, 2018 argument, Solicitor General Noel Francisco represented the government, and Neal Katyal represented the respondents. Jadwat represented the respondents in the separate IRAP case. On June 26, 2018, Chief Justice John Roberts’s five-Justice majority held that 8 U.S.C. §1182(f) granted broad authority to suspend entry when the President found entry detrimental to national interests. The proclamation’s detailed findings and review process satisfied the statutory prerequisite under the deferential standard the Court applied. The majority also rejected the Establishment Clause challenge under rational-basis review. It pointed to the worldwide review, varying country treatment, the inclusion of North Korea and Venezuelan officials, the removal of Iraq, Sudan, and later Chad, and a waiver system as features rationally related to screening and information-sharing goals. Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, focused on whether the waiver process operated as represented. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, read the anti-Muslim statements and policy sequence as powerful evidence that the stated national-security rationale failed to cure the constitutional defect. Two days later, the Court granted review in the IRAP matter, vacated the Fourth Circuit judgment, and remanded for reconsideration under Hawaii. Hawaii supplied the controlling rule for the third proclamation. ###### Revocation, Then Reissue On January 20, 2021, President Joseph Biden revoked Proclamation 9645 and directed agencies to resume visa processing and address applications affected by the restrictions. Revocation changed federal policy through executive action; it was neither a judicial reversal of Hawaii nor a restoration of the vacated Fourth Circuit judgments. On June 4, 2025, Proclamation 10949 created a new country-based regime. It fully restricted entry from twelve countries and partially restricted entry from seven, citing screening, identity management, information sharing, overstay rates, public safety, and cooperation in accepting removable nationals. The 2025 instrument retained categorical exceptions and national-interest exceptions decided case by case. A December successor, effective January 1, 2026, continued or added full restrictions for nineteen countries, partial restrictions for twenty, and a separate rule for travel documents issued or endorsed by the Palestinian Authority. The successor proclamations again used Section 1182(f), country-by-country findings, differentiated visa treatment, exemptions, discretionary exceptions, foreign-government engagement, and periodic review. They remain distinct policies with their own text, administrative record, affected people, and potential statutory or constitutional questions. Jadwat directs the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, whose lawyers continue to litigate restrictions on entry and access to asylum. ###### Congress’s Removal Procedures An April 24, 2026 D.C. Circuit decision marked a separate statutory boundary. RAICES v. Noem accepted that Section 1182(f) authorizes entry suspensions; it held that the same provision stopped short of replacing the removal procedures and asylum protections Congress prescribed for people physically present inside the country. RAICES involved a different proclamation, plaintiffs, counsel record, statute-specific injury, and remedy. Its reasoning left Hawaii’s broad entry holding intact while distinguishing entry from removal and presidential suspension power from Congress’s detailed commands governing asylum, withholding, and removal proceedings. The two cases concern different exercises of presidential power. Hawaii addressed suspension of entry; RAICES enforced the procedures Congress required when the government seeks to remove people already in the United States. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Director, Immigrants’ Rights Project - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Practice:** Immigrants’ Rights, Constitutional Litigation - **Location:** New York, New York ##### Contact - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Address:** 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York, New York 10004 - **Website:** aclu.org ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Omar C. Jadwat Immigrants’ Rights · Constitutional Litigation > “Putting a new coat of paint on the Muslim ban doesn’t solve its fundamental problem. ##### The Purpose Across Three Orders Omar Jadwat helped answer the first entry order with an overnight lawsuit. As the administration replaced it twice, his work turned to a harder question: how much of a policy’s purpose remained visible after its words and procedures changed? People were already in the air when President Trump signed Executive Order 13769 on January 27, 2017. After passengers arriving in the United States were detained, Omar Jadwat and his team worked through the night with lawyers and students from the National Immigration Law Center, the International Refugee Assistance Project and Yale’s Workers and Immigrants Rights Advocacy Clinic. They prepared a lawsuit for two detained Iraqi men and others in the same position. The order immediately suspended entry for ninety days from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. It paused the refugee program for 120 days, suspended Syrian refugee admissions indefinitely and directed future preferences toward certain religious minorities. Visa holders and refugees encountered those provisions while families, universities, resettlement organizations and employers awaited them. The administration invoked national security and inadequate information from the designated countries. Jadwat and his colleagues examined the directive alongside campaign statements, transition proposals and the preference based on religion. Their constitutional argument required the courts to consider how the policy had developed, including the possibility that country designations carried forward an announced religious exclusion. Jadwat went on to argue the Maryland injunction proceedings in International Refugee Assistance Project v. Trump. The ACLU, ACLU of Maryland, National Immigration Law Center and other counsel represented organizations and individuals; IRAP itself was among the plaintiffs. Within six weeks of the January directive, the government replaced it, changing the country list, refugee provisions, exceptions and effective date. ###### The Second Order Removes Iraq Executive Order 13780, issued March 6, removed Iraq. It also dropped the indefinite Syrian-refugee suspension and express religious-minority preference, delayed implementation and expressly exempted lawful permanent residents. The ninety-day entry restriction now covered Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen; the 120-day refugee pause remained. The replacement supplied country-specific explanations, categorical exceptions and case-by-case waivers. It described the entry pause as time to improve screening and review information. The government maintained that these changes, its statutory entry authority and the President’s responsibility for foreign affairs and security justified the revised order. Jadwat said, “Putting a new coat of paint on the Muslim ban doesn’t solve its fundamental problem.” The plaintiffs amended their complaint on March 10 and asked for relief before the replacement took effect. His argument was that the revised text had to be read with the statements, sequence and decisions that produced it. The declarations gave that argument a personal consequence. John Doe #1 and John Doe #3 were Muslim lawful permanent residents whose wives remained in Iran. They faced continued separation as well as anxiety about their own safety and place in the United States. HIAS and IRAP described disrupted refugee work and relatives still awaiting reunion; the Middle East Studies Association faced barriers to its members’ travel, fieldwork and annual conference. On March 16, Judge Theodore Chuang enjoined Section 2(c), the six-country entry restriction. He found the plaintiffs’ injuries and the public record sufficient for preliminary relief under the Establishment Clause. The court’s inquiry reached the President’s own statements and those of his advisers, including their descriptions of continuity between the two orders. ###### Purpose Before Thirteen Judges On May 8, 2017, Jadwat presented the IRAP appellees’ argument to thirteen active judges of the Fourth Circuit sitting en banc. Before the hearing, he explained how he approached a closely watched argument: “you focus entirely on what’s going on in the room.” He asked the judges to consider statements, timing and design together with the revised wording. The record included Trump’s explanation that he had shifted from speaking about Muslims to speaking about territories, and advisers’ descriptions of the second order as preserving the first order’s basic policy. The claimed constitutional purpose could be tested against those public choices. The government urged deference to an entry decision involving national security. It stressed nationality rather than religion, countries Congress and earlier administrations had already identified as security concerns, and a temporary review period. Its position would limit the use of statements outside the order to challenge the policy expressed within it. On May 25, the court affirmed the central injunction by a 10–3 vote. Chief Judge Roger Gregory’s majority found the challengers likely to succeed because the stated security rationale appeared secondary to a predominantly religious purpose. Jadwat’s argument had brought the affected individuals’ declarations and the work of the coalition before the full court. The concern also reached his own family. Jadwat had seen the value, for Muslim relatives overseas, of being able to visit the United States and experience fair treatment and religious tolerance. He worried about replacing that experience with discrimination. ###### Expiration Before Argument On June 26, the Supreme Court granted review and allowed part of the revised order to operate. It preserved the injunction for people with a credible claim of a bona fide relationship to a person or entity in the United States, while permitting restrictions against others during the pending merits review. Section 2(c)’s ninety-day restriction expired on September 24, the day the President issued a third instrument. On October 10, before hearing the merits, the Supreme Court vacated the Fourth Circuit judgment and directed dismissal of that challenge as moot. Jadwat was counsel of record for the IRAP respondents. The vacated judgment no longer carried precedential force. The new proclamation required another challenge, additional pleadings and a fresh request for relief. Counsel carried forward the injuries and evidence of purpose while addressing the provisions now governing entry. ###### The Third Instrument Proclamation 9645 followed a worldwide review and imposed different restrictions on Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. Iraq received enhanced screening without the same entry restrictions. Sudan left the list; North Korea and Venezuela joined it. The proclamation distinguished between immigrant and nonimmigrant visas, exempted lawful permanent residents and other categories, provided case-by-case waivers and required continuing review. Its country-specific findings and more developed administrative process gave the government new grounds on which to defend the restrictions. Jadwat was among the lawyers who argued the Maryland challenge. His public response again emphasized continuity across the revisions. On October 17, Chuang enjoined large portions of the proclamation for people with bona fide relationships in the United States, finding that the history still supported preliminary Establishment Clause relief despite the new review and provisions. The government relied on the global review and the different treatment of different countries, including Iraq’s screening, Sudan’s removal and, later, Chad’s removal. It maintained that those changes and the accompanying exceptions reflected security judgments rather than religious disfavor. ###### A Different Advocate, the Same Record Cecillia Wang presented the appellees’ argument when the Fourth Circuit heard the third-order appeal en banc on December 8, 2017. Jadwat joined the brief as part of the IRAP team. On February 15, 2018, the court affirmed the injunction by a 9–4 vote. The majority considered the predominantly Muslim country coverage, the history and statements preceding each version, and the asserted national-security process. It treated the worldwide review as relevant to the purpose inquiry without finding that it ended the constitutional claim before final adjudication. The dissenters and government emphasized the Executive’s access to classified information, diplomatic cooperation, document-reliability assessments, overstay data and threat analysis. They argued that courts lacked the information and institutional competence to displace a facially neutral entry policy supported by a worldwide review. Jadwat became counsel of record for the IRAP respondents in Supreme Court case No. 17-1270. They filed a memorandum while their judgment awaited review alongside the separate Hawaii litigation. The Supreme Court heard no separate oral argument in IRAP. ###### What Hawaii Upheld Trump v. Hawaii came from the Ninth Circuit. At the April 25, 2018 argument, Solicitor General Noel Francisco appeared for the government and Neal Katyal for the respondents. Jadwat represented the respondents in the parallel IRAP case. On June 26, Chief Justice John Roberts’s five-Justice majority held that section 1182(f) gave the President broad authority to suspend entry upon finding it detrimental to United States interests. The proclamation’s detailed findings and review process satisfied the statute under the Court’s deferential standard. The majority also rejected the Establishment Clause challenge under rational-basis review. It found a rational connection to screening and information-sharing goals in the worldwide review, varying country treatment, restrictions on North Korea and specified Venezuelan officials, removal of Iraq, Sudan and later Chad from entry restrictions, and the waiver system. Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, focused on whether the waivers worked as represented. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, viewed the anti-Muslim statements and policy sequence as evidence that the asserted security rationale had not cured the constitutional defect. Two days later, the Court granted review in IRAP, vacated the Fourth Circuit judgment and remanded for reconsideration under Hawaii. The Supreme Court’s ruling now controlled the challenge to the third proclamation. ###### Revocation, Then Reissue President Joseph Biden revoked Proclamation 9645 on January 20, 2021, directing agencies to resume visa processing and address applications affected by the restrictions. On June 4, 2025, Proclamation 10949 imposed full entry restrictions for twelve countries and partial restrictions for seven. It cited screening, identity management, information sharing, visa-overstay rates, public safety and cooperation in accepting removable nationals, while retaining categorical and case-by-case national-interest exceptions. A December successor took effect on January 1, 2026. It continued or added full restrictions for nineteen countries, partial restrictions for twenty, and a separate restriction for travel documents issued or endorsed by the Palestinian Authority. These were distinct policies, each with its own text, administrative record and affected people. They again invoked section 1182(f) through country findings, differentiated visa treatment, exemptions, discretionary exceptions, engagement with foreign governments and periodic review. Each left its own statutory and constitutional questions to be examined. ###### Congress’s Removal Procedures Jadwat continues to direct the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, which he joined as a fellow in 2002. His work on entry and asylum restrictions also reached the RAICES litigation over a separate 2025 proclamation. He was on the appellees’ appellate brief; Lee Gelernt presented their argument. On April 24, 2026, the D.C. Circuit held that the power to suspend entry under section 1182(f) did not authorize the Executive to replace Congress’s removal procedures or deny the prescribed opportunity to seek asylum and withholding protections to people physically present in the country. Hawaii addressed entry restrictions; this case concerned how the government could remove people already here. The court affirmed summary judgment for the plaintiffs and class certification with a clarified definition. For Jadwat and the team, the statutory question had a concrete consequence: the government had to respect Congress’s procedures and protections when seeking to remove the people covered by the judgment. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Director, Immigrants’ Rights Project - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Practice:** Immigrants’ Rights, Constitutional Litigation - **Location:** New York, New York ##### Contact - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Address:** 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York, New York 10004 - **Website:** aclu.org --- ## 8. Karen Tumlin — `900005347` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `eab5a3ddf8e52f73544fb13445ee59527267e2857981de8c05c26c865ef353f1` - **After/current hash:** `846511b8b5167f42f01eea572ff55e840035ee0f9d3311c3110790c8bac55dc4` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005405 (2026-09-10 00:43:43 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 31**: Describe the injunction's operational effect directly instead of leading with a caution about remaining visa requirements. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 33**: Preserve the stay disposition, judicial split, and distinct advocacy roles while removing the appended merits disclaimer. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 47**: Retain the rehearing and revocation chronology while replacing the editorial qualification about a durable appellate result. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 50**: Preserve the substantive effects of vacatur and the later opinion's treatment while removing repetitive cautions about unresolved interpretations. - `rewrite` — **Opening and family evidence**: Introduce Tumlin's filing and actual collaborators immediately, preserve every family's distinct circumstances and combine the repeated Morales enrollment explanation. - `rewrite` — **Statutory dispute and appellate sequence**: Preserve both sides' legal positions and all procedural consequences while consolidating repeated ordinary-visa and stay explanations. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Transitory claims and vacatur**: Add the January 28 interview, March 9 surreply and plaintiffs' vacatur request, all established by the primary orders, to show the lawyers responding to developments. - `rewrite` — **Specific accuracy corrections**: Correct the location of Blake Doe's parents, avoid an exact-class-count implication and state the 2026 opinion's nonbinding-precedent clarification precisely. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Closing professional statement**: Retain the current role and all practice areas and add a short exact quotation from Tumlin's June 30, 2026 official statement about presidential limits. ### BEFORE #### Karen Tumlin Immigrants’ Rights · Family Reunification > “My vision for Justice Action Center is to bring fierce courtroom advocacy to currently unseen problems… ##### The Coverage That Began After Entry Before an immigrant visa could issue, Proclamation 9945 required proof that approved health coverage would begin within thirty days after entry—or proof of enough money to pay foreseeable medical costs. Karen Tumlin and a nationwide legal team showed how many approved routes opened only after arrival, employment, residence, enrollment or a Social Security number. Proclamation 9945 was issued on October 4, 2019 and scheduled to take effect at 12:01 a.m. on November 3. It covered specified immigrant-visa applicants unless a consular officer was satisfied that approved health coverage would begin within thirty days after entry or that the applicant could pay reasonably foreseeable medical costs. Applicants had to establish that future coverage would begin within thirty days, although they could obtain the coverage after arrival. Consular officers would decide at the interview whether an applicant had made that showing. John Doe #1 had a wife’s interview scheduled in Mexico for November 6. He was disabled, had undergone heart surgery and relied on her care for himself and their son. On November 1, the family postponed the interview rather than risk denial and loss of the provisional waiver supporting her return. Brenda Villarruel and Gabino Soriano Castellanos confronted the same clock. His November 5 interview followed years of processing and separation. They postponed after concluding that the approved plans were unavailable or unaffordable, even though his tattoo customers and family were waiting for him in Chicago. Karen Tumlin appeared for the plaintiffs with Esther Sung, Stephen Manning, Nadia Dahab, Sidley Austin lawyers and other partners. The case began with families making immediate decisions about interviews, waivers and separation; it became a challenge to a national entry condition. ###### Eight Named Routes Eight principal insurance routes appeared in the proclamation: employer-sponsored coverage, an unsubsidized individual-market plan, short-term limited-duration insurance, catastrophic coverage, a family member’s plan, specified military coverage, qualifying visitor insurance and Medicare. It also allowed any other plan the health secretary later deemed adequate. Those categories were not interchangeable. Employer plans often began after hiring and a waiting period. Juan Ramon Morales could add his wife to his plan only after she received a Social Security number, an identifier expected after admission rather than before the visa decision. Marketplace coverage presented a different division. The proclamation accepted an unsubsidized Affordable Care Act plan but excluded coverage purchased with premium tax credits. Congress, however, had allowed lawfully present immigrants to use those credits, making the policy’s approved list narrower than the coverage route Congress had made available. Short-term and visitor plans could exclude preexisting conditions or provide limited benefits. Some states restricted short-term policies. Catastrophic plans generally depended on lawful presence and age; Medicare generally required age plus years of United States residence. A formally approved category could therefore remain inaccessible to the person required to prove it. Applicants could demonstrate sufficient financial resources instead of insurance. The proclamation also exempted existing visa holders, nonimmigrant travelers, certain children, and national-interest admissions; it left asylum, refugee status, withholding of removal, and Convention Against Torture protection outside its rule. The litigation concerned applicants subject to the new condition. ###### Families as Evidence Different families exposed different points of failure. Morales’s wife had experienced emergency brain surgery and continued seizures. He was insured, yet his plan accepted her only after she obtained the Social Security number that admission was expected to make possible. Jane Doe #3 was disabled and insured through Medi-Cal. Her husband, an architect and teacher living in Germany, had multiple sclerosis. Their record placed two questions beside each other: whether an approved product could cover his expected care and whether the couple could purchase it before his employment in the United States began. Iris Angelina Castro had left her teaching job when her son became ill and was pregnant while her husband remained in the Dominican Republic. The plans she located were beyond her means or offered incomplete coverage. The missing spouse was also the person expected to contribute emotional, physical and financial support. Blake Doe was a college senior sponsoring his parents. Quotes reached roughly $2,500 a month, his father’s employer offered no insurance and neither parent could join the student plan or Blake’s wife’s employment plan. The proclamation measured available money before the family’s post-entry household could exist. Latino Network documented an organizational injury. Its immigration navigator diverted time from ordinary workshops and referrals, other staff shifted away from early-childhood programs and the organization estimated nearly $14,000 in unbudgeted response costs. A national rule had already changed local work before its effective hour. ###### A Second Test Beside Public Charge Congress had already created an immigrant-visa system organized around family, employment, humanitarian and diversity categories. It also supplied a public-charge inquiry that required consideration of age, health, family status, assets, resources and financial status rather than one insurance condition alone. Proclamation 9945 described its review as separate and independent from other statutes, regulations and proclamations. The plaintiffs argued that this additional gateway displaced Congress’s family priorities, public-charge factors and decision to make premium tax credits available to lawfully present immigrants. Section 1182(f) supplied the government’s answer. It permits the President to suspend or restrict entry after finding that a class would be detrimental to national interests. The government argued that Trump v. Hawaii confirmed broad authority and that overlap with subjects Congress had regulated was insufficient; plaintiffs needed a direct statutory contradiction. The government maintained that Congress had delegated a broad entry power and had never expressly withdrawn it for health-insurance or healthcare-cost restrictions. Under that argument, the policy could stand even if some listed plans were difficult to obtain and the parties disputed its economic premises. A preliminary injunction required likely success on the merits, irreparable harm, and consideration of the equities and public interest. Expert evidence about immigrant healthcare use and the policy’s fit supported the plaintiffs’ request. The resulting preliminary findings addressed interim protection while the litigation proceeded. ###### Before 12:01 A.M. Filed on October 30, the complaint reached the court four days before the announced effective date. On November 2, Judge Michael Simon entered a temporary restraining order hours before implementation. The order preserved the existing visa process while the court considered whether the new entry condition fit within the authority Congress had delegated. On November 26, the court entered a nationwide preliminary injunction. Its likelihood-of-success analysis treated the proclamation as potentially ultra vires and contrary to separation-of-powers limits because it added a second admissibility test beside Congress’s public-charge framework. The court also found that families faced prolonged separation, lost waiver protection, and financial or medical consequences beyond later repair. Applicants still had to satisfy the ordinary visa rules, and consular officers retained authority to decide admissibility. The injunction prevented one additional proclamation-based ground from being applied while the case proceeded. Nationwide scope responded to a nationwide consular instruction and the need for uniform visa administration. The government objected that a court should not impose universal relief before class certification and that the Executive would suffer institutional and financial harm while the policy remained blocked. At the stay stage, Chief Judge Sidney Thomas and Judge Marsha Berzon denied relief; Judge Daniel Bress dissented. Naomi Igra and Esther Sung argued for the plaintiffs, while Tumlin remained counsel. The majority said it was not prejudging the merits appeal. ###### Two Nationwide Subclasses On April 7, 2020, the district court certified two Rule 23(b)(2) subclasses. The U.S. Petitioner Subclass covered sponsors whose relatives were subject to the proclamation and unable to establish qualifying coverage or resources. The Visa Applicant Subclass covered otherwise eligible foreign nationals facing the same condition. To avoid speculation, the court replaced people who “will soon file” with people who currently had or would have an approved or pending petition. The revised definition tied class membership to an approved or pending visa petition. Gabino Soriano Castellanos received his visa before certification, but the court treated the visa-decision injury as transitory. Consular adjudication could end an individual claim before a judge completed Rule 23 review. Its transitory timing still permitted adjudication of the visa-applicant subclass. Standing, commonality, typicality and adequacy all drew government objections, including a claim that differing finances would produce class conflicts. The court found a common legal challenge to one policy, typical exposure to that policy and numerosity reaching tens or hundreds of thousands of people. Under Rule 23(g), the court appointed Tumlin and Sung, Manning, Dahab and Tess Hellgren, Scott Stein and Kevin Fee, and Jesse Bless as class counsel. Those appointments gave the coalition responsibility for representing both nationwide subclasses. ###### Two Appellate Panels In May 2020, the stay panel found no showing of irreparable government harm and credited the record of family separation and other injuries. Judge Bress answered that the proclamation was lawful, the Executive’s institutional interests were substantial and the injunction’s nationwide scope was improper. A different panel heard the merits in September. Tumlin remained counsel for the certified classes, while Tacy Fletcher Flint presented the merits argument. On December 31, Judge Daniel Collins’s majority reversed the preliminary injunction. Trump v. Hawaii supplied the framework: section 1182(f) allowed additional entry restrictions unless they contradicted another statute, and policy overlap with public-charge law or marketplace subsidies was not enough. Judge Collins’s majority emphasized that applicants needed to establish coverage beginning within thirty days; they were not necessarily required to purchase it before entry. It also relied on exceptions, the financial-resources alternative and periodic review as evidence that the proclamation defined and limited its operation. Judge A. Wallace Tashima dissented. He viewed the policy as replacing Congress’s multifactor public-charge inquiry and family protections with an insurance screen, excluding subsidized coverage Congress had authorized and bearing an uncertain relationship to the healthcare costs invoked as justification. ###### Revocation Before Finality After the panel reversal, the plaintiffs sought rehearing en banc. Before that process produced a durable appellate result, President Biden revoked Proclamation 9945 on May 14, 2021. Proclamation 10209 described the restriction as failing to advance United States interests and rejected barring lawful immigrants who lacked significant financial means or insurance from a restrictive list. Agencies were instructed to review rules, guidance and policies developed under the proclamation. On July 16, the Ninth Circuit vacated its December 2020 opinion, remanded with instructions to vacate the November 2019 preliminary injunction as moot and denied rehearing en banc as moot. Because the challenged policy had been revoked, vacatur removed the panel opinion’s precedential force and the injunction’s operative force without resolving the judges’ competing statutory interpretations. A 2026 Ninth Circuit opinion later described the earlier motions-panel ruling as persuasive at most, without binding force. The district docket was terminated in November 2021. ###### Family Reunification and Entry Conditions The named families’ circumstances exposed how the proclamation’s approved routes depended on entry, employment, residence or a Social Security number. As class counsel, Tumlin helped bring those practical barriers into the dispute over the scope of executive entry power. Tumlin remains Founder and Director of Justice Action Center, where her work includes immigrants’ rights, family reunification, DACA, temporary protected status and constitutional litigation. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founder and Director - **Organization:** Justice Action Center - **Practice:** Immigrants’ Rights, Family Reunification - **Location:** Los Angeles, California ##### Contact - **Organization:** Justice Action Center - **Address:** P.O. Box 27280, Los Angeles, California 90027 - **Website:** justiceactioncenter.org ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Karen Tumlin Immigrants’ Rights · Family Reunification > “My vision for Justice Action Center is to bring fierce courtroom advocacy to currently unseen problems… ##### The Coverage That Began After Entry Karen Tumlin and her co-counsel challenged an insurance requirement at the consular interview. The families they represented faced a problem the approved list could not resolve: coverage often depended on the arrival, job, residence, enrollment or Social Security number still ahead of them. On October 30, 2019, Karen Tumlin and a coalition of lawyers filed a challenge to a new condition on immigrant visas. They had four days before it was scheduled to take effect. Tumlin and Esther Sung of Justice Action Center joined Stephen Manning and Nadia Dahab of Innovation Law Lab, Sidley Austin lawyers and other partners in representing families facing decisions about interviews, waivers and separation. President Trump had issued Proclamation 9945 on October 4. Beginning at 12:01 a.m. on November 3, specified immigrant-visa applicants would have to satisfy a consular officer that approved health insurance would cover them within thirty days after entry, or that they could pay reasonably foreseeable medical costs. The proof was due before the visa could issue, although the coverage itself could begin after arrival. John Doe #1 relied on his wife to care for him and their son. He was disabled and had undergone heart surgery. If her November 6 interview in Mexico ended in a visa denial and revocation of the provisional waiver supporting her return, he faced losing that care. On November 1, the family asked to postpone the interview. Brenda Villarruel and Gabino Soriano Castellanos postponed his November 5 interview as well. Years of processing and separation had brought them close to a decision, but the approved insurance plans appeared unavailable or unaffordable. His family and tattoo customers were waiting for him in Chicago. ###### Eight Named Routes The proclamation named eight principal forms of coverage: an employer-sponsored plan, an unsubsidized individual-market plan, short-term limited-duration insurance, catastrophic coverage, a family member’s plan, specified military coverage, qualifying visitor insurance and Medicare. It also permitted other plans the health secretary deemed adequate. Employer coverage depended on getting a job and completing any waiting period. Juan Ramon Morales already had insurance, but his plan required a Social Security number before it could add his wife. Her immigrant visa would make that next step possible; he could obtain no guarantee that coverage would begin within thirty days. She had undergone emergency brain surgery and continued to suffer seizures, making the price and exclusions of alternative plans consequential. The proclamation accepted an unsubsidized Affordable Care Act plan while excluding coverage purchased with premium tax credits. Congress had expressly made those credits available to lawfully present immigrants. A family could therefore qualify for assistance buying insurance that would not satisfy the new entry condition. Short-term and visitor policies could exclude preexisting conditions or limit benefits. Some states restricted short-term coverage. Catastrophic plans generally depended on lawful presence and age; Medicare generally required age and years of United States residence. Each category brought its own eligibility rules to an interview held before admission. Applicants with sufficient financial resources could qualify without insurance. Existing visa holders, nonimmigrant travelers, certain children and national-interest admissions were exempt; asylum, refugee status, withholding of removal and Convention Against Torture protection were outside the rule. Tumlin and her co-counsel represented applicants who remained subject to the condition and could not establish either qualifying coverage or the necessary resources. ###### The Care a Spouse Would Provide For Jane Doe #3, insurance and reunion were inseparable. She was disabled and covered by Medi-Cal; her husband, an architect and teacher in Germany, had multiple sclerosis. His treatment was expensive, and neither his employment in the United States nor coverage within thirty days could be assured before he arrived. The couple could not afford to bridge that uncertainty with cash or an approved policy. Iris Angelina Castro had left her teaching job when her son became ill. Pregnant while her husband remained in the Dominican Republic, she contacted insurers and received quotes she could not afford for plans that offered incomplete coverage. The husband awaiting admission was also the person she needed for emotional, physical and financial support. Blake Doe, a college senior sponsoring his parents, investigated insurance with his attorney. Premium quotes were $2,500 or more a month. His father’s employer offered no insurance, and neither parent could join Blake’s student plan or his wife’s employment plan. His parents already lived in Oregon; the obstacle arose in securing immigrant visas through the consular process. The effects also reached Latino Network, a plaintiff alongside the families. Its immigration navigator postponed intake interviews, workshops and ordinary referrals to answer questions about the proclamation. Other staff moved away from early-childhood programs, and the organization anticipated nearly $14,000 in unbudgeted research and training costs. The lawyers could show harm already occurring while the new rule was still awaiting its effective date. ###### A Second Test Beside Public Charge Tumlin and her colleagues challenged the authority to impose this additional condition. Congress had organized immigrant visas around family, employment, humanitarian and diversity categories. Its public-charge inquiry required consideration of age, health, family status, assets, resources, financial status, education and skills. The plaintiffs argued that a separate insurance requirement displaced those choices, including Congress’s provision of premium tax credits. The proclamation expressly made its review separate and independent from other statutes, regulations and proclamations. The government defended that approach under section 1182(f), which authorizes the President to suspend or restrict entry after finding that a class would be detrimental to United States interests. It relied on Trump v. Hawaii: regulating a subject Congress had addressed was insufficient to invalidate a restriction; the plaintiffs needed to establish a direct statutory contradiction. On the government’s reading, Congress had delegated broad entry authority without expressly withdrawing it for health-insurance or healthcare-cost restrictions. Difficulty obtaining a listed plan, or disagreement with the policy’s economic premises, would not by itself defeat that authority. For immediate protection, the plaintiffs also had to establish likely success on the merits and irreparable harm, with the equities and public interest favoring an injunction. They submitted expert evidence about immigrant healthcare use and whether the restriction addressed the costs offered to justify it. The family declarations supplied the consequences of allowing the policy to operate while those questions were litigated. ###### Before 12:01 A.M. Judge Michael Simon entered a temporary restraining order on November 2, hours before the proclamation was to take effect. On November 26, he issued a nationwide preliminary injunction. His analysis found likely success in the challenge to presidential authority and separation of powers: the new condition added an admissibility test beside Congress’s public-charge framework. The court also credited the prospect of prolonged family separation, lost waiver protection and financial or medical harm that later relief could not repair. During the litigation, consular officers would continue deciding admissibility under the ordinary visa rules, without applying the proclamation’s additional insurance condition. The nationwide order addressed a consular instruction operating across the visa system and the need for uniform administration. The government objected to universal relief before class certification and asserted institutional and financial harm from keeping its policy on hold. For Tumlin’s team, preserving emergency protection now meant defending both the injunction and the breadth of the representation. ###### Two Nationwide Subclasses The lawyers sought certification of two subclasses under Rule 23(b)(2): sponsors in the United States and otherwise eligible foreign visa applicants whose applications were subject to the proclamation. Both definitions turned on inability to demonstrate qualifying coverage or resources to the consular officer’s satisfaction. Soriano Castellanos received his visa at a rescheduled interview on January 28, 2020. The government argued that his individual relief left the Visa Applicant Subclass without a representative. In their March 9 surreply, the plaintiffs’ lawyers invoked the exception for claims too transitory to receive class review before ending. Simon agreed: a consular interview and visa decision could resolve an individual’s claim before the court ruled on certification, while the same condition continued to confront others. On April 7, Simon certified both nationwide subclasses. He narrowed the sponsor definition by replacing people who “will soon file” a petition with people who currently had or would have an approved or pending petition. Membership would turn on an actual petition to sponsor a family member. The government’s objections to standing, commonality, typicality and adequacy included the contention that different financial circumstances would create conflicts. The court found a common challenge to one policy and claims typical of the people it affected. With the proclamation expected to reach tens or hundreds of thousands of immigrants, the record also supported the required showing that joining every class member individually would be impracticable. Under Rule 23(g), the court appointed Tumlin and Sung, Manning, Dahab and Tess Hellgren, Scott Stein and Kevin Fee, and Jesse Bless as class counsel. Tumlin’s work now carried a formal responsibility to the two nationwide subclasses as well as the named families. ###### Two Appellate Panels In May 2020, Chief Judge Sidney Thomas and Judge Marsha Berzon denied the government’s request to stay the injunction. They found no showing of irreparable government harm and credited the injuries to families and others. Judge Daniel Bress dissented, defending the proclamation’s legality and the Executive’s institutional interests and objecting to nationwide relief. Naomi Igra and Esther Sung argued for the plaintiffs; Tumlin continued on the appellate team. A different panel heard the merits in September, with Tacy Fletcher Flint presenting the argument for the classes. On December 31, Judge Daniel Collins’s majority reversed the preliminary injunction. Applying Trump v. Hawaii, it concluded that section 1182(f) permitted additional entry restrictions and that overlap with public-charge law or marketplace subsidies did not establish a statutory contradiction. The majority emphasized that applicants could establish coverage beginning within thirty days without necessarily purchasing it before entry. The financial-resources alternative, exceptions and periodic review also mattered to its assessment of the proclamation’s reach and limits. Judge A. Wallace Tashima dissented. He viewed the insurance condition as overriding Congress’s multifactor public-charge inquiry and family protections, excluding subsidized coverage Congress had authorized, and bearing an uncertain relationship to the healthcare costs invoked to support it. ###### Revocation Before Finality The plaintiffs sought rehearing en banc. While that request was pending, President Biden revoked Proclamation 9945 on May 14, 2021. His Proclamation 10209 said the restriction did not advance United States interests and rejected excluding lawful immigrants who lacked substantial financial means or insurance from a restrictive list. Agencies were directed to review the rules, guidance and policies developed under it. The plaintiffs then sought vacatur of the appellate opinion. On July 16, the Ninth Circuit vacated its December decision, remanded with instructions to vacate the November 2019 preliminary injunction as moot, and denied rehearing en banc as moot. Revocation had ended the challenged policy; vacatur removed the merits opinion’s precedential force and required the injunction to be set aside. The district docket was terminated in November 2021. In 2026, the Ninth Circuit clarified that vacating the merits opinion had not revived the earlier stay ruling as binding authority. The policy had ended without a surviving merits precedent resolving the judges’ competing interpretations of presidential power. ###### Who May Set the Conditions Tumlin remains Founder and Director of Justice Action Center, working on immigrants’ rights, family reunification, DACA, temporary protected status and constitutional litigation. In Doe #1, she and her co-counsel brought employers’ enrollment rules and families’ medical needs into a national dispute over who could set the conditions for a family’s reunion. Responding to a Supreme Court decision on birthright citizenship in June 2026, she made her view of presidential limits explicit: “presidents do not get to rewrite the Constitution or decide which babies count as American.” ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founder and Director - **Organization:** Justice Action Center - **Practice:** Immigrants’ Rights, Family Reunification - **Location:** Los Angeles, California ##### Contact - **Organization:** Justice Action Center - **Address:** P.O. Box 27280, Los Angeles, California 90027 - **Website:** justiceactioncenter.org --- ## 9. Hina Shamsi — `900005351` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **MEDIUM** — Manifest history contains at least one substantive correction/addition. - **Before hash:** `2e48c90da2ecfa366505eed7324d1869bc0be818274fcd7b8d8a8c1fa9d84461` - **After/current hash:** `38536c2a3563eadf21d44b1877383b008df5006359808954d119bb6ac70c7b2a` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005463 (2026-09-11 17:04:11 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 48**: Remove the routine no-merits disclaimer after certiorari denial while retaining the date, disposition, and continuing advocacy. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 50**: State the separate lawsuit's document-release result directly while removing the appended warning about the full report. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 53**: Retain the later appellate holding and constitutional ground while removing the redundant statement about an unresolved alternative ground. - `rewrite` — **Opening and documentary chronology**: Bring Shamsi's documented reading of the final-transfer letter and named co-counsel into the opening before reconstructing the 2009 agreement. - `rewrite` — **Agency control, court reasoning and later disclosure proceedings**: Consolidate repeated control explanations while retaining the statutory threshold, competing institutional accounts, exemptions and distinct later lawsuits. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **An Oath in a Familiar Courthouse**: Add verified prior legal roles, Columbia teaching and Shamsi's own naturalization recollection, ending with her short first-person return-to-work quotation. ### BEFORE #### Hina Shamsi National Security · Human Rights · Transparency > “…government agencies have copies and must use them to ensure that a program of inhuman and unlawful cruelty never happens again. ##### The Report in Executive Hands Copies of the Senate’s 6,963-page torture report sat inside the White House, CIA, Defense, Justice, and State so officials could use the study broadly and prevent repetition. Hina Shamsi argued that official possession and authorized use made those copies agency records under FOIA. The D.C. Circuit held that a 2009 control clause survived the transfer, leaving executive custody without disclosure authority. In 2009, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence began its detention-and-interrogation study. Committee staff reviewed millions of pages of CIA material and produced a classified full report running 6,963 pages, accompanied by an executive summary, findings, conclusions, and minority views. On December 9, 2014, the public received the declassified executive summary, findings, conclusions and minority views. The full study remained classified, including thousands of additional pages about the evidence, agency representations, internal disagreements and the history of the CIA program. Copies of the full report then entered the Executive Branch. The President, CIA, Department of Defense, Department of Justice, and Department of State each received the Senate’s work for use inside institutions responsible for intelligence policy, detention, law, diplomacy, and oversight. Chair Dianne Feinstein asked that the report be used broadly enough to prevent repetition. Her transmittal letter contemplated CIA training, future guidelines, and Executive Branch procedures, inviting the President to encourage use as he saw fit. From those instructions came the case Hina Shamsi eventually argued. Agencies possessed the report for official purposes and could learn from it, yet they rejected a Freedom of Information Act request on the ground that the Senate still controlled every copy. ###### The Agreement in the Reading Room Unusual conditions governed the report from the beginning. Senate investigators needed access to highly classified CIA records, including sensitive identities and operational locations. The Committee and agency negotiated an interbranch arrangement before the review could proceed. CIA supplied a secure electronic reading room and a segregated network drive. Senators and staff could examine agency material there while creating their own notes, drafts, recommendations, and reports inside a protected technical environment. A June 2, 2009 letter provided that Committee-generated materials remained congressional records in their entirety, with disposition and control lying exclusively with the Committee even after completion of the review. That agreement directed CIA to treat the materials as congressional rather than agency records. Requests for access would trigger notice to the Committee, preserving the Senate’s authority over disclosure while CIA safeguarded the underlying classified environment. For the government, that division protected congressional oversight itself. Automatic FOIA conversion whenever Congress shared sensitive work with an agency could force legislators to choose between confidential exchange and effective supervision of the Executive Branch. ###### Draft, Final, and Public In December 2012, the Committee approved an initial version and sent a limited number of copies to designated Executive Branch officials for comments and proposed edits. The Senate retained authority to accept, reject, and incorporate those responses. By April 2014, an updated study was ready. The Committee voted to seek declassification and public release of the executive summary, findings, and conclusions, while reserving the full report for later treatment. Further editing continued through the year. On December 9, the public package appeared as Senate Report 113-288. Its release gave the country a substantial record while leaving the complete evidentiary account inside classified systems. One day later, Feinstein sent the completed full report to executive officials without repeating the earlier restrictions and urged broad institutional use, including training and policy development. Control then became contested within the Senate. Incoming Chair Richard Burr requested the return of Executive Branch copies in January 2015. Feinstein, by then vice chair, asked the President to retain the 6,963-page report in executive systems for cleared officials. ###### When Possession Becomes a Record FOIA supplies judicial authority only over agency records improperly withheld. That threshold comes before classification and other exemptions. Supreme Court doctrine asks first whether the agency created or obtained the material and then whether it controlled the material when the request arrived. Ordinary control analysis considers four features: the creator’s intent, the agency’s ability to use and dispose of the material, the extent of staff reliance, and integration into agency files. Physical possession satisfies only part of that inquiry. Congress falls outside FOIA’s definition of agency. When legislative documents enter the Executive Branch, appellate doctrine gives clear congressional control intent special force, protecting both separation of powers and the legislature’s authority to maintain confidential records. A clear congressional reservation can make creator intent and executive disposition authority effectively decisive. An agency may hold a document, consult it, and use it internally while lacking the legal power that turns custody into FOIA control. Authority, rather than location, governed the litigation. The same paper could sit in an agency vault, inform official work, and remain beyond FOIA if the Senate had preserved the final power to release, return, integrate, or destroy it. ###### Shamsi’s Theory of Transfer Shamsi argued the appeal before the D.C. Circuit on March 17, 2016. She had signed the opening brief, with Arthur Spitzer and Ashley Gorski as co-counsel. Together they framed the dispute around the final report rather than preliminary Senate work product. In the ACLU’s reading, the 2009 letter governed an investigation conducted inside a CIA facility. Its restrictions protected notes and drafts created on the segregated drive, while the final report was later completed in Senate workspace and transmitted as a finished institutional product. For the ACLU, December 2014 supplied the operative intent. The transmittal imposed no renewed public-disclosure restriction, encouraged use throughout the Executive Branch, and placed training, guidelines, and future procedures within executive discretion. Words such as broadly and as you see fit carried practical weight. If agencies could circulate the study for official duties, rely on it, and preserve it in their systems, Shamsi argued, the Senate had relinquished the exclusive control necessary to keep those copies congressional. Agency-record status also left FOIA’s exemptions intact. Classification could protect exempt passages after agency processing and judicial review. The threshold ruling would determine whether the request entered that system and whether any reasonably segregable, nonexempt portions required release. ###### The Senate’s Reservation Congress’s statutory exclusion anchored the government’s answer. A requester unable to compel a Senate committee directly, it argued, should not obtain the same legislative document indirectly because an executive agency happened to possess a copy. The 2009 letter covered notes, documents, draft and final recommendations, reports, and other Committee materials, assigning disposition and control to the Senate even after the review ended. A separate declassification vote reinforced the distinction. The Committee selected the executive summary, findings, and conclusions for public release. The full report received no comparable vote, and internal distribution remained different from authority to disclose it outside government. On that theory, executive officials acted as authorized users rather than owners. The court’s trustee analogy captured the division: agencies could consult the material for approved purposes while Congress retained the decisive power over public access and final disposition. Senator John D. Rockefeller IV offered a different institutional account. After fourteen years on the Committee and direct involvement in the investigation, he told the court that the 2009 limits served the evidence-gathering phase and that the final transfer was meant to let agencies assume control and learn from the report. ###### The Court Reads 2009 Forward Senior Judge Harry Edwards wrote the unanimous appellate opinion on May 13, 2016. The court affirmed dismissal, holding that the full report remained a congressional document outside FOIA despite lawful Executive Branch possession. Specificity drove the panel’s reading of the 2009 letter. Its reference to final reports, entire congressional records, and control after completion covered the finished study even though drafting later moved to Capitol Hill. Feinstein’s 2014 instructions authorized internal use without surrendering disclosure authority. Broad circulation for training and policy could coexist with a continuing congressional reservation over public dissemination. Burr’s return request received no weight because it followed the FOIA request and the filing of suit. That exclusion still left the earlier agreement sufficient, so the post hoc letter neither created control nor rescued the ACLU’s transfer theory. A separate Panetta Review claim ended on deliberative-process grounds after the district court accepted CIA evidence that the review consisted of unfinished draft documents. That issue formed no part of Shamsi’s appeal concerning the Senate report. ###### Preservation and Disclosure Rehearing ended in July 2016 at both the panel and en banc stages. Shamsi then served as Supreme Court counsel of record with Ashley Gorski, Steven R. Shapiro, and Arthur Spitzer, asking when congressional material transferred for official executive use becomes an agency record. The Supreme Court denied certiorari on April 24, 2017, without deciding the merits. Shamsi continued to urge agencies holding the report to use it to prevent a repetition of the conduct it documented. Preservation followed a different path from disclosure. President Barack Obama placed one copy under the Presidential Records Act. Guantánamo litigation orders preserved additional copies through the Defense Department and a federal court, while most other executive agencies returned theirs at Burr’s request. A separate ACLU lawsuit sought records referenced in or implicated by the public Senate report. CIA released more than fifty documents in 2016, expanding the underlying record while the full Committee study remained outside the remedy won in that distinct case. ###### The Legislative Privilege Journalist Shawn Musgrave later pursued the report directly from the Senate committee and its chair under a common-law right of access. The district court dismissed, confronting sovereign immunity, legislative privilege, and whether courts may compel Congress to release its own investigative work. In June 2024, the appellate court affirmed on a narrower ground. The Speech or Debate Clause’s nondisclosure privilege barred discovery and judicially compelled release of the legislative document; the panel left the separate sovereign-immunity question unresolved. The Senate’s publication page continues to make the December 2014 public package available. In January 2025, Senator Ron Wyden asked the prospective Director of National Intelligence whether she would support declassification of the full study, returning the question of public access to the political branches. Shamsi directs the ACLU National Security Project. In the report litigation, she and her co-counsel separated the agencies’ authority to consult the study from the Senate’s claimed power to control its release. The case turned on the letters that accompanied its creation and transfer. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Director, National Security Project - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Practice:** National Security, Human Rights, Transparency - **Location:** New York, New York ##### Contact - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Address:** 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York, New York 10004 - **Website:** aclu.org ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Hina Shamsi National Security · Human Rights · Transparency > “…government agencies have copies and must use them to ensure that a program of inhuman and unlawful cruelty never happens again. ##### The Report in Executive Hands Hina Shamsi asked the D.C. Circuit to consider what changed when the Senate sent its full torture report to executive agencies for use in training and policy. The agencies had lawful copies. Whether those copies could be requested under FOIA depended on the authority that accompanied them. When Hina Shamsi argued before the D.C. Circuit on March 17, 2016, she directed the dispute toward the Senate’s finished report and the instructions for using it. The 6,963-page study had been sent to the President and to the CIA, Defense, Justice and State Departments. Senator Dianne Feinstein wanted officials to learn from it and prevent the conduct it described from recurring. In her December 10, 2014 letter to President Barack Obama, Feinstein encouraged use of the report “as broadly as appropriate” and contemplated CIA training programs, future guidelines and procedures for executive employees, “as you see fit.” Shamsi had signed the ACLU’s opening brief with Arthur Spitzer and Ashley Gorski as co-counsel. Their argument gave those instructions legal significance: the Senate had delivered a completed institutional product for executive use, and the agencies’ copies had become agency records. The government relied on an earlier letter, written before the investigation began. It said the Senate had reserved exclusive control over the committee’s work. Shamsi and her colleagues disputed both the reach of that original agreement and its application after the final transfer. The case required the judges to read the two letters together. ###### A Place to Investigate the CIA The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence began its detention-and-interrogation study in 2009. Committee staff needed to examine millions of pages of CIA records containing highly classified information, including sensitive identities and operational locations. Before the review could proceed, the committee and the agency negotiated where the work would be done and who would control what investigators produced. The CIA supplied a secure electronic reading room and a segregated network drive. Senators and staff could examine agency records there while preparing notes, drafts, recommendations and reports. A June 2, 2009 letter provided that committee-generated materials remained congressional records in their entirety. Their disposition and control would lie exclusively with the committee, even after its review was complete. The CIA was to safeguard those materials as congressional records and notify the committee of outside requests for access. The arrangement protected the Senate’s work inside the agency it was investigating. For the government, it also served a broader oversight interest: Congress needed to exchange confidential material with agencies without automatically making that material subject to FOIA. Drafting eventually moved from the CIA’s segregated drive to the committee’s secure workspace at the Capitol. Shamsi’s team read the 2009 agreement as protecting work product kept at the CIA facility. In their view, it did not settle the status of a final report completed elsewhere and later delivered to executive officials for their own institutional purposes. ###### From a Draft for Comment to a Study for Use In December 2012, the committee approved an initial version and sent a limited number of copies to designated executive officials for comments and proposed edits. The Senate could accept, reject or incorporate their responses. By April 2014, it had approved an updated study and voted to seek declassification and public release of the executive summary, findings and conclusions. The full report was reserved for later treatment. Editing continued through the year. On December 9, 2014, the declassified public package appeared as Senate Report 113-288, including the executive summary, findings, conclusions and minority views. The full study remained classified. Its thousands of additional pages set out the evidence, agency representations, internal disagreements and history of the CIA program in greater detail. The next day’s transmittal to the President did not repeat the earlier restrictions. It urged broad use of the completed report within institutions responsible for intelligence policy, detention, law, diplomacy and oversight. Shamsi and her co-counsel contrasted that permission with the limited invitation to comment on a draft in 2012. Officials could now circulate the study for their duties, rely on it and keep it in their systems, they argued; those were powers relevant to control. Senator John D. Rockefeller IV supported that reading in an amicus brief. He had served on the committee for fourteen years and had worked directly on the investigation, the negotiations for access and the production of the report. He described the 2009 limits as protections needed during evidence gathering. The final transfer, in his account, was intended to let executive agencies assume control and learn from the completed work. A change in committee leadership produced conflicting instructions. In January 2015, the new chair, Richard Burr, asked for the executive copies to be returned. Feinstein, now vice chair, urged the President to retain the full report in executive systems where appropriately cleared officials could consult it. ###### What an Agency Record Would Permit The Freedom of Information Act gives courts authority to order production of agency records that have been improperly withheld. Congress is excluded from the statute’s definition of an agency. A Senate document therefore does not enter the FOIA system simply because an executive agency receives a copy. Under Supreme Court doctrine, an agency must have created or obtained the material and controlled it when the request was made. The ordinary control inquiry considers the creator’s intent, the agency’s ability to use and dispose of the record, staff reliance on it, and its integration into agency files. With congressional documents, a clear reservation of control receives special weight: the creator’s intent and the recipient’s authority can become decisive. The agencies unquestionably possessed the report for official purposes. They rejected the ACLU’s request because, they said, possession and authorized use had not given them the Senate’s power over disclosure and final disposition. The government warned that a requester could otherwise obtain a legislative document indirectly from an agency when FOIA provided no way to compel the committee itself. Shamsi’s argument would have brought the copies into FOIA processing. It would not have required the immediate release of every classified page. Exemptions could still protect covered material, subject to processing and judicial review; reasonably segregable, nonexempt portions would have to be considered for release. She and her colleagues were contesting the threshold that kept the report outside that process altogether. ###### The Earlier Letter Survives On May 13, 2016, the D.C. Circuit affirmed dismissal in a unanimous opinion by Senior Judge Harry Edwards. The court held that the full report remained a congressional document outside FOIA. Its analysis began with the specificity of the 2009 agreement: the reservation covered notes, documents, draft and final recommendations, reports and other committee materials, and continued after the investigation ended. For the panel, that language reached the finished study even though drafting had moved to Capitol Hill. The 2014 instructions permitted broad internal use without surrendering the Senate’s authority over public dissemination. The agencies could consult the report for training and policy while holding it, in the analogy the court drew from earlier cases, as trustees for Congress. Having a copy did not give them unrestricted power to release it, integrate it into their records, return it or otherwise dispose of it as their own. The committee’s separate declassification decision reinforced that conclusion. It had selected the executive summary, findings and conclusions for public release; there had been no comparable decision for the full report. Rockefeller’s account of the intended transfer and the ACLU’s reading of Feinstein’s instructions did not displace the court’s interpretation of the written reservation. Burr’s later request for the copies played no part in the holding. Because his letter came after the FOIA request and the filing of suit, the court gave it no weight as evidence of congressional control. The earlier agreement was sufficient. A separate claim concerning the CIA’s Panetta Review had ended in the district court on deliberative-process grounds. The court accepted CIA evidence that the review consisted of unfinished drafts. Shamsi’s appeal concerned the Senate report; it did not include that separate claim. ###### Copies Preserved, Other Records Released Panel and en banc rehearing ended in July 2016. Shamsi then served as Supreme Court counsel of record with Ashley Gorski, Steven R. Shapiro and Arthur Spitzer. They asked when congressional material transferred for official executive use becomes an agency record. The Supreme Court denied review on April 24, 2017, leaving the appellate judgment in place without ruling on the merits. Shamsi continued to urge the agencies holding copies to use them to prevent a repetition of the conduct documented. Preserving the report required a different set of decisions. President Obama placed a copy among his records under the Presidential Records Act. Orders in Guantánamo litigation preserved additional copies through the Defense Department and a federal court. Most other executive agencies returned theirs at Burr’s request. Retaining those copies did not make them publicly available. Other ACLU litigation did produce additional records. A separate suit sought documents referenced in or implicated by the public Senate report, and the CIA released more than fifty in 2016. Those disclosures expanded the underlying evidence available to readers; they did not amount to release of the committee’s full study. Journalist Shawn Musgrave later sought the report directly from the Senate committee and its chair under a common-law right of access. That was a separate lawsuit, with different parties and counsel. The district court dismissed it on sovereign-immunity and legislative-privilege grounds. On June 18, 2024, the D.C. Circuit affirmed under the Speech or Debate Clause’s nondisclosure privilege, which barred the requested discovery and judicially compelled release. The appellate court did not decide the separate sovereign-immunity question. That holding concerned what a court could compel. It did not make voluntary congressional release impossible. The Senate’s publication page continues to provide the December 2014 public package. At a January 2025 nomination hearing, Senator Ron Wyden asked the prospective Director of National Intelligence whether she would support declassification of the full study. ###### An Oath in a Familiar Courthouse Shamsi directs the ACLU’s National Security Project, working where domestic constitutional protections meet international human rights and humanitarian law. Before taking that role, she had worked at Cleary Gottlieb, Human Rights First and the ACLU, and as a senior adviser to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions. At Columbia Law School, she teaches international human rights advocacy, examining the institutions, tools and strategies through which lawyers seek to enforce those protections. In a February 2017 essay written while the report petition was still pending, Shamsi recalled returning from Dominica, where she had attended meetings and depositions in a separate case for clients alleging CIA torture. The following morning, before her naturalization ceremony, she reread Langston Hughes’s poem Let America Be America Again. She took the citizenship oath in a New York federal courthouse where she and her colleagues had argued cases for citizens and noncitizens. “I’d planned to take the rest of the day off to celebrate, but that afternoon, I went back to work,” she wrote. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Director, National Security Project - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Practice:** National Security, Human Rights, Transparency - **Location:** New York, New York ##### Contact - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Address:** 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York, New York 10004 - **Website:** aclu.org --- ## 10. Ben Wizner — `900005352` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `e118115046a81b1f5fcb52859b1d698fc929fc76ae5c525c9b11364c7c9158ad` - **After/current hash:** `b7cd879c105da4b4c4e1d8ab375b0c9c72db938a78a47fe56be03befc2456deb` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005462 (2026-09-11 16:59:31 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 13**: Keep the allegations expressly attributed to the complaint and remove the appended warning that they did not reach trial findings. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 14**: State the actual habeas filing rule and disposition directly instead of appending a no-merits qualification. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 20**: Preserve the criminal conviction and the civil suit's separate purpose through affirmative descriptions of each proceeding. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 38**: State the dismissal and allocation of remedial authority directly without repeating the disclaimer about absent factfinding. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 50**: Remove the generic no-merits warning while retaining the exact certiorari disposition and effect on the appellate judgment. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 55**: Close on the petition's concrete remedial argument and nominal demand instead of repeating the qualification about denied review. - `rewrite` — **Title, deck and petition opening**: Show the precise claims Wizner and his co-counsel carried forward and omitted, using the primary petition and actual six respondents. - `rewrite` — **Custody chronology and Fourth Circuit reasoning**: Consolidate repeated habeas explanation and preserve the different work of constitutional damages, RFRA and prospective relief. - `rewrite` — **Habeas merits and communication passages**: Correct the overbroad original merits statement and qualify incommunicado wording using the actual petition's brief message to his mother. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Narrowed petition and final professional formation**: Add the exact petition quotation, state-secrets response, named respondents, docket dates and Wizner's own Reinhardt clerkship recollection. ### BEFORE #### Ben Wizner Speech · Privacy · Constitutional Litigation > “If the law does not protect Jose Padilla … it protects no one. ##### One Dollar from Each Defendant José Padilla sought one dollar from each official he blamed for policies behind his military detention and alleged mistreatment. Before any factfinder tested the complaint, a court had to decide whether a constitutional damages action existed. Ben Wizner argued that habeas could challenge custody while leaving completed treatment unanswered. The Fourth Circuit assigned creation of the requested remedy to Congress. $1 from each individual defendant was the nominal remedy Jose Padilla and his mother, Estela Lebron, requested in their South Carolina civil action. They also sought declarations and an injunction. The demand asked a federal court to hold named federal officials personally answerable for policies and commands alleged to have produced unconstitutional military detention and mistreatment. Nominal damages would establish responsibility without attempting to measure the harm in money. Filed on February 9, 2007, after Padilla had left military custody, the suit concerned treatment at the Naval Consolidated Brig in South Carolina. The allegations included isolation, coercive interrogation, deprivation, threats, and interference with religion and access to information. Sixty-one people appeared in the initial complaint. By the appeal, Padilla had dismissed claims against the lawyers, medical professionals, interrogators, and guards who dealt most directly with his custody. Seven defendants remained: four senior Defense policymakers, two former brig commanders, and the serving Defense Secretary for prospective relief. The remaining defendants placed detention policy and the military chain of command before the courts. Before discovery could test attribution, causation or the pleaded account of treatment, the judiciary had to decide whether a damages cause of action existed. ###### Civilian Custody Becomes Military Custody Padilla arrived at Chicago’s O’Hare airport on May 8, 2002 and entered federal civilian custody under a material-witness warrant. He received appointed counsel and challenged the warrant in the Southern District of New York. On June 9, President George W. Bush designated him an enemy combatant and directed the Secretary of Defense to detain him. Padilla moved from the civilian system to the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, where military officials controlled his confinement and interrogation. From June 2002 until March 2004, Padilla remained incommunicado from counsel, family, and friends. The later civil complaint alleged that this period included a systematic program of abusive conditions and coercive techniques; those allegations never reached trial findings in the damages case. Procedure ended the first Supreme Court proceeding. Rumsfeld v. Padilla held in 2004 that a core habeas petition normally must name the immediate custodian and be filed in the district of confinement. The Court expressly left the legality of Padilla’s military detention unresolved. Later, the government transferred Padilla to civilian custody for criminal prosecution, ending the military detention before a final habeas merits judgment. The civil action did different work: it sought retrospective recognition and damages for past conduct rather than release from present custody. ###### Habeas and the Retrospective Gap Habeas corpus asks whether the government may continue holding a person. It can produce release, a hearing, or a judicial test of detention authority while custody remains live. That made habeas central to the Fourth Circuit’s account of available process. Padilla’s habeas proceedings reached five courts. The Fourth Circuit concluded that he had extensive opportunities to challenge the legal basis for military detention. Wizner and his co-counsel argued that habeas could examine custody but supplied no compensation or personal judgment for completed treatment. During the period of the most serious alleged mistreatment, the petition argued, Padilla lacked ordinary communication with counsel. Civilian prosecution supplied another distinct process. It adjudicated criminal charges and resulted in a conviction; it neither determined whether conditions at the brig violated the Constitution nor imposed civil responsibility on officials who designed or implemented detention policy. The one-dollar request occupied that remaining space. Its practical value lay in forcing the threshold left unanswered by release and prosecution: whether a federal court could recognize a retrospective constitutional remedy against the individual officials named. ###### What Bivens Had to Supply Congress has created a damages action against state and local officials through 42 U.S.C. § 1983. No comparably general statute authorizes constitutional damages against federal officers, so Padilla relied on Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents. Bivens recognized an implied Fourth Amendment damages action in 1971. The Supreme Court later recognized one Fifth Amendment employment-discrimination context and one Eighth Amendment federal-prison medical-care context. The question in Padilla was whether the remedy reached a materially different setting. Alongside the constitutional theories stood a claim under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. For the constitutional claims, the plaintiffs invoked Bivens and Carlson v. Green, arguing that alleged mistreatment of a person in federal custody belonged within an established judicial function rather than beyond it. Defendants characterized the action as a new national-security and military-policy context. A suit against senior officials, they argued, would make courts design a remedial regime Congress had declined to enact and expose sensitive command decisions, classified sources, and policymaking deliberations to civil litigation. At the district court, both threshold defenses prevailed. The judge found no Bivens cause of action, held the defendants protected by qualified immunity on the pleaded constitutional and statutory claims, and rejected prospective relief for lack of standing. ###### Special Factors Before the Facts Wizner argued the appeal on October 26, 2011. Alexander Abdo joined the ACLU briefing; Jonathan Freiman, Hope Metcalf, and Tahlia Townsend represented the Yale Lowenstein clinic team; Michael O’Connell served as South Carolina counsel. A unanimous Fourth Circuit panel affirmed on January 23, 2012. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote for Judges Diana Gribbon Motz and Allyson Kay Duncan. The opinion treated the Bivens inquiry as a question about institutional authority before it became a judgment about the truth of the complaint. Separation of powers came first. The Constitution assigns military regulation to Congress and command responsibility to the President. Congress had legislated repeatedly about detainee treatment and military process while omitting the personal damages action Padilla requested. Judicial administrability came second. The panel anticipated discovery into the chain of command, high-level policy formation, classified intelligence, interrogation design, and decisions extending across military operations. It regarded Congress as better equipped to weigh those systemic consequences. Factfinding therefore never began. Bivens, the court emphasized, attaches only after a judicial decision that courts rather than Congress should create a remedy for that setting; a pleaded constitutional injury alone supplies no automatic damages action. ###### The Alternative the Court Accepted Habeas connected the structural concerns to an alternative process. Padilla’s cases had tested detention authority through district courts, two courts of appeals, and the Supreme Court, even though the military-to-civilian transfer ended the final live controversy. The court acknowledged the different relief available through habeas and nominal damages, but treated the existing habeas process as a reason against creating a separate damages action. The panel framed its holding narrowly: the Constitution itself posed no categorical bar, while Congress retained authority to create a damages remedy after considering national-security, military, and institutional consequences. Without that authorization, the court declined to proceed. Dismissal at the cause-of-action stage meant the constitutional claims ended without discovery, an evidentiary hearing, or adjudicated findings about the pleaded conditions of military confinement. The panel expressly left qualified immunity undecided for the Bivens claims. Special factors had already removed the constitutional damages action, ending that branch before any inquiry into whether each constitutional right was clearly established. ###### Two Different Immunity Questions RFRA followed another route. Padilla alleged that officials removed religious materials and denied means of observing prayer times and holidays, substantially burdening religious exercise during military detention. RFRA supplied its own statutory text, eliminating any need for an implied constitutional action. The question became whether the statute clearly authorized the personal liability sought in the enemy-combatant setting and whether officials had fair notice of that rule during Padilla’s detention. Here qualified immunity controlled. The court found it anything but clearly established that RFRA supplied the asserted rights and damages action in military enemy-combatant detention, and it dismissed the RFRA claim on immunity grounds. Prospective relief failed separately. A future enemy-combatant designation was speculative rather than real and immediate, and the claimed reputational effect added little beyond the consequences of Padilla’s criminal convictions. The panel therefore found no standing for an injunction or retrospective declaration on that theory. The court used separate grounds for the three kinds of relief: special factors foreclosed the constitutional damages action, qualified immunity resolved the RFRA claim, and standing barred prospective relief. ###### The Petition Narrows the Question Wizner served as Supreme Court counsel of record with Steven Shapiro, Alexander Abdo, Jameel Jaffer, Hina Shamsi, the Yale clinic team of Freiman, Metcalf, and Townsend, and O’Connell. The petition was dated April 19 and docketed the next week as Lebron v. Rumsfeld, No. 11-1277. Its question was deliberately confined: whether federal officials alleged to be responsible for mistreatment of an American citizen in an American prison could be sued for constitutional damages. The petition argued that Carlson already supplied the federal-custody analogue and that qualified immunity could protect legitimate official action. Other pieces of the original suit fell outside the petition. The filing excluded damages for the initial detention itself and the requested injunction against future military designation. The one-dollar claim for alleged treatment became the center. On June 11, 2012, the Supreme Court denied certiorari without comment. The denial supplied no merits ruling and left the Fourth Circuit judgment—and its separation of remedial authority from factual adjudication—in place. ###### The Later Bivens Decisions Later Supreme Court decisions moved further along the path visible in Lebron. Ziglar v. Abbasi called expansion of Bivens a disfavored judicial activity; Hernández v. Mesa treated foreign relations and national security as reasons for restraint; Egbert v. Boule asked whether Congress might be better suited to decide. In 2024, the Fourth Circuit allowed a federal prisoner’s excessive-force claim to proceed in Fields. The Supreme Court granted review and reversed in Goldey v. Fields on June 30, 2025. In Goldey, an Eighth Amendment excessive-force claim against federal prison officials fell outside Bivens. The Court pointed to forty-five years without a new context, congressional activity without a damages statute, possible systemic effects, and alternative prison remedies even when they offered less than damages. Wizner serves as an ACLU Deputy Legal Director and Director of its Center for Democracy. In Lebron, he and his co-counsel asked for a remedy directed at completed treatment, separate from the lawfulness of continued custody. Their petition left that distinction in the record even though the Court declined review. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Deputy Legal Director and Director, Center for Democracy - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Practice:** Speech, Privacy, Constitutional Litigation - **Location:** New York, New York ##### Contact - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Address:** 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York, New York 10004 - **Website:** aclu.org ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Ben Wizner Speech · Privacy · Constitutional Litigation > “If the law does not protect Jose Padilla … it protects no one. ##### One Dollar, Six Officials Ben Wizner took a narrowed claim to the Supreme Court: Jose Padilla sought one dollar from each of six officials for alleged mistreatment in military custody. The petition set aside other disputes to ask whether an American citizen could hold those officials personally answerable for what had happened in an American prison. In the Supreme Court petition dated April 19, 2012, Ben Wizner and his co-counsel left two claims behind. They did not seek review of Padilla’s demand for damages for the detention itself, or of his request for an injunction against being designated an enemy combatant again. They asked the justices to hear the claim concerning his treatment while confined. Wizner was counsel of record. The requested damages were one dollar from each of six former Defense Department officials. Padilla and his mother, Estela Lebron, sought a judgment establishing personal responsibility; they were not trying to put a price on the alleged harm. Before evidence could be tested, however, the lawyers had to establish that the Constitution allowed this kind of damages suit at all. ###### From O’Hare to the Brig Padilla had entered civilian custody on May 8, 2002, when federal agents arrested him at Chicago’s O’Hare airport under a material-witness warrant. He received appointed counsel and challenged the warrant in the Southern District of New York. On June 9, President George W. Bush designated him an enemy combatant and directed the Secretary of Defense to detain him. Military officials moved him to the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina, taking control of his confinement and interrogation. From June 2002 until March 2004, Padilla was denied ordinary contact with counsel, family and friends. His lawyers’ account identified a single short message to his mother after ten months, telling her he was alive. The civil complaint later alleged isolation, coercive interrogation, deprivation, threats, and restrictions on religion and access to information during this confinement. His lawyers challenged the military detention through habeas corpus, the proceeding in which a court examines the government’s authority to keep someone in custody. In Rumsfeld v. Padilla, the Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that a core habeas petition normally must name the immediate custodian and be filed in the district of confinement. That ruling ended the first Supreme Court proceeding on a procedural ground, without deciding whether the detention was lawful. Padilla pursued habeas relief again in South Carolina. Across the litigation, district courts in New York and South Carolina and two courts of appeals ruled on detention authority. Five courts, including the Supreme Court, considered his challenges. The government eventually transferred him to civilian custody for criminal prosecution, and the Supreme Court declined further review of the military detention. The proceedings ended without a Supreme Court ruling on its lawfulness. Habeas could lead to release, a hearing or a ruling on detention authority. It could not itself provide compensation or a personal damages judgment for completed mistreatment. Wizner and his co-counsel also emphasized that, during the worst of the alleged treatment, Padilla had been unable to communicate with counsel. The later civilian prosecution adjudicated criminal charges and resulted in a conviction; it did not decide the civil claim against those alleged to have designed and implemented his treatment at the brig. ###### The Officials Who Remained Padilla and Lebron filed their civil action on February 9, 2007, after he had left military custody. Alongside the nominal damages demand, they requested declarations that the detention and treatment policies were unconstitutional and an injunction against future military designation. The initial complaint named sixty-one people. By the appeal, Padilla had dismissed claims against the lawyers, medical professionals, interrogators and guards who dealt most directly with his custody. Seven defendants remained: four senior Defense policymakers, two former brig commanders, and the serving Defense Secretary for prospective relief. The four former policymakers were Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, William Haynes and Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby; the former commanders were Catherine Hanft and Melanie Marr. The claims concerned policies and orders allegedly devised at senior levels and implemented at the brig. Establishing which official was responsible, what the orders required and how they caused the alleged injuries would have required discovery into the chain of command. The constitutional claims relied on Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents. Congress had enacted 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for constitutional claims against state and local officials, but no comparably general statute supplied a damages action against federal officers. In 1971, Bivens had recognized a Fourth Amendment damages action directly under the Constitution. The Supreme Court later recognized a Fifth Amendment claim of sex discrimination in employment and an Eighth Amendment claim concerning medical care in a federal prison. For Wizner’s team, that prison decision, Carlson v. Green, supplied the relevant comparison: a person in federal custody seeking redress for mistreatment. The defendants saw a different setting—military detention, national security and senior policymaking—and argued that Congress had left the requested remedy uncreated. The plaintiffs also brought a separate statutory claim under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The district court dismissed the suit. It found no Bivens cause of action, held that qualified immunity protected the defendants on the constitutional and statutory claims, and rejected prospective relief for lack of standing. Wizner argued the appeal on October 26, 2011. Alexander Abdo joined the ACLU briefing; Jonathan Freiman, Hope Metcalf and Tahlia Townsend represented the Yale Lowenstein clinic team; Michael O’Connell served as South Carolina counsel. ###### What the Fourth Circuit Would Decide On January 23, 2012, a unanimous Fourth Circuit panel affirmed. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote for Judges Diana Gribbon Motz and Allyson Kay Duncan. Their first question was who had authority to provide the damages remedy. A pleaded constitutional injury, the panel explained, did not automatically authorize courts to create an action against the officials accused of causing it. The court identified two sets of reasons for leaving that decision to Congress. The first concerned the constitutional allocation of military responsibilities: Congress regulates the armed forces, and the President commands them. Congress had repeatedly legislated about detainee treatment and military process without creating the personal damages action Padilla requested. The second concerned what judges would have to supervise once such a suit began. Discovery could reach high-level policy discussions, interrogation design, the chain of command, classified intelligence and its sources, and operations beyond Padilla’s confinement. The panel considered Congress better placed to weigh those consequences and design a remedy. It did not hold that the Constitution categorically prohibited such litigation; Congress remained free to authorize it. The court also treated Padilla’s habeas proceedings as an available means of challenging his designation and detention. Those proceedings had offered extensive opportunities for review, it reasoned, even though they supplied different relief from the nominal damages he now sought. Their existence weighed against a separate judicially created damages action. The constitutional branch of the suit therefore ended before discovery could test the allegations. On these claims, the Fourth Circuit expressly left qualified immunity undecided. It had already concluded that no Bivens action could proceed in this setting, so it did not reach whether particular constitutional rights had been clearly established or whether the complaint alleged each defendant’s responsibility with sufficient specificity. ###### The Statute and the Injunction The religious-freedom claim presented a different question. Padilla alleged that officials had removed religious materials and denied the means to observe prayer times and holidays, substantially burdening his religious exercise. RFRA supplied statutory language on which to sue, without requiring the court to imply an action under the Constitution. Here, qualified immunity did decide the result. The panel concluded that RFRA’s application to enemy-combatant military detention—and the personal liability sought under it—had not been clearly established during Padilla’s confinement. Without that fair notice, the officials were entitled to immunity. The court did not need to resolve RFRA’s reach in every setting to decide this claim. The request for an injunction against future enemy-combatant designation failed on standing. The panel considered renewed military detention speculative, without a real and immediate threat, and found that the asserted reputational harm added little to the consequences of Padilla’s criminal convictions. That theory did not supply a basis for the requested injunction or declaration. The court had thus resolved the constitutional damages claim, the RFRA claim and the prospective claim on three distinct grounds. ###### A Prisoner’s Treatment Wizner returned to Carlson in the Supreme Court petition. An American citizen alleging mistreatment by federal officials in a prison on American soil, the lawyers argued, was invoking an established remedy. Calling Padilla an enemy combatant could not withdraw that protection. Their petition put the objection directly: “a unilateral change in label cannot effect a change in law.” The petition also answered the Fourth Circuit’s concerns about the consequences of litigation. Qualified immunity could protect legitimate official action; the state-secrets privilege could address particular evidence whose disclosure might harm national security. Wizner’s team argued that those questions could be handled within a case. The possibility that they might arise should not prevent the claim from being heard. With the damages claim narrowed to completed treatment and the request for an injunction left out, the serving Defense Secretary was no longer a respondent. The petition named the six former officials in their individual capacities. Steven Shapiro, Alexander Abdo, Jameel Jaffer and Hina Shamsi joined Wizner for the ACLU, alongside Freiman, Metcalf, Townsend and O’Connell. The petition was filed on April 20, 2012, and docketed on April 25 as Lebron v. Rumsfeld, No. 11-1277. On June 11, the Supreme Court denied review without comment, leaving the Fourth Circuit’s judgment in place. ###### Rights and the Means to Enforce Them Later Supreme Court decisions further restricted the extension of Bivens. Ziglar v. Abbasi described expansion as a disfavored judicial activity; Hernández v. Mesa treated foreign relations and national security as reasons for restraint; Egbert v. Boule asked whether Congress might be better suited to decide whether a remedy should exist. In 2024, the Fourth Circuit allowed a federal prisoner’s excessive-force claim to proceed in Fields. The Supreme Court reversed on June 30, 2025, in Goldey v. Fields. It held that the Eighth Amendment excessive-force claim against federal prison officials fell outside the recognized Bivens contexts. The Court pointed to forty-five years without a new context, congressional legislation without a damages statute, possible systemic effects, and alternative prison remedies even when they were less effective than damages. Wizner’s interest in the distance between a right and its enforcement began before his work on Padilla’s case. As a second-year student at New York University in 1998, he heard Judge Stephen Reinhardt speak about procedural barriers to constitutional claims. “I wanted to work for a judge like that,” Wizner later recalled. He became Reinhardt’s clerk and remembered an exacting practice of drafting, revision and sustained attention to people confronting government power. At the ACLU, Wizner now serves as Deputy Legal Director and Director of the Center for Democracy, whose work includes speech, privacy, immigrants’ rights, voting rights, human rights and national security. In his remembrance of Reinhardt, he described the effort required to find lawful paths to relief through procedural obstacles. That work required close attention to the individual case: the person seeking protection, the right asserted and the proceeding in which a court could enforce it. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Deputy Legal Director and Director, Center for Democracy - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Practice:** Speech, Privacy, Constitutional Litigation - **Location:** New York, New York ##### Contact - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Address:** 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York, New York 10004 - **Website:** aclu.org --- ## 11. Joseph M. Sellers — `900005353` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `6840278ddfb9131ee7cbeddba28d01716f25d7f1274102826cf4b05b6bfaa5d0` - **After/current hash:** `5882f8582a72c5e3d8f4ae7ad958cce93aa2326829daead4c8241f5ef10b510b` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005460 (2026-09-11 16:37:14 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 3 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 9**: State the certification question directly and remove the opening disclaimer about what certification would not establish. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 21**: Replace the repeated no-liability and later-proof warnings with the affirmative procedural effect of class certification. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 24**: Retain the appellate reasoning and sequence of evidentiary review without the generic warning that certification was not a liability judgment. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 52**: Preserve the reversal, unsuccessful narrower class, and confidential resolution while removing the appended unadjudicated-claims disclaimer. - `rewrite` — **Title, deck and courtroom opening**: Bring Sellers's reasoning and the exact scope of his position forward before the procedural history. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Opening exchanges with Roberts and Kennedy**: Add two brief verified replies that show how Sellers distinguished specific discretionary choices from all subjective employment decisions. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Biographical section and dated closing reflection**: Add Sellers's personal account of the roots of his civil-rights interest, verified education and practice founding, and his credit to his wife. - `rewrite` — **Evidence, certification, holdings and representative-proof sections**: Consolidate repeated explanations while retaining the evidence, procedural chronology, two rules, distinct judicial alignments and later doctrinal qualification. - `rewrite` — **Title, deck and courtroom opening**: Bring Sellers's reasoning and the exact scope of his position forward before the procedural history. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Opening exchanges with Roberts and Kennedy**: Add two brief verified replies that show how Sellers distinguished specific discretionary choices from all subjective employment decisions. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Biographical section and dated closing reflection**: Add Sellers's personal account of the roots of his civil-rights interest, verified education and practice founding, and his credit to his wife. - `rewrite` — **Evidence, certification, holdings and representative-proof sections**: Consolidate repeated explanations while retaining the evidence, procedural chronology, two rules, distinct judicial alignments and later doctrinal qualification. ### BEFORE #### Joseph M. Sellers Civil Rights · Employment · Class Actions > “None of us succeed alone. ##### The Policy Was Discretion Wal-Mart gave local managers broad latitude over pay and promotion. Joseph Sellers argued that the identical delegation—reinforced by a common corporate culture and measured through statistics, employee accounts, and personnel systems—supplied the shared question Rule 23 required. The Supreme Court disagreed and reversed a class of roughly 1.5 million women, drawing the modern boundary between widespread discretion and classwide proof. In the 2001 federal class action against Wal-Mart, a promotion opening could remain invisible to the employees who might have sought it. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s account of the record described managers identifying candidates informally rather than regularly posting openings and inviting applications. Pay decisions carried similar latitude. Store managers could place hourly employees within pay bands and make adjustments without written criteria governing the full choice. The women in Dukes v. Wal-Mart challenged that delegation of discretion as a common employment practice. Betty Dukes and other named employees filed the case in federal court in 2001. They alleged that women received less pay and fewer promotions than men across Wal-Mart’s domestic retail operations, despite companywide systems, common job structures, and a corporate culture connecting thousands of stores. The proposed class eventually encompassed roughly 1.5 million current and former women employees. Its size drew attention, but scale alone supplied no common answer. The certification question was whether one legal and factual issue could generate a classwide resolution across local decisions made by many managers. Certification would decide how the claims could be tried, not whether Wal-Mart had discriminated. The employees still needed a theory capable of turning dispersed decisions into proof about a common employment practice. ###### One Rule, Thousands of Managers Wal-Mart’s formal policy prohibited discrimination and gave local managers substantial authority over pay and promotion. The company treated that decentralization as evidence against a nationwide class: managers made different decisions for different reasons in different stores. The employees reversed the premise. Every store, they argued, received the same grant of broad and weakly guided discretion. A strong corporate culture transmitted common expectations, while centralized personnel structures and recurring disparities made the delegation itself a companywide practice suitable for common adjudication. The proof was built in layers. Statistical analyses compared pay and promotion outcomes; declarations described individual experiences; personnel policies established the scope of managerial authority; and social-framework testimony addressed the conditions under which subjective decisionmaking could permit gender bias to influence employment judgments. No single layer carried the entire theory. Aggregate figures required an explanation linking them to decision processes. Anecdotes required enough institutional reach to illuminate more than isolated incidents. The social-framework account required a method for showing how often susceptibility to bias became actual discrimination. Wal-Mart attacked each link. It emphasized variation among stores, an express equal-opportunity policy, the limited geographic distribution of employee declarations, and an expert who described susceptibility to bias yet supplied no estimate of how frequently discriminatory decisions occurred. ###### How a Class Becomes a Class Rule 23(a) requires numerosity, commonality, typicality, and adequate representation. In Dukes, commonality became the decisive word: whether the class members shared a contention whose truth or falsity would resolve an issue central to every claim in one stroke. The employees also sought certification under Rule 23(b)(2). That injunction-centered provision applies when a defendant acts on grounds generally governing the class, making one injunction or declaration appropriate for everyone. It carries neither mandatory notice nor the opt-out rights associated with the Rule 23 damages-class provision. The women asked to change employment practices and recover lost pay. They sought an injunction governing pay and promotion systems, declaratory relief, and backpay. That combination required courts to ask whether monetary relief remained incidental to a classwide injunction or demanded individualized adjudication. After extensive discovery, the district court certified the class in 2004. The court treated Wal-Mart’s uniform delegation of discretion, corporate culture, statistical proof, declarations, and expert evidence as enough to present a common question about whether company practices exposed women to discrimination. The certification order remained procedural. It accepted neither every allegation nor every inference as true. It determined that the case could proceed in a representative form subject to appellate review and later proof on the merits. ###### The En Banc Shape of the Class An en banc Ninth Circuit affirmed much of the certification. The court allowed the injunction-centered class of current employees to pursue declaratory relief, prospective relief, and backpay, while directing further consideration of punitive damages and the claims of former employees. The appellate decision remained a certification ruling rather than a liability judgment. It concluded that the district judge had remained within the permissible framework and that disputes over the ultimate weight of statistics, declarations, and expert testimony belonged to later stages of the litigation. The en banc record also exposed disagreement about manageability and individual defenses. Some judges saw a common institutional practice capable of aggregate proof. Others saw millions of employment decisions whose lawfulness could be determined only by examining each manager, employee, job opening, and pay choice. Brad Seligman served as Supreme Court counsel of record. Joseph Sellers presented the employees’ oral argument. The named employees, trial and appellate counsel, experts, and civil-rights organizations supplied the broader litigation record. The Supreme Court granted review of both commonality and the use of an injunction-centered class for backpay. By the time Sellers entered the courtroom on March 29, 2011, the case asked two distinct questions: what made the claims common, and what remedies could be tried without individual notice and opt-out rights. ###### Sellers at the Lectern Sellers described a requested injunction governing pay and promotion decisions. It would require detailed, job-related criteria, meaningful oversight, and accountability for managers exercising the delegated authority. His theory treated the absence of guidance as uniform. Local managers possessed the same kind of discretion throughout the company, he argued, and a strong corporate culture supplied the environment in which those choices operated. Commonality arose from testing that shared design. Justice Anthony Kennedy pressed the tension at its center. The employees portrayed Wal-Mart as highly centralized while challenging decisions made locally. Sellers answered that central control and local discretion could coexist: the company chose the structure, transmitted culture, and withheld guidance from the same categories of decisions across stores. Recordkeeping became part of the remedial problem. A system built around informal promotion choices can leave no complete list of vacancies, applicants, or rejected candidates. The absence of records complicates individual reconstruction while strengthening the practical case for prospective criteria and documented review. Statistics and experiences were offered to show why discretion should be tested collectively; the injunction was designed to make future decisions visible, job-related, and reviewable. ###### The Majority Asks for Glue On June 20, 2011, the Supreme Court reversed. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for a five-Justice majority on commonality, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito. The majority required significant proof that Wal-Mart operated under a general policy of discrimination. An express ban on discrimination pointed the other way, and broad local discretion appeared to produce heterogeneous decisions rather than one answer capable of resolving every class member’s claim. Discretion could support commonality only if exercised through a common mode that pervaded the company, the Court reasoned. The record needed the “glue” connecting all the alleged reasons for millions of decisions so that examining one common contention would determine why each woman experienced a pay or promotion outcome. The majority found the social-framework testimony too indeterminate because the expert supplied no estimate of how frequently susceptibility to bias translated into discriminatory employment decisions. It also regarded roughly 120 employee declarations as too sparse and unevenly distributed for a class spanning thousands of stores. National and regional statistics likewise failed to establish the required store-level answer in the majority’s view. Differences could reflect unlawful bias, lawful local variation, or both. Lacking a classwide method for deciding among those explanations, the commonality requirement remained unsatisfied. ###### A Unanimous Limit on Backpay All nine Justices agreed on a separate point: individualized backpay belonged outside the injunction-centered class provision. That subsection centers indivisible injunctive or declaratory relief, while backpay depended on employment decisions and defenses specific to individual class members. The damages-class subsection contains procedural protections including notice and the opportunity to opt out. Routing individualized monetary claims through the injunction subsection would bypass those protections for absent employees while binding them to the result. Wal-Mart also possessed a statutory right to present individual defenses. In a Title VII pattern-or-practice framework, an employer may show that a particular pay or promotion decision rested on a lawful reason even after broader discrimination has been established. The proposed “Trial by Formula” would sample a subset of claims and apply the resulting percentage to the class. The Court rejected that shortcut because extrapolation could replace Wal-Mart’s opportunity to litigate defenses to each person’s entitlement to backpay. Dukes produced two holdings with different majorities. Five Justices found the proposed commonality showing insufficient. All nine placed individualized backpay outside the injunction-centered provision. ###### The Dissent’s Common Question Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, agreed that backpay belonged outside the injunction-centered provision. She concluded that the employees had nevertheless satisfied the threshold commonality rule. Her opinion identified a uniform employment practice: delegating pay and promotion decisions to local managers under common corporate conditions. Statistics, company structures, personnel practices, culture evidence, and employee accounts could together support the common question whether that delegation produced disparate treatment. For Ginsburg, the majority demanded too much at the initial commonality stage by importing concerns associated with the damages-class provision, where common questions must predominate over individual ones. The threshold rule asks for a common question rather than proof that it will dominate the entire case. She would have returned the case for consideration under Rule 23(b)(3), with notice, opt-out, predominance, and manageability requirements. That route preserved a possible class while acknowledging that monetary claims demanded a more protective procedural structure. ###### Representative Proof After Dukes The reversal ended the nationwide certification while leaving every employee’s underlying Title VII claim unadjudicated. On remand, the plaintiffs pursued a narrower California-centered class; certification failed in 2013, and the remaining action ended through confidential settlement and voluntary dismissal in 2016. Later doctrine resisted turning Dukes into a categorical ban on representative proof. In Tyson Foods v. Bouaphakeo, the Court explained that representative evidence may support a class when each member could have used the same proof in an individual action. Admissibility depends on the claim and evidence, not a universal class-action rule. Reflecting on his career, Sellers credited colleagues at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee and Cohen Milstein for their work and support. “None of us succeed alone,” he said. Sellers is a Cohen Milstein partner and founder and co-chair of its Civil Rights & Employment practice. In Dukes, he argued for job-related criteria, oversight and documented review of pay and promotion decisions. Those proposed rules addressed the same managerial discretion that the employees sought to test through common proof. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner; Founder and Co-Chair, Civil Rights & Employment - **Organization:** Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll - **Practice:** Civil Rights, Employment, Class Actions - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Firm:** Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll - **Office:** Washington, D.C. - **Website:** cohenmilstein.com - **Phone:** 202.408.4600 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Joseph M. Sellers Civil Rights · Employment · Class Actions > “None of us succeed alone. ##### Discretion Across Thousands of Stores Joseph Sellers argued that Wal-Mart’s delegation of pay and promotion decisions could be tested as a common employment practice. The Supreme Court’s review of a class of roughly 1.5 million women turned on two distinct questions: common proof and backpay. At the Supreme Court on March 29, 2011, Chief Justice John Roberts asked Joseph M. Sellers whether Wal-Mart’s scale made subjective employment decisions necessarily illegal. “No, not at all, Mr. Chief Justice,” Sellers replied. He was challenging particular features of the company’s pay and promotion process: decisions made without job-related guidance, under the same grant of authority across thousands of stores. Justice Anthony Kennedy pressed the apparent tension between a powerful headquarters and decisions left to local managers. Sellers answered by narrowing the point: “we’re not attacking every facet of the pay and promotion decisions.” The district court had identified specific choices left entirely to managerial judgment. The company could delegate those choices while influencing managers through its training and corporate culture. Sellers presented the employees’ argument; Brad Seligman was Supreme Court counsel of record. Behind them stood the named employees, trial and appellate lawyers, experts and civil-rights organizations that had developed the case over a decade. The Court was reviewing whether their claims could proceed together and whether the proposed class could recover backpay. ###### Choosing Candidates and Setting Pay Betty Dukes and other named employees filed the federal action in 2001, alleging that women received less pay and fewer promotions than men across Wal-Mart’s domestic retail operations. Promotion openings were not regularly posted. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg later described the record, managers could identify candidates informally, leaving other qualified employees without an opportunity to apply. Pay decisions allowed similar latitude. Managers could set hourly wages within bands and make adjustments without written criteria governing the full choice. The employees argued that Wal-Mart’s common job structures, personnel systems and corporate culture connected these local decisions. Wal-Mart’s formal policy prohibited discrimination; the company maintained that different managers made different decisions for different reasons. The employees sought to test the delegation itself. Their statistical analyses compared pay and promotion outcomes, declarations described individual experiences, personnel policies established managers’ authority, and social-framework testimony examined how subjective decisions could permit gender bias. Together, those forms of proof were offered to connect dispersed employment choices to a common practice. Each form of evidence had a different task. The statistics needed a link to the decision process; the employee accounts needed enough reach to illuminate practices beyond isolated stores; and the expert testimony needed to connect susceptibility to bias with actual decisions. Wal-Mart contested those links, emphasizing local variation, its equal-opportunity policy, the geographic distribution of declarations and the expert’s inability to estimate how often bias affected employment choices. ###### Becoming a Civil-Rights Lawyer Sellers traced his interest in civil rights to two experiences: watching televised attacks on peaceful Black demonstrators in the South during the 1960s, and running on a high-school mile-relay team in Philadelphia with three Black teammates. As they came to depend on one another, he noticed the racial insults and slights they encountered. He later recalled realizing that the discrimination he had watched from a distance also existed close to home. He graduated from Brown University in 1975 and Case Western Reserve’s law school in 1979. His work at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs included directing its Employment Discrimination Project. In 1997, he established a national civil-rights practice at Cohen Milstein. Sellers is a partner at Cohen Milstein, where he founded and co-chairs the Civil Rights & Employment practice. His work includes individual claims as well as class actions. In Dukes, he and the employees’ team had to show why the evidence could support a shared proceeding across thousands of workplaces. ###### Two Questions Before the Court Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(a) requires numerosity, commonality, typicality and adequate representation. For the proposed class of roughly 1.5 million current and former women employees, commonality became decisive. The employees needed a contention whose resolution would answer an issue central to each claim; the number of employees alone could not supply it. The employees also sought certification under Rule 23(b)(2), which permits a class when one injunction or declaration can address conduct affecting the group as a whole. They wanted changes to pay and promotion practices, declaratory relief and backpay. Combining those requests raised a separate question: could the monetary claims proceed under a provision that lacks the mandatory notice and opt-out rights of the damages-class rule? After extensive discovery, the district court certified the class in 2004. It accepted the uniform delegation of discretion, corporate culture, statistics, declarations and expert evidence as a sufficient basis for a common question. The order authorized the named employees to pursue the claims for the class using that shared proof. An en banc Ninth Circuit affirmed much of the certification. It allowed current employees to seek prospective and declaratory relief and backpay, while directing further consideration of punitive damages and former employees’ claims. The appellate majority concluded that the district judge had used a permissible certification framework and left disputes about the ultimate weight of the evidence for later proceedings. The judges nevertheless disagreed about how a trial would work. Some saw an institutional practice that could be proved collectively; others saw employment decisions that required separate examination of each manager, employee, opening and pay choice. The Supreme Court agreed to review both commonality and the use of the injunction provision for backpay. Sellers’s proposed injunction addressed the decisions at the center of the case. It would require detailed, job-related criteria for pay and promotion, effective oversight and accountability for managers. The same discretionary practices the employees sought to examine through statistics and individual accounts would become subject to documented standards and review. Recordkeeping complicated the request for lost pay. Informal promotion decisions could leave no complete list of openings, applicants or rejected candidates. Sellers argued that reconstructing old decisions through individual hearings would be unreliable when managers lacked records explaining what they had done. The employees proposed representative proof; Wal-Mart insisted on its right to defend each challenged decision. ###### The Justices Divide on Commonality On June 20, 2011, the Supreme Court reversed. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the commonality ruling for five Justices: himself, Roberts, Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. They required significant proof of a general policy of discrimination and found that Wal-Mart’s express prohibition and broad local discretion did not establish one answer that could resolve every employee’s claim. The majority required a common mode of exercising discretion throughout the company. Its “glue” metaphor described the missing connection among the alleged reasons for millions of pay and promotion decisions. National and regional disparities could reflect bias, lawful local variation or both; the majority found no classwide method for choosing among those explanations at store level. The majority also found the social-framework testimony too indeterminate because the expert had not estimated how frequently susceptibility to bias produced discrimination. It regarded roughly 120 employee declarations as too sparse and unevenly distributed for the nationwide class. Ginsburg, joined by Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, reached a different conclusion on commonality. In their view, the uniform delegation of pay and promotion decisions under common corporate conditions supplied a shared question. Statistics, personnel practices, culture evidence and employee accounts could together test whether that delegation produced disparate treatment. Ginsburg distinguished the threshold requirement of a common question from Rule 23(b)(3)’s demand that common questions predominate over individual ones. She concluded that the majority had imported the more demanding inquiry too early. She would have returned the case for consideration under Rule 23(b)(3), including its notice, opt-out, predominance and manageability requirements. ###### Backpay and the Limits of Representative Proof All nine Justices, including the four who disagreed on commonality, held that individualized backpay could not proceed under Rule 23(b)(2). That provision concerns relief that applies to the class as a whole. The damages-class rule protects absent employees through notice and an opportunity to opt out; using the injunction provision for individualized monetary claims would bind them without those protections. Wal-Mart also had a statutory right to present individual defenses. Under Title VII’s pattern-or-practice framework, an employer can offer a lawful reason for a particular employment decision even after broader discrimination has been established. The proposed “Trial by Formula” would sample claims and extend the resulting percentage to the class. The Court rejected that method because it could displace the employer’s opportunity to contest each person’s entitlement to backpay. The nationwide certification ended with those two holdings: a five-Justice ruling on commonality and a unanimous ruling on backpay. On remand, the plaintiffs sought a narrower California-centered class. Certification was denied in 2013, and that action ended through confidential settlement and voluntary dismissal in 2016. In Tyson Foods v. Bouaphakeo, the Supreme Court later explained that representative evidence could support a class when each member could have used the same proof in an individual action. Whether the evidence was admissible depended on the claim and the proof offered. Dukes therefore did not establish a categorical prohibition on representative evidence. When Sellers reflected on his career in July 2023, he credited his colleagues at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee and Cohen Milstein, and the support of his wife, Laurie Davis. “None of us succeed alone,” he said. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner; Founder and Co-Chair, Civil Rights & Employment - **Organization:** Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll - **Practice:** Civil Rights, Employment, Class Actions - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Firm:** Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll - **Office:** Washington, D.C. - **Website:** cohenmilstein.com - **Phone:** 202.408.4600 --- ## 12. Kimberley Motley — `900005359` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `8a678e51dd4482f34196af2902de80de3427bb3597ff8be71f9f80b963d4be06` - **After/current hash:** `ec7466b02df817c9087299aaab1bccfea26f192cd2e31c5ef6204d4f0aabca86` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005359/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Deck and clemency sections**: Remove repeated statements of unconditional release while preserving the sentence history, executive remedy, family pressure and administrative implementation. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Professional beginnings and method**: Add the Wisconsin public-defense background, Afghan training and private practice, prison letters, language experience and preparation for local judges from primary sources. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Release quotation and conclusion**: Place the safer-place quotation beside Gulnaz's release and close with Motley's original statement about putting written law into practice. - `restructure` — **Current legal context**: Preserve the precise 2026 communication and all stated concerns in one paragraph before returning to Motley's practice and direct quotation. ### BEFORE #### Kimberley Motley Human Rights · International Litigation > “She's happy that she's in a safer place. ##### Twelve Days After the Pardon Gulnaz’s sentence moved from two years to twelve, then down to three. A presidential pardon followed, but she remained imprisoned for twelve more days. Kimberley Motley represented her through clemency and release while officials processed the order and pressure persisted for her to marry the man she had accused. Gulnaz reported that she had been raped by her cousin’s husband. Afghan authorities prosecuted her for a so-called moral offense. She later gave birth to a daughter while imprisoned at Badam Bagh. Her sentence increased from two years to twelve on appeal, then fell to three after further review. The successive proceedings changed the term of imprisonment while leaving her in custody for conduct arising from the assault she had reported. Kimberley Motley represented Gulnaz during the campaign for clemency and release. Her work involved the institutions controlling the sentence, the presidential office with power to pardon and the officials responsible for implementing a release order. Marriage to the accused man was repeatedly discussed as a route to release or social acceptance. Motley pursued clemency without a legal marriage condition, while Gulnaz faced pressure over a decision that would govern her life after prison. ###### Release and the Proposed Marriage By late 2011, Gulnaz’s imprisonment had attracted international attention. The presidential release order ultimately carried no legal requirement that she marry the accused man. An unconditional order gave counsel a basis to demand release independently of any proposed marriage. Family, social and institutional pressure continued around Gulnaz, but those pressures were separate from the terms on which the state had authorized her freedom. The remedy was executive clemency. It ended custody through presidential authority without establishing a binding judicial precedent for other women prosecuted for moral offenses. Officials processing the release had to act on the pardon; Gulnaz’s later personal decisions were not legal prerequisites to carrying it out. ###### The Twelve Days After the Order The presidential palace announced clemency on December 1, 2011. Gulnaz remained confined with her daughter while the order moved through administrative offices. Implementation required the decree to reach the authorities responsible for custody and produce an instruction the prison would execute. Until then, the public announcement had left Gulnaz’s physical circumstances unchanged. Motley continued pressing for release after the announcement, asking why the order had not yet been carried out and resisting the reappearance of marriage as an unofficial prerequisite. Gulnaz left prison on December 13. The release completed the individual act of clemency. It did not end moral-crimes prosecutions throughout Afghanistan or remove the wider pressures faced by women leaving prison. ###### Counsel and the Wider Campaign Gulnaz and her mother, Afghan lawyers and officials, human-rights advocates, journalists, documentary makers and international institutions all formed part of the case’s public and legal history. Motley supplied independent representation during the effort to obtain and implement clemency. She explained the sentence history and the distinction between the pardon and a proposed marriage to audiences outside the prison system. Continued attention to the detention helped sustain pressure for officials to complete the release. European institutions later cited Gulnaz’s pardon and release while noting continuing marriage pressure. United Nations treaty bodies separately criticized moral-crimes prosecutions and the charging of rape victims with zina. Those interventions addressed both the individual case and the wider treatment of women. Gulnaz’s pardon remained an exercise of executive power in her case, rather than a judicial ruling binding all Afghan courts. ###### A Different Legal Order Motley founded Motley Legal Services and The Justness Project. Her international practice has included criminal, civil, commercial, employment and human-rights matters across different legal systems. Afghanistan’s institutions changed after Gulnaz’s 2011 release. In an April 10, 2026 communication, United Nations special-procedure experts raised concerns about the Taliban’s newly issued criminal rules, including their silence on the roles of lawyers and prosecutors and their lack of stated appeal or judicial-review rights. The experts also identified missing protections for accused persons and concerns about judicial independence and equality. They sought clarification from the de facto authorities through a special-procedures communication. The clemency and appeal procedures used in 2011 belonged to the earlier Afghan legal order. In Gulnaz’s case, Motley and the wider group of participants pursued the presidential remedy through the offices responsible for implementing it, until the release authorized on December 1 became a departure from prison twelve days later. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Attorney; Founder - **Organization:** The Justness Project - **Practice:** Human Rights, International Litigation - **Location:** International practice ##### Contact - **Organization:** The Justness Project - **Website:** justnessproject.com ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Kimberley Motley Human Rights · International Litigation > “She's happy that she's in a safer place. ##### Twelve Days After the Pardon Kimberley Motley pursued Gulnaz’s release while officials discussed marriage to the man she had accused of rape. Once the presidential palace announced an unconditional pardon, Motley still had to press for the order to reach the prison where Gulnaz and her daughter remained confined. Motley began practicing in 2003 as a Wisconsin public defender. In Milwaukee, she represented people facing felony, misdemeanor and juvenile proceedings. She arrived in Afghanistan in 2008 through a State Department-funded program to train and mentor defense lawyers, then opened her own practice there in 2009. She visited court hearings and prisons to learn how defendants were treated. At Pul-e Charki, two English-speaking prisoners asked her to read letters describing proceedings without witnesses, legal representation or an interpreter. She investigated their legal protections and began representing clients herself. As a child in Milwaukee, Motley had often spoken for her Korean immigrant mother, who was uncomfortable speaking English. In Afghanistan, she worked with interpreters, observed local proceedings and studied Islamic law. When preparing arguments, she considered the judges’ religious and cultural understanding alongside the written rules. ###### Gulnaz’s Sentence Gulnaz reported that she had been raped by her cousin’s husband. Afghan authorities prosecuted her for a so-called moral offense. She later gave birth to a daughter while imprisoned at Badam Bagh. Her sentence increased from two years to twelve on appeal, then fell to three after further review. She remained in custody for conduct arising from the assault she had reported. Motley represented her during the campaign for clemency and release. Marriage to the accused man was repeatedly proposed as a route to freedom or social acceptance. Motley pursued a pardon that would allow Gulnaz to leave prison without making that marriage a legal condition. ###### Unconditional Clemency By late 2011, Gulnaz’s imprisonment had attracted international attention. Gulnaz and her mother, Afghan lawyers and officials, human-rights advocates, journalists, documentary makers and international institutions participated in the campaign. Motley explained the changing sentences and pressed the distinction between release and the marriage others proposed. The presidential release order ultimately carried no marriage requirement. Motley could demand its execution regardless of Gulnaz’s later personal decisions. Family and social pressure continued, but officials responsible for custody had an unconditional order to carry out. European institutions later cited Gulnaz’s pardon and release while noting continuing marriage pressure. United Nations treaty bodies separately criticized moral-crimes prosecutions and the charging of rape victims with zina. ###### The Twelve-Day Wait The presidential palace announced clemency on December 1, 2011. Gulnaz remained confined with her daughter while the decree passed through the offices responsible for authorizing her departure. Motley continued asking why the order had not been carried out and resisting marriage as an unofficial prerequisite. On December 13, Gulnaz left prison. “She’s happy that she’s in a safer place,” Motley said after the release. The pardon ended her custody through presidential authority. It left the law governing other moral-offense prosecutions in place. ###### Across Legal Systems The clemency and appeal proceedings in Gulnaz’s case took place under Afghanistan’s earlier legal order. On April 10, 2026, United Nations special-procedure experts sought clarification from the Taliban authorities about new criminal rules that made no provision for lawyers, prosecutors, appeals or judicial review. The experts also raised concerns about protections for accused persons, judicial independence and equality. Motley founded Motley Legal Services and The Justness Project. Her international practice has included criminal, civil, commercial, employment and human-rights matters. Visiting detained clients, learning the rules available to them and pursuing officials responsible for implementing relief became part of that work. “Laws are just words on a piece of paper,” Motley said. “It’s up to us to bring them to life.” ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Attorney; Founder - **Organization:** The Justness Project - **Practice:** Human Rights, International Litigation - **Location:** International practice ##### Contact - **Organization:** The Justness Project - **Website:** justnessproject.com --- ## 13. David Sanford — `900005354` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `60b0dc84d6b906c664035800788eb63f2aef9f6128b6808b1522fa0f2f6a9681` - **After/current hash:** `bc277904d5f2addda4e43587c16374f86c2b99145a8537760c335cdbec5a098c` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005461 (2026-09-11 16:48:49 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 31**: Retain the exact fifth verdict answer and remove the appended repetition framed as a disclaimer about university liability. - `rewrite` — **Title, deck and opening conversation**: Connect the fourth-answer frame to research and professional reputation, and introduce Sanford through his documented thinking about juror comprehension. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Opening and final practice section**: Add the precise note-taking quotation, verified teaching and clerkship background, judicial editing account and Guentert's documented hiring exchange. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Collaboration and trial evidence**: Specify the division of research work, corroborating draft and code evidence, six-month delay testimony and 26 emails shown to the jury. - `rewrite` — **Pretrial rulings, verdict answers, damages and later City law cases**: Consolidate duplicated legal explanations and team recaps while preserving all claims, findings, time periods, defendant allocations, accepted remedies and later doctrinal distinctions. ### BEFORE #### David Sanford Employment Discrimination · Retaliation · Trial Practice > “Today’s verdict affirms that Professor Ravina’s career was irreparably damaged by the actions of Columbia Business School Professor Geert Bekaert and the University ##### Five Questions on the Verdict Form A jury found that Professor Geert Bekaert retaliated against Enrichetta Ravina and held Columbia University responsible under the City law’s employee-or-agent rule. David Sanford and his trial team obtained compensatory and punitive relief after fifteen days of proceedings. The fourth answer on the verdict form established the university’s liability through Bekaert’s conduct. The verdict form in Ravina v. Columbia University separated one workplace dispute into five questions. It asked about discrimination by Geert Bekaert, Columbia’s responsibility for that discrimination, retaliation by Bekaert, Columbia’s statutory responsibility for his retaliation, and retaliation by Columbia through its own conduct. After two days of deliberation, the answers divided sharply. The jury rejected discrimination, found retaliation by Bekaert, imposed Columbia liability for his conduct through the local attribution rule, and rejected the claim that the university itself had retaliated. Columbia’s responsibility arose through the municipal statute’s attribution rule. The finding against Bekaert supplied the unlawful act; the fourth answer connected that act to the employer. The verdict form allowed the jury to decide that question separately from the university’s own conduct. The trial itself had two stages. Across fifteen days, the jury first resolved the five liability questions and then heard a separate damages phase measuring emotional and reputational injury and punishment of Bekaert. Post-trial review changed the dollar amounts while preserving the liability allocation. David Sanford tried the case with a Sanford Heisler Sharp team that included H. Vincent McKnight, Andrew Melzer, Melinda Koster and Amy Donehower. Enrichetta Ravina supplied the claims, testimony and professional history the verdict resolved. ###### A Junior Professor and a Senior Collaborator Ravina joined Columbia Business School as a junior professor in 2008. Bekaert was a senior tenured professor in the same department. They began collaborating on a large Financial Engines data set concerning the savings behavior of millions of people. According to Ravina’s testimony, the professional relationship later acquired unwanted personal conduct and pressure. Her complaint alleged sexual harassment, obstruction of research, hostile treatment, and retaliation after she raised concerns with Columbia. The retaliation claim focused on what followed the complaint. The successful trial theory concerned obstruction and delay of Ravina’s research and disparaging communications sent into the professional community in which her scholarship and prospects were evaluated. Bekaert disputed retaliatory causation and characterized the research disagreements and communications as ordinary professional conflict rather than evidence supporting the verdict Ravina sought. Columbia offered academic and administrative explanations for its tenure and leave decisions, emphasized that Bekaert lacked supervisory authority, and denied retaliation by its own decisionmakers. The fifth verdict answer ultimately accepted that distinction as to direct university conduct, even while the fourth imposed statutory liability for Bekaert’s retaliation. The retaliation claim concerned conduct following Ravina’s complaints. It required the jury to determine whether she suffered retaliation for opposing conduct she reasonably regarded as discriminatory, a question separate from whether she proved the underlying discrimination claim. ###### The Claims Set for Trial Before trial, Bekaert and Columbia filed separate summary-judgment motions. The court denied Bekaert’s motion in full and granted Columbia’s motion in part, narrowing both the claims and the routes by which the university could face liability. Columbia obtained judgment on the federal quid pro quo theory and on discrimination claims insofar as they accused the university of direct discrimination. Other hostile-environment and discrimination theories could proceed only through Columbia’s handling of Bekaert’s alleged conduct rather than through a direct-discrimination finding against the institution. The retaliation claims survived. That ruling opened a trial path for proof that protected complaints preceded conduct harming Ravina’s research or reputation and that the defendants’ explanations left a retaliatory inference for the jury. The court also ruled that Bekaert was not Ravina’s supervisor. That holding eliminated a theory keyed to supervisory status. It later became crucial because Columbia’s trial liability rested on the City law’s separate employee-or-agent attribution provision. At the close of the defense case, Ravina withdrew the remaining federal claims against Columbia. The jury therefore received five questions under the municipal human-rights statute rather than a blended verdict under Title VII, Title IX, and city law. ###### Fifteen Days of Proof The jury trial lasted fifteen days and was divided into liability and damages. Ravina testified about the collaboration, the conduct she attributed to Bekaert, her complaints, the subsequent research obstacles, and communications reaching scholars in her field. The successful retaliation theory connected protected opposition to later acts. Sanford’s team had to show more than workplace hostility: the jury needed a basis to infer that Bekaert obstructed work and attacked Ravina’s reputation because she had accused him of harassment. The liability questions required separate decisions about the earlier conduct and the response to Ravina’s complaints. The jury could find retaliation for a protected complaint even though it did not find actionable discrimination in the conduct that prompted the complaint. On post-trial review, Bekaert argued that the evidence was insufficient to sustain retaliation or punitive damages. The court applied the Rule 50 standard, viewed the trial record in Ravina’s favor, and concluded that a reasonable jury had a sufficient basis for both findings. ###### The Third, Fourth and Fifth Answers The first question asked whether Bekaert had discriminated against Ravina. The jury answered no. The dependent question concerning Columbia’s responsibility for that discrimination therefore also produced no liability. The third question asked whether Bekaert had retaliated. The jury answered yes, establishing the basis for compensatory relief and for its later consideration of punitive damages against him. The fourth question asked whether Columbia was liable for Bekaert’s retaliation. The answer was yes because the municipal statute makes an employer liable for an unlawful practice committed by an employee or agent in violation of the section. The fifth question asked whether Columbia had retaliated through its own conduct. The jury found Columbia was not liable for retaliation based on its own conduct. Its liability thus existed without a verdict that university decisionmakers independently chose retaliation. Together, the third and fourth answers established retaliation by Bekaert and statutory responsibility on Columbia’s part. The fifth kept that responsibility separate from a finding that university decisionmakers had themselves retaliated. ###### Employer Responsibility Under City Law The supervisor ruling and the employer-liability verdict can coexist because they arise from different provisions. Supervisory status was unavailable as the route. The City law’s employee-or-agent language supplied another route once the jury found unlawful retaliation by Bekaert. The employer may bear liability for an employee’s unlawful retaliatory act even when the factfinder rejects a claim that the institution itself retaliated and a court has already rejected supervisor status. Ravina’s direct theories faced their own proof requirements. The verdict form forced the jury to decide attribution and direct conduct separately rather than treating the university as a single undifferentiated actor. After the liability phase, Sanford spoke about the damage to Ravina’s career. The proceedings had examined research delays and communications reaching the scholars who assessed her work; the damages phase then addressed the resulting emotional and reputational injury. The employee-or-agent provision connected the senior colleague’s retaliatory conduct to the employer. It supplied a path to relief despite the court’s earlier ruling that Bekaert was not Ravina’s supervisor. ###### The Accepted Damages Judgment The damages jury initially awarded $750,000 in compensatory damages against Bekaert and Columbia and $500,000 in punitive damages against Bekaert alone. The original judgment reflected that $1.25 million total before post-trial review. The court preserved liability but reduced the compensatory award to $500,000. It compared emotional-distress and reputational-harm cases, credited medical and professional evidence, and selected the maximum amount the court considered sustainable without a new damages trial. On post-trial review, the court set punitive damages at $250,000 after considering the repeated intentional retaliation, comparable awards, the compensatory award and the City law’s civil-penalty benchmark. Ravina accepted both reduced awards on April 22, 2019. The accepted damages disposition therefore comprised $500,000 in compensatory damages against Bekaert and Columbia and $250,000 in punitive damages against Bekaert. The court denied a permanent injunction. Ravina and Bekaert no longer worked together, years had passed since the communications, the record showed no continuing course of retaliation, and the substantial damages already served compensatory and deterrent functions. ###### A Collective Trial Team Sanford worked with McKnight, Melzer, Koster and Donehower through the trial. Alexandra Harwin and other lawyers and staff also contributed to the representation. Separate summary-judgment motions defined the claims; liability and damages required their own trial phases; and post-trial proceedings tested whether the evidence supported the verdict and the monetary remedy. ###### The City Law After Ravina In May 2026, the First Department’s decision in Quintanar again separated retaliation from the underlying discrimination claim. At the pleading stage, it recognized rejection of sexual advances as possible protected opposition and applied the City law’s broader retaliation standard. In Quintanar, the First Department held that allegations of agency could support imputing an individual’s retaliatory act to an employer. Direct misconduct by the employer remained a separate question at the pleading stage. In June 2026, the Second Department applied the City law’s retaliation standard in Griffith. Although a claimant could rely on conduct that disadvantaged the employee, protected activity remained necessary. The court affirmed summary judgment where the employee’s complaint concerned office size rather than opposition to discrimination. Sanford serves as Co-Founder, Chairman and Co-Chair of Executive Representation at Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight. In Ravina, the verdict form assigned responsibility for one person’s retaliation to an employer under the municipal statute. The accepted judgment retained that allocation and provided Ravina with compensatory and punitive damages. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Co-Founder and Chairman; Co-Chair, Executive Representation - **Organization:** Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight, LLP - **Practice:** Employment Discrimination, Retaliation, Trial Practice - **Location:** United States ##### Contact - **Firm:** Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight, LLP - **Office:** United States - **Website:** sanfordheisler.com - **Email:** dsanford@sanfordheisler.com - **Phone:** 646-402-5656 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### David Sanford Employment Discrimination · Retaliation · Trial Practice > “Today’s verdict affirms that Professor Ravina’s career was irreparably damaged by the actions of Columbia Business School Professor Geert Bekaert and the University ##### Research, Reputation and the Fourth Answer David Sanford and his trial team represented Enrichetta Ravina in a case about research delays, professional reputation and retaliation. Five questions under the New York City Human Rights Law separated the conduct of a senior professor from the university’s responsibility for it. The fourth answer gave Ravina a remedy against Columbia. In a conversation with his colleague Andrew Macurdy, David Sanford defended a practical aid to jury deliberations: letting jurors take notes. Jurors, he said, “remember more when they hear and are active listeners by taking notes.” He recognized the risk that one person’s notes might carry too much weight, but preferred that risk to asking jurors to retain days of testimony entirely in memory. The Ravina trial had required that kind of sustained attention. Across fifteen days in July 2018, a federal jury heard a dispute involving a junior professor’s research, complaints about a senior colleague, and communications sent to people who could influence her career. It first decided liability, then damages. Sanford tried the case with H. Vincent McKnight, Andrew Melzer, Melinda Koster and Amy Donehower; Alexandra Harwin and other lawyers and staff also contributed. Ravina testified about the collaboration, the conduct she attributed to Bekaert, her complaints and the obstacles that followed. The successful retaliation claim concerned what happened after she complained: delays in completing scholarship and disparaging messages reaching the academic community in which her work and prospects were evaluated. ###### A Collaboration and Its Deadlines Ravina joined Columbia Business School as a junior professor in 2008. Geert Bekaert was a senior tenured professor in her department. They began collaborating on a Financial Engines data set covering the savings behavior of millions of people. Ravina took the larger role in preparing the data and performing statistical analysis; Bekaert took the larger role in drafting their papers. Ravina testified that unwanted personal conduct and pressure entered the relationship. Her complaint alleged sexual harassment, obstruction of research, hostile treatment and retaliation after she raised concerns with Columbia. The discrimination allegations and the later retaliation claim would require separate decisions from the jury. For Sanford’s team, the retaliation proof had to connect Ravina’s complaints to subsequent conduct. Ravina described demands for unnecessary work, delayed drafts and repeated refusals to share computer code. Emails corroborated her account of refused schedules and withheld drafts. She testified that the stalling delayed a paper by six months as her tenure vote approached. The jury also saw 26 emails from 2014 and 2016. Their recipients included influential professors and editors of leading journals. Some messages encouraged further circulation. Both Ravina and Bekaert confirmed the professional standing of people who received them, giving the jury a basis to assess their reach beyond a private disagreement. Bekaert disputed that the research delays or communications were retaliatory. He offered explanations rooted in professional disagreements and described the emails as efforts to defend himself. Columbia offered academic and administrative reasons for its tenure and leave decisions, emphasized that Bekaert lacked supervisory authority, and denied retaliation by its own decisionmakers. The jury therefore had to decide why the conduct occurred and whether it was reasonably likely to deter a complaint about discrimination. Ravina could establish retaliation for opposing conduct she reasonably believed discriminatory even if the jury did not find that the underlying conduct amounted to actionable discrimination. ###### Preparing the Questions for the Jury Before trial, Bekaert and Columbia had filed separate motions for summary judgment. The court denied Bekaert’s motion in full and granted Columbia’s in part. Columbia obtained judgment on the federal quid pro quo theory and on claims accusing the university of direct discrimination. Other hostile-environment and discrimination theories could proceed through its handling of Bekaert’s alleged conduct. The retaliation claims survived. Sanford’s team could present evidence that protected complaints preceded harm to Ravina’s research or reputation and ask the jury to infer retaliation despite the defendants’ explanations. The court also ruled that Bekaert was not Ravina’s supervisor, eliminating theories that depended on that status. The City law, however, separately made an employer responsible for unlawful conduct by an employee or agent. That provision would supply the basis for Columbia’s liability at trial. At the close of the defense case, Ravina withdrew her remaining federal claims against Columbia. The jury received five questions under the New York City Human Rights Law. Its answers would address the City law claims, without combining them with Title VII or Title IX. ###### The Third, Fourth and Fifth Answers After about two days of deliberation, the jury answered the first question no: Bekaert had not been proved liable for discrimination against Ravina. The second question depended on a finding against him, so Columbia incurred no liability for that alleged discrimination. The third answer was yes: Bekaert had retaliated. The fourth established Columbia’s responsibility for that retaliation under the employee-or-agent provision. The unlawful act was Bekaert’s; the statute attached responsibility to his employer. His lack of supervisory status did not defeat that basis for relief. The fifth question concerned Columbia’s own conduct. The jury found that the university had not itself retaliated. Its answer left intact the liability arising from Bekaert’s acts. By deciding the questions separately, the jury could impose employer responsibility without finding direct misconduct by university decisionmakers. Those findings established the basis for compensatory relief and for punitive damages against Bekaert. After the liability phase, Sanford spoke publicly about the damage to Ravina’s career. The next phase required evidence of the emotional and reputational injury caused by the conduct the jury had found retaliatory. ###### The Judgment Ravina Accepted The damages jury awarded $750,000 in compensatory damages against Bekaert and Columbia and $500,000 in punitive damages against Bekaert alone. The initial judgment totaled $1.25 million. On post-trial review, Bekaert challenged the sufficiency of the evidence supporting retaliation and punitive damages. Applying Rule 50 and viewing the record in Ravina’s favor, the court found that a reasonable jury had a sufficient basis for both findings. The liability allocation stood. The amounts received separate scrutiny. The court reduced compensatory damages to $500,000 after comparing emotional-distress and reputational-harm cases and considering medical and professional evidence. It selected the largest amount it considered sustainable without a new damages trial. Punitive damages were set at $250,000. The court considered repeated intentional retaliation, comparable awards, the compensatory amount and the City law’s civil-penalty benchmark. Ravina accepted both reductions on April 22, 2019: $500,000 in compensatory damages against Bekaert and Columbia, and $250,000 in punitive damages against Bekaert. The court denied a permanent injunction. Ravina and Bekaert no longer worked together, years had passed since the communications, and the record showed no continuing course of retaliation. The damages also served compensatory and deterrent purposes. ###### The Protection for a Complaint Later, separate cases continued to distinguish retaliation from the discrimination that prompted a complaint. In May 2026, the First Department’s decision in Quintanar recognized that rejecting sexual advances could constitute protected opposition under the City law. At the pleading stage, it applied the law’s broader retaliation standard and allowed allegations of agency to support attributing an individual’s retaliatory act to an employer. Direct employer misconduct remained a separate question. In June 2026, the Second Department applied the City law in Griffith. Conduct that disadvantaged an employee could support a retaliation claim, but protected activity was still necessary. The court affirmed summary judgment because the employee’s complaint concerned office size rather than opposition to discrimination. ###### Learning and Building a Trial Practice Sanford had taught for years before attending law school. After earning his law degree at Stanford, he clerked for Judge Gladys Kessler in the federal district court in Washington. He has credited her close editing with helping him make the transition from academic writing to legal writing. In discussing trial work with Macurdy, he emphasized the value of clerkships and the practical demands of presenting a case to jurors. He now serves as Co-Founder, Chairman and Co-Chair of Executive Representation at Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight. Carolin Guentert recalled a related conversation when she interviewed with Sanford in 2019. Her career had included corporate practice, a clerkship and teaching in a domestic-violence clinic. Sanford told her that differing professional backgrounds brought useful perspectives and that she could learn the details of Title VII. What mattered, in her account, was “tenaciousness and creativity” in representing clients whose civil rights were being challenged. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Co-Founder and Chairman; Co-Chair, Executive Representation - **Organization:** Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight, LLP - **Practice:** Employment Discrimination, Retaliation, Trial Practice - **Location:** United States ##### Contact - **Firm:** Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight, LLP - **Office:** United States - **Website:** sanfordheisler.com - **Email:** dsanford@sanfordheisler.com - **Phone:** 646-402-5656 --- ## 14. Cyrus Mehri — `900005355` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `3c592250a2723cd2cc1bd0da413e2bd5b9d697b050d95a989e622065a5eedad5` - **After/current hash:** `0d897eb9e0e7e7ae77c80727f2391d767de187198206e6996cfce6050e6a1852` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005444 (2026-09-11 15:32:58 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 12**: Keep the disputed conduct attributed to the complaint and state the settlement directly, removing the standard denial-and-no-finding disclaimer. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 18**: Retain the dismissal ruling and parallel discovery-and-mediation strategy while removing the generalized warning about later proof. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 37**: Preserve the amount's expressly estimated, prospective character while removing the warning against counting it as an immediate cash fund. - `rewrite` — **Title, deck and negotiation opening**: Bring the documented filing deadline, three co-lead counsel and separately arbitrated backpay into the opening, making the negotiation choices clear. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Linda Ingram section and final current-role paragraph**: Add the representatives' documented participation, Mehri's exact short description, communication motion and officially stated Working IDEAL co-founders. - `rewrite` — **Task-force authority and temporary stay procedure**: Consolidate repeated enforcement explanations and correct the old stay assertion against the signed agreement's explicit motion-filing provision. - `rewrite` — **Class coverage, money, systems, audits and final conference**: Consolidate duplicated explanations while preserving every supported scope limit, amount, time period, named participant, system, audit figure and dated conclusion. ### BEFORE #### Cyrus Mehri Civil Rights · Employment · Workplace Reform > “This settlement sets a new standard for corporate diversity. ##### Thirty Days to Defeat the Recommendation The Coca-Cola settlement gave a seven-member outside task force authority to recommend workplace changes. Coca-Cola had thirty days to challenge a recommendation in court and had to prove one of three specified grounds. Cyrus Mehri and his co-lead counsel negotiated access to personnel data, annual public reports and enforceable implementation. Under the signed November 16, 2000 agreement, a recommendation from Coca-Cola’s outside task force entered the company with an implementation date already attached. Coca-Cola had thirty days to seek judicial relief. Silence, delay or ordinary managerial disagreement left the recommendation in force. Within that 30-day window, the company carried the burden in court. It had to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that the recommendation reflected unsound business judgment, was technically infeasible or was not cost-effective. Before litigation over a recommendation, the task force and company had to meet and confer. Coca-Cola also needed a stay if it wanted implementation paused during judicial review. Filing a challenge alone would not suspend the recommendation. Cyrus Mehri was one of three co-lead class counsel, alongside H. Lamar Mixson and Jeffrey Bramlett, within a broader team representing four named employees and a nationwide salaried class. The company retained the right to challenge a recommendation, but the task force did not need to win a separate order before implementation. Coca-Cola had to bring the dispute to court and satisfy the agreement’s evidentiary standard. ###### The Employees Inside the Company Elvenyia Barton-Gibson, George H. Eddings Jr., Linda Ingram and Kimberly Gray Orton served as the class representatives. They challenged systems governing compensation, promotion, performance evaluation and movement through Coca-Cola’s salaried workforce. The complaint alleged that those systems produced racial disparities and confined African-American employees away from influential divisions and higher corporate levels. Coca-Cola denied discrimination and liability. The parties resolved the action by agreement without a liability finding. The settlement class covered African-American employees in salaried exempt and non-exempt positions in Coca-Cola’s United States operations during the period from April 22, 1995 through June 14, 2000. Employees of separately owned bottling companies fell outside that definition. Coca-Cola’s commercial network also included independently owned bottlers. The agreement governed the salaried workforce of the defendant company; it did not cover every worker who bottled or distributed its products. Rule 23 required notice, a fairness hearing and judicial approval before the agreement could bind absent class members. The court assessed the negotiated compromise and the representation of the class. ###### The Record Built Before Settlement Linda Ingram contacted Mehri in the spring of 1998. His firm then led an investigation drawing on employee accounts, company records and specialist analysis before asserting class allegations in the federal complaint in April 1999. Coca-Cola moved to dismiss the class allegations, and Judge Richard Story denied the motion in July 1999. He cautioned that the ruling rested on assumptions still requiring proof and that significant legal and management issues remained after discovery. Litigation then continued on two tracks: building a class-certification record while the court directed confidential, nonbinding mediation. Class counsel reviewed human-resources databases and diversity reports, examined more than 140,000 pages of documents, gathered over 150 employee affidavits and deposed senior management. Mediation continued while discovery and briefing moved forward. The parties reached agreement in principle on June 14, 2000, near the class-certification filing deadline. A neutral later resolved the disputed backpay component through the binding process the parties had selected. The formal agreement was signed on November 16, 2000. After notice and a fairness hearing, the court granted final approval on June 7, 2001. The case then moved from adversarial discovery into years of supervised implementation and public reporting. ###### Seven Seats Outside Management The agreement created a seven-member task force. Coca-Cola selected three members, class counsel selected three and the parties jointly selected the chair, all subject to court approval. Former Labor Secretary Alexis Herman chaired the body. The other members were M. Anthony Burns, Gilbert F. Casellas, Edmund D. Cooke Jr., Marjorie Fine Knowles, Bill Lann Lee and René A. Redwood. They served outside Coca-Cola’s ordinary management hierarchy. The agreement authorized the task force to examine relevant nonprivileged books, records and workforce data; communicate with officers and employees; commission anonymous surveys and focus groups; and receive confidential information from the ombuds office. It could investigate complaints, retain independent consultants and obtain legal assistance, including from class counsel, with reasonable expenses reimbursed under the agreement. Each year it reported in writing to the chief executive, the board, the court and class counsel, presented its findings to board leadership and placed the report in the public domain. ###### A Recommendation Takes Effect The task force first evaluated policies and practices and recommended changes within the settlement’s defined employment systems. When Coca-Cola disagreed, the agreement required consultation. Unresolved resistance then moved to a judge rather than remaining inside a private executive meeting. Coca-Cola had thirty days after the recommendation to seek relief. The company bore the evidentiary burden and could prevail only on the agreement’s three grounds: unsound business judgment, technical infeasibility or lack of cost-effectiveness. Coca-Cola had to request and obtain a stay to pause implementation during a challenge. Without one, implementation continued while the court considered the dispute. Coca-Cola retained management of the business. The task force’s recommendations addressed the employment systems covered by the agreement and remained subject to judicial review. The class team negotiated a sequence of access, recommendation, implementation and judicial review. After identifying a defect through company records or employee accounts, the task force could recommend a correction and monitor whether Coca-Cola carried it out. ###### Funds and Future Pay The settlement provided several forms of relief on different timelines. Direct funds addressed class members’ compensatory and backpay claims, while future salary adjustments and changes to employment systems required continuing implementation. The parties allocated approximately $58.7 million to a compensatory fund, $24.1 million to make-whole and backpay relief, and $10 million to a promotional-achievement fund. Class counsel’s experts estimated approximately $43.5 million in pay-equity adjustments over ten years. Those adjustments concerned future salary effects and promotion-related corrections; they were estimates of prospective compensation consequences rather than another immediate cash fund. Counsel also estimated approximately $36 million in programmatic expenditures during the task force’s original four-year term. That estimate covered systems, experts, monitoring and implementation required by the agreement. The promotional-achievement fund addressed advancement after settlement. Pay-equity adjustments would affect future earnings, while the task force’s access to personnel records and independent analysis allowed it to examine whether the promised changes reached employees. ###### Nine Systems, One Monitor The task force organized its review into nine connected systems: performance management, staffing, compensation, diversity education, equal employment opportunity, problem resolution, career development, succession planning and mentoring. For staffing, Coca-Cola implemented an internal posting system and candidate-pool requirements. Positions at lower salaried grades generally required at least three candidates including a woman or minority; higher-grade nondiverse slates required senior human-resources review and task-force reporting. Performance reviews used common criteria and appeal rights. Compensation design connected base pay, bonuses and stock options to documented performance and potential, while pay-equity analyses tested outcomes. People-leadership metrics created a route between diversity performance and managerial compensation. The problem-resolution system included a confidential ombuds office reporting directly to the chief executive, a round-the-clock telephone service and written investigation and disposition procedures. Employees gained multiple paths for surfacing concerns beyond the immediate supervisory chain. Dr. Kathleen Lundquist and Dr. Irwin Goldstein served as joint experts. Their audits, workforce analyses and system reviews supported the task force’s judgments, while the board’s public-issues committee and annual reports supplied recurring oversight above ordinary human-resources administration. ###### Progress, Delay and New Disparities The December 2003 report evaluated the first major year of implementation. It recorded considerable progress in several systems and delay in others, especially as Coca-Cola reorganized its North American business through the large “S2” restructuring. The posting process was functioning and employees reported better visibility into openings. Diversity and equal-opportunity training drew positive responses; adverse-impact monitoring expanded; one-on-one mentoring continued; the ombuds office received substantial use; and board vacancies became more diverse. The same report found incomplete performance-management training, missing interim reviews in nearly half the audited appraisals, delayed career-development and structured-interview work, and weak diverse slates for many executive openings. It also identified promotion disparities during the restructuring period. An audit of 526 postings found 94 that missed candidate-pool requirements, mostly because fewer than three candidates applied; four lacked a woman or minority candidate. A smaller internal-only sample raised adverse-impact concerns that the task force directed the company to investigate. The report also recorded 194 salary increases after a 2002 pay-equity analysis, while a computer-system conversion delayed analysis of the next cycle. When the task force raised implementation gaps, company leadership committed resources, closer monitoring and more frequent accountability reviews. ###### The Final Settlement Conference The original task-force term lasted four years. At Coca-Cola’s request, Judge Story extended it through December 2006. On December 1, 2006, the court found that the company had met or exceeded the agreement’s requirements through that date, thanked the seven members and joint experts, and relieved them of further duties. Mehri appeared for Linda Ingram at the final settlement conference. Mehri is a founding partner of Mehri & Skalet and a co-founder of Working IDEAL, where he advises on workplace policies and measures of equity. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner; Co-Founder, Working IDEAL - **Organization:** Mehri & Skalet, PLLC - **Practice:** Civil Rights, Employment, Workplace Reform - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Firm:** Mehri & Skalet, PLLC - **Address:** 2000 K Street NW, Suite 325, Washington, D.C. 20006 - **Website:** findjustice.com - **Email:** cmehri@findjustice.com - **Phone:** 202.822.5100 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Cyrus Mehri Civil Rights · Employment · Workplace Reform > “This settlement sets a new standard for corporate diversity. ##### An Outside Authority Inside Coca-Cola Cyrus Mehri and his co-lead counsel negotiated a Coca-Cola settlement that opened personnel records to an independent task force and gave its recommendations a path to enforcement. The work continued through years of salary adjustments, workplace reviews and public reports. At four in the afternoon on June 14, 2000, the parties resolved the final details of a settlement in principle with Coca-Cola. The employees’ class-certification motion was due that day; filing had to begin before the clerk’s office closed. Cyrus Mehri, H. Lamar Mixson and Jeffrey Bramlett were the three co-lead class counsel, working with a broader team for four named employees and a nationwide salaried class. Backpay remained unsettled. The parties agreed to submit that question to binding arbitration by neutral employment-discrimination experts, assisted by a neutral labor economist. Discovery and negotiations had brought them to an agreement on workplace reform while leaving a defined process for resolving the disputed amount. The formal agreement, signed on November 16, 2000, placed an independent task force inside the company’s employment systems. It could examine personnel data, speak with employees and recommend changes that Coca-Cola would have to implement unless it obtained judicial relief. Annual public reports would show what the company had done and what remained unfinished. ###### Linda Ingram’s Call Linda Ingram had contacted Mehri in the spring of 1998. His firm led a lengthy investigation of employee accounts, company records and specialist analysis before class allegations were added to the federal complaint in April 1999. Ingram, Elvenyia Barton-Gibson, George H. Eddings Jr. and Kimberly Gray Orton became the class representatives. They challenged the systems governing compensation, promotion, performance evaluation and advancement through Coca-Cola’s salaried workforce. They alleged racial disparities that kept African-American employees away from influential divisions and higher corporate levels. The representatives helped identify witnesses, reviewed pleadings and participated personally in mediation. Mehri, who had represented more than a hundred class representatives, described these four as “more involved in prosecuting this case and negotiating the settlement” than any he had previously encountered. Their participation continued through the negotiations over the remedy. The class covered African-American employees in salaried exempt and non-exempt positions in Coca-Cola’s United States operations from April 22, 1995 through June 14, 2000. That boundary mattered in a business whose products also passed through independently owned bottlers: employees of those separate companies were outside the settlement. Coca-Cola sought dismissal of the class allegations, but Judge Richard Story denied its motion in July 1999. Counsel built the record for class certification while pursuing court-directed, confidential, nonbinding mediation. The litigation continued during the talks. To reach employees, the class team sought emergency relief from local rules restricting communication with class members. Counsel examined human-resources databases and diversity reports, reviewed more than 140,000 pages of documents, gathered over 150 employee affidavits and deposed senior management. The June 2000 agreement in principle and the later backpay determination still required judicial approval. Under Rule 23, notice and a fairness hearing gave absent class members an opportunity to assess the proposed resolution. On June 7, 2001, after reviewing the compromise and the class’s representation, the court granted final approval. Supervised implementation could begin. ###### Seven Seats and a Right to Investigate Coca-Cola selected three task-force members, class counsel selected three, and the parties jointly chose a chair, all subject to court approval. Former Labor Secretary Alexis Herman chaired the seven-member body. M. Anthony Burns, Gilbert F. Casellas, Edmund D. Cooke Jr., Marjorie Fine Knowles, Bill Lann Lee and René A. Redwood held the other seats. These members worked outside the company’s management hierarchy. They could examine relevant nonprivileged books, records and workforce data, communicate directly with officers and employees, commission anonymous surveys and focus groups, and receive confidential information from the ombuds office. They could also investigate complaints, retain independent consultants and obtain legal assistance, including from class counsel, with reasonable expenses reimbursed under the agreement. That access gave the task force a way to identify defects in employment practices and test proposed corrections. Its written annual reports went to the chief executive, the board, the court and class counsel, and became public. The task force also presented its findings to board leadership. A recommendation carried an obligation to act. Coca-Cola had thirty days to petition for judicial relief, unless the company and task force agreed to extend the deadline. To prevail, the company had to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that the recommendation involved unsound business judgment, was technically infeasible or was not cost-effective. Before a petition, the parties and task force had to make a good-faith effort to resolve their disagreement. The agreement treated temporary delay separately. To postpone implementation while seeking relief, Coca-Cola had to file a stay motion with its petition. Filing that motion paused the obligation to implement the disputed recommendation until seven days after the motion was denied. A challenge without a stay motion did not itself suspend implementation. Coca-Cola continued to manage its business, and the task force’s authority covered the employment systems defined by the settlement. Within those limits, Mehri and his co-lead counsel had secured a process that reached from evidence to action: the task force could examine a problem, recommend a correction and monitor compliance. A recommendation did not depend on a fresh enforcement order; the company had to bring its objection to court and satisfy the agreed standard. ###### Relief on Different Timelines The settlement’s financial provisions addressed both past losses and future earnings. Approximately $58.7 million went to a compensatory fund, $24.1 million to make-whole and backpay relief, and $10 million to a promotional-achievement fund addressing advancement after settlement. Other figures described work still to be done. Class counsel’s experts estimated approximately $43.5 million in pay-equity adjustments over ten years, including future salary effects and promotion-related corrections. Counsel estimated a further $36 million in programmatic expenditures during the task force’s original four-year term, covering systems, experts, monitoring and implementation. Those future benefits required continuing review. Access to personnel records and independent analysis allowed the task force to examine whether salary adjustments and changes in advancement practices reached employees. ###### How a Vacancy Was Filled The task force organized its work around nine connected systems: performance management, staffing, compensation, diversity education, equal employment opportunity, problem resolution, career development, succession planning and mentoring. Staffing made the changes tangible. Coca-Cola introduced internal job postings and candidate-pool requirements. Openings at lower salaried grades generally required at least three candidates, including a woman or minority candidate. At higher grades, a nondiverse slate required senior human-resources review and reporting to the task force. Performance reviews used common criteria and provided appeal rights. Compensation design linked base pay, bonuses and stock options to documented performance and potential, while pay-equity analyses tested the results. Measures of managers’ leadership of employees connected diversity performance to managerial compensation. Employees also gained ways to raise concerns beyond their immediate supervisors. A confidential ombuds office reported directly to the chief executive. A telephone service operated around the clock, and written procedures governed investigations and their disposition. Joint experts Dr. Kathleen Lundquist and Dr. Irwin Goldstein supplied audits, workforce analyses and system reviews. Their work informed the task force’s judgments. The board’s public-issues committee and the annual reports provided recurring oversight above the company’s human-resources administration. ###### What the 2003 Audits Found The December 2003 report assessed the first major year of implementation during Coca-Cola’s large “S2” restructuring of its North American business. Some systems had advanced considerably; others had been delayed. Because the report was public, employees could see both the changes and the remaining obligations. The posting system was operating, and employees reported better visibility into openings. Diversity and equal-opportunity training drew positive responses. Adverse-impact monitoring had expanded, one-on-one mentoring continued, the ombuds office was receiving substantial use, and board vacancies were being filled more diversely. Performance-management training remained incomplete. Interim reviews were missing from nearly half the audited appraisals. Career-development and structured-interview work had been delayed, diverse slates remained weak for many executive openings, and the report identified promotion disparities during the restructuring. The figures made some of those shortcomings precise. Of 526 audited postings, 94 missed the candidate-pool requirements, mostly because fewer than three candidates had applied; four lacked a woman or minority candidate. A smaller sample of internal-only postings raised adverse-impact concerns that the task force directed Coca-Cola to investigate. A 2002 pay-equity analysis had produced 194 salary increases. A computer-system conversion then delayed analysis of the next cycle. In response to implementation gaps raised by the task force, company leadership committed resources, closer monitoring and more frequent accountability reviews. ###### The Final Conference At Coca-Cola’s request, Judge Story extended the task force’s original four-year term through December 2006. On December 1, 2006, he found that the company had met or exceeded the agreement’s requirements through that date, thanked the seven members and the joint experts, and relieved them of further duties. Mehri appeared for Linda Ingram at the final settlement conference, more than eight years after she had first contacted him. Mehri is a founding partner of Mehri & Skalet and co-founded Working IDEAL with Pam Coukos and Jenny Yang. There he advises on workplace policies, leadership practices and measures of equity, bringing his experience negotiating and monitoring employment reforms to the design of companies’ everyday practices. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner; Co-Founder, Working IDEAL - **Organization:** Mehri & Skalet, PLLC - **Practice:** Civil Rights, Employment, Workplace Reform - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Firm:** Mehri & Skalet, PLLC - **Address:** 2000 K Street NW, Suite 325, Washington, D.C. 20006 - **Website:** findjustice.com - **Email:** cmehri@findjustice.com - **Phone:** 202.822.5100 --- ## 15. Daryl D. Parks — `900005360` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `d0f0bc0eada5709525136cef5eebdf33351319dfc8f079f4e94d0bff33651243` - **After/current hash:** `39fe75f75e3332644aa2922c514c9586881927eedcee4b34f748440337246fd2` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005446 (2026-09-11 15:52:26 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 3 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 11**: Describe the recording's evidentiary contribution directly instead of introducing it with a caution about interpretation. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 17**: Preserve the criminal finding and municipal-liability requirements while removing the warning that one result did not automatically establish the other. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 26**: Keep the collateral-review outcome and dates while removing generic qualifications about written merits discussion and new factfinding. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 27**: State the habeas proceeding's subject and chronology directly while removing the unrelated warning about reopening the civil settlement. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 31**: Close on the actual evidence the recording preserved and remove the opening disclaimer about movements it could not show. - `rewrite` — **Deck, opening and An Account With a Timestamp**: Bring Parks into focus and consolidate repeated explanations while preserving each evidentiary distinction. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Recorded shots and call timing**: Replace repeated abstract claims with the court's six-shot sequence and the thirty-three-second gap before Raja's 911 call. - `rewrite` — **Criminal and civil proceedings**: Preserve distinct roles and legal tests, clarify the surviving claim and use the documented training depositions. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **After the Civil Settlement**: End with verified education, scholarship support and specific prevention efforts discussed in Parks's 2024 address. - `rewrite` — **Deck, opening and An Account With a Timestamp**: Bring Parks into focus and consolidate repeated explanations while preserving each evidentiary distinction. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Recorded shots and call timing**: Replace repeated abstract claims with the court's six-shot sequence and the thirty-three-second gap before Raja's 911 call. - `rewrite` — **Criminal and civil proceedings**: Preserve distinct roles and legal tests, clarify the surviving claim and use the documented training depositions. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **After the Civil Settlement**: End with verified education, scholarship support and specific prevention efforts discussed in Parks's 2024 address. ### BEFORE #### Daryl D. Parks Civil Rights · Plaintiff Litigation > “If Corey had his gun out, he never made any kind of offensive action. ##### The Call That Kept Recording Corey Jones was waiting for roadside assistance when a plainclothes officer arrived in an unmarked van and never identified himself as police. The assistance line stayed open. Daryl Parks represented the family as that recording separated the spoken encounter from the account given after Jones could no longer speak. Corey Jones’s vehicle failed on the southbound Interstate 95 offramp at PGA Boulevard after he had performed with his band. A friend and a Road Ranger tried to help. The vehicle would not start. Jones remained beside it because musical equipment was inside and a tow truck was still coming. He had already called roadside assistance. The final call began around 3:10 in the morning and stayed connected as an unmarked van approached. Nouman Raja, then a Palm Beach Gardens police officer assigned to an auto-burglary detail, was dressed in plain clothes. Raja did not audibly identify himself as an officer before the exchange escalated. The recording preserved him asking Jones whether he was good and then abruptly commanding him to raise his hands. It captured words, timing and gunshots while leaving the physical scene to be reconstructed through other evidence. Jones had a concealed-weapons permit and a firearm in the vehicle. He did not fire it. Daryl Parks, representing the family with a broader legal team, emphasized the difference between lawful possession and aggression before investigators or courts had resolved the case. ###### An Account With a Timestamp The recording captured an encounter for which the surviving officer could give an account and the man killed could not. Physical evidence supplied trajectories and distance; the continuing roadside call preserved the words and timing against which the officer’s account could be tested. The roadside-assistance recording did not eliminate interpretation, but it narrowed it. It preserved no police introduction. It captured the confrontation beginning in a manner inconsistent with a routine, identified welfare check. It also established a sequence against which Raja’s later statements could be measured. Parks’s early work occurred before the family possessed the full investigative file. He spoke publicly about what the medical and firearms evidence showed, pressed for disclosure and resisted the first official characterization of an officer suddenly confronted by an armed subject. The recording prevented that characterization from standing alone. It also gave the civil complaint a contemporaneous factual anchor independent of later recollection. The call center had preserved the audio independently of the police and the family. Parks and the family’s lawyers connected that sequence with the medical and firearms evidence while seeking an explanation for the encounter from the arrival of the unmarked van onward. ###### The State's Criminal Case The Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office prosecuted Raja. A jury convicted him in 2019 of manslaughter by culpable negligence and attempted first-degree murder. The convictions reflected two distinct legal theories applied to the fatal encounter and its separated volleys of shots. Raja received a twenty-five-year sentence. Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal later affirmed, rejecting arguments that the convictions violated double-jeopardy, merger or single-homicide principles. The court treated the offenses as legally distinct rather than duplicative. The criminal judgment established Raja’s guilt under the counts submitted to the jury. It did not automatically establish that Palm Beach Gardens was civilly liable for municipal policy, training or supervision. Criminal responsibility belongs to the defendant’s conduct and mental state; municipal liability requires proof tied to the public entity under different doctrines. A plaintiff must connect the injury to an official policy, an established custom, a deliberately indifferent training failure or another legally attributable municipal decision. Parks represented the family and worked with other family counsel on the civil case and public demands for accountability. State prosecutors selected charges, presented the criminal trial and defended the convictions on appeal. The two processes drew from overlapping evidence while addressing different legal questions. ###### The City in the Civil Record Clinton Jones Sr., personally and as representative of his son’s estate, sued Raja and the City of Palm Beach Gardens in federal court. The civil complaint asserted constitutional and state-law theories and challenged the city’s responsibility for placing a plainclothes officer into an encounter that became fatal. The district court dismissed or narrowed claims against the city under municipal-liability and Florida sovereign-immunity rules. Raja’s malicious or wanton conduct could support personal liability while simultaneously placing some common-law claims outside the state’s waiver of immunity. Parks and the civil team had to identify which conduct could legally be attributed to the city, which claims survived and what evidence connected the city’s decisions to the shooting. In February 2023, the family and Palm Beach Gardens reached a two-million-dollar settlement through mediation. The amount represented the city’s insurance-policy limit, and the agreement ended the civil case. ###### The Evidence That Survived the Encounter The family pursued the matter across years of investigation, criminal proceedings and civil litigation. Prosecutors, investigators, experts, witnesses and multiple counsel performed separate roles in the criminal judgment and the family’s mediated civil settlement. The criminal judgment continued through collateral review. In June 2025, Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal affirmed without a written merits discussion the denial of Raja’s Rule 3.850 postconviction motion. Rehearing was denied the following month. That disposition left the state postconviction order intact; it did not add new factual findings about the roadside encounter. Raja filed a federal habeas petition in the Southern District of Florida in October 2025. A state response and reply briefing followed through January 2026. Those filings challenged his criminal judgment; they did not reopen the family’s settlement with the city. The criminal collateral proceedings concerned Raja’s conviction and sentence. Parks’s representation of the family occupied a separate civil track, governed by municipal-liability rules and the terms of the settlement reached in mediation. Parks represented the family while the public account was still being formed. He directed attention to the plain clothes, unmarked vehicle, absence of an audible police identification, continuous call and evidence that Jones’s firearm had never discharged. Parks practices with Parks Law in Tallahassee. In the Jones matter, he and the family’s counsel sought disclosure and examined the available medical, firearms and audio evidence before the criminal and civil cases reached their separate conclusions. The audio could not show every movement on the dark offramp. It preserved the beginning of the encounter, the exchange of words and the sequence of shots. That contemporaneous record remained available to the family’s counsel and the investigators and prosecutors who tested the officer’s account. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Attorney - **Organization:** Parks Law, LLC - **Practice:** Civil Rights, Plaintiff Litigation - **Location:** Tallahassee, Florida ##### Contact - **Firm:** Parks Law, LLC - **Website:** floridabar.org - **Phone:** 850.222.3333 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Daryl D. Parks Civil Rights · Plaintiff Litigation > “If Corey had his gun out, he never made any kind of offensive action. ##### The Call That Kept Recording Daryl Parks began representing Corey Jones’s family before they had the full investigative file. He pressed for disclosure and challenged the suggestion that possessing a gun explained the shooting. A roadside-assistance call preserved the encounter’s opening and gave the family’s lawyers evidence beyond the surviving officer’s account. Corey Jones’s vehicle failed on the southbound Interstate 95 offramp at PGA Boulevard after he had performed with his band. A friend and a Road Ranger tried to help. The vehicle would not start. Jones remained beside it because musical equipment was inside and a tow truck was still coming. Around 3:15 in the morning on October 18, 2015, Jones was speaking with a roadside-assistance operator when an unmarked van approached. Nouman Raja, then a Palm Beach Gardens police officer assigned to an auto-burglary detail, was dressed in plain clothes. The assistance line stayed connected. Raja did not audibly identify himself as an officer before the exchange escalated. The recording preserved him asking Jones whether he was good and then abruptly commanding him to raise his hands. It captured words, timing and gunshots while leaving the physical scene to be reconstructed through other evidence. Jones had a concealed-weapons permit and a firearm in the vehicle. He did not fire it. Parks, representing the family with a broader legal team, emphasized the difference between lawful possession and aggression before investigators or courts had resolved the case. ###### An Account With a Timestamp Parks’s early work occurred before the family possessed the full investigative file. He spoke publicly about what the medical and firearms evidence showed, pressed for disclosure and resisted the first official characterization of an officer suddenly confronted by an armed subject. He and the family’s lawyers sought an explanation that began with the arrival of the unmarked van. The call center had preserved the audio independently of the police and the family. Its record of the opening exchange gave investigators and counsel a way to test Raja’s later account. Physical evidence supplied trajectories and distances; the recording established when words and shots could be heard. Together, those sources informed the family’s civil complaint. Investigators found that the roadside call captured six shots in two volleys, separated by roughly ten to twelve seconds. Raja had described giving commands while on the phone with 911 during the encounter. His recorded 911 call began thirty-three seconds after the final shot. Those timestamps allowed the sequence to be reconstructed without relying on his recollection. ###### The State’s Criminal Case The Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office prosecuted Raja. A jury convicted him in 2019 of manslaughter by culpable negligence and attempted first-degree murder. The convictions applied distinct legal theories to the fatal encounter and its separated volleys of shots. Raja received a twenty-five-year sentence. Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal affirmed in April 2021, rejecting his double-jeopardy, merger and single-homicide arguments. Manslaughter required a death; attempted first-degree murder required a premeditated design to kill. Each offense contained an element the other did not. Parks and other family counsel pursued the civil case and public demands for accountability over years of litigation. State prosecutors selected the charges, presented the criminal trial and defended the convictions on appeal. Both proceedings drew on the work of investigators, experts and witnesses. ###### The City in the Civil Record Clinton Jones Sr., personally and as representative of his son’s estate, sued Raja and the City of Palm Beach Gardens in federal court. The civil complaint asserted constitutional and state-law theories and challenged the city’s responsibility for placing a plainclothes officer into an encounter that became fatal. The criminal judgment established Raja’s guilt on the counts submitted to the jury. A federal claim against the city required the family’s lawyers to connect the injury to an official policy, an established custom, a deliberately indifferent training failure or another legally attributable municipal decision. Florida’s sovereign-immunity rules presented a separate question. The district court dismissed several common-law claims against the city because the alleged malicious or wanton conduct fell outside the state’s waiver of immunity. Such conduct could support Raja’s personal liability while foreclosing those claims against his employer. The claim alleging inadequate training, policies and supervision survived the city’s motion to dismiss. The civil team pursued the city’s preparation of officers for the overnight detail. Two officers’ September 2022 depositions addressed instructions to stop and question people perceived as suspicious and the lack of formal training for that assignment. The family relied on that testimony to connect the city’s decisions to the encounter; the remaining claims required their own proof. In February 2023, the family and Palm Beach Gardens reached a two-million-dollar settlement through mediation. The amount represented the city’s insurance-policy limit, and the agreement ended the civil case. ###### After the Civil Settlement Raja continued to challenge his conviction and sentence. In June 2025, Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal affirmed the denial of his Rule 3.850 postconviction motion. Rehearing was denied the following month, leaving the state postconviction order intact. He filed a federal habeas petition in the Southern District of Florida in October 2025; a state response and reply briefing followed through January 2026. Parks’s work for the family belonged to the separate civil proceeding that had ended in mediation. He practices with Parks Law in Tallahassee. A Haines City native, he earned degrees in economics and political science at Florida A&M University and his law degree at Florida State University. He later helped endow one of the first scholarships at FAMU’s reestablished law school. At FAMU Law’s May 2024 hooding ceremony, Parks spoke about work that continued after verdicts. He recalled efforts to improve crib safety, change an ordinance to prevent drownings and end Florida’s juvenile boot camps with Governor Jeb Bush. Another effort concerned children left in hot daycare vans: he had pressed for head counts. His advice to the graduates followed those examples: “Make sure you are the lawyer in the room who makes right prevail.” ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Attorney - **Organization:** Parks Law, LLC - **Practice:** Civil Rights, Plaintiff Litigation - **Location:** Tallahassee, Florida ##### Contact - **Firm:** Parks Law, LLC - **Website:** floridabar.org - **Phone:** 850.222.3333 --- ## 16. Deuel Ross — `900005362` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `cb5f611b4ceddca3e592142f67f4fe1ab8223fa7565c8fddf3501214b93fe035` - **After/current hash:** `2e4e0b7f93f9845ec44cc9685bc010b01443959863b0287cdcb2666014f5fa61` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005445 (2026-09-11 15:44:28 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 5**: Preserve the district count and population share while removing the opening warning about entitlement to a second seat. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 8**: Explain the illustrative maps' evidentiary function directly without warnings about automatic remedies or proportional guarantees. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 13**: Retain both voting estimates and their evidentiary use while removing the appended warning about individual voter motives. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 15**: Keep the court's exact quotation and preliminary disposition while removing the repeated no-final-liability and no-permanent-map disclaimer. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 17**: State the stay's actual electoral effect and review posture without the generic warning against treating it as final approval. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 20**: Preserve Ross's quotation and benchmark argument while removing the warning against an expansive interpretation he did not advance. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 32**: Describe the governing configuration requirements affirmatively and remove the generalized proportional-representation disclaimer. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 35**: Identify the exact ruling affirmed instead of listing final decisions and future plans beyond its scope. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 37**: State the proof supporting the plaintiffs' result directly rather than repeating warnings about demographic proportionality. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 42**: Preserve the exact percentages and district types while removing the appended not-two-majority-districts qualification. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 49**: Retain the full substantive effect of vacatur while removing the editorial description of findings as mere historical work product. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 53**: Preserve the stay's electoral effect and the three maps while removing the generic statement that the emergency order did not resolve the merits. - `rewrite` — **Deck and initial illustrative plans**: Introduce Ross's advocacy and preserve complete map/population evidence. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Voting and Education**: Add primary-source career details, Sheff negotiation, Borel leadership and teaching. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Supreme Court argument**: Show Kavanaugh and Barrett exchanges and the earlier Alito response; preserve legal distinctions. - `rewrite` — **What the 2023 Judgment Decided**: Combine four repetitive explanations, preserving proof, preliminary posture and later remedy. - `rewrite` — **Trial, Callais and ending**: Place existing roles in context, date the rules, and preserve source-limited trial target and stay history. ### BEFORE #### Deuel Ross Voting Rights · Redistricting · Education > “There is nothing race-neutral about Alabama’s map. ##### Eleven Maps and One Missing District Alabama’s 2021 plan contained seven congressional seats and one effective Black-opportunity district. Eleven illustrative maps showed that another opportunity district could fit the state’s geography. Deuel Ross defended that proof before the Supreme Court in 2022. The ensuing litigation required separate decisions about the legal test, the remedy and later changes in governing law. Alabama emerged from the 2020 census with seven congressional seats. Its November 2021 plan preserved one district in which Black voters formed a voting-age majority. Black residents comprised roughly 27 percent of the state, but population share alone established no right to a second seat. The Milligan and Caster plaintiffs therefore supplied maps rather than arithmetic. Their experts produced eleven illustrative plans. Every plan retained Alabama’s existing majority-Black district, and at least one additional district in each plan gave Black voters a realistic opportunity to elect their preferred candidate. The January 2022 injunction described those alternatives as reasonably configured. They met equal-population and contiguity requirements, compared favorably on compactness, and respected counties, precincts, municipalities, and communities of interest while treating the Black Belt as a region with geographic and historical coherence. Those plans performed a threshold function under Thornburg v. Gingles. They showed that the challenged result arose from Alabama’s district lines rather than the simple dispersion of Black voters. An illustrative plan demonstrates possibility; it neither becomes the automatic remedy nor guarantees proportional representation. The three-judge court gave Alabama fourteen days to enact a new plan with an additional majority-Black district or another district affording Black voters an opportunity to elect their preferred representative. A special master would prepare alternatives if the legislature declined. ###### Seven Days of Evidence The injunction followed a seven-day hearing held from January 4 through January 12, 2022. Seventeen witnesses testified live. The judges considered more than 1,000 pages of briefing, over 350 exhibits, extensive expert reports, and arguments from 43 lawyers across three coordinated cases. Section 2 required more than drawing capacity. The plaintiffs had to establish a sufficiently large and geographically compact minority population, political cohesion among Black voters, and white bloc voting usually strong enough to defeat the Black-preferred candidate, followed by the statutory totality of circumstances. The record showed stark polarization. Black voters supported their candidates of choice at an estimated 92.3 percent rate; white voters supported those candidates at about 15.4 percent. The judges treated those figures as electoral evidence, not a claim that every voter selected candidates for the same reason. Geography generated a separate dispute. Plaintiffs joined portions of the Black Belt and Mobile County in configurations their experts regarded as compact communities. Alabama emphasized the Gulf Coast as a distinct community and argued that splitting it distorted legitimate state priorities. The judges found the Section 2 likelihood of success “not a close one.” They reserved the constitutional claims and entered preliminary relief. The order established neither final liability nor a permanent map; it governed the coming election unless stayed or altered on appeal. ###### The Map That Survived 2022 On February 7, 2022, the Supreme Court stayed the injunction. Alabama used the 2021 plan for that year’s congressional election. The emergency order preserved the map while full review proceeded and supplied no final approval of its lawfulness. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence emphasized election timing and the Purcell principle against late federal changes. Chief Justice John Roberts dissented from the stay, writing that the district court had properly applied existing precedent even though he regarded that precedent as producing uncertainty. The merits argument followed on October 4. Ross represented the Milligan appellees. Abha Khanna separately argued for the Caster respondents, and Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar appeared for the United States as amicus. The clients, local organizations, mapmakers, experts, and several litigation teams had developed the evidence presented to the courts. Ross began with the enacted map itself: “There is nothing race-neutral about Alabama’s map.” District lines reflected judgments about county splits, incumbents, communities, and political consequences. His point concerned the state’s proposed benchmark, not a contention that every districting choice was unlawful because it considered race. His argument defended the existing results test. Section 2 asks whether a standard or practice leaves minority voters with less opportunity under current conditions. Requiring proof of intentional discrimination would replace the statute Congress enacted with the constitutional theory Congress deliberately supplemented in 1982. ###### The Race-Neutral Benchmark Alabama asked the Court to recast the first Gingles inquiry. Illustrative maps should avoid race; the enacted plan should be compared with maps produced through race-neutral simulations; and departures from that benchmark should count only when race supplied the sole explanation. Alabama invoked simulations produced by plaintiffs’ experts. One generated two million maps without racial data; another generated 30,000. None produced two majority-Black districts. Alabama argued that the eleven illustrative maps reached their result because their designers consciously sought another Black-opportunity district. A mapmaker may consider race while testing Section 2, but the Equal Protection Clause forbids making race predominant while subordinating traditional districting principles without sufficient justification. Alabama and the principal dissents treated the illustrative plans as crossing that line. The plaintiffs answered that simulations encoded different assumptions and failed to reproduce Alabama’s actual mapmaking choices. Section 2 required judges to determine whether a reasonably configured alternative existed under traditional principles. The average output of a computer model could not decide that question. Ross also separated an illustrative map from a court-imposed plan. Plaintiffs may examine racial data to test whether vote dilution can be remedied while still drawing districts that satisfy compactness, contiguity, political boundaries, and genuine communities. The remedial court later conducts its own constitutional review. ###### Five Votes for the Existing Test On June 8, 2023, five Justices affirmed the preliminary injunction. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the controlling opinion; Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined it in full, and Justice Kavanaugh joined all but one section and wrote separately. The Court rejected Alabama’s proposed rewrite of Gingles. Section 2 neither demands a race-blind illustrative map nor directs judges to compare an enacted plan with the average simulated plan. The traditional inquiry remained compactness, cohesion, bloc voting, and the complete local record. Congress had repeatedly amended and renewed the Voting Rights Act while leaving the Gingles framework in place. The majority treated that history as powerful reason to resist replacing a settled results test with Alabama’s new benchmark. The judgment preserved constitutional limits. Race cannot dominate district design while ordinary principles become subordinate. Section 2 disclaims proportional representation. A state’s communities, political boundaries, and legitimate objectives remain part of deciding whether an additional opportunity district is reasonably configured. Justice Clarence Thomas’s principal dissent and Justice Samuel Alito’s separate dissent disputed the comparator and compactness analysis, emphasizing the plaintiffs’ racial target and Alabama’s Gulf Coast choices. Justice Kavanaugh separately noted a possible temporal limit on race-conscious remedies, an issue not properly presented for decision. ###### What the 2023 Judgment Decided Allen v. Milligan affirmed a likelihood-of-success judgment after a preliminary hearing. Its reach stopped before final liability, permanent map selection, and approval of every later plan containing two effective Black-opportunity districts. The holding confirmed that Alabama’s 2021 plan could be assessed under the familiar Section 2 framework. The eleven maps showed an additional district was possible; polarized voting and the wider record supported preliminary relief. The district court still had to supervise remedy and adjudicate any later disputes. The decision also rejected a crude proportionality argument. Two of seven seats happened to approximate the Black population share, yet demographic coincidence created no legal entitlement. The plaintiffs prevailed by satisfying Gingles and the totality inquiry rather than by mechanically converting 27 percent of population into two districts. The judgment sustained the January 2022 preliminary findings and required Alabama to return to mapmaking under the existing Gingles test. The legislature then had an opportunity to enact a compliant plan before the district court selected a remedy. ###### Alabama’s Next Map Alabama enacted Senate Bill 5 in July 2023. The new plan placed District 7 at 50.65 percent Black voting-age population and District 2 at 39.93 percent. The state conceded that District 2 offered no additional opportunity to elect the Black-preferred candidate. The three-judge court enjoined that plan in September. It read the 2023 Supreme Court judgment and its own earlier order to require an additional opportunity district, then directed a special master to prepare maps after Alabama chose a plan concededly lacking one. The special master proposed three alternatives. The court adopted Remedial Plan 3: District 7 had approximately 51.9 percent Black voting-age population and District 2 approximately 48.7 percent. The map therefore contained one majority-Black district and one additional Black-opportunity district—not two majority-Black districts. The cartographer drew without displaying racial-demographic data, relying on counties, municipalities, precincts, the Black Belt, and other criteria. Performance analysis came afterward to confirm electoral opportunity. Alabama used the Special Master Plan in 2024; Shomari Figures won District 2 and Terri Sewell won District 7. After an eleven-day trial, the court entered May 2025 judgments finding Section 2 violations and intentional discrimination in the 2023 plan. Those findings once supported a permanent injunction, but they ceased to be operative judgments when the Supreme Court vacated and remanded in May 2026. ###### Callais Changes the Baseline Louisiana v. Callais changed the Section 2 proof model on April 29, 2026. The first Gingles precondition now requires a practicable alternative map drawn without using race as a districting criterion and serving the state’s legitimate districting interests at least as well as the challenged plan. Callais tightened the circumstantial proof needed to overcome the existing presumption of legislative good faith. Without direct evidence of racial purpose, an intentional-discrimination claim must rule out race-neutral explanations. Evidence of polarized voting must distinguish racial division from ordinary party preference rather than treating party correlation as enough. Historical discrimination remains relevant, but current and recent conditions receive greater weight than remote history. The decision narrowed the manner of proving dilution and permissible remediation while leaving Section 2 in force and additional opportunity districts subject to case-specific review. On May 11, the Supreme Court vacated the Alabama judgments and remanded for reconsideration under Callais. The old 25-274 merits proceeding ended with that order. The May 2025 findings remained historical work product, no longer an operative final judgment. The district court issued a new preliminary injunction on May 26 after reviewing the record under Callais. It again found likely Section 2 and constitutional violations and ordered continued use of the race-blind Special Master Plan for the remaining 2026 election events, while setting the case for renewed trial preparation. ###### The June 2026 Stay On June 2, the Supreme Court stayed the May 26 order at the emergency stage. The majority said Alabama had shown likely success under Callais, faulting the treatment of legislative good faith, Gulf Coast and incumbent interests, partisan voting, and election timing. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented. The stay suspended the command to use Remedial Plan 3 for the 2026 election pending the further appellate proceedings specified in the order. It did not finally resolve the post-Callais merits. The 2021 plan, the 2023 legislative plan and the court-selected Special Master Plan remained distinct maps with different procedural histories. Ross serves as one of LDF’s two Directors of Litigation, co-leading the department with Chris Kemmitt. He argued for the Milligan appellees in 2022 and led their later trial team. Khanna, Prelogar, the Milligan and Caster plaintiffs, local organizations, experts, mapmakers and multiple counsel teams contributed separate work to the litigation. The May 26 district-court order directed the parties to prepare for renewed proceedings, with a trial-ready target in January 2027. The Supreme Court’s June 2 stay intervened before that stage. The eleven illustrative maps remained part of the case’s evidentiary history, while the courts reconsidered what the changed legal standard required of that proof. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Director of Litigation - **Organization:** Legal Defense Fund - **Practice:** Voting Rights, Redistricting, Education - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Organization:** Legal Defense Fund - **Office:** 700 14th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, D.C. 20005 - **Website:** naacpldf.org - **Phone:** 202.682.1300 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Deuel Ross Voting Rights · Redistricting · Education > “There is nothing race-neutral about Alabama’s map. ##### Eleven Maps and One Missing District Deuel Ross defended the Milligan plaintiffs’ evidence that Alabama could draw another congressional district in which Black voters had a fair chance to elect their preferred candidate. His argument pressed the Court to examine the state’s own districting choices. The 2023 judgment preserved that route to relief; later decisions changed the governing standard while the Alabama litigation continued. Alabama emerged from the 2020 census with seven congressional seats. Its November 2021 plan preserved one district in which Black voters formed a voting-age majority. Black residents comprised roughly 27 percent of the state. The Milligan and Caster plaintiffs submitted eleven illustrative plans prepared by their experts. Every plan retained Alabama’s existing majority-Black district, and at least one additional district in each plan gave Black voters a realistic opportunity to elect their preferred candidate. The January 2022 injunction described those alternatives as reasonably configured. They met equal-population and contiguity requirements, compared favorably on compactness, and respected counties, precincts, municipalities, and communities of interest while treating the Black Belt as a region with geographic and historical coherence. Those plans performed a threshold function under Thornburg v. Gingles. They showed that Alabama’s geography could accommodate another opportunity district and allowed the court to test the effect of the enacted district lines. The three-judge court gave Alabama fourteen days to enact a new plan with an additional majority-Black district or another district affording Black voters an opportunity to elect their preferred representative. A special master would prepare alternatives if the legislature declined. ###### Seven Days of Evidence The injunction followed a seven-day hearing held from January 4 through January 12, 2022. Seventeen witnesses testified live. The judges considered more than 1,000 pages of briefing, over 350 exhibits, extensive expert reports, and arguments from 43 lawyers across three coordinated cases. Section 2 required more than drawing capacity. The plaintiffs had to establish a sufficiently large and geographically compact minority population, political cohesion among Black voters, and white bloc voting usually strong enough to defeat the Black-preferred candidate, followed by the statutory totality of circumstances. The record showed stark polarization. Black voters supported their candidates of choice at an estimated 92.3 percent rate; white voters supported those candidates at about 15.4 percent. The judges evaluated those figures as electoral evidence under the Section 2 framework. Geography generated a separate dispute. Plaintiffs joined portions of the Black Belt and Mobile County in configurations their experts regarded as compact communities. Alabama emphasized the Gulf Coast as a distinct community and argued that splitting it distorted legitimate state priorities. The judges found the Section 2 likelihood of success “not a close one.” They entered a preliminary injunction for the coming election and reserved the constitutional claims. ###### Voting and Education Ross’s work at the Legal Defense Fund spans access to elections and equal educational opportunity. He now co-leads its litigation department with Chris Kemmitt as one of two Directors of Litigation. Before joining LDF, he clerked for Fourth Circuit judge Roger Gregory, held an ACLU Karpatkin Fellowship and worked as a Fried Frank associate and Civil Rights–LDF Fellow. He studied at the University of Southern California and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. In Connecticut, Ross played a lead role in negotiating the 2022 settlements in Sheff v. O’Neill, the school-desegregation case brought on behalf of Hartford children. The January agreement proposed a long-term plan to expand access to integrated schools, increase available seats and require public reporting on educational equity. Elizabeth Horton Sheff and the families were represented by LDF alongside the Center for Children’s Advocacy, the ACLU, the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, and local counsel. He led the LDF team in Borel v. St. Martin Parish School Board, where the Fifth Circuit affirmed a desegregation order entered after a 2021 trial. He has taught as an adjunct at Penn and NYU law schools. ###### The Map That Survived 2022 On February 7, 2022, the Supreme Court stayed the injunction. Alabama used the 2021 plan for that year’s congressional election while full review proceeded. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence emphasized election timing and the Purcell principle against late federal changes. Chief Justice John Roberts dissented from the stay, writing that the district court had properly applied existing precedent even though he regarded that precedent as producing uncertainty. The merits argument followed on October 4. Ross represented the Milligan appellees. Abha Khanna separately argued for the Caster respondents, and Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar appeared for the United States as amicus. The clients, local organizations, mapmakers, experts, and several litigation teams had developed the evidence presented to the courts. Ross began with the enacted map itself: “There is nothing race-neutral about Alabama’s map.” He argued that its lines divided the Black Belt despite the district court’s findings about the community’s geographic and historical coherence. Alabama’s choices about county splits, incumbents, communities and political aims belonged in the comparison with the plaintiffs’ alternatives. He defended the existing results test. Section 2 asked whether a standard or practice left minority voters with less opportunity under current conditions. Requiring proof of intentional discrimination would replace the statute Congress enacted with the constitutional theory Congress deliberately supplemented in 1982. ###### The Race-Neutral Benchmark Alabama asked the Court to recast the first Gingles inquiry. Illustrative maps should avoid race; the enacted plan should be compared with maps produced through race-neutral simulations; and departures from that benchmark should count only when race supplied the sole explanation. Alabama invoked simulations produced by plaintiffs’ experts. One generated two million maps without racial data; another generated 30,000. None produced two majority-Black districts. Alabama argued that the eleven illustrative maps reached their result because their designers consciously sought another Black-opportunity district. A mapmaker could consider race while testing Section 2, but the Equal Protection Clause forbade making race predominant while subordinating traditional districting principles without sufficient justification. Alabama and the principal dissents treated the illustrative plans as crossing that line. Ross reminded the Court that Alabama itself had criticized simulations for failing to reproduce its map or incorporate all traditional districting criteria. The models depended on their designers’ assumptions. The plaintiffs asked the judges to decide whether a reasonably configured alternative existed; the average output of a computer model could not decide that question. Kavanaugh asked Ross to answer Alabama’s objection that the proposed district sprawled across the state. Ross pointed to the district court’s compactness findings and to Alabama’s own Board of Education map, drawn at the same time under the same redistricting criteria. That map contained a district of much the same shape. Ross also separated an illustrative map from a court-imposed plan. Plaintiffs could examine racial data to test whether vote dilution could be remedied while still drawing districts that satisfied compactness, contiguity, political boundaries, and genuine communities. The remedial court would later conduct its own constitutional review. Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked whether his reading required states to maximize the number of majority-minority districts whenever they could draw compact ones. Ross answered that drawing an additional district satisfied only one part of the inquiry. Plaintiffs still had to prove polarized voting and satisfy the totality of circumstances. He had told Alito that his clients sought a fair chance to elect their preferred candidate, without a guarantee of the result. ###### Five Votes for the Existing Test On June 8, 2023, five Justices affirmed the preliminary injunction. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the controlling opinion; Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined it in full, and Justice Kavanaugh joined all but one section and wrote separately. The Court rejected Alabama’s proposed rewrite of Gingles. Section 2 neither demanded a race-blind illustrative map nor directed judges to compare an enacted plan with the average simulated plan. The traditional inquiry remained compactness, cohesion, bloc voting, and the complete local record. Congress had repeatedly amended and renewed the Voting Rights Act while leaving the Gingles framework in place. The majority treated that history as powerful reason to resist replacing a settled results test with Alabama’s new benchmark. The judgment retained the constitutional requirement that racial considerations remain consistent with traditional districting principles. A state’s communities, political boundaries, and legitimate objectives remained part of deciding whether an additional opportunity district was reasonably configured under Section 2. Justice Clarence Thomas’s principal dissent and Justice Samuel Alito’s separate dissent disputed the comparator and compactness analysis, emphasizing the plaintiffs’ racial target and Alabama’s Gulf Coast choices. Justice Kavanaugh separately noted a possible temporal limit on race-conscious remedies, an issue not properly presented for decision. ###### What the 2023 Judgment Decided Allen v. Milligan sustained the district court’s likelihood-of-success determination after its January 2022 evidentiary hearing. The eleven illustrative maps, polarized-voting evidence and wider local record supported preliminary relief under Gingles and the totality-of-circumstances inquiry. Alabama had to return to mapmaking, with an opportunity to enact a compliant plan before the district court selected a remedy and adjudicated later disputes. ###### Alabama’s Next Map Alabama enacted Senate Bill 5 in July 2023. The new plan placed District 7 at 50.65 percent Black voting-age population and District 2 at 39.93 percent. The state conceded that District 2 offered no additional opportunity to elect the Black-preferred candidate. The three-judge court enjoined that plan in September. It read the 2023 Supreme Court judgment and its own earlier order to require an additional opportunity district, then directed a special master to prepare maps after Alabama chose a plan concededly lacking one. The special master proposed three alternatives. The court adopted Remedial Plan 3: District 7 had approximately 51.9 percent Black voting-age population and District 2 approximately 48.7 percent. The map contained one majority-Black district and one additional Black-opportunity district. The cartographer drew without displaying racial-demographic data, relying on counties, municipalities, precincts, the Black Belt, and other criteria. Performance analysis came afterward to confirm electoral opportunity. Alabama used the Special Master Plan in 2024; Shomari Figures won District 2 and Terri Sewell won District 7. Ross led the Milligan trial team in the later challenge to the 2023 plan. After an eleven-day trial, the court entered May 2025 judgments finding Section 2 violations and intentional discrimination. Those findings supported a permanent injunction until the Supreme Court vacated the judgments and remanded in May 2026. ###### Callais Changes the Baseline Louisiana v. Callais changed the Section 2 proof model on April 29, 2026. The first Gingles precondition now required a practicable alternative map drawn without using race as a districting criterion and serving all the state’s legitimate districting interests at least as well as the challenged plan. Callais required evidence supporting a strong inference that the state had intentionally drawn its districts to give minority voters less opportunity because of race. Without direct evidence of racial purpose, plaintiffs had to rule out race-neutral explanations, including partisan goals. The presumption of legislative good faith remained in place, and polarized-voting analysis had to control for party affiliation. Historical discrimination remained relevant, but current and recent conditions received greater weight than remote history. The decision narrowed the manner of proving dilution and permissible remediation while leaving Section 2 in force and additional opportunity districts subject to case-specific review. On May 11, the Supreme Court vacated the Alabama judgments and remanded for reconsideration under Callais, ending the old 25-274 merits proceeding and setting aside the May 2025 judgments. The district court issued a new preliminary injunction on May 26 after reviewing the record under Callais. It again found likely Section 2 and constitutional violations and ordered continued use of the race-blind Special Master Plan for the remaining 2026 election events, while setting the case for renewed trial preparation. ###### The June 2026 Stay On June 2, the Supreme Court stayed the May 26 order at the emergency stage. The majority said Alabama had shown likely success under Callais, faulting the treatment of legislative good faith, Gulf Coast and incumbent interests, partisan voting, and election timing. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented. The stay suspended the command to use Remedial Plan 3 for the 2026 election pending the further appellate proceedings specified in the order. The litigation had involved three plans: Alabama’s 2021 map, its 2023 legislative replacement, and the court-selected Special Master Plan. The May 26 district-court order had directed the parties to prepare for renewed proceedings, with a trial-ready target in January 2027. The Supreme Court’s June 2 stay intervened before that stage, leaving the courts to reconsider what the changed legal standard required of the plaintiffs’ proof. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Director of Litigation - **Organization:** Legal Defense Fund - **Practice:** Voting Rights, Redistricting, Education - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Organization:** Legal Defense Fund - **Office:** 700 14th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, D.C. 20005 - **Website:** naacpldf.org - **Phone:** 202.682.1300 --- ## 17. Pamela S. Karlan — `900005363` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `ed9fb3bb6ffe2a42b915b42e125a70088b0761286e9d3fb85839e38b3aee00d0` - **After/current hash:** `820fd9a676beb6a3839662a6cdde2b5436fabc6c594200a4c1362c682431b2aa` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005447 (2026-09-11 16:05:21 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 7**: Retain the employee's allegation and quoted employer language while removing the warning that the Court had not tried motive. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 33**: Preserve all three appellate dispositions and the statutory holding while removing the generic further-merits-and-remedies disclaimer. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 40**: Replace a caveat-led section heading with the subject of the Court's employment-discrimination holding. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 41**: State the holding and the practice-specific nature of other employment questions without presenting a list of what the opinion declined to decide. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 43**: Replace the generic no-general-ruling disclaimer with an affirmative description of the different legal settings. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 45**: State the Court's rule directly and remove repeated warnings about untried motives, final liability, and damages. - `rewrite` — **Narrative block 8**: Identify Cole's advocacy directly while removing the contrastive credit disclaimer naming Karlan as the person who did not argue the case. - `rewrite` — **Opening and The Variable**: Remove repeated comparator explanations while preserving exact clients, dates, statutory terms and multiple-cause analysis. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **The Words Congress Enacted and At the Lectern**: Use Karlan’s verified response to Roberts and her concrete Dothard example to show how she answered the Court’s questions. - `rewrite` — **Six Votes and Two Dissents**: Consolidate intentional but-for analysis; give concrete content to Phillips and Manhart; retain each vote, disposition and dissent. - `rewrite` — **Title VII’s Employment Rule and The Comparator Returns**: Combine repeated reservations and the Skrmetti continuity paragraph while preserving separate laws, defenses and judicial positions. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **The Stanford Clinic**: Replace the repeated thesis ending with documented career context and actual student briefing and practice-argument work. ### BEFORE #### Pamela S. Karlan Supreme Court · Constitutional Litigation > “When [an] employer fires a male employee for dating men but does not fire female employees who date men, he violates Title VII. ##### Change One Variable At 10:05 a.m. on October 8, 2019, Pamela Karlan opened with one comparison: a man fired for dating men and a woman allowed to do the same. The conduct stayed fixed; the employee’s sex changed. Eight months later, six Justices made that causal test the center of Title VII. At 10:05 a.m. on October 8, 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts called Bostock and Altitude Express. Pamela Karlan rose for Gerald Bostock and Donald Zarda’s estate. Her opening compared two employees who both date men: a woman who keeps her job and a man who loses his. The employees’ attraction to men remained constant, and job performance lay outside the hypothetical. Changing the employee’s sex changed the employer’s response, placing sex inside the chain of causes that produced the discharge. Bostock had worked as a child-welfare advocate for Clayton County, Georgia. He alleged that the county fired him for conduct “unbecoming” an employee after he joined a gay recreational softball league. The Supreme Court received that account as an allegation, not a tried finding about the county’s actual motive. Zarda had worked as a skydiving instructor and alleged that Altitude Express dismissed him days after he mentioned being gay. Aimee Stephens separately told a Michigan funeral-home owner that she intended to live and work as a woman; David Cole, rather than Karlan, argued her transgender-status case. The three matters arrived with different judgments below and distinct questions presented. Eleventh Circuit precedent defeated Bostock. The en banc Second Circuit sustained Zarda’s statutory theory. The Sixth Circuit sustained the EEOC and Stephens. Consolidation preserved those separate records and advocates. ###### The Variable Title VII bars an employer from discharging or otherwise discriminating against an individual because of that individual’s sex. Karlan’s argument relied on the enacted nouns, verbs and causal phrase. It asked the Court to apply “because of sex,” not insert a new protected word into the statute. The traditional but-for inquiry changes one fact at a time and observes the result. When the outcome changes, the altered fact is a cause. Events often have several such causes, and Title VII attaches when sex is one of them rather than only when it dominates every other explanation. Karlan compared two employees attracted to men. From the employer’s perspective, every fact relevant to attraction remains the same except that one employee is male and the other female. Firing the man for that attraction penalizes conduct accepted in the woman; sex has altered the choice. The statute’s repeated focus on an “individual” defeats a balance-sheet defense. Equal hostility toward gay men and lesbians may distribute injury across sexes as groups, yet each discharge remains a separate act. The employer cannot offset one employee’s sex-based injury with another employee’s injury in the opposite direction. The majority later illustrated the point with sex stereotypes. An employer that fires Hannah for insufficient femininity and Bob for insufficient masculinity commits two individual violations. ###### The Words Congress Enacted Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked how the argument could fit a statute enacted when same-sex relations remained criminal in many states and homosexuality was widely pathologized. Karlan answered from the words Congress enacted and from applications of Title VII that the 1964 Congress had never specifically forecast. Sexual harassment, same-sex harassment and discrimination against a woman who failed conventional expectations of femininity all became recognized applications through later cases. Those decisions applied the unchanged statutory language to conduct Congress had not specifically anticipated. Chief Justice Roberts asked about Judge Richard Posner’s suggestion that courts should update old statutes when legislatures do not. Karlan expressly rejected that premise. Her comparison used “sex” to distinguish men from women, held the employee’s conduct constant and tested the difference in treatment. That answer separated original public meaning from expected applications. The meaning of sex could remain the biological distinction accepted by the parties, while the consequences of using sex in an employment rule reached far beyond applications familiar in 1964. The six-Justice opinion adopted the same separation. Historical sources could illuminate a changed meaning or an overlooked idiom, but political surprise about a protected group or application supplied no unwritten exception to the enacted rule. ###### At the Lectern Karlan argued for Bostock and the Zarda respondents. Jeffrey Harris represented the opposing employers, and Solicitor General Noel Francisco argued for the United States as amicus supporting the employers. The separate Harris Funeral Homes argument followed with David Cole for Stephens. Karlan used earlier disparate-treatment cases to keep the comparison disciplined. A rule barring a man from a role permitted to a woman still turns on sex even when a corresponding rule burdens women elsewhere. Exemptions and justifications belong to a later inquiry; the classification remains. Justice Samuel Alito challenged the comparator. A man attracted to men and a woman attracted to men, he argued, might reveal discrimination against men rather than sexual orientation. Including a man attracted to women and a woman attracted to women would identify orientation as the employer’s chosen category. Karlan returned to the individual before the Court. The employers had hired the men, and the allegation concerned why each lost an existing job. If a woman could say she dates men without discharge while a man received the opposite response, Title VII’s individual causal requirement was satisfied. In rebuttal, Karlan pointed out that the employer’s proposed comparison changed both the employee’s sex and the partner’s sex. Title VII required no such double substitution. Changing the employee alone exposed whether sex played a role, even when “sexual orientation” remained an accurate name for the broader policy. ###### Six Votes On June 15, 2020, Justice Neil Gorsuch delivered a six-to-three judgment. Chief Justice Roberts joined Justices Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. The Court held that an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII. The opinion framed the governing rule in individual terms: an employer violates the statute when it intentionally fires an employee based in part on sex. Changing the employee’s sex while preserving the other relevant facts would yield a different choice, so the statutory causal condition is met. A discharge could involve the employee’s sex and the sex of the person to whom the employee is attracted or with whom the employee identifies. Title VII attaches once sex is one but-for cause; an additional motive cannot insulate the decision. Earlier employers might have called a policy motherhood discrimination or a life-expectancy adjustment. The legal question remains whether the rule intentionally treats an individual worse in part because of sex. A neutral-sounding category cannot remove the protected trait required to apply it. Bostock’s dismissal was reversed and remanded. The Second Circuit’s judgment for the Zarda estate and the Sixth Circuit’s judgment in Harris Funeral Homes were affirmed. Statutory coverage was resolved; the underlying factual merits and individual remedies remained for further proceedings where necessary. ###### Two Dissents Justice Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, opened with the charge that the Court had legislated. His dissent emphasized the absence of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from Title VII and decades of unsuccessful congressional proposals to add express protection. The majority answered that Congress had already chosen broad language focused on individuals and but-for causation. A court faithful to that choice could neither enlarge the text through policy preferences nor shrink it through assumptions about the applications legislators expected. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s separate dissent asked who decides. He accepted the force of policy arguments protecting gay and lesbian employees but assigned any expansion of Title VII’s ordinary meaning to Congress and the President rather than the judiciary. All three opinions claimed fidelity to the 1964 statute. The majority emphasized the causal operation of each enacted term; the dissents emphasized the ordinary meaning of the phrase “discriminate because of sex” as a whole. Karlan defended the individual comparison adopted in the judgment. Sexual orientation and sex remained distinct concepts, but an employer necessarily used sex when applying the disputed discharge rule to a known employee. ###### Questions Reserved Bostock addressed discharge under Title VII. The majority expressly set aside bathrooms, locker rooms, dress codes and other policies absent from the records. Similar language in another statute would require analysis of that statute, its context, the challenged practice and the available defenses. Religious liberty received its own reservation. Title VII contains an exemption for qualifying religious organizations. The First Amendment protects the relationship between religious institutions and ministers, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act can supersede ordinary federal commands when its demanding test is met. The opinion supplied no general ruling about pronouns, athletics, school facilities or medical treatment. Those disputes involve different rules and factual variables. Harris Funeral Homes had pursued a RFRA defense in the Sixth Circuit, then left the adverse ruling outside its Supreme Court petition. The Justices therefore faced no live religious-liberty defense. David Cole, the ACLU, the EEOC and Stephens’s estate retained their distinct role in that record. Coverage also differed from final liability. The Court accepted the allegations necessary to resolve whether Title VII reached the claimed reasons for discharge. It neither tried every disputed motive nor calculated damages. Bostock established the governing statutory rule for the proceedings that followed. ###### The Comparator Returns Five years later, United States v. Skrmetti considered Tennessee’s restrictions on puberty blockers and hormones for minors. Challengers invoked Bostock’s comparison in an Equal Protection case involving a medical regulation rather than an employment discharge under Title VII. The 2025 majority reserved whether Bostock’s reasoning generally extends beyond Title VII. On its reading, changing a minor’s sex or transgender status left Tennessee’s rule operating the same way because access to the requested drug also depended on diagnosis and medical purpose. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent argued that the comparison should preserve the requested treatment and purpose. In her account, the majority had changed diagnosis along with sex and thereby concealed sex as one causal factor. The opinions disagreed about which facts could remain fixed across the medical examples. Skrmetti left Bostock’s employment holding intact. The Justices disagreed about which facts to preserve when comparing patients under Tennessee’s medical regulation, a different legal setting from the employment decisions governed by Title VII. ###### Two Cases, One Method Karlan argued the two sexual-orientation cases; Cole argued the transgender case. The named employees and estates, lower-court counsel, the Stanford clinic, the ACLU, the EEOC, amici and opposing advocates contributed distinct work to the three cases decided together. Karlan remains the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law and co-director of Stanford’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. The clinic places students inside live Supreme Court matters across substantive fields, combining record analysis, briefing and advocacy with responsibility to actual clients. For Bostock and Zarda, Karlan presented the employee comparator, rejected an updating theory, defended individual causation and answered the argument that equal hostility toward both sexes could neutralize Title VII. A male employee could lose his job for dating men while a female employee could keep hers for the same conduct. Karlan asked the Court to hold the attraction constant and change the employee’s sex. The majority applied that comparison to determine whether sex was a cause of the employer’s decision. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law - **Organization:** Stanford Law School - **Practice:** Supreme Court, Constitutional Litigation - **Location:** Stanford, California ##### Contact - **Institution:** Stanford Law School - **Office:** Crown Quadrangle, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305 - **Website:** profiles.stanford.edu ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Pamela S. Karlan Supreme Court · Constitutional Litigation > “When [an] employer fires a male employee for dating men but does not fire female employees who date men, he violates Title VII. ##### Change One Variable Representing Gerald Bostock and Donald Zarda’s estate, Pamela Karlan faced questions about what Congress meant in 1964 and what counts as a cause of dismissal. Her answers kept the argument focused on Title VII’s protection of each employee. The resulting judgment recognized the statute’s coverage of gay and transgender workers. At 10:05 a.m. on October 8, 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts called Bostock and the consolidated Altitude Express case. Pamela Karlan began for Gerald Bostock and Donald Zarda’s estate with a comparison: a woman who keeps her job while dating men and a man who loses his for the same conduct. Bostock had worked as a child-welfare advocate for Clayton County, Georgia. He alleged that the county fired him for conduct “unbecoming” an employee after he joined a gay recreational softball league. Zarda had worked as a skydiving instructor and alleged that Altitude Express dismissed him days after he mentioned being gay. Aimee Stephens separately told a Michigan funeral-home owner that she intended to live and work as a woman; David Cole argued her transgender-status case. The three matters arrived with different judgments below and distinct questions presented. The Eleventh Circuit had treated sexual-orientation discrimination as outside Title VII. The en banc Second Circuit sustained Zarda’s statutory theory, and the Sixth Circuit sustained the EEOC and Stephens. The Supreme Court heard Bostock and Zarda together, followed by the separate argument in Harris Funeral Homes. ###### The Variable Title VII bars an employer from discharging or otherwise discriminating against an individual because of that individual’s sex. Karlan asked the Court to apply the statute’s words, “because of sex,” to the employers’ decisions. The traditional but-for inquiry changes one fact at a time and observes the result. In Karlan’s hypothetical, attraction to men stayed constant and job performance lay outside the comparison. Changing the employee’s sex changed the employer’s response. Sex could therefore be a cause of discharge even when other factors contributed to the decision. The statute protects an “individual.” An employer cannot offset one employee’s sex-based injury with another employee’s injury in the opposite direction. Equal hostility toward gay men and lesbians still produces separate acts of discrimination against the affected employees. The majority later illustrated the point with sex stereotypes. An employer that fires Hannah for insufficient femininity and Bob for insufficient masculinity commits two individual violations. ###### The Words Congress Enacted Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked how the argument could fit a statute enacted when same-sex relations remained criminal in many states and homosexuality was widely pathologized. Karlan answered from the words Congress enacted and from applications of Title VII that the 1964 Congress had never specifically forecast. Sexual harassment, same-sex harassment and discrimination against a woman who failed conventional expectations of femininity all became recognized applications through later cases. Those decisions applied the unchanged statutory language to conduct Congress had not specifically anticipated. Chief Justice Roberts asked about Judge Richard Posner’s suggestion that courts should update old statutes when legislatures do not. “I disagree with Judge Posner,” Karlan replied. “I don’t think you need to do any updating here.” She argued that the original wording already covered the employers’ actions. Karlan distinguished the meaning of the enacted words from the applications legislators expected. The parties accepted the biological distinction between men and women as the meaning of sex. The six-Justice opinion later held that historical sources could illuminate a changed meaning or an overlooked idiom, but surprise about a protected group or application supplied no unwritten exception to the rule Congress enacted. ###### At the Lectern Jeffrey Harris represented the opposing employers, and Solicitor General Noel Francisco argued for the United States as amicus supporting them. Roberts asked Karlan why a policy applied to both gay men and lesbians should count as sex discrimination. Karlan drew on Dothard v. Rawlinson, which concerned employment as a prison guard. A rule barring a woman from guarding men and a man from guarding women classified each applicant by sex. She asked the Court to substitute dating for guarding: the rule still turned on the employee’s sex. Any exemption or justification for that classification required a separate inquiry. Justice Samuel Alito challenged the comparator. A man attracted to men and a woman attracted to men, he argued, might reveal discrimination against men rather than sexual orientation. Including a man attracted to women and a woman attracted to women would identify orientation as the employer’s chosen category. Karlan returned to the individual before the Court. The employers had hired the men, and the allegation concerned why each lost an existing job. If a woman could say she dates men without discharge while a man received the opposite response, Title VII’s individual causal requirement was satisfied. In rebuttal, Karlan pointed out that the employer’s proposed comparison changed both the employee’s sex and the partner’s sex. Title VII required no such double substitution. Changing the employee alone exposed whether sex played a role, even when “sexual orientation” remained an accurate name for the broader policy. ###### Six Votes On June 15, 2020, Justice Neil Gorsuch delivered a six-to-three judgment. Chief Justice Roberts joined Justices Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. The Court held that an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII. The majority recognized sex and sexual orientation as distinct concepts while holding that the employer necessarily used sex in applying the challenged rule. Another contributing factor—such as the employee’s attraction to someone of the same sex or presentation as a different sex from the one assigned at birth—could not insulate a decision that intentionally relied on sex as at least one but-for cause of discharge. The Court’s earlier decisions had already addressed policies that depended on sex together with another characteristic. In Phillips v. Martin Marietta, the employer refused to hire women with young children while accepting men with young children. In Los Angeles Department of Water and Power v. Manhart, women had to contribute more to a pension fund because women as a group lived longer. Calling those rules motherhood discrimination or a life-expectancy adjustment left the sex-based difference in treatment in place. The Supreme Court reversed and remanded the judgment in Bostock’s case. It affirmed the Second Circuit’s judgment for the Zarda estate and the Sixth Circuit’s judgment in Harris Funeral Homes, establishing Title VII’s coverage of the challenged reasons for discharge. ###### Two Dissents Justice Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, opened with the charge that the Court had legislated. His dissent emphasized the absence of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from Title VII and decades of unsuccessful congressional proposals to add express protection. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s separate dissent assigned any expansion of Title VII’s ordinary meaning to Congress and the President. He accepted the force of policy arguments protecting gay and lesbian employees while disputing the majority’s reading of the statute. All three opinions claimed fidelity to the 1964 statute. The majority emphasized the causal operation of each enacted term; the dissents emphasized the ordinary meaning of the phrase “discriminate because of sex” as a whole. ###### Title VII’s Employment Rule The Court reserved questions about bathrooms, locker rooms, dress codes and other workplace policies. Those disputes would require consideration of the challenged practice and available defenses. Pronoun policies, athletics, school facilities and medical treatment also raise questions under the laws governing each practice. Religious liberty received its own reservation. Title VII contains an exemption for qualifying religious organizations. The First Amendment protects the relationship between religious institutions and ministers, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act can supersede ordinary federal commands when its demanding test is met. Harris Funeral Homes had pursued a RFRA defense in the Sixth Circuit but did not ask the Supreme Court to review the rejection of that defense. The Justices therefore faced no live religious-liberty defense. Cole, the ACLU, the EEOC and Stephens’s estate had handled a separate record from Karlan’s two cases. ###### The Comparator Returns Five years later, United States v. Skrmetti considered Tennessee’s restrictions on puberty blockers and hormones for minors. Challengers invoked Bostock’s comparison in an Equal Protection case involving medical regulation. Bostock’s employment holding remained intact as the Justices considered which facts to preserve when comparing patients. The 2025 majority reserved whether Bostock’s reasoning generally extends beyond Title VII. On its reading, changing a minor’s sex or transgender status left Tennessee’s rule operating the same way because access to the requested drug also depended on diagnosis and medical purpose. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent argued that the comparison should preserve the requested treatment and purpose. In her account, changing the diagnosis along with sex still left sex as one causal factor. The opinions disagreed about which facts could remain fixed across the medical examples. ###### The Stanford Clinic Karlan joined Stanford’s faculty in 1998 after teaching at the University of Virginia. She had clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun and federal district judge Abraham Sofaer. Her civil-rights work has included service as an assistant counsel and cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and two appointments as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. She is the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law and co-director of Stanford’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. In Bostock and Zarda, the clinic worked alongside the clients, their lower-court lawyers and amici. The clinic represents parties and amici across the Court’s docket. Students work in teams on briefs and other filings and take part in practice oral arguments. They must research the record, choose which arguments to press and prepare answers to the questions their advocate may face before the Justices. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law - **Organization:** Stanford Law School - **Practice:** Supreme Court, Constitutional Litigation - **Location:** Stanford, California ##### Contact - **Institution:** Stanford Law School - **Office:** Crown Quadrangle, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305 - **Website:** profiles.stanford.edu --- ## 18. Gerald Singleton — `900005361` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `e6be843f9dcc36c972166be805413b09b1ade64f3f9fb9e5dce7ffd0fc78fe39` - **After/current hash:** `fd54cc30596d472acf94c0d301ef543cef9aae498acd39c2a38fdefb2561a57d` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005361/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Headline and opening**: Identify the named bankruptcy and Singleton's actual roles while preserving the complete fire chronology and initial Trust funding. - `restructure` — **Claims and equal-percentage sections**: Consolidate repeated award/payment distinctions and claimant review mechanics into their specific sections while retaining every category, date and percentage. - `rewrite` — **Oversight responsibilities**: Name the committee's review and other operators' responsibilities affirmatively, eliminating repeated explanations of functions Singleton did not perform. - `correct` — **Final distribution**: Use the trustee's September 10 announcement to update funds received, the 1.25 percent final increase, 71.25 percent aggregate and October 14 scheduled payment. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Professional conclusion**: Add the Federal Defenders beginning, 2003 private practice, named wildfire liaison roles, PFAS matters and 2023 smoke-related medical-monitoring claim. ### BEFORE #### Gerald Singleton Wildfire Litigation · Mass Torts > “We will continue to fight for full accountability and fair compensation for the survivors we represent. ##### The Percentage After the Loss PG&E’s bankruptcy placed tens of thousands of wildfire claims inside one finite trust. The claims process could value each survivor’s losses in full, while available assets limited payment to an equal percentage of every accepted award. Gerald Singleton represented thousands of fire victims and served on the Trust Oversight Committee as claims moved from individual proof to shared distribution. The 2015 Butte Fire, the 2017 North Bay fires and the 2018 Camp Fire produced losses that could not be reduced to burned structures alone. Homes disappeared with their contents. Families incurred temporary housing costs, interrupted income and medical expenses. Businesses lost equipment, customers and continuity. People suffered injuries, deaths and forms of emotional harm that remained after the landscape changed. The claims initially belonged to individual people and cases. PG&E’s January 2019 Chapter 11 filing changed their procedural destination. Bankruptcy gathered tens of thousands of tort claims into one reorganization and forced negotiation around a common limit: the amount the reorganized company could commit while emerging from bankruptcy. The confirmed plan established a Fire Victim Trust valued at thirteen and a half billion dollars. It became effective on July 1, 2020. The Trust was not funded as a single pile of cash available on its first day. Its opening assets included approximately five-point-four billion dollars in cash and a substantial block of PG&E stock, followed by additional payments and later asset realization. Gerald Singleton represented thousands of wildfire claimants and became one of nine members of the Trust Oversight Committee. His position occupied two levels at once: counsel for people whose losses had to be documented individually, and committee member inside a structure responsible for protecting the collective interests of all covered fire claimants. ###### Seven Channels Into One Notice The Trust could not treat a destroyed house, a closed business, a physical injury and the death of a family member as interchangeable merely because they arose from fire. Its process separated claims into seven broad categories: real property, personal property, personal income loss, business loss, other out-of-pocket expenses, wrongful death or personal injury, and emotional distress. A claimant’s questionnaire could contain several of those categories at once. One family might document the market value of a home, the contents inside it, months of alternative housing, lost wages, medical treatment and emotional harm. The claims processor had to review each component, request missing material where necessary and then issue a single Determination Notice containing the aggregate approved award. The notice was not necessarily the last word. A claimant could accept the determination or pursue reconsideration and appeal with supplemental evidence. Only after acceptance or completion of review did the award become final. The process therefore distinguished the administrative value first assigned to a loss from the value that survived challenge. As claimant counsel, Singleton worked with individual losses inside those common procedures. Claimants had to document the separate components of their loss, respond to requests for information and decide whether to accept a determination or pursue review. The resulting award supplied the basis for their share of later distributions. ###### From an Award to a Payment The Trust introduced a second calculation after the legal loss had been valued. Because it was a limited fund, it could not pay finalized awards in full as soon as they were approved. Bankruptcy orders and Trust documents required eligible claimants to receive the same proportion of their awards, regardless of whether a claim was early or late, modest or catastrophic. The first pro rata payments were made at thirty percent. A claimant with a finalized award could receive thirty cents for each approved dollar while additional funding and stock sales expanded the amount available to all eligible claimants. The percentage rose to forty-five, sixty and sixty-six percent, then to seventy percent effective October 24, 2024. That mechanism protected equality among claimants, but it created a severe psychological and financial divide. A Determination Notice might formally recognize the full value assigned by the process while the payment showed a much smaller number. The unpaid portion was not a rejection of the loss. It represented the collective shortfall of a fund whose approved claims exceeded the assets available for distribution. Funding the Trust with PG&E stock made the divide more complicated. Fire victims became dependent in part on the market value of equity in the company whose conduct had generated the bankruptcy claims. The Trust completed its final stock sale in December 2023, ending that source of market exposure, but the uniform payment gate remained. The Trust also pursued claims against Davey Tree Surgery Company and related parties. In June 2026, the trustee expected the Trust’s share of the settlement to support a final pro rata increase after funding and reconciliation of reimbursable litigation expenses. The proceeds would enter the common distribution process rather than be assigned only to claimants connected to that litigation. ###### The Oversight Committee The Trust Oversight Committee was selected by claimant professionals and the Tort Claimants Committee to oversee the Trust and represent fire-victim interests. Singleton sat beside lawyers and advocates drawn from different firms and institutions. The committee reviewed the system from the claimant side; it did not replace the trustee, claims administrator, processor, appeals personnel or bankruptcy court. The trustee directed the Trust, the claims administrator oversaw resolution procedures and BrownGreer processed claims. Other specialists handled appeals, insurance and financial operations. Singleton and the Oversight Committee reviewed administration and represented claimant interests without taking over those separate functions. Fire survivors and public officials raised questions about the pace of payments, administration costs and transparency. The trustee and Oversight Committee disputed criticisms of the Trust’s spending and described the work needed to establish and operate the claims process. Administration required staff, evidence review and financial operations while survivors waited for compensation. The committee reviewed the Trust from the claimant side, with the trustee and court retaining their own authority. Payment speed, consistent treatment and the resources available for distribution all remained part of that oversight. ###### Determinations and Remaining Distribution By August 31, 2026, all 71,787 claimants who submitted claims questionnaires had received finalized Determination Notices. The Trust reported 66,530 eligible claimants and payments to 66,171 of them. It had approved approximately $19.57 billion in awards and paid approximately $13.72 billion to claimants. The approved awards exceeded the original $13.5 billion settlement valuation because the process assessed losses separately from the fund’s available assets. The pro rata rule limited payment without reducing each finalized award to the cash immediately available. On June 26, 2026, the bankruptcy court found that the conditions for payment under the Davey Tree settlement had been satisfied. The settling parties were to fund a qualified settlement account within thirty days. Reimbursable litigation expenses then had to be finalized before the Trust received its share. Trustee Cathy Yanni said in June that those proceeds would finance the final pro rata payment after the Trust received its share and completed the necessary calculation. She did not announce the final percentage. The seventy-percent level and the prospect of an additional distribution remained distinct from payment of every approved award in full. Singleton continues his wildfire practice at Singleton Schreiber. His Fire Victim Trust work combined representation of individual claimants with oversight of the shared mechanism that valued claims and distributed available assets. A claimant’s accepted notice fixed an award; each pro rata increase converted another portion of that award into a payment. Singleton’s clients and the other eligible survivors participated in the same percentage increases, regardless of when their losses were valued or how large their awards became. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Managing Attorney - **Organization:** Singleton Schreiber - **Practice:** Wildfire Litigation, Mass Torts - **Location:** San Diego, California ##### Contact - **Firm:** Singleton Schreiber - **Address:** 591 Camino De La Reina, Suite 1025, San Diego, California 92108 - **Website:** texaswildfirelawyers.com ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Gerald Singleton Wildfire Litigation · Mass Torts > “We will continue to fight for full accountability and fair compensation for the survivors we represent. ##### Fire Claims Inside PG&E’s Bankruptcy Gerald Singleton represented thousands of wildfire survivors whose claims entered PG&E’s bankruptcy. As one of nine members of the Fire Victim Trust Oversight Committee, he also reviewed a distribution process shared by tens of thousands of claimants. Their losses required individual proof; payment depended on the assets available to the whole group. The 2015 Butte Fire, the 2017 North Bay fires and the 2018 Camp Fire destroyed homes and their contents, displaced families and interrupted work. Survivors faced temporary housing costs and medical expenses. Businesses lost equipment and customers. Claims also arose from injuries, deaths and emotional harm. PG&E’s January 2019 Chapter 11 filing gathered those individual tort claims into one reorganization. Negotiations had to address how much the company could commit to fire victims while emerging from bankruptcy. The confirmed plan established a Fire Victim Trust valued at $13.5 billion, effective July 1, 2020. Its opening assets included approximately $5.4 billion in cash and a substantial block of PG&E stock. Additional payments and the sale of assets supplied funds for later distributions. ###### Documenting Each Loss The Trust divided claims into seven categories: real property, personal property, personal income loss, business loss, other out-of-pocket expenses, wrongful death or personal injury, and emotional distress. A single questionnaire could include several categories. Singleton represented claimants who needed to assemble evidence of those separate losses. One family might document a home’s value and contents, months of alternative housing, lost wages, medical treatment and emotional harm. The processor reviewed each component, requested missing information and issued a Determination Notice containing the aggregate approved award. Claimants could accept the determination or seek reconsideration and appeal with supplemental evidence. Singleton’s clients faced those choices within the same procedures as other survivors. Their awards became final after acceptance or completion of review and supplied the basis for later payments. ###### Equal Percentages The Trust’s assets could not cover every finalized award in full. Bankruptcy orders and Trust documents required eligible claimants to receive the same proportion of their awards, regardless of when the claims were approved or how large the losses were. The shortfall reflected the available fund, while the Determination Notices retained the value assigned to each claimant’s losses. Payments began at 30% of finalized awards—thirty cents for each approved dollar. As additional funding and stock sales increased the assets available, the percentage rose to 45%, 60%, 66% and then 70%, effective October 24, 2024. Part of the recovery depended on the market value of shares in PG&E, the company facing the wildfire claims. The Trust completed its final stock sale in December 2023. Subsequent distributions continued to use the common percentage applied to all eligible awards. ###### Counsel and Oversight Claimant professionals and the Tort Claimants Committee selected the nine-member Oversight Committee to review the Trust and represent fire-victim interests. Singleton served with lawyers and advocates from different firms and institutions. His committee responsibilities concerned the shared administration; his representation of individual clients required attention to their separate claims. The trustee directed the Trust, the claims administrator oversaw resolution procedures and BrownGreer processed claims. Other specialists handled appeals, insurance and financial operations. The committee reviewed that work from the claimant side, including payment speed, consistent treatment and the resources available for distribution. The bankruptcy court retained its authority over the Trust. Fire survivors and public officials raised questions about the pace of payments, administration costs and transparency. The trustee and Oversight Committee disputed criticisms of the Trust’s spending and described the work needed to establish and operate the claims process. ###### The Final Distribution By August 31, 2026, all 71,787 claimants who submitted claims questionnaires had received finalized Determination Notices. The Trust reported 66,530 eligible claimants and payments to 66,171 of them. It had approved approximately $19.57 billion in awards and paid approximately $13.72 billion to claimants. The Trust also pursued claims against Davey Tree Surgery Company and related parties. On June 26, 2026, the bankruptcy court found that the settlement’s payment conditions had been satisfied. The settling parties were to fund a qualified settlement account within thirty days, with reimbursable litigation expenses finalized before the Trust received its share. Trustee Cathy Yanni expected those proceeds to fund the final pro rata increase. On September 10, Yanni announced that the Trust had received all funds from the Davey settlement. She scheduled a final additional payment of 1.25% for October 14, 2026, bringing the aggregate distribution to 71.25% of approved awards. The increase applies through the common distribution process, including to Singleton’s eligible clients. Yanni said there would be no further pro rata distributions after that payment. ###### Beyond the Trust Singleton began his career in 2000 at Federal Defenders of San Diego, representing criminal defendants in the Southern District of California and before the Ninth Circuit. In 2003, he opened his own practice, which developed into Singleton Schreiber. His wildfire work has included court-appointed liaison roles in the Thomas, Woolsey, Bobcat, Kincade, Zogg and Dixie fire litigation. He has also expanded into environmental cases for individuals and public entities, including PFAS contamination. In 2023, he and his team brought a medical-monitoring claim addressing exposure to carcinogens and other toxins in wildfire smoke. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Managing Attorney - **Organization:** Singleton Schreiber - **Practice:** Wildfire Litigation, Mass Torts - **Location:** San Diego, California ##### Contact - **Firm:** Singleton Schreiber - **Address:** 591 Camino De La Reina, Suite 1025, San Diego, California 92108 - **Website:** texaswildfirelawyers.com --- ## 19. Bryan A. Stevenson — `900005358` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `8c75f359a23856c152d6bacdcc56b8af6a8e5773710e868d88191d365a2950a4` - **After/current hash:** `fff9b82c20671ac1cbd5cef36f2a411cd34aaa5828b9b6b4d995aefb07fa711d` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005358/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Opening and mitigation explanation**: Consolidate repeated mitigation lists without losing any supported circumstance or legal distinction. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **The Cases Behind the Argument**: Add verified founding and education plus EJI's investigation and report supporting its juvenile litigation campaign. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **What Youth Changes**: Show the Ginsburg and Kennedy exchanges and Stevenson's simultaneous defense of individualized and categorical protections. - `rewrite` — **The June 2012 Ruling and later decisions**: Combine repeated hearing explanations, place the transfer objection with the ruling and preserve retroactivity and Jones limits. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Miller and Jackson After the Judgment**: Retain Miller's documented hearing and add Jackson's release, studies and actual museum conversation as a concrete ending. ### BEFORE #### Bryan A. Stevenson Juvenile Sentencing · Constitutional Litigation > “The Court has recognized that children need additional attention and protection in the criminal justice system. ##### Youth Before a Life Sentence Evan Miller and Kuntrell Jackson were fourteen at the time of their offenses. Alabama and Arkansas required life without parole after their homicide convictions. Bryan Stevenson asked the Supreme Court to require a sentencing hearing in which age, family history, peer pressure and capacity for change could affect the punishment. Evan Miller and Kuntrell Jackson arrived in court through different homicides and different states. Both were fourteen at the time of their offenses. After their convictions, the sentencing authorities had no lawful choice of punishment. Alabama and Arkansas required life imprisonment without parole. The judge could not substitute a term that allowed later release. Evidence about maturity, family life, vulnerability to older companions and participation in the offense could not change the mandatory sentence. Bryan Stevenson represented Miller and Jackson through the Equal Justice Initiative and argued both cases before the Supreme Court in March 2012. He challenged the mandatory imposition of the harshest noncapital punishment on children whose individual circumstances could make a different sentence appropriate. Alabama argued that youth could be considered earlier, when deciding whether a child would be prosecuted as an adult. The Supreme Court rejected that substitute. Transfer decisions could belong to prosecutors or operate mandatorily, and they addressed adult prosecution rather than proportional punishment after conviction. ###### What Youth Changes Stevenson’s argument drew on the Court’s earlier decisions concerning adolescent development. Children are more impulsive than adults, more susceptible to peer pressure and less able to escape destructive environments. Their characters are also less fixed, allowing greater prospects for change. Those differences bear on culpability and punishment even when the offense is grave. A sentence based on an expectation of permanent dangerousness requires a judgment about a person whose maturity and self-control are still developing. Mandatory sentencing excluded distinctions among offenders that courts ordinarily consider: intent, participation, coercion, intellectual capacity, family circumstances, trauma and prospects for rehabilitation. For Miller and Jackson, the sentencing law assigned the same punishment without allowing those differences to affect it. The EJI team’s work was accompanied by briefs from scientists, former judges, correctional officials, lawyers, advocates and victims’ representatives. They addressed adolescent development, responsibility and the consequences of imposing an irrevocable sentence on a child. ###### The June 2012 Ruling On June 25, 2012, the Supreme Court ruled five to four that the Eighth Amendment forbids mandatory life without parole for juvenile homicide offenders. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the majority opinion, joining the Court’s juvenile-sentencing precedents with its requirement for individualized consideration before the most severe punishments. Before imposing life without parole, a sentencer must hold an individualized hearing and consider youth and its attendant characteristics. The sentence remains available through that individualized process. The Court expected the harshest sentence to be uncommon. Miller and Jackson became entitled to new sentencing hearings at which their age, circumstances and participation could influence the result. Stevenson and his colleagues had secured a change in the sentencing authority’s lawful choices. Judges applying a mandatory statute had been required to impose one punishment; after Miller, they had to consider the individual before choosing a sentence. ###### Earlier Sentences Return to Court Thousands of people had received mandatory life without parole years or decades before Miller. State courts divided over whether the ruling reached their final convictions. In Montgomery v. Louisiana, decided in 2016, the Supreme Court held that Miller applied retroactively on state collateral review. States could provide a new sentencing proceeding or make affected prisoners eligible for parole. Implementation produced different outcomes. Some prosecutors again sought life without parole; other people received terms that allowed release after demonstrating maturity and rehabilitation. In June 2022, EJI reported that more than 880 people sentenced as children had been released. In Jones v. Mississippi, decided in 2021, the Court held that federal law did not require a separate finding of permanent incorrigibility before imposing juvenile life without parole. A discretionary system allowing consideration of youth satisfied the federal requirement. Legislatures and state courts remained free to require additional findings, parole eligibility or categorical limits. ###### An Individualized Hearing Evan Miller’s resentencing included testimony from family members, correctional officials, educators and a child psychiatrist, together with records concerning his childhood and development. The Lawrence County Circuit Court again imposed life without parole in April 2021. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed in August 2023 after reviewing the individualized sentencing findings. Miller's resentencing applied the individualized process required by the 2012 decision. Alabama's sentencing framework supplied the additional findings reviewed on appeal, alongside the federal requirement of a discretionary system that considers youth. Stevenson remains founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery. His representation of Miller and Jackson formed part of the organization’s sustained juvenile-sentencing practice, developed through the clients’ cases, EJI’s legal work and the evidence supplied by the broader group of participants. Age, environment, pressure, participation and capacity for change became relevant to the sentencing decision before life without parole could be imposed. The ruling required the state to exercise judgment about the child and the offense, giving the defense an opportunity to present evidence that the mandatory statutes had excluded from the choice of punishment. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founder and Executive Director - **Organization:** Equal Justice Initiative - **Practice:** Juvenile Sentencing, Constitutional Litigation - **Location:** Montgomery, Alabama ##### Contact - **Organization:** Equal Justice Initiative - **Address:** 122 Commerce Street, Montgomery, Alabama 36104 - **Website:** eji.org - **Phone:** 334.269.1803 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Bryan A. Stevenson Juvenile Sentencing · Constitutional Litigation > “The Court has recognized that children need additional attention and protection in the criminal justice system. ##### Youth Before a Life Sentence Evan Miller and Kuntrell Jackson were fourteen at the time of their offenses. Alabama and Arkansas required life without parole after their homicide convictions. Bryan Stevenson asked the Supreme Court to require a sentencing hearing in which age, family history, peer pressure and capacity for change could affect the punishment. Evan Miller and Kuntrell Jackson arrived in court through different homicides and different states. Both were fourteen at the time of their offenses. After their convictions, the sentencing authorities had no lawful choice of punishment. Alabama and Arkansas required life imprisonment without parole. The judge could not substitute a term that allowed later release. Maturity, family life, vulnerability to older companions and participation in the offense could not change the sentence. Nor could distinctions in intent, coercion, intellectual capacity, trauma or prospects for rehabilitation. Bryan Stevenson represented Miller and Jackson through the Equal Justice Initiative and argued both cases before the Supreme Court on March 20, 2012. He challenged the mandatory imposition of the harshest noncapital punishment on children whose individual circumstances could make a different sentence appropriate. ###### The Cases Behind the Argument Stevenson founded EJI in 1989 and remains its executive director in Montgomery, Alabama. A graduate of Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School, he built a practice representing people facing severe punishment, including children prosecuted as adults. Miller and Jackson’s cases grew from the organization’s sustained juvenile-sentencing work. After the Supreme Court barred the juvenile death penalty in Roper v. Simmons in 2005, EJI began investigating how many children had been sentenced to life without parole. Its report documented seventy-three cases involving offenses at thirteen or fourteen. Those individual cases supplied the basis for a national litigation campaign. Graham v. Florida then barred juvenile life without parole for nonhomicide offenses in 2010. Miller and Jackson brought the question of homicide sentences before the Court. ###### What Youth Changes Stevenson drew on Roper and Graham to argue that adolescents’ developmental differences remained relevant when the offense was grave. Children are more impulsive than adults, more susceptible to peer pressure and less able to escape destructive environments. Their characters are less fixed, with greater prospects for change. Predicting permanent dangerousness meant judging someone whose maturity and self-control were still developing. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked whether a hearing at which he could present all the mitigating circumstances would satisfy him. Stevenson said it would not: the offense could overwhelm the evidence of youth, and a new procedure would not resolve the difficulty of distinguishing a child’s temporary characteristics from permanent ones. Justice Anthony Kennedy then asked whether it would be unprincipled to prohibit mandatory sentences while allowing life without parole in some cases. Stevenson accepted that such a ruling would be principled. He kept that possibility open while defending a categorical ban for children under eighteen, arguing that it would be “a mistake to equate kids with adults.” The EJI team’s work was accompanied by briefs from scientists, former judges, correctional officials, lawyers, advocates and victims’ representatives. They addressed adolescent development, responsibility and the consequences of imposing an irrevocable sentence on a child. ###### The June 2012 Ruling On June 25, 2012, the Supreme Court ruled five to four that the Eighth Amendment forbids mandatory life without parole for juvenile homicide offenders. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the majority opinion, joining the Court’s juvenile-sentencing precedents with its requirement for individualized consideration before the most severe punishments. Miller and Jackson became entitled to new sentencing hearings. Stevenson and his colleagues had secured the opportunity to present age, circumstances and participation as reasons for a different punishment. A sentencer could still impose life without parole after considering youth and its attendant characteristics, but the Court expected that choice to be uncommon. Alabama had argued that youth could be considered earlier, when deciding whether a child would be prosecuted as an adult. The Court rejected that substitute. Transfer decisions could belong to prosecutors or operate mandatorily, and they addressed adult prosecution rather than proportional punishment after conviction. The sentencing authority had to consider the individual before choosing the punishment. ###### Earlier Sentences Return to Court Thousands of people had received mandatory life without parole years or decades before Miller. State courts divided over whether the ruling reached their final convictions. In Montgomery v. Louisiana, decided in 2016, the Supreme Court held that Miller applied retroactively on state collateral review. States could provide a new sentencing proceeding or make affected prisoners eligible for parole. In Jones v. Mississippi, decided in 2021, the Court held that federal law did not require a separate finding of permanent incorrigibility before imposing juvenile life without parole. A discretionary system allowing consideration of youth satisfied the federal requirement. Legislatures and state courts remained free to require additional findings, parole eligibility or categorical limits. Implementation produced different outcomes. Some prosecutors again sought life without parole; other people received terms that allowed release after demonstrating maturity and rehabilitation. In June 2022, EJI reported that more than 880 people sentenced as children had been released, citing figures from the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. ###### Miller and Jackson After the Judgment Evan Miller’s resentencing included testimony from family members, correctional officials, educators and a child psychiatrist, together with records concerning his childhood and development. The Lawrence County Circuit Court again imposed life without parole in April 2021. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed in August 2023 after reviewing the individualized sentencing findings. Alabama’s sentencing framework supplied additional factors for the court to consider alongside the federal requirement of a discretionary system that considers youth. The defense could now present evidence about Miller’s age, environment, pressure, participation and capacity for change as part of the choice of punishment. Kuntrell Jackson was released on February 21, 2017. By July 2019, he was studying film and theatre at a university in Montgomery and volunteering at the Legacy Museum, which Stevenson had helped create through EJI. That month, ACLU of Missouri staff member Elaine Sutton watched Jackson describe his imprisonment in a video exhibit. When she turned to leave, he was standing behind her, answering visitors’ questions. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founder and Executive Director - **Organization:** Equal Justice Initiative - **Practice:** Juvenile Sentencing, Constitutional Litigation - **Location:** Montgomery, Alabama ##### Contact - **Organization:** Equal Justice Initiative - **Address:** 122 Commerce Street, Montgomery, Alabama 36104 - **Website:** eji.org - **Phone:** 334.269.1803 --- ## 20. Christine E. Webber — `900005357` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `a5b1db5f8b3c1670f9a89cf78681b40cdce8b555ef2b3d0569786d80e8e4c125` - **After/current hash:** `4a0e637313cedd452e3492fad28a3c8598d9b8e5da158890c33f78b5b469ea76` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005357/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 3 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Title, deck and opening**: Replace an abstract opening with Louis's documented references and the manager's response while preserving the voucher and scoring allegations. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Credit History, Rental History**: Add Webber's fellowship, early trial work and individually selected statements to reveal experience and judgment in context. - `rewrite` — **Who Controlled the Calculation**: Consolidate vendor-control repetition and place the government filing, causal ruling and pleading posture in one sequence. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **A Condition on the Next Score**: Specify the covered products, named validator and benefit-sensitive installment choice from the settlement memorandum. - `rewrite` — **Title, deck and opening**: Replace an abstract opening with Louis's documented references and the manager's response while preserving the voucher and scoring allegations. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Credit History, Rental History**: Add Webber's fellowship, early trial work and individually selected statements to reveal experience and judgment in context. - `rewrite` — **Who Controlled the Calculation**: Consolidate vendor-control repetition and place the government filing, causal ruling and pleading posture in one sequence. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **A Condition on the Next Score**: Specify the covered products, named validator and benefit-sensitive installment choice from the settlement memorandum. - `rewrite` — **Title, deck and opening**: Replace an abstract opening with Louis's documented references and the manager's response while preserving the voucher and scoring allegations. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Credit History, Rental History**: Add Webber's fellowship, early trial work and individually selected statements to reveal experience and judgment in context. - `rewrite` — **Who Controlled the Calculation**: Consolidate vendor-control repetition and place the government filing, causal ruling and pleading posture in one sequence. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **A Condition on the Next Score**: Specify the covered products, named validator and benefit-sensitive installment choice from the settlement memorandum. ### BEFORE #### Christine E. Webber Civil Rights · Employment · Fair Housing > “Every morning I wake up and know I will be fighting for them, fighting for the dignity and fairness due to everyone… ##### Housing Vouchers and Tenant Screening SafeRent’s tenant score could absorb credit history and non-tenancy debt while excluding the voucher that paid most of an applicant’s rent. Christine Webber and the plaintiffs’ team challenged the vendor’s control of that calculation under the Fair Housing Act and negotiated limits on the score’s use for covered voucher holders. Mary Louis applied for an apartment with a housing voucher that covered a substantial portion of the rent. Yet the tenant-screening system used in her application allegedly left that benefit out of the score that determined whether she qualified. SafeRent Solutions supplied landlords with an automated tenant-screening score and a resulting accept, conditional or decline decision. The system incorporated credit-related information, including debts unrelated to a previous tenancy. The plaintiffs alleged that it did not adequately account for the voucher’s contribution to the applicant’s ability to pay rent. The landlord could set a minimum threshold but could not inspect or alter SafeRent’s internal weighting. The property owner received the result, while the vendor determined how the result was calculated. Christine E. Webber represented Louis, Monica Douglas and the Community Action Agency of Somerville with lawyers from Cohen Milstein, Greater Boston Legal Services and the National Consumer Law Center. They alleged that the vendor’s calculation directly shaped whether applicants obtained housing. ###### The Data Inside the Score The plaintiffs alleged that reliance on credit history imposed a racially disparate burden. They cited differences in conventional credit scores between Black and Hispanic consumers and white consumers, connecting those differences to inequalities in income, wealth and access to credit. Their claim concerned the effect of those inputs even without an explicit race variable. The voucher created a second mismatch. Credit data purported to estimate whether an applicant could meet future rent obligations. But for a voucher holder, a public program had already committed to paying much of that obligation. If the model heavily weighted credit history while excluding the voucher, it could understate the applicant’s actual capacity to pay the landlord. Opacity made the problem harder to correct. A landlord who knows an applicant’s circumstances may still be unable to exercise meaningful judgment when the vendor does not disclose all inputs or weights and the property’s screening workflow treats the score as dispositive. The plaintiffs alleged an unjustified discriminatory effect from SafeRent’s screening practices. They did not have to allege that a programmer had instructed the system to discriminate. Webber and her co-counsel sought to connect the model’s inputs, the score’s racial distribution and the denial of housing closely enough to state a Fair Housing Act claim against the vendor itself. ###### The Vendor Behind the Landlord SafeRent argued that landlords made the ultimate decisions and that the Fair Housing Act should not reach a company supplying information to them. The district court largely rejected that position at the pleading stage. The court focused on control. Landlords selected decision points, but SafeRent controlled how the score was calculated. Housing providers could not change the algorithm and did not know how the underlying data had been weighted. The vendor therefore did more than pass along a raw credit report; it transformed information into the decision used to approve or reject an application. The court held that the complaint plausibly connected SafeRent's practice to the alleged disparate impact and that a screening vendor could fall within the Fair Housing Act's reach. The landlord's presence did not automatically sever causation because the complaint alleged that the housing provider lacked access to the model's internal reasoning and relied on the vendor's output as the operative screening decision. Formal authority remained with the landlord; practical control over the calculation remained with SafeRent. The Department of Justice and the Department of Housing and Urban Development filed a statement of interest on January 9, 2023. Their filing addressed the Fair Housing Act’s application to tenant-screening companies and the allegations connecting the vendor’s score to housing decisions. ###### Remove the Score, Validate the Replacement Judge Angel Kelley granted final approval to the settlement on November 20, 2024. The $2.275 million settlement provided monetary relief to defined classes. SafeRent agreed not to include the challenged score in specified screening reports for applicants using housing vouchers in the covered circumstances. The agreement anticipated substitution. Removing one score would offer little protection if an equivalent model immediately replaced it. A future score intended for the covered voucher use therefore had to pass validation by an agreed third party before deployment. The validator would test whether a proposed replacement satisfied the settlement’s requirements before use. The court retained jurisdiction for five years after SafeRent certified implementation of the practice changes, preserving a forum for disputes about removal, replacement and continuing compliance. The settlement administrator mailed check payments on June 30, 2025 and sent digital-payment instructions on July 1. For eligible class members who chose two installments, the administrator reported issuing the second payment by February 17, 2026. Those distributions were separate from the court’s five-year jurisdiction over the practice changes. ###### Accountability at the Point of Calculation The July 2023 ruling allowed the Fair Housing Act claims to proceed against the screening vendor. The complaint alleged that landlords could neither inspect nor alter the score’s internal weighting and relied on its output when evaluating applicants. The court found those allegations sufficient at the pleading stage. The parties settled before trial. The settlement imposed defined limits on the score's use and conditions on a replacement. Webber is a partner and co-chair of Cohen Milstein’s Civil Rights & Employment practice. In Louis, she and the plaintiffs’ team obtained monetary relief and a requirement for outside validation before a replacement score could be used in the covered voucher screenings. The remedy addressed the calculation that had excluded the voucher’s contribution to rent. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner; Co-Chair, Civil Rights & Employment - **Organization:** Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll - **Practice:** Civil Rights, Employment, Fair Housing - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Firm:** Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll - **Website:** cohenmilstein.com - **Phone:** 202.408.4600 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Christine E. Webber Civil Rights · Employment · Fair Housing > “Every morning I wake up and know I will be fighting for them, fighting for the dignity and fairness due to everyone… ##### The Tenant Behind the Screening Score A housing voucher helped Mary Louis pay her rent, but SafeRent’s score did not account for it. Christine Webber and her co-counsel challenged the calculation, the vendor’s claim to stand outside fair-housing law and the use of an untested replacement. Mary Louis had a housing voucher and a rental history she was willing to document. When an apartment manager rejected her application in May 2021, she offered references from two landlords and from her employers to establish at least sixteen years of paying rent early or on time. In July, the manager replied that it did not accept appeals and could not override the screening outcome. Louis had applied at Granada Highlands in Malden, Massachusetts, where her voucher would have covered about 69 percent of the rent. SafeRent Solutions supplied the score used to reject her. The plaintiffs alleged that it counted debts unrelated to tenancy while leaving out the voucher’s contribution to payment. Christine E. Webber represented Louis, Monica Douglas and the Community Action Agency of Somerville with lawyers from Cohen Milstein, Greater Boston Legal Services and the National Consumer Law Center. They filed the class action in May 2022. Webber described a practical obstacle that reached beyond the accuracy of any one credit entry: without knowing the score’s inputs or weights, she said, “housing providers cannot exercise any independent judgment as to the merits of housing applicants.” ###### Credit History, Rental History Webber had spent decades working with the records behind discrimination claims. After earning her law degree at the University of Michigan in 1991, she received a Women’s Law and Public Policy fellowship that funded the first of four years at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. She participated in the 1995 trial of the Neal sexual-harassment class action involving the District of Columbia’s Department of Corrections. As a partner and co-chair of Cohen Milstein’s Civil Rights & Employment practice, she works with economic and statistical experts on class claims. In Louis, the plaintiffs connected differences in conventional credit scores among Black, Hispanic and white consumers to inequalities in income, wealth and access to credit. They alleged that using those scores to screen tenants imposed an unjustified racially disparate burden. The voucher presented a separate question about what the model was measuring. Credit history was being used to estimate whether an applicant could meet future rent obligations. For Louis, however, a public program had committed to paying most of that obligation. A score that heavily weighted credit information while excluding that commitment could understate her ability to pay. Webber and her co-counsel sought to link the model’s inputs, the racial distribution of its scores and the resulting housing denials. Their Fair Housing Act claim concerned discriminatory effects, including those produced without an explicit race variable or an instruction to discriminate. Describing the case at settlement, Webber told the Associated Press that the choice and weighting of data could have “the same effect as if you told it to discriminate intentionally.” ###### Who Controlled the Calculation SafeRent supplied an accept, conditional or decline decision. A landlord selected a minimum threshold, but the plaintiffs alleged that it could neither inspect nor change the algorithm or its internal weighting. The vendor converted the underlying information into the score on which the housing provider relied. SafeRent argued that the Fair Housing Act should not reach a company supplying information to landlords who made the ultimate housing decisions. On January 9, 2023, the Department of Justice and the Department of Housing and Urban Development filed a statement of interest addressing the Act’s application to tenant-screening companies and the connection between SafeRent’s score and access to housing. Judge Angel Kelley allowed the Fair Housing Act claims against the vendor to proceed on July 26, 2023. The complaint plausibly alleged that SafeRent controlled the calculation and that housing providers relied on its output to accept or reject applicants. A landlord’s formal authority did not automatically break the causal connection between the vendor’s scoring practice and the alleged discrimination. The ruling gave Webber and the plaintiffs’ team a path forward against the company that produced the score. The court had found their allegations sufficient at the pleading stage; the parties would resolve the claims through settlement before trial. ###### A Condition on the Next Score Kelley granted final approval to the $2.275 million settlement on November 20, 2024. It provided monetary relief to defined classes and required SafeRent to remove the challenged score from specified reports used in covered voucher screenings. SafeRent would stop supplying the score or a score-based accept-or-decline recommendation through its Affordable Model. For its Market and No-Credit models, housing providers would have to certify that the applicant was not receiving a publicly funded housing voucher. Without that certification, SafeRent would provide underlying information subject to the agreement’s score restrictions. Webber and her co-counsel secured a condition on any replacement tenant score intended for the covered voucher screenings: it could be used only after the National Fair Housing Alliance or another qualifying organization agreed to under the settlement had found it valid for voucher holders. Removing the old score would not permit an untested equivalent to take its place. The court retained jurisdiction to enforce the agreement for five years after SafeRent confirmed that it had implemented the required practice changes. That term gave the parties a forum for disputes about removal, replacement and continuing compliance after implementation. The payment arrangements accounted for the recipients’ circumstances too. To help avoid disrupting eligibility for public benefits, eligible class members could choose to receive their money in two equal installments over two years. The administrator mailed check payments on June 30, 2025 and sent digital-payment instructions on July 1. It reported issuing the second installments by February 17, 2026. The distributions and the five-year enforcement period served separate purposes: compensation for eligible applicants who had been denied housing, and continuing court supervision of the agreed screening changes. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner; Co-Chair, Civil Rights & Employment - **Organization:** Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll - **Practice:** Civil Rights, Employment, Fair Housing - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Firm:** Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll - **Website:** cohenmilstein.com - **Phone:** 202.408.4600 --- ## 21. Kelly M. Dermody — `900005356` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **MEDIUM** — Manifest history contains at least one substantive correction/addition. - **Before hash:** `985412da194b219d238e6efefde54f3ec10ec7791bed28d4cecde188531f0787` - **After/current hash:** `6882663f48f294e462d4138ce729ea241066d2159c13dd0b6ca026d5e1dac8ce` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005356/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Opening, deck and job-level explanation**: Bring Dermody's documented case-selection judgment forward and consolidate the consequences of the starting tier. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Choosing Civil-Rights Work**: Add her recalled college internship, education and early civil-rights assignments to show an individual professional path. - `rewrite` — **Two Claims and the Records to Test Them**: Join claim narrowing and discovery in one sequence while preserving each theory and all original evidence and procedural distinctions. - `rewrite` — **Compensation and Independent Review**: Preserve the money and review terms, add the negotiation chronology and remove the duplicated explanation of starting-level effects. ### BEFORE #### Kelly M. Dermody Civil Rights · Employment · Pay Equity > “Justice is where equity meets dignity. It is the promise kept for accountability and fair play. ##### The Level Before the Salary Ellis v. Google challenged more than the size of a paycheck. Kelly Dermody and the class team alleged that some women entered the company at lower job levels because prior pay shaped placement—and that the starting level then governed salary bands, bonuses and advancement for years. A job level determines the compensation range, expected responsibility, bonus opportunity and promotion path attached to an employee’s position. An employee entering at a lower level may receive less pay immediately and face additional steps before reaching the next tier. In Ellis v. Google, Kelly Ellis, Holly Pease, Kelli Wisuri and Heidi Lamar alleged that women in covered California positions were paid less than men performing substantially similar work. They also challenged an earlier decision: the level assigned when an employee entered the company. The leveling theory alleged that Google relied on prior compensation in ways that placed some women below men with comparable education and experience. A lower starting level could then reproduce itself through smaller salary bands, lower bonuses and a longer distance to the next promotion. Kelly M. Dermody appeared for the plaintiffs and certified class with lawyers from Lieff Cabraser and Altshuler Berzon. The case required the team to connect individual hiring records to a companywide architecture of job codes, levels and compensation rather than treating each salary as an isolated negotiation. ###### From Complaint to Certified Claims The plaintiffs filed in 2017. Their original allegations included pay, leveling, job channeling and promotion concerns. By the time they sought class certification, they had concentrated the class case on pay discrimination and leveling-at-hire. The equal-pay claim compared women and men within covered job codes who performed substantially similar work. The leveling claim concerned whether women hired before the relevant policy change entered lower tiers than comparable men. In May 2021, the court certified both claims. Google sought appellate review, but the petition was denied. The defined groups could proceed through common proof rather than thousands of disconnected individual lawsuits. The plaintiffs had to identify shared practices capable of producing classwide answers: the job-code structure used to compare substantially similar work, the leveling process applied at hire and statistical methods that could test whether those mechanisms affected women differently across the covered positions. The certified classes covered specified California positions and employment periods, with the court's definitions identifying the employees and claims that could proceed together. ###### The Hiring and Pay Records Before settlement, Google had produced 60 sets of documents totaling 163,491 pages. The parties had taken 19 depositions, including the four named plaintiffs, corporate representatives and experts, with additional merits discovery underway. The records allowed the parties to examine what information entered the leveling process, how candidates were compared, how job codes mapped to compensation and whether pay-equity analyses captured the consequences of initial placement. Dermody and the two-firm class team sought to connect recurring hiring inputs and procedures to the alleged disparities. The class claims required common proof about placement and compensation across the covered jobs, alongside the employees’ individual employment records. Trial would require competing statistical models, expert testimony about substantially similar work and detailed examination of hiring and compensation practices. ###### Money and Recalibration The approved settlement created a $118 million gross fund. Approximately $86 million was allocated to participating class members under the agreement’s distribution formula. The agreement provided that unused money would not revert to Google. The formula divided the net fund between the equal-pay class and the leveling subclass. Individual awards accounted for factors defined in the agreement rather than distributing the same amount to every worker. The structure recognized that time employed, job history and the particular certified claim affected the alleged loss. The nonmonetary relief returned to the entry decision. An independent third-party expert was to analyze leveling-at-hire practices. An independent labor economist was to review Google’s pay-equity studies. An external monitor would supervise that work over three years. ###### The Compounding Effect of a Starting Tier Final approval in October 2022 resolved the certified class claims through settlement. The judgment subsequently became final and payments were distributed. The alleged effect of initial placement extended beyond a single paycheck. If prior compensation influenced a worker’s level, the resulting tier could affect later salary bands, bonus eligibility and promotion opportunities. The independent review addressed that hiring process alongside Google’s recurring pay-equity studies. Dermody is Managing Partner of Lieff Cabraser’s San Francisco office and a partner in San Francisco and New York. Her practice includes civil-rights and employment class actions. In Ellis, the class team obtained a fund for the covered employees and a defined period of outside review of the systems challenged in the case. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner; Managing Partner, San Francisco Office - **Organization:** Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP - **Practice:** Civil Rights, Employment, Pay Equity - **Location:** San Francisco and New York ##### Contact - **Firm:** Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP - **Address:** 275 Battery Street, Suite 2900, San Francisco, California 94111 - **Website:** lieffcabraser.com - **Phone:** 415-956-1000 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Kelly M. Dermody Civil Rights · Employment · Pay Equity > “Justice is where equity meets dignity. It is the promise kept for accountability and fair play. ##### The Level Before the Salary Kelly Dermody and the Ellis v. Google class team challenged both unequal pay and the job level assigned at hire. Their case alleged that prior compensation could place women in lower tiers, shaping salary bands, bonuses and advancement long after the hiring decision. Kelly M. Dermody described a demanding threshold for taking on a class action. In a 2021 interview, she said she accepted fewer than one percent of the cases offered to her. “You have to be convinced that there is some sort of policy you can attack,” she told Bloomberg Law. The commitment could require years of work from lawyers and clients. In Ellis v. Google, Dermody represented Kelly Ellis, Holly Pease, Kelli Wisuri and Heidi Lamar with lawyers from Lieff Cabraser and Altshuler Berzon. The women alleged that Google paid them less than men performing substantially similar work in covered California positions. They also challenged the level assigned when an employee joined the company. Their jobs differed. Ellis worked as a software engineer and left Google with the title of senior manager. Pease held technical leadership positions, Wisuri worked in operations and communications, and Lamar taught at Google’s children’s center. The plaintiffs’ team had to connect individual hiring and employment records to common practices governing covered job codes, levels and compensation. A level determined an employee’s compensation range, expected responsibility, bonus opportunity and promotion path. The leveling claim alleged that Google used prior compensation in ways that placed some women below men with comparable education and experience. A lower entry tier could mean less pay immediately, smaller bonuses and more steps to the next promotion. ###### Choosing Civil-Rights Work Dermody’s decision to become a civil-rights lawyer took shape during a break from college. After her sophomore year at Harvard, she went to Washington to intern in Senator Edward Kennedy’s office. She later recalled that encounters with advocates and lawyers, together with her experience of coming out as gay in the late 1980s, deepened her interest in racial equity and the law’s effect on people’s lives. She returned to Harvard, graduated in 1990 and earned her law degree at the University of California, Berkeley in 1993. During law-school summers, she worked on police-misconduct matters at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and housing discrimination at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. She joined Lieff Cabraser in 1994. Dermody is now managing partner of the firm’s San Francisco office and a partner in San Francisco and New York. Her civil-rights and employment practice includes challenges to hiring, promotion, compensation and performance systems. In Ellis, that work required distinct comparisons of the pay women received and the levels at which they entered. ###### Two Claims and the Records to Test Them The plaintiffs filed in September 2017 with allegations involving pay, leveling, job channeling and promotions. By the class-certification stage, they had concentrated their case on pay discrimination and leveling-at-hire. The equal-pay claim compared women and men doing substantially similar work within covered job codes. The leveling claim compared the entry tiers of women and men with comparable qualifications. The court certified both claims in May 2021. Google sought appellate review, but its petition was denied. The ruling allowed the defined groups to proceed through common proof, using the job-code structure, hiring process and statistical analysis to test whether shared practices affected women differently across covered positions. The certified classes covered specified California positions and employment periods. The leveling claim concerned women hired before the relevant policy change; the court’s definitions identified which employees and claims could proceed together. Obtaining the records took three years of discovery disputes. The parties contested access to fields in Google’s personnel data, internal discrimination complaints and pay, performance and promotion equity audits. They also negotiated whose electronic records should be searched and the terms used to find relevant material. Before settlement, Google had produced 60 sets of documents totaling 163,491 pages. The parties had taken 19 depositions: the four named plaintiffs, eleven Google corporate representatives and four experts. Additional merits discovery was underway. Dermody and the two-firm team used that record to examine the information considered at hire, comparisons among candidates, the relationship between job codes and compensation, and whether pay-equity studies captured the consequences of initial placement. The individual employment records remained part of that inquiry. The class team sought common proof about recurring inputs and procedures. Trial would require competing statistical models, expert testimony about substantially similar work and detailed examination of both hiring and compensation practices. ###### Compensation and Independent Review The parties mediated in March 2022 and continued negotiating by telephone over the next two months. They signed a memorandum of understanding on June 2. Final approval in October 2022 resolved the certified class claims through settlement. The agreement created a $118 million gross fund, with approximately $86 million allocated to participating class members under its distribution formula. Unused money would not revert to Google. The judgment subsequently became final and payments were distributed. The formula divided the net fund between the equal-pay class and the leveling subclass. Awards reflected the agreement’s factors, including time employed, job history and the particular certified claim, rather than an identical payment to every worker. The allocation connected compensation to the alleged losses the two claims addressed. Dermody and the class team also obtained three years of outside review. An independent third-party expert was assigned to analyze leveling-at-hire practices, and an independent labor economist to examine Google’s recurring pay-equity studies. An external monitor would supervise that work and Google’s good-faith efforts to address the experts’ recommendations. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner; Managing Partner, San Francisco Office - **Organization:** Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP - **Practice:** Civil Rights, Employment, Pay Equity - **Location:** San Francisco and New York ##### Contact - **Firm:** Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP - **Address:** 275 Battery Street, Suite 2900, San Francisco, California 94111 - **Website:** lieffcabraser.com - **Phone:** 415-956-1000 --- ## 22. Amal Clooney — `900005575` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **MEDIUM** — Manifest history contains at least one substantive correction/addition. - **Before hash:** `e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855` - **After/current hash:** `138c82c3f05425e0e3b3ab7c3e7facc4ce3a004f72ef235acf67423e8339fead` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005577 (2026-09-13 01:27:35 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restore` — **Complete Amal Clooney narrative, hero quotation, professional sidebar and excerpt**: The owner requested a full manual polish to remove staccato, performative pacing. The revised manuscript uses connected factual paragraphs, preserves legal and procedural detail, and corrects identified overstatements without implying that Clooney was the prosecutor or sole counsel. ### BEFORE _(empty)_ ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Amal Clooney International law and human rights > “With this judgment, Germany’s highest court has confirmed that ISIS committed genocide. ##### A Member of the Group Amal Clooney and the prosecution of crimes against the Yazidis When the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt delivered its judgment on 30 November 2021, Reda’s mother was in the courtroom. Six years earlier, she and her five-year-old daughter had been enslaved in Fallujah by the man now facing the court. Her testimony about their captivity and her daughter’s death helped establish the first conviction of an Islamic State member for genocide. Amal Clooney represented her alongside the German lawyers Natalie von Wistinghausen and Jörg Oesterle. Their client participated as a co-plaintiff, a status that allowed her to remain in the proceedings, receive legal assistance and make applications through counsel. Germany’s Federal Public Prosecutor brought the criminal case; the three lawyers represented the woman whose account supplied evidence of what had happened inside the defendant’s home. German courts could hear the case under the Code of Crimes against International Law, enacted in 2002. Section 1 allows them to try genocide, crimes against humanity and specified war crimes committed abroad even when the offences have no connection to Germany. Taha A.-J. was Iraqi, his victims were a Yazidi mother and daughter from Iraq, and the conduct occurred in Fallujah. His wife, Jennifer W., was German, but jurisdiction over his crimes did not depend on her nationality. Taha was arrested in Greece in May 2019 and transferred to Germany that October. His trial opened in Frankfurt in April 2020 and continued for nineteen months. The judges had to determine both what he had done to the mother and child and whether he had acted with the intent to contribute to the destruction of the Yazidi religious group. ###### Reda and her mother Reda and her mother came from Kocho, a village in Sinjar that Islamic State fighters overran in August 2014. The attackers separated men from women and children, killed the men and took women and children into captivity. Mother and daughter were sold repeatedly before Taha bought them in Raqqa in June 2015. He had been running an Islamic State office there for a religious healing practice involving exorcism. About two weeks after buying them, he took them to Fallujah, where he lived with Jennifer W. The Frankfurt court found that Taha controlled their movements, deprived them of adequate food, forced them to practise Islam and subjected them to repeated beatings. Reda’s mother worked in the household, and both lived in constant fear. One day, when Reda was ill and had wet a mattress, he tied her outdoors to the window bars as punishment. Temperatures in Fallujah reached as high as 51 degrees Celsius in the shade. The child suffered heatstroke and died. Her mother was in the house and unable to intervene. The court later identified that helplessness, together with the subsequent uncertainty about what had become of her daughter, as causes of serious psychological harm. Yazda, the Yazidi survivor organisation, located her in Iraq and interviewed her two years before the trial began. By then the organisation had gathered thousands of survivor testimonies. It helped her participate in the German proceedings, where her evidence would be tested against the defendant’s account and considered alongside evidence of the wider campaign against the Yazidis. German law allowed her to join the case through the Nebenklage, usually translated as private accessory prosecution. Victims of qualifying offences can participate alongside the public prosecution and defence, with rights to attend hearings, question witnesses, object and ask the court to take evidence. Those rights gave her lawyers a continuing role throughout the trial, including the ability to advance arguments on her behalf. Clooney and her co-counsel used that position to ask the court to consider gender-based persecution as a crime against humanity. Their argument addressed the treatment of Yazidi women and girls specifically: the enslavement and abuse targeted them because of their gender as well as their religion. The application sought recognition of that conduct in addition to the charges the public prosecutor had brought. Her lawyers referred to her publicly as Reda’s mother or as their client. She gave evidence in a case that attracted worldwide attention while retaining the privacy of her own name. ###### Proving genocide To convict Taha of genocide, the court had to find that he intended to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part, and that he committed one of the acts the law specifies with that intent. The prosecution had to establish his own purpose in abusing the mother and child, as well as the Islamic State’s wider policy toward the Yazidis. The court considered the treatment of Reda and her mother within the Islamic State’s organised campaign of killings, forced conversion and enslavement. The group’s doctrine denied the Yazidis a right to continue practising their religion. Its members separated families, enslaved women and girls, imposed religious observance and sought to destroy the community’s continued existence. Expert evidence helped establish that broader policy; the mother’s testimony described how Taha enforced it in his own household. The judges found that he regarded his captives as worthless and deliberately inflicted physical and psychological harm to contribute to the destruction of their religion and its members. His eventual aim of establishing an Islamic caliphate did not displace that genocidal intent. Destroying the Yazidi community could be an intermediate objective pursued in service of that further goal. The genocide conviction rested on Section 6(1)(2), which prohibits causing serious bodily or mental harm to a member of the protected group. The Genocide Convention uses the plural “members,” as did an earlier German provision; the legislature deliberately clarified the wording by using the singular when it adopted the international-crimes code. The Federal Court of Justice examined that history on appeal. Serious harm to an individual can satisfy the provision when the other elements of genocide, including the perpetrator’s intent to destroy the group, are established. The court therefore considered Taha’s conduct together with similar acts by other Islamic State members. The organised enslavement and forced religious observance of Yazidi women and girls were capable of contributing to the group’s destruction. Within that campaign, the harm he inflicted on Reda and her mother was sufficient to support his individual conviction. The judgment also distinguished the intent to inflict that harm from an intent to kill. The trial findings did not establish that Taha intended Reda’s death, so the genocide conviction could not rest on the statutory provision for intentional killing. It rested on the serious bodily harm he deliberately inflicted on the child and the serious mental harm he deliberately inflicted on her mother. The fatal outcome was also reflected in his conviction for the war crime of torture resulting in death. The defence disputed the account of Reda’s death and produced documents purporting to show that she was alive. Investigators with the United Nations team examining Islamic State crimes checked the documents in Iraq and found them to be forged. ###### The conviction and appeal Taha entered court with a folder covering his face. As the verdict was read on 30 November 2021, he fainted, briefly interrupting the proceedings. The court convicted him of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, sentenced him to life imprisonment and ordered him to pay Reda’s mother €50,000. The presiding judge, Christoph Koller, identified the decision as the first genocide conviction arising from the Islamic State’s campaign against the Yazidis. Jennifer W. had been sentenced in Munich the previous month to ten years for her part in the abuse; Reda’s mother had testified in that proceeding too. Jennifer had served in the group’s morality police, and her criminal responsibility was considered in a separate case. Clooney described the verdict as the recognition Yazidi survivors had been waiting for since the attacks of 2014. It was the first conviction of an Islamic State member for genocide anywhere in the world, following earlier recognition of the genocide by the United Nations and other public bodies. Taha appealed, and the Federal Court of Justice decided the case on 30 November 2022. The Third Criminal Senate upheld the factual findings, the genocide conviction and the life sentence. It changed the formal description of some concurrent offences, applying the rules that govern how several violations arising from the same conduct are recorded in a verdict. One change concerned the separate conviction for aiding the war crime of displacement. The appellate court found that the facts did not establish the necessary contribution to the displacement offence. Another concerned bodily harm resulting in death under ordinary German criminal law: the international-crimes convictions already covered that wrongdoing, so the domestic offence did not remain as a separate count. The final verdict retained genocide, crimes against humanity involving enslavement, torture, serious harm and deprivation of liberty with a fatal result, and the war crime of torture resulting in death. The appellate decision was made public in January 2023, leaving the genocide conviction and life sentence final. That same month, on 19 January, the Bundestag recognised the crimes against the Yazidi community as genocide. The parliamentary resolution urged further prosecutions. It followed the Frankfurt verdict by more than a year and had no effect on the court’s findings or the defendant’s liability. ###### Participation after Frankfurt When Reda’s mother joined the proceedings, German law did not expressly list genocide and crimes against humanity among the offences that entitled victims to participate as co-plaintiffs. Survivors instead relied on overlapping offences under ordinary criminal law, including homicide, sexual violence and serious deprivation of liberty. A prosecution could concern international crimes while the victim’s formal right to take part depended on the domestic offences arising from the same conduct. Germany addressed that gap in the Act for the Development of International Criminal Law, passed by the Bundestag in June 2024 and effective that August. The reform added genocide, crimes against humanity and specified war crimes directly to the co-plaintiff provisions, subject to requirements concerning the rights injured and their connection to the offence being tried. It also expanded access to appointed counsel and psychosocial support for qualifying victims. Other changes improved interpretation and the recording of proceedings of outstanding historical significance. The legislation amended the offence of enforced disappearance and expanded provisions concerning sexual violence, including sexual slavery. It also expressly recognised persecution on grounds of sexual orientation as a crime against humanity. These were later changes to the law; they did not supply the legal basis for Taha’s conviction or alter the final judgment against him. The reform followed Germany’s broader experience of international-crimes proceedings, including the Syrian torture trials and investigations concerning Ukraine. Those cases had exposed practical difficulties in representing large numbers of survivors, providing language access and enabling victims to participate in trials conducted far from where the crimes occurred. Courts may appoint a common lawyer for several co-plaintiffs whose interests align, including victims whose injuries arise from the same underlying events. In specified cases where participation rests solely on the new international-crimes provisions, that lawyer exercises the procedural rights on their behalf. The court may allow a victim to make a personal closing statement, but the statute does not guarantee that opportunity in those circumstances. Survivors had made such statements in the Koblenz torture trial, addressing the court themselves at the close of the proceedings. Eligibility also depends on the interests the statute lists, including physical integrity, liberty and religious, sexual or reproductive self-determination. That wording leaves questions about access for victims whose injuries consist of psychological torture or discriminatory persecution without an injury falling within those categories. The substantive criminal law has continued to develop as well. In July 2025, the Federal Court of Justice removed a finding of aiding and abetting genocide from a separate Koblenz judgment. The findings established the Islamic State’s genocide but did not establish that defendant’s assistance in the genocidal acts at issue. Other international-crimes convictions remained, and the case returned for a new sentencing decision. The ruling required proof of the individual defendant’s contribution even where the wider campaign of genocide was established. ###### A continuing practice Clooney is a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, Professor of Practice in International Law at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, and co-founder of the Clooney Foundation for Justice and the Oxford Institute of Technology and Justice. Her work for Yazidi survivors has involved both efforts to secure investigations and representation in the national proceedings that followed. By January 2023, Clooney, von Wistinghausen, Oesterle and Sonka Mehner, working in different combinations, had represented Yazidi victims across nine German cases. The proceedings extended over several years and included trials in Frankfurt, Munich, Düsseldorf, Hamburg and Koblenz, with survivors giving evidence against the people who had held them captive. After the final decision in Taha’s case, Clooney spoke of her client’s relief that the man who had enslaved her and killed her daughter would serve a life sentence. She credited the German prosecutors and called for other countries to pursue comparable cases. Nadia Murad, herself a survivor from Kocho, said that Taha was the first Islamic State member convicted of genocide and would not be the last. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Barrister - **Organization:** Doughty Street Chambers - **Practice:** International law and human rights - **Location:** London ##### Contact - **Organization:** Doughty Street Chambers - **Office:** London - **Website:** doughtystreet.co.uk --- ## 23. Sharon McGowan — `900005350` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `20c299fcc0dcd8492fa32c556dfd1ec16ed4fa3ebd23e19ac18407185960af66` - **After/current hash:** `7fa474dc46dcc901208d28bb30fa07c83745b1f2d4115ff46fd7cde9c1f84f3d` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005350/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Deck, opening and hiring chronology**: Introduce McGowan through the actual signed post-trial argument and preserve the client's full selection and disclosure history. - `rewrite` — **Clearance, witness evidence and the five explanations**: Consolidate repeated facts while distinguishing the three pretext findings from the two reasons held discriminatory on their face. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Argument quotation, security witnesses and later career**: Add a short quotation from the signed brief, named officials from the trial opinion and verified career responsibilities and access-to-courts statement. - `rewrite` — **Title VII routes, relief, later law and ending**: Preserve both routes and every remedial amount, date and scope limit, and close on McGowan's own words after the individual career context. ### BEFORE #### Sharon McGowan Civil Rights · Employment Equality > “The administration’s decision not to challenge this important civil rights ruling is a welcome sign… ##### The Offer Before the Disclosure Among eighteen candidates, Diane Schroer earned the highest score. A unanimous committee recommended her, the selecting official made the offer, and hiring paperwork began. After one pre-start disclosure, the Library reversed itself while every qualification stayed fixed. Sharon McGowan’s trial team forced five later explanations through the institution’s clearance procedures, witnesses, and documents. In August 2004, the Congressional Research Service opened a position for a Specialist in Terrorism and International Crime. The analyst would advise members and committees of Congress on questions where operational judgment, national-security knowledge, and dependable sources carried unusual institutional weight. Twenty-five years of military service placed Diane Schroer inside that field. She held graduate degrees in history and international relations, had directed a 120-person classified counterterrorism organization, and maintained a Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance continuously from 1987. Eighteen candidates reached the interview process. Schroer earned the highest score. After reviewing writing samples and updated references, the three-member selection committee unanimously recommended that the Library offer her the position. Mid-December brought the call from Charlotte Preece, the selecting official. Schroer asked whether the salary could match her private-sector compensation. Preece confirmed that it could, Schroer accepted, and the Library began the paperwork required to complete the hire. On December 20, Preece introduced Schroer to staff as the incoming hire and showed her the office. At lunch, she explained that Schroer’s operational experience, creative answers, and military and defense contacts made her significantly stronger than the remaining candidates. ###### One New Fact at Lunch Lunch served a purpose Schroer had chosen before her first day. She intended to begin work presenting as a woman and believed a pre-start disclosure would create less disruption than arriving in one presentation and changing after joining the office. Schroer explained that she was transgender, described the timing of her transition, and answered questions about anticipated medical care. She addressed her start date, existing clearance, and acquaintances who had retained federal clearances while transitioning. Nothing used to rank her first changed during that conversation. Degrees, counterterrorism experience, interview score, references, salary, accepted offer, and clearance remained fixed. The new information concerned how the selected candidate would present when she arrived for work. Back at the Library, Preece left her favorable hiring memorandum unfinished. She contacted the personnel-security officer without supplying Schroer’s full identifying information or the details needed to retrieve the existing clearance file from the federal system. At nine the next morning, Preece told senior colleagues that Schroer had been her first choice and no longer was. Replacement discussions began before the ordinary clearance process had tested whether transition created any individualized security obstacle. ###### Five Reasons, One Timing Preece later named five concerns: military contacts, credibility with members of Congress, trustworthiness, distraction during transition, and clearance timing. The record placed each reason on the same side of a clean temporal line—the disclosure that followed acceptance. The Library relied on the position’s security requirements. The work involved sensitive material, clearance was mandatory, and congressional needs imposed pressure to fill the vacancy. Preece testified that a fresh investigation might keep Schroer from starting for as long as a year. Trustworthiness arose from the timing of disclosure, although Schroer spoke before employment began and invited questions. Distraction arose from anticipated medical care, although she had explained how recovery and any later procedure could fit around the position. Two concerns predicted the reactions of outsiders. Preece feared that members of Congress would doubt a transgender analyst’s military history and that established contacts might withdraw cooperation after learning about the transition. The first draft explanation tied rejection to transition, clearance delay, contacts, and attention. A meeting with the General Counsel’s office produced a shorter message: the candidate was no longer a good fit for the immediate needs of Congress. ###### The Unexamined Clearance File Reciprocity gave the security rationale a concrete test. A current clearance could transfer when the prior investigation had adequate scope, remained timely, and followed an uninterrupted period of service. New information called for evaluation rather than automatic restart. Personnel security also had intermediate tools. Health Services could assess any medical concern; the agency holding the clearance could confirm its knowledge; and a conditional waiver could permit work while an investigation proceeded when reciprocity proved unavailable. Although Preece knew Schroer held an active high-level clearance, the security officer never opened the complete federal file. The Library sought no information from the current clearance holder, asked Health Services nothing, and gathered no individualized facts before reversing the offer. From that incomplete inquiry came the predicted year-long delay. The urgency account also faced internal comparisons: the previous terrorism specialist and the lower-scoring replacement each worked for months before receiving final clearance. Judge James Robertson found that the security-clearance concerns were pretextual. The Library invoked clearance urgency while bypassing the inquiries that could establish whether delay, reciprocity or waiver actually applied to Schroer. ###### Bias Passed Through the Employer Trustworthiness and distraction were pretextual as well. The Library conceded that Schroer presented no condition affecting stability, judgment, reliability, or protection of classified information. Preece thanked her for honesty during the call that withdrew the offer. Available witnesses remained unused. References received no question about future cooperation. The current employer received no inquiry about focus or reliability. The therapist Schroer offered as a source received no call. Congressional credibility exposed a different mechanism. Preece assumed legislators would see Schroer’s military record as incompatible with a woman and therefore distrust the analyst. The concern converted a stereotype about who may possess such experience into a qualification for public service. Military contacts carried the same premise through third parties. Every reference knew about the transition, yet none was asked whether cooperation would continue. Robertson held the credibility and contact reasons facially discriminatory because an employer remains responsible when it acts on real or presumed prejudice elsewhere. Finally, the replacement closed the factual comparison. Preece hired a candidate with a lower interview score and testified that he presented fewer complications because he was not transitioning. The protected fact entered the final employment choice in express terms. ###### A Claim That Changed Shape The ACLU filed Schroer v. Billington on June 2, 2005. McGowan served as lead counsel alongside Kenneth Choe, James Esseks and Arthur Spitzer. The Title VII claim required evidence of how and why the Library reversed its hiring decision. In March 2006, Robertson denied dismissal because discrimination connected to transition could constitute treatment because of sex. The claim proceeded toward a factual record, where the sex-stereotyping theory would develop beyond its initial pleading. Later motions developed that proof. In July 2008, a one-page order found material facts disputed and denied summary judgment. A four-day bench trial in August placed Preece, security officials, experts, references, contemporaneous messages, and the hiring chronology before one factfinder. McGowan signed the post-trial brief. It argued that direct evidence of sex-stereotyped decisionmaking removed the need for an invented comparator. The Library had supplied the real comparison itself: the same candidate before disclosure and after disclosure. Once testimony filled the record, the stereotype theory changed character. Preece connected the reversal to masculinity, professional appearance, congressional credibility, and military experience. Those admissions supplied the direct evidentiary link absent at the pleading stage. ###### Two Routes Through Title VII The Library’s legal defense began with a narrow reading of sex. Earlier cases had treated transgender status as a category outside Title VII, and the Library argued that congressional proposals addressing gender identity showed existing law stopped short of the claim. One route to judgment came through Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins. Title VII reaches decisions infected by expectations about how men and women should look or behave. Preece’s difficulty reconciling Special Forces service with a woman supplied direct evidence of that process. A second route began with the statutory words because of sex. Robertson compared transition discrimination to firing an employee for converting from Christianity to Judaism. Disfavoring the change remains discrimination based on the characteristic named in the statute. Congressional inaction offered no reliable answer. Several explanations could account for an unenacted bill, including a belief that existing law already covered the conduct. The court instead followed the statutory text and Supreme Court instructions that broad language can reach applications unanticipated at enactment. Two experts supplied different scientific accounts of sex and gender identity. Robertson called both presentations impressive and grounded judgment in the employment evidence: sex stereotypes and transition caused the refusal to hire, bringing the decision within Title VII. ###### The Judgment and the Decision to Stop On September 19, 2008, the district court entered judgment for Schroer after trial and scheduled a remedial phase. On April 28, 2009, the court awarded approximately $491,190: $183,653 for back pay and benefits, $300,000 for emotional pain and suffering, and $7,537.80 for other out-of-pocket losses. The emotional-distress component reached the statutory maximum. The award followed a bench trial. The Justice Department allowed the June 30 appeal deadline to expire, making the judgment final between Schroer and the Library. McGowan welcomed the government’s decision to end the litigation, saying it also closed a painful chapter in Schroer’s life. ###### The Nationwide Rule Eleven years later, Bostock v. Clayton County supplied the nationwide Supreme Court rule. An employer that discharges an individual for being gay or transgender necessarily uses sex as a but-for cause, even when other motives also enter the decision. The two decisions examined whether sex caused an employment decision. In Schroer's case, the Library had accepted her qualifications and reversed its answer after learning she would begin work as a woman. Bathrooms, locker rooms, religious-liberty defenses and other policies present distinct legal questions. A February 2026 EEOC appellate decision addressed intimate spaces within the federal administrative process, governing federal agencies. The EEOC's guidance, under review in September 2026, continued to classify transgender-status discrimination in hiring and firing as sex discrimination. On July 8, 2026, the Human Rights Campaign announced McGowan as Senior Vice President of Policy and Litigation. Her career had included senior roles at the Justice Department and Office of Personnel Management, work at Lambda Legal, and private practice. In Schroer, she and her co-counsel tested the Library’s explanations against the hiring record, security procedures and witnesses who knew the selected candidate. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Senior Vice President of Policy and Litigation - **Organization:** Human Rights Campaign - **Practice:** Civil Rights, Employment Equality - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Organization:** Human Rights Campaign - **Address:** 1640 Rhode Island Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20036 - **Website:** hrc.org ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Sharon McGowan Civil Rights · Employment Equality > “The administration’s decision not to challenge this important civil rights ruling is a welcome sign… ##### The Offer Before the Disclosure Diane Schroer had the highest interview score, a unanimous recommendation and an accepted offer. Sharon McGowan and her co-counsel built the discrimination case around what happened next: the Library of Congress learned that its chosen terrorism specialist would start work as a woman, and withdrew the offer. In the post-trial brief she signed on August 27, 2008, Sharon McGowan asked Judge James Robertson to look at the hiring official’s own account. Charlotte Preece had explained what troubled her about employing Diane Schroer. McGowan and her colleagues argued that those admissions supplied direct evidence of sex stereotyping; their client did not need to find another employee against whom to measure the discrimination. The Library’s proposed comparison posed a further problem. If employers could defend a decision by showing that they would penalize gender nonconformity in both men and women, the lawyers argued, the law would end up “rewarding the employers that enforce the most sex stereotyped workplaces.” They also had an answer on the facts: the Library had chosen a lower-scoring replacement whose conformity to its expectations raised none of the same concerns. McGowan led the ACLU team with Kenneth Choe, James Esseks and Arthur Spitzer. Their case began with the Library’s favorable assessment of Schroer, before it knew about her transition. Degrees, experience, references and an active security clearance had secured the offer. The trial would test the five explanations the Library gave for reversing it. ###### The Candidate They Had Chosen In August 2004, the Congressional Research Service advertised for a Specialist in Terrorism and International Crime. The analyst would advise members and committees of Congress, drawing on national-security knowledge, operational judgment and dependable sources. Schroer brought twenty-five years of military service, graduate degrees in history and international relations, and experience directing a 120-person classified counterterrorism organization. She had continuously held a Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance since 1987. Of eighteen candidates interviewed, she earned the highest score. After examining writing samples and updated references, the three-member selection committee unanimously recommended her. Preece called in mid-December to offer the job. Schroer asked whether the Library could match her private-sector salary; once Preece confirmed that it could, she accepted. The hiring paperwork began. On December 20, Preece introduced her to staff as the incoming hire and showed her the office. Over lunch, she explained why Schroer stood out: operational experience, creative answers and contacts in the military and defense industries. Schroer had arranged the lunch to discuss how she would begin work. She intended to present as a woman from her first day and believed that telling Preece beforehand would be less disruptive than changing her presentation after joining the office. She explained that she was transgender, described the timing of her transition and answered questions about anticipated medical care. She addressed her start date and existing clearance, mentioning acquaintances who had retained federal clearances while transitioning. Preece returned to the Library and left her favorable hiring memorandum unfinished. She contacted personnel-security officer Cynthia Wilkins, but supplied neither the full identifying information nor the details needed to retrieve Schroer’s clearance history from the federal system. At nine the next morning, Preece told senior colleagues that Schroer had been her first choice and no longer was. They began discussing a replacement before examining whether any individualized security obstacle existed. ###### The File Behind the Clearance Concern Preece eventually identified five concerns: clearance timing, trustworthiness, distraction during transition, credibility with members of Congress and the reliability of military contacts. The first draft of her explanation tied the reversal to transition, a possible clearance delay, contacts and attention to the job. After a meeting with the General Counsel’s office, she circulated a shorter version: the candidate was no longer a good fit for Congress’s immediate needs. The position required a clearance, and the Library said it needed to fill the vacancy promptly. Preece testified that a fresh investigation might delay Schroer’s start for as long as a year. Yet the Library had procedures for recognizing an existing clearance. At trial, its security director, Kenneth Lopez, described the conditions for reciprocity: a sufficiently recent investigation of adequate scope, without a significant break in service. New information required evaluation; it did not automatically require starting over. Other procedures could address a specific concern. Health Services could assess a medical question, and the organization holding the clearance could confirm what it knew. If reciprocity was unavailable, a waiver could allow a new employee to work conditionally while an investigation proceeded. Wilkins could have opened Schroer’s complete federal file. She did not. The Library contacted neither the current clearance holder nor Health Services and gathered no individualized facts before withdrawing the offer. Preece’s prediction of a year’s delay therefore rested on no examination of the clearance Schroer already held. The trial record also tested the claimed urgency against the Library’s own practice. The previous terrorism specialist had worked for six months before receiving clearance; the lower-scoring replacement worked for several months before his became final. Robertson found the clearance explanation pretextual. The Library had invoked a process whose available routes it had not investigated. ###### Three Pretexts and Two Discriminatory Reasons Trustworthiness and distraction failed as explanations too. Schroer had disclosed her transition before employment began, invited questions and explained how recovery and any later procedure could fit around the job. During the call rescinding the offer, Preece thanked her for her honesty. The Library conceded at trial that Schroer had no condition affecting her stability, judgment, reliability or ability to protect classified information. The people who could answer practical questions had not been asked. Preece contacted neither Schroer’s employer about her focus and reliability nor the therapist she had offered as a source. Every reference knew about the transition, but none was asked whether professional cooperation would continue. Robertson found the trustworthiness and distraction concerns pretextual. The concerns about Congress and military contacts worked differently. Preece assumed that legislators would find Schroer’s military background incompatible with her presentation as a woman, and that contacts might withdraw cooperation. The trial testimony connected her reaction to expectations about masculinity, professional appearance and Special Forces experience. The Library was treating presumed prejudice among the people an analyst would work with as a reason to reject the analyst. Robertson held those two explanations facially discriminatory. An employer remains responsible when it acts on the real or presumed biases of others. Preece’s testimony about the replacement brought the point back to the hiring decision: although he had scored lower, she considered him less complicated to employ because he was not transitioning. ###### The Evidence Changes the Legal Question The ACLU had filed Schroer v. Billington on June 2, 2005, under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In March 2006, Robertson denied dismissal because discrimination connected to transition could constitute treatment because of sex. The case proceeded toward a factual record, and the sex-stereotyping theory developed beyond its initial pleading. A one-page order on July 3, 2008, denied summary judgment because material facts remained disputed. The four-day bench trial in August brought Preece, security officials, experts, references, contemporaneous messages and the hiring chronology before Robertson. By the time McGowan signed the post-trial brief, the lawyers could point to admissions about what had influenced the decision. They distinguished a case about a generally applicable grooming policy from this refusal to hire. Schroer was relying on direct evidence that the decisionmaker’s expectations about sex had affected her choice. The Library’s own recommendation, offer and reversal also made the factual comparison unusually close: the applicant’s qualifications had not changed. The Library argued that earlier decisions placed transgender status outside Title VII. It also pointed to proposed legislation addressing gender identity as evidence that the existing statute did not reach the claim. McGowan’s team sought judgment through two independent routes: the prohibition on sex stereotyping and the statute’s words, because of sex. The first route followed Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, which addressed employment decisions shaped by expectations about how men and women should look or behave. Preece’s difficulty reconciling Special Forces service with a woman, and her testimony about the response she expected from others, supplied evidence of those expectations in the actual hiring decision. The second route concerned transition itself. Robertson used the example of an employee fired for converting from Christianity to Judaism. An employer could not avoid a religious-discrimination claim by saying it objected only to converts. A decision made because of a change in the characteristic named by the statute still depended on that characteristic. The parties’ two experts gave different scientific accounts of sex and gender identity. Robertson described both presentations as impressive but found it unnecessary to resolve their disagreement. The employment evidence supported judgment: sex stereotypes and Schroer’s transition had caused the refusal to hire. Nor did unenacted legislation settle the statute’s meaning. McGowan and her colleagues argued that Congress’s inaction could support several explanations, including the view that existing law already covered the conduct. The court followed the statutory text and Supreme Court decisions recognizing that broad language can reach applications lawmakers did not anticipate. ###### A Judgment That Became Final On September 19, 2008, Robertson entered judgment for Schroer and scheduled a remedial phase. On April 28, 2009, he awarded approximately $491,190: $183,653 in back pay and benefits, $300,000 for emotional pain and suffering, and $7,537.80 for other out-of-pocket losses. The emotional-distress award reached the statutory maximum. The relief followed a bench trial. The Justice Department let the June 30 appeal deadline expire, making the judgment final between Schroer and the Library. McGowan welcomed the decision as an end to years of litigation and a painful chapter in her client’s life. In 2020, Bostock v. Clayton County supplied the nationwide Supreme Court rule: an employer that discharges a person for being gay or transgender necessarily uses sex as a but-for cause, even if other motives contribute. Schroer’s earlier district-court case had examined that relationship through one hiring decision, with the accepted offer and subsequent reversal establishing the sequence. Bostock left bathrooms, locker rooms, religious-liberty defenses and other policies to distinct legal questions. In February 2026, an EEOC appellate decision addressed intimate spaces within the federal administrative process. It applied to federal agencies, excluded private employers and bound no federal court. The EEOC’s public guidance, marked under review in September 2026, continued to identify transgender-status discrimination in hiring and firing as sex discrimination. ###### The Work After Schroer On July 8, 2026, the Human Rights Campaign announced McGowan’s appointment as senior vice president of policy and litigation. Her work had by then taken her from individual representation into the institutions that enforce civil-rights law. At the Justice Department, she became principal deputy chief of the Civil Rights Division’s Appellate Section, supervising attorneys and advising department leadership, including the Solicitor General. Her career also included a senior role at the Office of Personnel Management. At Lambda Legal, she led litigation and policy teams as chief strategy officer and legal director; in private practice at Katz Banks Kumin, she represented people facing workplace harassment and discrimination. When Public Justice announced her selection as chief executive in April 2024, McGowan spoke about extending access to courts. She wanted to work with its members to “help those who have been locked out of our country’s courts.” ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Senior Vice President of Policy and Litigation - **Organization:** Human Rights Campaign - **Practice:** Civil Rights, Employment Equality - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Organization:** Human Rights Campaign - **Address:** 1640 Rhode Island Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20036 - **Website:** hrc.org --- ## 24. Julia Kaye — `900005349` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `9ced14e96bd7a694655aa0a587e69c2b9d1c710dc090b95ef4ea1fa8e6066083` - **After/current hash:** `6c4c8c4b4d36bbe24472a8be5ff230775ce913d5298d6afd142b696d65fd13eb` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005349/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Deck, opening, safeguards and coalition placement**: Make Kaye's recorded two-part legal choice the opening and consolidate the full REMS explanation while retaining every clinical and distribution requirement. - `rewrite` — **July injunction, MacNaughton patient evidence and emergency stays**: Preserve every procedural limit while giving the actual patient accounts and changing conditions a clear place in the renewed proceedings. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Chelius leadership and January 2023 response**: Add verified leadership of the broader case and a selective nine-word quotation explaining why the expanded pharmacy route did not satisfy Kaye's stated position. - `rewrite` — **FDA chronology, revised REMS and Louisiana-case ending**: Keep court-ordered and agency-directed periods distinct, explain the formal modification process and retain the separate current case and limited stays. ### BEFORE #### Julia Kaye Reproductive Rights · Medication Access > “There is no medical reason to dictate where a patient is standing when handed a pill… ##### The Trip for One Tablet Clinical eligibility could be assessed remotely, counseling completed, consent obtained, and prescriptions issued. FDA still required one trip to a clinical setting solely for receipt and signature. Julia Kaye led the case that isolated that handoff and secured a temporary COVID-19 suspension. FDA later removed mandatory pickup through its own evidence review while retaining a certified prescription-and-pharmacy system. The prescription had been issued; the tablet had not moved. A provider had assessed pregnancy duration and ectopic-pregnancy risk, counseled on alternatives and complications, and obtained informed consent. If the patient was elsewhere, FDA still required a trip to a hospital, clinic, or medical office to receive one 200-milligram mifepristone tablet and sign the Patient Agreement Form. One tablet crossed the clinic threshold only to leave again. The patient could swallow it at any location, including home, then take misoprostol twenty-four to forty-eight hours later. The compulsory physical moment was neither diagnosis, counseling, administration, nor follow-up. It was custody: where the package changed hands. Julia Kaye challenged the medical justification for requiring a patient to collect the pill in person after a clinician had completed the necessary assessment. Eligibility checks, risk counseling, consent, emergency planning and follow-up could remain in place when the provider arranged delivery instead. Mifepristone served both early medication abortion and miscarriage management, each time-sensitive care. Travel distance, transportation, childcare, missed work, reduced clinic capacity, and viral exposure accumulated around a visit that could add no examination or treatment for a patient already cleared to receive the medicine. On May 27, 2020, Kaye served as lead counsel when the ACLU and Arnold & Porter filed American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists v. FDA. ACOG led a coalition with university obstetrics chairs, New York family physicians, SisterSong, and Dr. Honor MacNaughton. ###### One Required Detour Mifepristone operated under a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, or REMS, with three pertinent safe-use elements. Prescribers certified their qualifications. Dispensing had to occur through a specified health-care setting. A signed Patient Agreement documented counseling and receipt of the required information. Location created the detour. A certified provider could prescribe after an assessment conducted in person or, when medically appropriate, by telemedicine. The rule barred provider shipment, mail-order filling, and retail-pharmacy dispensing even where state law permitted remote care. Paperwork reinforced the same physical point. The Patient Agreement described the regimen and its risks, and its provider signature line stated that the patient signed in the prescriber’s presence. The case asked whether review, questions, consent, and signature could occur through telemedicine and electronic or mailed documents. In May 2020, Kaye argued that mifepristone was unique among more than 20,000 FDA-regulated drug products in combining mandatory clinical pickup with permission for unsupervised home use. Its companion drug, misoprostol, could already come from an ordinary pharmacy. Two acts defined the requested remedy: in-person dispensing and in-person signature. Certification, pregnancy assessment, ectopic-pregnancy screening, counseling, the Medication Guide, recordkeeping, controlled distribution, and follow-up remained. Remote delivery changed the route without dissolving the prescription system. ###### The System Around the Handoff A certified clinician still had to possess the ability to date the pregnancy and diagnose an ectopic pregnancy. The clinician also had to arrange surgical intervention or emergency access when necessary, explain the regimen, provide instructions, and counsel the patient about complications and follow-up. A Patient Agreement still governed the exchange. A provider could review it over telemedicine, answer questions, obtain the patient’s signature electronically or by mail, supply the agreement and Medication Guide, and retain a copy. The litigation separated informed documentation from physical co-location. Distribution retained another boundary. During the temporary suspension, the drug still moved first to certified providers rather than onto retail shelves. Providers arranged delivery to named patients and recorded the serial numbers of distributed packages, preserving the chain FDA then required. FDA defended the rule as part of its safety administration. The agency’s earlier review had treated facility dispensing as an opportunity for counseling and as protection against late receipt, ineffective timing, or difficulty finding a stocked pharmacy. The government urged substantial deference to that specialized judgment. Plaintiffs answered through fit, and Judge Theodore Chuang’s preliminary analysis did the same. FDA’s last complete justification predated widespread telemedicine and its own 2016 decisions allowing home administration, a longer gestational window, and qualified nonphysician prescribers. Under the constitutional doctrine then controlling, expertise received weight without displacing judicial review of the rule’s current benefit and burden. ###### What the Pandemic Changed COVID-19 altered the cost of every avoidable encounter. Federal agencies encouraged delivery and telemedicine, relaxed selected REMS procedures for other medicines, expanded remote Medicare services, and invoked a controlled-substance telemedicine exception when a clinician judged an in-person evaluation unnecessary. One trip exposed a wider circle than the patient. Public transportation, shared rides, waiting rooms, clinicians, staff, household members, and caregivers all entered the risk calculation. Clinic closures and reduced hours also turned a nominally simple pickup into delay for care available only within a limited gestational window. Patient declarations made those burdens concrete. Some people lacked cars, shared homes with older relatives, cared for children learning remotely, or faced high medical risk from COVID-19. Transportation and childcare costs landed hardest on communities already bearing disproportionate illness and economic loss. Nationwide relief drew its scope from the coalition itself. ACOG represented more than 60,000 members, including practitioners in every state, and its membership covered roughly ninety percent of the nation’s obstetrician-gynecologists. CUCOG, NYSAFP, SisterSong, and individual physicians extended the record across institutions and communities. Government lawyers disputed both degree and uniformity. They argued that one trip carried a low individual risk, that conditions varied by region and time, and that emergency decisions belonged to health officials able to compare the complete safety record. The case asked whether those institutional claims still justified a fixed national rule as the emergency and available medical practices changed. ###### A Remedy Measured to the Rule On July 13, 2020, Judge Chuang granted preliminary relief in part on the Fifth Amendment due-process claim. The order temporarily barred enforcement of the in-person dispensing and signature requirements for medication-abortion patients during the federal public-health emergency. Every surrounding REMS control remained. Certified providers still assessed eligibility, reviewed risks and the agreement, supplied the required documents, supervised dispensing, maintained records, and controlled distribution. In-person care also remained available whenever clinical judgment made it appropriate. Relief stopped at medication abortion. For miscarriage treatment, the court found the preliminary equal-protection record too incomplete to establish that the proposed comparator drugs were similarly situated or that different treatment lacked a rational basis. The same medicine therefore occupied two different remedial positions. Time supplied another limit. The injunction would last until resolution of the case or thirty days after the federal public-health emergency ended, whichever came first. Its design attached relief to the changed condition that magnified the burden rather than rewriting the REMS for all circumstances. Government lawyers sought a stay in the district court and then in the Fourth Circuit. Both requests failed, the appellate denial arriving on August 13. Covered patients could continue receiving mifepristone through delivery while the emergency dispute moved toward the Supreme Court. ###### The Stay That Restored the Trip In August 2020, the government filed an emergency Supreme Court application. On October 8, the Court held it in abeyance and directed the district court to consider whether changed circumstances justified dissolving, modifying, or staying the injunction. Dr. MacNaughton’s renewed evidence described patients evaluated through telemedicine, supplied through delivery, and treated without logistical or medical complications. The government offered no patient evidence showing harm from temporary nonenforcement. By December, national cases and deaths had risen sharply. The government cited changed conditions in support of its renewed request: state restrictions and infection trends differed; testing and vaccines had advanced; offices had adapted; and the Fourth Circuit had warned against nationwide relief grounded only in pragmatism. Judge Chuang found the emergency still nationally acute and denied a general, partial, or geographically narrowed stay on December 9. On January 12, 2021, the Supreme Court stayed the preliminary injunction during appeal. Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized deference to politically accountable officials charged with responding to the pandemic. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented from restoring the in-person requirement. Kaye served as counsel of record for the respondent coalition in the Supreme Court. The emergency order restored the in-person requirement during the appeal; it did not finally decide the constitutional claim or prescribe the permanent REMS. ###### Court Relief and Agency Action Agency action supplied the next change. On April 12, 2021, FDA announced enforcement discretion for the in-person dispensing requirement and related signature process during the remaining public-health emergency. Remote delivery reopened through administration rather than a new court order. Nonenforcement covered two distinct periods: the court-ordered interval from July 13, 2020, through January 12, 2021, and the agency-directed interval beginning April 12, 2021. During those periods, mail-order pharmacies held product for certified prescribers and shipped it to named patients on prescription. FDA’s 2021 review extended beyond that experience. The agency examined published literature, safety and adverse-event data, information from applicants, individuals, and advocacy groups, and literature references supplied in the broader Chelius litigation. The question became whether the REMS could assure safe use while reducing burden on health-care delivery. On December 16, 2021, FDA announced that it would remove mandatory in-person dispensing and add pharmacy certification. Applicants then submitted formal REMS modifications. FDA reviewed those submissions and approved the revised program on January 3, 2023. ACOG v. FDA produced the first nationwide nonenforcement interval and experience with controlled delivery. Chelius supplied a broader challenge and literature for review, and the applicants completed the formal modification process. FDA made the regulatory judgment under its statutory authority. ###### A New Route Inside the REMS By 2023, the program permitted dispensing in person or by mail through a certified prescriber or a certified pharmacy acting on a prescription from one. Removing facility pickup opened a new route while retaining the drug inside a single shared REMS. Prescribers still certify. They complete a Prescriber Agreement, maintain the ability to date pregnancy and diagnose ectopic pregnancy, arrange intervention or emergency access, explain risks, review and sign the Patient Agreement with the patient, and provide both the signed form and Medication Guide. Pharmacies also enter the closed system by agreement. They dispense only on prescriptions from certified prescribers, receive prescriber documentation, use shipping with tracking information, and provide the medicine promptly. FDA continues postmarketing monitoring and states that its reviews have identified no new safety signals. Kaye welcomed the expanded pharmacy route while emphasizing the special prescriber certification, pharmacy certification and patient form that remained. Mandatory clinical pickup had ended, while mifepristone continued to require a prescription and a regulated distribution system. ###### The Same Route, a Different Case A separate Administrative Procedure Act case now contests the 2023 route. Louisiana v. FDA began in 2025 while FDA was undertaking another comprehensive review. It involves different plaintiffs, claims, evidence, and counsel from the pandemic litigation, even though both records concern the same dispensing requirement. On April 7, 2026, the district court denied Louisiana’s request to stay the 2023 REMS without prejudice and paused the entire case for FDA’s review. Reliance interests, different state abortion laws, parallel suits, and the breadth of nationwide relief informed that balance. The court required the administrative record within sixty days, a status report within six months, and agency action with all deliberate speed. On May 1, the Fifth Circuit reached the balance differently. It credited Louisiana’s asserted sovereign and Medicaid injuries and found a strong likelihood of success, reasoning that FDA had relied on missing FAERS data after reducing reporting and on literature the panel viewed as insufficient by itself. Its section 705 order would suspend the 2023 remote-dispensing route during the appeal. On May 14, the Supreme Court stayed the Fifth Circuit order during the appeal and any timely certiorari proceedings; Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented. The Fifth Circuit heard the appeal on September 9, 2026, with the Supreme Court’s stay preserving the mail and certified-pharmacy route during that review. Kaye spoke for the ACLU about the case as a senior staff attorney in its Reproductive Freedom Project. Her role as lead counsel in the earlier pandemic case remains distinct from that later litigation. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Senior Staff Attorney, Reproductive Freedom Project - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Practice:** Reproductive Rights, Medication Access - **Location:** New York, New York ##### Contact - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Address:** 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York, New York 10004 - **Website:** aclu.org ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Julia Kaye Reproductive Rights · Medication Access > “There is no medical reason to dictate where a patient is standing when handed a pill… ##### The Trip for One Tablet Julia Kaye’s pandemic lawsuit challenged two moments in medication care: collecting a pill and signing for it in person. The clinical work could already happen elsewhere. Her case put the compulsory journey before a court, with patients’ circumstances determining what that journey cost. On May 27, 2020, Julia Kaye led a challenge to a visit the FDA required even after a clinician had decided that a patient could receive mifepristone. In American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists v. FDA, the ACLU and Arnold & Porter sought to suspend two requirements during the COVID-19 emergency: collecting the medicine at a health-care facility and signing the Patient Agreement there. The regimen described in the case began with one 200-milligram tablet of mifepristone, followed by misoprostol twenty-four to forty-eight hours later. A patient could take both medicines at home. Before prescribing, a clinician assessed pregnancy duration and the risk of an ectopic pregnancy, discussed alternatives and possible complications, and obtained informed consent. When medical judgment permitted that assessment by telemedicine, the patient could complete it without entering a hospital, clinic, or medical office. FDA nevertheless required a trip to one of those facilities for the mifepristone and the signature. Kaye questioned why the package had to change hands there. In her account of the lawsuit that May, she argued that mifepristone was unique among more than 20,000 FDA-regulated drug products: patients had to collect it in a clinical setting but could use it without clinical supervision. Misoprostol, its companion in the regimen, could already be obtained from an ordinary pharmacy. Both early medication abortion and miscarriage management were time-sensitive. For a patient already assessed and counseled, the additional visit could require transportation, childcare and time away from work without adding an examination or treatment. During the pandemic, reduced clinic capacity and exposure to the virus increased the cost of that requirement. ###### What Delivery Would Leave in Place The FDA regulated mifepristone through a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, or REMS. Three requirements shaped the case: prescribers had to certify their qualifications, dispensing had to occur in a specified health-care setting, and a signed Patient Agreement had to document counseling and receipt of information. The dispensing rule barred provider shipment, mail-order filling and retail-pharmacy dispensing even where state law permitted remote care. Kaye’s coalition proposed delivery within the existing prescription system. Certified clinicians would still need the ability to date a pregnancy and diagnose an ectopic pregnancy, provide or arrange surgical intervention when necessary, and ensure access to emergency care. They would explain the regimen, risks and alternatives, give instructions for complications and follow-up, and obtain informed consent. The Patient Agreement presented a separate obstacle because its signature language contemplated the patient signing in the prescriber’s presence. The proposed alternative preserved the review and questions through telemedicine, with a signature returned electronically or by mail. The provider would supply the signed agreement and Medication Guide and retain the required copy. Distribution would still run through certified providers, who arranged delivery to named patients and recorded package serial numbers; the drug would not move onto retail shelves. FDA defended facility dispensing as an opportunity for counseling and a protection against late receipt, ineffective timing or difficulty finding a pharmacy that stocked the medicine. Government lawyers urged deference to the agency’s expertise. Kaye’s clients challenged the continuing value of those reasons: the agency’s last complete justification preceded widespread telemedicine and its own 2016 changes allowing home administration, extending the gestational window and permitting qualified nonphysicians to prescribe. Under the constitutional doctrine then in force, Judge Theodore Chuang would weigh the rule’s current benefit against its burden. ###### The Cost of an Encounter Other federal health policies had already changed in response to COVID-19. Agencies encouraged delivery and telemedicine, relaxed selected REMS procedures for other medicines and expanded remote Medicare services. A controlled-substance telemedicine exception allowed clinicians to forgo an otherwise required in-person evaluation. Those measures recognized that a visit itself could create a health risk. The coalition’s evidence followed the trip beyond the clinic door. A patient might need public transportation or a shared ride, encounter staff and other patients, then return to household members or caregivers. Closures and reduced hours could delay treatment within a limited gestational window. Transportation and childcare costs bore especially heavily on communities already suffering disproportionate illness and economic loss. The government contested both the magnitude of an individual patient’s risk and the basis for treating the country alike. Infection rates and restrictions varied by place and time, it argued, while health officials had the expertise to assess the complete safety record. The dispute required Chuang to decide whether that institutional judgment justified the same mandatory visit throughout a changing emergency. ###### The July Injunction On July 13, 2020, Chuang granted preliminary relief on the Fifth Amendment due-process claim. FDA could no longer enforce the in-person dispensing and signature requirements against medication-abortion patients during the period specified in his order. The other REMS safeguards remained binding, and clinicians could still require an in-person assessment when appropriate. The coalition’s membership helped determine the order’s reach. Alongside ACOG stood the Council of University Chairs of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the New York State Academy of Family Physicians, SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, and Dr. Honor MacNaughton. They brought the experience of medical institutions, community organizations and individual physicians into the case. ACOG alone had more than 60,000 members, with practitioners in every state and roughly ninety percent of the nation’s obstetrician-gynecologists. Relief for those members and their patients already extended across the country; the injunction also protected others similarly situated. The order did not extend to miscarriage treatment. Chuang found the preliminary equal-protection record insufficient to establish that the proposed comparator drugs were similarly situated or that the different treatment lacked a rational basis. He also fixed an endpoint: resolution of the case or thirty days after the federal public-health emergency ended, whichever came first. The relief addressed the emergency’s burden without permanently revising the REMS. The government sought a stay in the district court and then the Fourth Circuit. Both requests were denied, the appellate order arriving on August 13. Those denials kept delivery available to covered patients while the litigation continued; they did not finally resolve the underlying claim. ###### MacNaughton’s Patients When the government brought its emergency application to the Supreme Court in August 2020, Kaye was counsel of record for the respondent coalition. On October 8, the Court held the application in abeyance and asked the district court to consider whether changed circumstances warranted dissolving, modifying or staying the injunction. In the renewed proceedings, MacNaughton described what delivery had meant in her practice. One patient with several risk factors for COVID-19 had left her job to avoid exposure and struggled to find an appointment during the clinic’s reduced hours. Another lived with two elderly relatives and a young child, had no car and would need public transportation or a shared ride. A third had three children attending school remotely and lacked childcare. MacNaughton had evaluated these patients by telemedicine; they received the medicine by delivery and took it without logistical or medical complications. The government offered no patient evidence of harm from temporary nonenforcement. It instead pointed to differing state restrictions and infection trends, advances in testing and vaccines, and adaptations by medical offices. It also invoked a Fourth Circuit warning against nationwide relief based on pragmatism alone. Chuang found that the sharply rising national cases and deaths, continuing obstacles to care and coalition’s geographic breadth still supported the injunction. On December 9, he refused to stay it generally, in part or in selected regions. The Supreme Court stayed the injunction on January 12, 2021. Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized deference to politically accountable officials responsible for the pandemic response; Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented from restoring the in-person requirement. The stay restored that requirement during the appeal. The emergency order left the constitutional merits and the permanent REMS undecided. ###### The FDA’s Own Review On April 12, 2021, FDA announced that it would exercise enforcement discretion over the in-person dispensing requirement and related signature process for the remainder of the public-health emergency. That decision reopened delivery through agency action. It followed a distinct court-ordered interval, July 13, 2020, through January 12, 2021. During the nonenforcement periods, mail-order pharmacies could hold product for certified prescribers and ship it to named patients on prescription. Kaye also led the ACLU’s broader challenge to the mifepristone REMS in Chelius. The agency’s 2021 review considered literature references from that litigation alongside published research, safety and adverse-event data, and information from applicants, individuals and advocacy groups. The pandemic case had secured a nationwide interval of controlled delivery; the broader litigation put the continuing restrictions before the agency for review. FDA announced on December 16, 2021, that it would remove mandatory in-person dispensing and add pharmacy certification. The applicants then submitted formal modifications, which the agency reviewed and approved on January 3, 2023. That regulatory judgment belonged to FDA under its statutory authority and drew on a record extending beyond either lawsuit. The revised shared REMS permitted dispensing in person or by mail through a certified prescriber or a certified pharmacy filling that prescriber’s prescription. Prescribers continued to complete a Prescriber Agreement and accept the clinical and emergency-care responsibilities, patient counseling, signed agreement and document delivery already required. Pharmacies now completed their own agreement, received prescriber documentation, used shipping with tracking information and ensured prompt dispensing. FDA continued postmarketing monitoring and reported that its reviews had identified no new safety signals. Kaye welcomed the expanded pharmacy access but regarded the remaining prescriber certification, new pharmacy certification and special patient form as further barriers. In January 2023, she said the agency’s actions “fall short of what science and justice demand.” Mandatory pickup had ended; her challenge to the remaining special restrictions continued. ###### The Route Returns to Court Louisiana v. FDA, filed in 2025, brought a separate Administrative Procedure Act challenge to the 2023 dispensing rules while FDA undertook another comprehensive review. Different plaintiffs, claims, evidence and counsel now placed mail and pharmacy access before the courts. On April 7, 2026, the district court denied Louisiana’s request to suspend the 2023 REMS without prejudice and paused the case for the agency’s review. It weighed reliance on the existing system, varying state abortion laws, parallel suits and the breadth of nationwide relief. FDA had to produce the administrative record within sixty days, report on its progress within six months and proceed with all deliberate speed. The Fifth Circuit reached a different balance on May 1. It credited Louisiana’s asserted sovereign and Medicaid injuries and found a strong likelihood of success. In the panel’s view, FDA had relied on missing data from its adverse-event reporting system after reducing reporting requirements, together with literature insufficient by itself to support the change. Its order under section 705 of the Administrative Procedure Act would suspend the 2023 remote-dispensing route during the appeal. On May 14, the Supreme Court stayed that order pending the appeal and any timely certiorari proceedings; Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented. The Fifth Circuit heard argument on September 9, 2026, while the Supreme Court’s stay preserved mail and certified-pharmacy dispensing during the review. Kaye spoke about that later case for the ACLU as a senior staff attorney in its Reproductive Freedom Project. Her role there was distinct from her leadership of the pandemic lawsuit and the broader Chelius challenge. The access she had helped secure remained in use as another court considered whether patients would again have to travel to collect the medicine. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Senior Staff Attorney, Reproductive Freedom Project - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Practice:** Reproductive Rights, Medication Access - **Location:** New York, New York ##### Contact - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Address:** 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York, New York 10004 - **Website:** aclu.org --- ## 25. Susan Talcott Camp — `900005348` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `c7c816f5c6bdc4df4084f29f98650fb91ec89907dcf1db17722d8da2d8926f13` - **After/current hash:** `bac692e011b246bc83623b7b1a7150958bf93ab44ccde04ead33b2bb0a7a6956` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005348/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Title, deck, opening and medical evidence**: Lead with Camp's verified appellate answer and the record supporting it, replacing repeated abstract explanation while retaining the cardiac-activity and viability distinction. - `rewrite` — **Act 301 mechanisms, severability and divided judgment**: Consolidate the statute and remedy explanations while preserving every exception, duty, sanction, legal argument and exact enjoined provision. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Clinic identity, two-page declaration, dated opposition and quotations**: Use the final and appellate opinions, Supreme Court docket and contemporaneous report to add specific facts about the clients, evidence and Camp's words. - `rewrite` — **Appellate review, Dobbs and Rule 60 chronology**: Retain the historical judgment and subsequent doctrinal change in a clear sequence without repeating the same result or asserting an unverified later order disposition. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Closing professional responsibilities and provider statement**: Add verified historical ACLU and NAF work to connect Camp's individual case advocacy with her sustained professional responsibilities and own stated purpose. ### BEFORE #### Susan Talcott Camp Reproductive Rights · Constitutional Litigation > “We must ensure that this personal medical decision remains where it belongs: not with politicians, but with a woman, her family, and her doctor. ##### The Heartbeat Before Viability Arkansas defined viability as a detectable heartbeat and attached a twelve-week prohibition to the same signal. Susan Talcott Camp and a multiorganizational team built a record showing that cardiac activity, survival outside the uterus, truthful medical disclosure, and a legal ban were four distinct things. The courts severed the prohibition from the testing rules; Dobbs later removed the federal doctrine that had required that result. On March 6, 2013, Arkansas enacted Act 301 over the governor’s veto. Its most consequential sentence appeared in the definitions. The statute declared that viability began with a detectable fetal heartbeat, assigning one medical signal the legal work ordinarily performed by a judgment about survival outside the uterus. The definition collapsed two moments into one. Cardiac activity described an observable event during pregnancy. Viability, under the federal constitutional law then controlling, marked the capacity for sustained life outside the uterus and established the point after which a state could prohibit abortion, subject to protections for life and health. In Edwards v. Beck, the physicians challenged Arkansas’s substitution of a detectable heartbeat for the medical assessment of viability. The new definition placed the legal cutoff at a signal ordinarily present in every normally progressing pregnancy by twelve weeks. Act 301 was scheduled to take effect on August 16, 2013. It required testing before an abortion, prescribed information after a heartbeat was detected, and withdrew the procedure once the pregnancy reached twelve weeks. A licensing sanction gave the prohibition immediate professional force. The statute preserved exceptions for rape, incest, a threat to the pregnant patient’s life, and defined medical emergencies. It also protected the patient from criminal or civil punishment. A tolling clause suspended any provision voided as unconstitutional until an appellate tribunal upheld it. Those limits shaped the law without changing its categorical rule for other pregnancies. ###### Three Mechanisms in One Act Act 301 contained three operative mechanisms. The first was diagnostic: a person authorized to perform an abortion had to test for a detectable heartbeat through an abdominal ultrasound conducted according to standard medical practice. The Medical Board received rulemaking authority over the testing protocol. The second mechanism was informational. When cardiac activity appeared, the physician had to provide written notice of that finding and the statistical probability of carrying the pregnancy to term. The patient then signed an acknowledgment of receipt. The third mechanism transformed information into prohibition. The physician also had to state that abortion was prohibited under section 20-16-1304. At twelve weeks, performing the procedure outside the exceptions exposed the physician to mandatory revocation of the medical license. Testing, disclosure, prohibition, and punishment occupied adjacent provisions, yet each performed different legal work. The litigation asked whether a court could remove the ban-specific commands while preserving medical observations that the state defended as truthful and relevant. Drs. Louis Jerry Edwards and Tom Tvedten brought the challenge for themselves and their patients. Camp entered the case with Bettina Brownstein, Holly Dickson, Stephanie Toti, the ACLU of Arkansas, the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and additional counsel whose filings built the district record. ###### Twelve Weeks and Twenty-Four The physicians filed on April 16, 2013 and sought emergency relief before enforcement began. Camp obtained pro hac vice admission, participated in the April scheduling conference, appeared at the May preliminary-injunction hearing, and remained active in the district proceedings. Their medical proof came from Dr. Janet Cathey, a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist. Her declaration placed abdominal detection of cardiac activity at about twelve weeks in a normally progressing pregnancy and placed viability generally at twenty-four weeks or later, subject to individual variation. Cathey separated signal from capacity in direct terms: a fetus at twelve weeks lacked the capacity to survive outside the uterus. Arkansas supplied no competing medical evidence at summary judgment. The state’s own 2011 statistics showed that twenty percent of Arkansas abortions occurred at or after twelve weeks. Arkansas emphasized access before the cutoff and the statute’s exceptions, invoked Gonzales v. Carhart, and argued that a facial challenge required proof about the pregnancies actually burdened. The state also maintained that medical progress made the viability framework increasingly unstable. Judge Susan Webber Wright entered a preliminary injunction on May 23. Although the plaintiffs targeted the prohibition, the temporary order covered the entire Act while the parties briefed severability. The case therefore moved from emergency protection to the finer question of which statutory functions could stand independently. ###### The State’s Severability Case Arkansas then sought partial summary judgment for the testing and disclosure provisions. Its position accepted the court’s expected ruling against the twelve-week ban while asking to preserve the parts that gathered medical information and communicated it to the patient. The state argued that testing and disclosure had an independent purpose. From the beginning of pregnancy, it possessed an interest in potential life under the doctrine then governing. Heartbeat testing and accurate developmental information could advance that interest without themselves removing the patient’s choice. The physicians cross-moved for judgment against the entire Act. They argued that the testing and disclosure structure served a single legislative objective: identifying the cardiac signal that activated the prohibition. On that view, the remaining provisions had little practical identity apart from the ban. Severability required the court to examine function rather than proximity. Arkansas law permitted part of an enactment to survive when the remainder remained complete and capable of advancing a legislative purpose. Federal remedial principles likewise favored removing no more statutory work than the constitutional violation required. ###### Three Provisions Enjoined On March 14, 2014, Judge Wright entered final summary judgment. The court held that the uncontested record placed the twelve-week cutoff before viability under Roe and Casey, permanently barring the state from enforcing the provisions that converted cardiac activity into a prohibition. The judgment named three provisions. Section 20-16-1304(a) supplied the twelve-week ban. Section 20-16-1304(b) supplied license revocation. Section 20-16-1303(d)(3) required the physician to announce that abortion was prohibited under the enjoined ban. The judgment left the remaining provisions of Act 301 in effect, including testing and the two neutral disclosures. The physicians obtained permanent protection from the twelve-week prohibition, its licensing sanction and the requirement to announce the enjoined ban. The ban-specific statement fell for a distinct reason. Once section 1304 lost enforceability, a physician could no longer be compelled to present its prohibition as operative law. The surviving statements concerned observed cardiac activity and statistical probability rather than an invalid legal command. Camp’s team secured an injunction against the provisions that prohibited the procedure and punished physicians for providing it. The testing and neutral disclosure requirements continued to operate separately. ###### The Appeal Camp Argued Arkansas appealed the permanent injunction against the three severed provisions. With testing and neutral disclosures continuing in effect, the Eighth Circuit considered the prohibition, licensing consequence and related legal statement. At the January 13, 2015 argument, Assistant Attorney General Colin Jorgensen emphasized changes in viability standards. Camp answered from the record before the panel: no fetus was viable at twelve weeks. Her presentation kept the appeal tied to the evidence Arkansas had left uncontested. A unanimous panel of Judges Lavenski Smith, Duane Benton, and Bobby Shepherd affirmed on May 27. The per curiam opinion treated Casey’s pre-viability rule as controlling and classified section 1304 as a ban because nothing outside the exceptions allowed a patient to obtain the procedure after the cutoff. Rule 56 supplied the evidentiary consequence. Cathey’s declaration stated that viability generally began around twenty-four weeks and never at twelve weeks; Arkansas had offered no contrary proof. With the material facts undisputed, the court affirmed the permanent injunction as a matter of law. The opinion also examined viability as a case-specific standard shaped by medical technology. It discussed legislative factfinding and encouraged fuller scientific records in future cases, while resolving this appeal on the uncontested medical evidence. ###### The Judgment Survives Review The state sought panel rehearing and rehearing en banc. The Eighth Circuit denied both requests in July 2015. Arkansas then petitioned the Supreme Court, carrying forward its challenge to the viability framework and the permanent injunction. Camp served as counsel of record for Drs. Edwards and Tvedten in the Supreme Court proceedings, defending the respondents’ judgment after the coalition’s district litigation and appellate work. On January 19, 2016, the Supreme Court denied certiorari. The order left the Eighth Circuit judgment in place and ended that appellate path. The physicians retained the injunction after the Supreme Court declined review. The appellate affirmance remained in place under the then-controlling viability doctrine. The original proceedings ended with the prohibition, licensing penalty, and ban-specific disclosure enjoined, while testing and neutral information survived. Camp’s work extended from the emergency district litigation through Eighth Circuit argument to Supreme Court counsel of record. ###### Dobbs Returns to the Judgment On June 24, 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overruled Roe and Casey. The Supreme Court removed the federal constitutional right to abortion and returned regulatory authority to the political process, eliminating the viability rule that had controlled Edwards. On July 1, 2022, Arkansas returned to the district court under Rule 60(b)(5), seeking relief from the earlier judgment after the Supreme Court changed the governing law. The physicians opposed the motion on July 15. Camp’s withdrawal was granted on July 18, ending her appearance before resolution of that renewed dispute. Successor counsel handled the later proceedings. ###### Information and Prohibition Arkansas’s post-Dobbs prohibition arose from a different enactment. Act 180 of 2019, the Human Life Protection Act, was designed to activate after an attorney-general certification that Roe had been overruled. That certification occurred on June 24, 2022, making the separate trigger law effective immediately. Act 180 provided an exception to save the life of a pregnant woman in a medical emergency. It authorized criminal penalties against providers while excluding prosecution of the pregnant woman. The change in access followed that separate statute and certification. The 2014 severability judgment addressed whether medical testing and truthful information could remain after the associated prohibition was enjoined. In Edwards, Camp helped obtain emergency protection, defended the physicians’ judgment in the court of appeals, and represented them when the state sought Supreme Court review. The medical record and the wording of each statutory command determined the scope of the relief. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Attorney - **Organization:** TCamp PLLC - **Practice:** Reproductive Rights, Constitutional Litigation - **Location:** New York, New York ##### Contact - **Practice:** TCamp PLLC - **Office:** New York, New York - **Professional biography:** aclu.org ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Susan Talcott Camp Reproductive Rights · Constitutional Litigation > “We must ensure that this personal medical decision remains where it belongs: not with politicians, but with a woman, her family, and her doctor. ##### The Record at Twelve Weeks Arkansas defended its twelve-week abortion prohibition by questioning the viability standard. Susan Talcott Camp answered with the medical record. Her work in Edwards v. Beck carried a physicians’ challenge from emergency relief through appellate argument and Supreme Court review. At the Eighth Circuit argument on January 13, 2015, Arkansas Assistant Attorney General Colin Jorgensen contended that viability standards had changed. Susan Talcott Camp returned to the statute’s twelve-week cutoff. “No fetus can be viable at 12 weeks,” she said. Camp represented two physicians, Drs. Louis Jerry Edwards and Tom Tvedten, whose medical licenses were at risk if they performed abortions prohibited by Arkansas’s Act 301. The state had offered no evidence that a fetus could survive outside the uterus at the law’s twelve-week cutoff. Camp’s answer rested on the distinction their case had established: detecting cardiac activity did not establish the capacity for sustained life outside the uterus. ###### What Act 301 Required Arkansas enacted Act 301 on March 6, 2013, over the governor’s veto, with an effective date of August 16. Its definition of viability described a medical condition beginning with a detectable fetal heartbeat. Under the federal constitutional doctrine then controlling, however, viability depended on the capacity for sustained survival outside the uterus. It marked the point after which a state could prohibit abortion, with protections for the patient’s life and health. Act 301 instead attached a prohibition to cardiac activity and twelve weeks’ gestation. The law first required a person authorized to perform abortions to test for a heartbeat by abdominal ultrasound, following standard medical practice. The Arkansas State Medical Board would approve the tests and establish the protocol by rule. If cardiac activity appeared, the physician had to give written notice of that finding and the statistical probability of carrying the pregnancy to term. The patient signed an acknowledgment of receipt. A third required statement announced that abortion was prohibited under section 20-16-1304. That section barred the procedure once a heartbeat had been detected and the pregnancy had reached twelve weeks. A violation required revocation of the physician’s medical license. Act 301 preserved exceptions for rape, incest, threats to the pregnant patient’s life and defined medical emergencies. It excluded criminal or civil punishment of the patient. A tolling clause suspended the effective date of any provision held unconstitutional until an appellate tribunal upheld it. Those provisions qualified the law, while leaving the twelve-week prohibition applicable to pregnancies outside its exceptions. ###### The Physicians’ Evidence Edwards and Tvedten, who provided abortion care at Little Rock Family Planning Services, sued for themselves and their patients on April 16, 2013. Camp worked with Bettina Brownstein, Holly Dickson, Stephanie Toti and other counsel from the ACLU of Arkansas, the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project and the Center for Reproductive Rights. She obtained permission to appear in the district court, participated in the April scheduling conference and appeared at the May preliminary-injunction hearing. Their medical evidence came from Dr. Janet Cathey, a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist. Her declaration explained that abdominal ultrasound could detect cardiac activity at about twelve weeks in a normally progressing pregnancy, while viability generally began at twenty-four weeks or later and varied with the individual pregnancy. At twelve weeks, she stated, a fetus could not survive outside the uterus. The state’s own 2011 figures showed that twenty percent of Arkansas abortions occurred at or after the proposed cutoff. Arkansas pointed to the availability of abortion before twelve weeks and within the statutory exceptions afterward. It invoked Gonzales v. Carhart and argued that a facial challenge required proof concerning the pregnancies actually burdened. It also contended that medical progress made the viability standard increasingly unstable. Those arguments addressed the legal framework; the state supplied no competing medical evidence at summary judgment. On May 23, Judge Susan Webber Wright entered a preliminary injunction. The physicians had targeted the prohibition, but the temporary order covered the entire Act while the parties addressed whether some provisions could survive independently. Camp and her co-counsel had secured protection before the August enforcement date. The next stage concerned how much of the statute the final judgment should reach. ###### The Provisions That Could Stand Alone Arkansas sought partial summary judgment preserving testing and disclosure. While recognizing that Wright would reject the twelve-week prohibition, the state argued that those other provisions had their own purpose. Under the doctrine then governing, its interest in potential life began at the outset of pregnancy. A heartbeat test and truthful developmental information could serve that interest without taking away the patient’s choice. The physicians cross-moved for judgment against the whole Act. In their account, testing identified the signal that activated the ban, and disclosure explained why the procedure was prohibited. The provisions served a single legislative objective and could not sensibly be detached from it. Arkansas severability law asked whether the remaining statute would be complete and capable of carrying out a legislative purpose on its own. Federal remedial principles also favored leaving intact as much of the legislature’s work as the Constitution allowed. Wright therefore had to examine what each command required a physician to do, rather than treating neighboring provisions as inseparable. On March 14, 2014, Wright entered final summary judgment. The uncontested medical evidence established that the twelve-week prohibition reached pregnancies before viability and violated the rule of Roe and Casey. Her permanent injunction covered three provisions: section 20-16-1304(a), the ban; section 20-16-1304(b), license revocation; and section 20-16-1303(d)(3), the requirement to tell the patient that abortion was prohibited under the enjoined law. The final provision fell with the legal command it described. Once the prohibition could not be enforced, the physician could not be required to present it to a patient as operative law. Testing and the two other disclosures—cardiac activity and the statistical probability of reaching term—remained in effect, along with the rest of the Act. Camp’s team had secured permanent protection against the twelve-week ban and its licensing sanction while the surviving requirements continued to govern the medical encounter. ###### The Undisputed Declaration The state appealed the injunction against those three provisions. Testing and the other disclosures continued in effect, so Camp’s appellate argument concerned the prohibition, its professional sanction and the statement tied to it. The two-page Cathey declaration supplied the medical facts the state had left uncontested. On May 27, 2015, a unanimous panel of Judges Lavenski Smith, Duane Benton and Bobby Shepherd affirmed. The per curiam opinion treated Casey’s rule against pre-viability prohibitions as controlling. Access before twelve weeks, or afterward within specified exceptions, did not change the fact that the statute barred other patients from obtaining an abortion before viability. The absence of contrary medical proof had a procedural consequence. Under Rule 56, the court could decide the case as a matter of law when the material facts were undisputed. The panel also examined the variability of viability and advances in medical technology, discussed the role of legislative factfinding and encouraged fuller scientific records in future cases. It nevertheless resolved this appeal on the evidence before it, affirming the physicians’ injunction. ###### Counsel of Record The Eighth Circuit denied the state’s requests for panel rehearing and rehearing en banc in July 2015. Arkansas then petitioned the Supreme Court, continuing its challenge to the viability framework and the injunction. Camp served as counsel of record for Edwards and Tvedten; the respondents filed their brief in opposition on December 9. On January 19, 2016, the Supreme Court denied certiorari. The denial left the appellate judgment in place and ended that route of review. It added no Supreme Court merits holding to the case. The physicians retained the injunction under the law then controlling. ###### After the Viability Rule On June 24, 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overruled Roe and Casey, removed the federal constitutional right to abortion and returned regulatory authority to the political process. The viability rule on which Edwards had depended no longer governed. Arkansas’s immediate post-Dobbs prohibition came from a separate enactment: Act 180 of 2019, the Human Life Protection Act. The attorney general’s June 24 certification that Roe had been overruled activated that law. It provided an exception to save the life of a pregnant woman in a medical emergency, authorized criminal penalties against providers and excluded prosecution of the pregnant woman. That change in access followed Act 180 and its certification. On July 1, Arkansas sought relief from the Edwards judgment under Rule 60(b)(5), citing the change in governing law. The physicians opposed the motion on July 15. Camp’s withdrawal was granted on July 18, before the renewed dispute was resolved; successor counsel handled the later proceedings. ###### Work for the Providers During twenty-five years at the ACLU, Camp devised strategy and directed and supervised advocacy and litigation for clinicians providing contraception and abortion care. She served most recently as deputy director of the Reproductive Freedom Project, with lead or supervisory responsibility for challenges in multiple states. In 2020, she moved to the National Abortion Federation as chief legal and strategy officer, after co-chairing a task force concerned with threats to care and providers’ ability to continue working. The role encompassed the organization’s legal activities and the direction of its programs and membership services. It brought her into the leadership of an organization whose members she had represented. When that appointment was announced, Camp described the people at the center of her work: “Throughout my career, I have worked to protect clinicians who devote their lives to ensuring that individuals can access the abortion care they need.” ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Attorney - **Organization:** TCamp PLLC - **Practice:** Reproductive Rights, Constitutional Litigation - **Location:** New York, New York ##### Contact - **Practice:** TCamp PLLC - **Office:** New York, New York - **Professional biography:** aclu.org --- ## 26. Trina Realmuto — `900005346` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `df16e61316dc1a3b71bc94359be91e022675b3d69e883681312b04b221c619db` - **After/current hash:** `994c5ec4035318e4e2023b916650c6711ccb2cc125676a8105e4bcab02241e44` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005346/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Opening and case architecture**: Lead with Realmuto's petition and the missing agency record; consolidate the repeated legal distinction while preserving every consequential date and factual stake. - `rewrite` — **Historical opinion facts and holdings**: Correct form boxes, filing contents, certification attribution and the scope of the First Circuit's holding after reading all sixteen pages. - `rewrite` — **2026 deadline and briefing history**: Incorporate the overlooked March 8 vacatur, retain the published categories as history and distinguish the briefing provision that remained. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Professional work and closing quotation**: Develop verified career formation, NILA's actual co-counseling program, habeas training and Rekha Nair's specific account of briefing collaboration. - `rewrite` — **Opening and case architecture**: Lead with Realmuto's petition and the missing agency record; consolidate the repeated legal distinction while preserving every consequential date and factual stake. - `rewrite` — **Historical opinion facts and holdings**: Correct form boxes, filing contents, certification attribution and the scope of the First Circuit's holding after reading all sixteen pages. - `rewrite` — **2026 deadline and briefing history**: Incorporate the overlooked March 8 vacatur, retain the published categories as history and distinguish the briefing provision that remained. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Professional work and closing quotation**: Develop verified career formation, NILA's actual co-counseling program, habeas training and Rekha Nair's specific account of briefing collaboration. ### BEFORE #### Trina Realmuto Immigration Litigation · Federal Appeals > “This initiative will empower the removal defense bar with the knowledge and skills needed to navigate these challenges. ##### The Date Printed Wrong The immigration judge’s written order printed March 18, 2020. The governing thirty-day rule made March 20 the actual deadline. Andrea Joy James placed her notice in detention mail on April 1, asking for equitable tolling as the pandemic emergency closed around her. The Board answered a different question. Trina Realmuto’s First Circuit appeal forced the agency to separate discretionary grace from a reviewable tolling claim. On February 19, 2020, an immigration judge denied Andrea Joy James asylum, withholding of removal, and protection under the Convention Against Torture. James was detained and represented herself at the hearing. The written order directed removal to Jamaica. The form printed March 18 as the appeal deadline. The regulation then in force allowed thirty calendar days from the oral decision, making March 20 the correct date. Two unchecked boxes for appeal due and appeal waived added ambiguity without resolving it. James had lived in the United States since 1989 and had a United States-citizen daughter. She entered immigration detention in October 2019 after completing a criminal sentence. The government disclaimed reliance on waiver, and the Board had not used waiver to dismiss the appeal. The First Circuit therefore left that question undecided. James asked the Board to consider whether detention, illness and the pandemic emergency justified treating her late filing as timely under equitable tolling. ###### Seventeen Days Through Detention Massachusetts declared a state of emergency on March 10 as COVID-19 spread. James remained at the Bristol County House of Correction during the first weeks of disruption and uncertainty inside detention facilities. On April 1, twelve days after the legal deadline, she signed a Notice of Appeal and deposited it in the detention facility’s internal mail. The Board received it on April 6, seventeen days late under the receipt rule. The notice said she lacked time to secure counsel and described health conditions, including diabetes and high blood pressure, that heightened the emergency’s significance for her. She sought review of the immigration judge’s denial of protection and removal order. James also checked the box promising a later brief. That choice ordinarily would trigger a transcript and briefing schedule after a valid appeal entered the Board’s docket. No such schedule issued because timeliness came first. The receipt rule placed the risk of transit delay on the filer. Depositing an appeal in detention mail did not, by itself, establish timely filing. ###### The Filing Named Tolling James supplemented the notice with a written request that invoked equitable tolling. She tied the delay to detention, the opening pandemic emergency, medical vulnerability, and difficulty obtaining legal assistance. Equitable tolling asks whether a litigant pursued rights with reasonable diligence and whether an extraordinary circumstance prevented timely filing. The doctrine leaves the deadline intact while permitting a late filing to count as timely when both elements are established. Her submission also asked the Board to accept the case through self-certification. That mechanism allowed the Board, in an exceptional situation, to bring a matter within its appellate authority through discretionary institutional action. The two requests shared the same desired result—consideration of the appeal—but rested on different sources of authority. One claimed an entitlement under a legal standard. The other sought a discretionary act that no party could demand as of right. A court can examine whether an agency applied the correct tolling standard and considered the evidence presented. An agency’s unfettered refusal to grant discretionary certification occupies a different legal category. ###### The Board Opened the Other Door On June 19, 2020, the Board summarily dismissed the appeal as untimely. Its written order discussed certification and concluded that the circumstances fell short of that exceptional exercise of discretion. The order contained no ruling on equitable tolling. It neither found diligence nor rejected it, neither evaluated extraordinary circumstances nor explained why the pandemic record fell outside the doctrine. The paper asked one question and the order answered the other. Summary dismissal ended the ordinary appeal before a transcript or merits brief developed. The Board never reviewed the immigration judge’s asylum, withholding, or Convention Against Torture rulings through the appellate process James had attempted to invoke. The Board’s approach fit the precedent then governing its practice. Matter of Liadov treated the thirty-day deadline as admitting no ordinary extension and described certification as a narrow safety valve for exceptional cases. The First Circuit petition therefore required counsel to separate a missing analysis from a disputed result. Realmuto’s team confronted an untouched standard: the written order applied certification and left equitable tolling unanswered. ###### The Question in the First Circuit Trina Realmuto appeared for James in the First Circuit with Kristin Macleod-Ball, Tiffany Lieu, and Kira Gagarin on the petitioner’s brief. The government argued that the court lacked jurisdiction because James had failed to exhaust a tolling claim before the agency. It characterized her request as indirect or insufficiently developed and defended the Board’s certification analysis. Judge William Kayatta’s opinion rejected that exhaustion account. James had used the phrase “equitable tolling,” cited the doctrine, and connected it to facts she believed explained the delay. The court called the request crystal clear. Exhaustion requires the agency to receive a fair opportunity to address an issue. Agency silence supplies no proof that an explicitly raised claim was absent. The government’s theory assumed the conclusion it sought. The court also found the tolling issue reviewable. The thirty-day deadline was a claim-processing rule rather than a jurisdictional boundary, and the Board’s discretionary certification authority left the separate tolling request intact. ###### Two Doors, Two Standards The opinion described certification as an unfettered discretionary indulgence. The Board could use it in an exceptional situation, but a litigant possessed no enforceable right to compel that choice. Equitable tolling operated differently. A party who proved diligent pursuit and an extraordinary obstacle could claim the benefit of the doctrine. The Board had to decide whether the record met those standards. An agency cannot answer whether it wishes to excuse a filing and thereby avoid deciding whether governing law requires the filing to be treated as timely. Tolling turns on the explanation for the delay, the supporting evidence and the filer's response after the obstacle. Those facts establish whether the applicant acted diligently and encountered an extraordinary circumstance. James's case brought those questions into a concrete record: a misprinted date, detention, a declared emergency, internal mail, medical vulnerability, a pro se notice, and an express tolling request. ###### The Board Had to Decide The First Circuit vacated the Board's decision and remanded so the agency could decide equitable tolling in the first instance. The judgment required a ruling on the legal claim James had presented. On remand, the Board had to evaluate James's diligence, the extraordinary circumstances she described, and the legal effect of the record explaining her seventeen-day delay. The agency retained responsibility for adjudicating James's claims for asylum, withholding of removal, and Convention Against Torture protection. Realmuto and her co-counsel obtained a judgment requiring the Board to address equitable tolling under the governing legal standard. The agency’s discretionary certification decision could not substitute for that ruling. ###### Morales-Morales Builds a Procedure In 2023, the Board decided Matter of Morales-Morales. It overruled Liadov, held that the appeal deadline is a claim-processing rule, and formally recognized authority to accept a late appeal through equitable tolling. The Board adopted the same two elements identified in circuit precedent: diligent pursuit and an extraordinary circumstance that prevented timely filing. That standard applies to a one-day delay as well. The Morales-Morales respondents used regular mail two days before the deadline, offered little explanation for the choice, and supplied an incomplete account of their efforts. The Board found neither sufficient diligence nor an extraordinary obstacle. EOIR’s public guidance instructs a late filer to submit the Notice of Appeal with a separately titled “MOTION TO ACCEPT LATE APPEAL,” supported by affidavits, declarations, and other evidence. The Board must decide whether that evidence establishes diligence and an extraordinary circumstance. ###### Ten Days, Except When Thirty An interim final rule effective March 9, 2026 changed the notice period. The regulation’s published text, current through September 8, gives ten calendar days for an ordinary appeal from an immigration judge and thirty days when the judge adjudicated an asylum application without denying it under specified threshold bars. Both branches remain receipt based. The Federal Register linked the shorter default to electronic filing, expanded representation, and reduced mail-delay concerns. It also acknowledged the burdens that a shorter deadline could impose on people who were detained or representing themselves. As of September 10, EOIR’s public deadline manual continued to describe a general thirty-day rule, including for detained filers. Its description differed from the ten- and thirty-day categories in the published regulation, while its tolling instructions continued to require proof under Morales-Morales. A separate rule applies to briefing in appeals from immigration-judge decisions issued on or after March 9, 2026: both sides generally receive the same twenty calendar days, and the Board accepts a reply only when it invites or orders one. Realmuto serves as Executive Director and Co-Founder of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, whose work combines federal litigation, co-counseling and training for lawyers representing noncitizens. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Executive Director and Co-Founder - **Organization:** National Immigration Litigation Alliance - **Practice:** Immigration Litigation, Federal Appeals - **Location:** Brookline, Massachusetts ##### Contact - **Organization:** National Immigration Litigation Alliance - **Office:** Brookline, Massachusetts - **Website:** immigrationlitigation.org - **Email:** trina@immigrationlitigation.org - **Phone:** 617-819-4447 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Trina Realmuto Immigration Litigation · Federal Appeals > “This initiative will empower the removal defense bar with the knowledge and skills needed to navigate these challenges. ##### Seventeen Days Late Andrea Joy James asked the Board of Immigration Appeals to consider why her filing had arrived late. The Board dismissed it under a different standard. Trina Realmuto and her co-counsel took the unanswered claim to the First Circuit. When Trina Realmuto represented Andrea Joy James in the First Circuit, the appeal record contained no transcript of the immigration judge’s decision and no merits brief from James. The Board of Immigration Appeals had dismissed her filing before either could be produced. Realmuto’s team asked the court to return the case to the point where the agency had stopped: James’s express request for equitable tolling. James had lived in the United States since 1989 and had a United States-citizen daughter. After completing a criminal sentence, she entered immigration detention in October 2019 at the Bristol County House of Correction in Massachusetts. On February 19, 2020, she represented herself at a hearing where an immigration judge denied asylum, withholding of removal and protection under the Convention Against Torture, and ordered her removed to Jamaica. The written order gave March 18 as the appeal deadline. The thirty-day regulation made March 20 the correct date. Checked boxes on the form also appeared to indicate that James had waived appeal. The government did not rely on waiver, however, and the Board did not dismiss on that ground. The First Circuit left the question undecided. ###### A Filing from Detention Massachusetts declared a state of emergency on March 10, ten days before the legal deadline. James remained detained as the coronavirus outbreak disrupted life inside the facility. On April 1, twelve days after the deadline, she signed her notice of appeal and placed it in the internal mail. The Board received the package on April 6, seventeen days late. Under the receipt rule, depositing it with detention staff did not itself make the filing timely; the filer bore the risk of transit delay. James enclosed a supplement, a motion to accept the late appeal and a fee-waiver request. She explained that she had been unable to secure counsel within thirty days and was experiencing serious complications from diabetes and high blood pressure. Her notice identified challenges to the denial of withholding and Convention Against Torture protection. She also checked the box indicating that she would submit a fuller brief after receiving a briefing schedule. The supplement expressly invoked equitable tolling. It argued that the thirty-day limit was a claim-processing rule and required the Board to consider whether the deadline should be tolled. The filing put the legal claim and James’s circumstances before the agency, with the promised brief still to come. ###### What the Board Decided On June 19, 2020, the Board summarily dismissed the appeal. It treated the motion as a request to accept the case through self-certification, an authority it could exercise in exceptional circumstances. After noting James’s detention, difficulty retaining counsel and health complications, it declined to certify the case. That approach followed Matter of Liadov, the Board’s 2006 precedent treating the appeal deadline as admitting no ordinary extension and certification as a narrow safety valve. The dismissal contained no ruling on equitable tolling: no determination of diligence, no assessment of extraordinary circumstances under that doctrine. It also ended the attempted appeal without a transcript, briefing schedule or review of the immigration judge’s protection rulings. Realmuto appeared for James with Kristin Macleod-Ball, Tiffany Lieu and Kira Gagarin on the petitioner’s brief. Their petition sought a ruling on the claim the Board had left unanswered. It also advanced an alternative argument concerning the agency’s treatment of comparable requests for certification, but the court resolved the case on the primary tolling ground. ###### Reading the Request James Made The government first argued that the late filing meant James had failed to exhaust her administrative remedies, leaving the court without jurisdiction to review her claims. Judge William Kayatta’s October 25, 2021 opinion identified the assumption inside that argument: if equitable tolling applied, the appeal could count as timely. The court had jurisdiction to review the Board’s failure to address that question. The government separately described the tolling request as indirect and vague, contained in a single sentence of a preprinted supplement. Kayatta read the language James had submitted and called her request “crystal clear.” She had named “equitable tolling,” identified the deadline as a claim-processing rule and asked for an individualized decision. Including those arguments in a supplement preserved them. Her lack of counsel also called for a liberal reading of the filing. The government did not contest that the thirty-day limit could be equitably tolled. The panel therefore had no need to resolve that broader question, though it noted that four other circuits had held the deadline nonjurisdictional. The disputed issue was whether the Board had already answered James by declining certification. Realmuto’s team had to keep the two standards separate. Self-certification involved largely unfettered agency discretion. Equitable tolling entitled a litigant to relief upon proof of diligent pursuit of her rights and an extraordinary circumstance that prevented timely filing. A court could review a denial of tolling for abuse of discretion. The Board’s choice not to certify a case could not stand in for an application of that legal standard. The government also urged that James had not made a sufficient case for tolling. At oral argument, it stressed that her motion had not expressly mentioned COVID, then conceded that the Board must have known about the pandemic. The court declined to predict how the agency would have ruled. James’s health complications, detention and efforts to appeal belonged in that first assessment, particularly because summary dismissal had prevented her from developing the brief she had requested. ###### The Decision Sent Back The First Circuit vacated the dismissal and remanded. The Board had to decide whether James’s circumstances warranted tolling the deadline, evaluating diligence, the obstacle to timely filing and the evidence explaining the delay. The court left the protection claims within the immigration adjudication process. Realmuto and her co-counsel had secured an enforceable requirement to consider James’s legal claim. The result depended on the request already in the filing: the agency had received an opportunity to decide it, and its silence could not establish that James had failed to raise it. ###### A Procedure for Late Appeals On May 5, 2023, the Board decided Matter of Morales-Morales. It overruled Liadov and expressly held that the appeal deadline was a claim-processing rule, giving it authority to treat some late appeals as timely. It adopted the two requirements of diligence and an extraordinary circumstance that had figured in the circuit decisions. The respondents in Morales-Morales had mailed their notice by regular mail two days before it was due. They supplied an incomplete account of their efforts to appeal and little explanation for the mailing choice. The Board found neither required element established and denied reconsideration. Even a one-day delay required proof; the length of the delay alone did not determine whether tolling applied. EOIR’s appeal manual now directs a late filer to submit the notice with a separately titled “MOTION TO ACCEPT LATE APPEAL,” supported by affidavits, declarations and other evidence establishing both elements. The procedure gives the Board a motion to decide and the filer a defined way to explain what prevented timely receipt. ###### The Later Deadline Dispute In February 2026, the Justice Department issued an interim final rule scheduled to take effect on March 9. It would have reduced the ordinary notice period to ten calendar days while retaining thirty days where the judge adjudicated asylum without denying it under specified threshold bars; both periods depended on receipt. The Department relied on electronic filing, reduced mail-delay concerns and faster adjudication, while acknowledging difficulties for people seeking counsel after an adverse decision. On March 8, in the separate case Amica Center for Immigrant Rights v. EOIR, Judge Randolph Moss vacated the ten-day provision, along with new summary-dismissal and issue-waiver requirements, for failure to follow required rulemaking procedures. The eCFR text displayed through September 10 still contained the ten- and thirty-day categories. EOIR’s public manual, checked on September 13, continued to state a general thirty-day receipt deadline, including for detained filers. The court’s order is essential to understanding the difference between those texts. The briefing change had a different history. Moss’s order left it in place. For appeals from immigration-judge decisions issued on or after March 9, the manual gives both sides the same twenty calendar days to file briefs and permits a reply only when the Board invites or orders one. A notice deadline determines whether the appeal begins; a briefing schedule governs the argument that follows. ###### Building the Next Appellate Team Realmuto’s work at the National Immigration Litigation Alliance combines representation with teaching lawyers to litigate in federal court. Before becoming its executive director and co-founder, she directed litigation at the American Immigration Council and the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild. She began at Van Der Hout in San Francisco, handling federal litigation and deportation defense, and also worked in London and Switzerland representing visa applicants at United States embassies and consulates. NILA generally serves as lead counsel in its co-counseling program, with an agreement assigning responsibilities and deadlines. Lawyers seeking its involvement are asked to send Realmuto the legal issues and any impending deportation or filing date. The work spans petitions for review, detention challenges, damages actions and government-transparency litigation. In August 2025, NILA and Cardozo School of Law’s immigration clinic announced the National Immigration Habeas Institute to train lawyers whose practices had largely been confined to immigration court. Its intensive federal habeas training paired free participation with a commitment to accept pro bono referrals. Realmuto’s stated aim was to equip removal-defense lawyers for the demands of federal proceedings. Rekha Nair of the Phoenix Legal Action Network worked with Realmuto to develop and refine the arguments in a petition for review. In Nair’s description of their collaboration, Realmuto “co-wrote and thoroughly edited multiple drafts of briefing, giving me a level of feedback I had not received since law school.” ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Executive Director and Co-Founder - **Organization:** National Immigration Litigation Alliance - **Practice:** Immigration Litigation, Federal Appeals - **Location:** Brookline, Massachusetts ##### Contact - **Organization:** National Immigration Litigation Alliance - **Office:** Brookline, Massachusetts - **Website:** immigrationlitigation.org - **Email:** trina@immigrationlitigation.org - **Phone:** 617-819-4447 --- ## 27. Cecillia D. Wang — `900005198` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `4d6c6e28476fc2b51c52c1ab514bf04f5d69c58f0b42af52a1a597fa5c39d245` - **After/current hash:** `3abe0444a125a1b7fe8522beb66ab774c8988e6d260cfe5361d7780ff4b59f33` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005198/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Trial opening and named residents**: Use Wang's own contemporaneous trial account for the videos and Magos testimony, and her 2013 account for the Rodriguez family's experience. - `rewrite` — **Evidence and the original judgment**: Combine repeated descriptions of the evidence while preserving the intent/effect distinction, named co-counsel, trial dates and each legal holding. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Patrol records and community oversight**: Use the actual injunction to clarify recorded reasons, duration, access to data, confidentiality and regular public meetings. - `rewrite` — **Civil contempt and internal affairs**: Consolidate the repeated enforcement account and retain the dated 2016 and 2018 outcomes with a selective nineteen-word Wang quotation. - `rewrite` — **Professional formation and national role**: Preserve all education, clerkship, defense, teaching and leadership facts while placing her current responsibilities beside her published family reflection. ### BEFORE #### Cecillia D. Wang Civil Rights · Constitutional Litigation · Immigrants’ Rights > “In my two decades as an ACLU lawyer, I have worked with colleagues and allies to defend and advance freedom, equality, fairness, and the principle that the government is accountable to the people. ##### The Stops Became Evidence Cecillia D. Wang helped litigate the racial-profiling case that produced a federal injunction governing traffic stops, records, supervision, and community oversight in Maricopa County. Her work carried through civil-contempt proceedings and enforcement of the resulting reforms. Cecillia D. Wang was part of the trial team that challenged racial profiling by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in Ortega Melendres v. Arpaio. The plaintiffs brought individual accounts of traffic stops together with the agency’s correspondence, public statements, and statistical evidence about how it treated Latino drivers and passengers. The case went to a three-week bench trial in July and August 2012. On May 24, 2013, U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow found that the sheriff’s policies and practices violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Wang then directed the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. The plaintiffs’ team included the national ACLU, the ACLU of Arizona, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and Covington & Burling. They represented Latino residents and Somos America, a community organization in Phoenix. ###### Intent and the Pattern of Enforcement The plaintiffs used internal correspondence and public statements to establish discriminatory intent. Statistical analysis addressed the effects: Latino motorists experienced higher stop rates and longer stops. The evidence connected individual encounters with recurring agency practices. Wang’s co-counsel included Andre Segura, Daniel Pochoda, Anne Lai, Nancy Ramirez, Stanley Young, Andrew Byrnes, Lesli Gallagher, and David Hults. Their work combined the testimony of community members with the records and analysis needed to prove a classwide constitutional violation. The court’s findings addressed both the decision to stop a vehicle and the detention that followed. Deputies could not use Latino ancestry to select vehicles for stops, and suspicion of unauthorized immigration status alone did not supply a sufficient basis to hold a Latino vehicle occupant. ###### An Order for the Patrol Car On October 2, 2013, the court issued a supplemental permanent injunction. It required an independent monitor, changes to agency policies and training, a community advisory board, recordings of vehicle stops, and systematic collection of traffic-stop information. The order required deputies to collect information about every vehicle stop, including encounters that ended without a citation or arrest. The collection system was subject to audits and quality checks, giving the monitor a record against which to assess compliance. Traffic patrol vehicles were to receive video and audio equipment. Deputies had to begin recording when they decided to initiate a stop and continue through its end. The order also required repair or replacement of equipment that did not function. The community advisory board created a regular channel between the sheriff’s office and community representatives. It could make recommendations about policing and the implementation of the court’s requirements. ###### Enforcing the Judgment The plaintiffs returned to court to enforce the racial-profiling orders. On May 13, 2016, Judge Snow found Arpaio and senior deputies in civil contempt for repeatedly violating them. Wang’s work in the matter included the underlying racial-profiling trial and the subsequent civil-contempt proceedings. The enforcement case addressed the conduct of the sheriff and his commanders under existing court orders. The resulting relief extended to the agency’s internal investigations. On July 31, 2018, the Ninth Circuit upheld an injunction reforming the internal affairs department and addressing other problems established in the civil-contempt trial. That ruling required Maricopa County to continue implementing those court-ordered reforms. The remedy concerned the agency’s procedures for investigating misconduct as well as the policing practices that had brought the plaintiffs to court. ###### Criminal Defense and Immigration Law Wang graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992, studying English and biology, and from Yale Law School in 1995. She clerked for Ninth Circuit Judge William A. Norris and for retired Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun while working in Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s chambers. She served as an ACLU fellow in 1997–98, worked in the federal public defender’s office in New York, and practiced at Keker & Van Nest in San Francisco. In private practice, she also served on the federal Criminal Justice Act panel for the Northern District of California. Wang returned to the ACLU as a staff attorney in 2004 and later became managing attorney and director of its Immigrants’ Rights Project. She also taught immigration law as an adjunct lecturer at Stanford and Berkeley. ###### A National Legal Department From 2016 to 2024, Wang served as an ACLU deputy legal director and directed its Center for Democracy. That work encompassed immigrants’ rights, voting rights, national security, human rights, and speech, privacy, and technology. She became National Legal Director on October 15, 2024, succeeding David Cole. She was the first woman and the first woman of color to hold the position. Wang now oversees the national ACLU’s legal department, works with legal staff across its fifty-four state affiliates, and leads the organization’s Supreme Court work. Her professional office is in San Francisco. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** National Legal Director - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Practice:** Civil Rights, Constitutional Litigation, Immigrants’ Rights - **Location:** San Francisco, California ##### Contact - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Address:** 425 California Street, Suite 700, San Francisco, CA 94104 - **Website:** aclu.org ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Cecillia D. Wang Civil Rights · Constitutional Litigation · Immigrants’ Rights > “In my two decades as an ACLU lawyer, I have worked with colleagues and allies to defend and advance freedom, equality, fairness, and the principle that the government is accountable to the people. ##### The Stops Became Evidence Cecillia D. Wang and her co-counsel brought the Maricopa County sheriff’s public statements into court alongside the experiences of Latino drivers and passengers. Their case moved from proving discrimination to securing rules for patrols, records and supervision—and enforcing those rules when the sheriff defied them. In July 2012, Cecillia D. Wang and her co-counsel put Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s public statements before him in a federal courtroom. They played videos of him describing his immigration-enforcement strategies. The trial also gave Latino residents an opportunity to describe what those policies had meant at the roadside. Daniel Magos, a sixty-seven-year-old United States citizen and small-business owner, testified that a deputy had ordered him and his wife out of their truck and subjected him to a pat-down. The stated reason for the stop was a missing license plate on their trailer. No ticket was issued. Magos broke down while describing the humiliation he felt. Wang then directed the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. In Ortega Melendres v. Arpaio, her team challenged racial profiling by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office on behalf of a class of Latino residents and Somos America, a Phoenix community organization. The national ACLU, ACLU of Arizona, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and Covington & Burling combined individual accounts with agency correspondence, public statements and statistical evidence. ###### From an Encounter to a Pattern Among the clients were Jessika and David Rodriguez, United States citizens who had been stopped while driving with their young children. They described a deputy demanding David’s Social Security card and issuing a citation while other, non-Latino drivers were waved through the same area. The team used internal correspondence and public statements to establish discriminatory intent. Some operations had followed complaints about people speaking Spanish or gathering in particular neighborhoods. Statistical analysis supplied a different kind of proof: Latino motorists were stopped at higher rates and held longer. Wang’s co-counsel included Andre Segura, Daniel Pochoda, Anne Lai, Nancy Ramirez, Stanley Young, Andrew Byrnes, Lesli Gallagher and David Hults. After the three-week bench trial in July and August 2012, U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow ruled on May 24, 2013, that the sheriff’s policies and practices violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The court addressed both the selection of a vehicle and the detention of its occupants. Latino ancestry could not be used to choose which vehicles to stop. Suspicion of unauthorized immigration status, without more, did not justify holding a Latino driver or passenger. Wang and the other plaintiffs’ lawyers then had to secure measures that would govern how deputies acted on the road. ###### An Order for the Patrol Car On October 2, 2013, Snow issued a supplemental permanent injunction requiring an independent monitor, revised policies and training, and changes to the way the sheriff’s office documented traffic stops. The parties had agreed on some proposed terms and disputed others. The court resolved those differences after an August hearing. The order required deputies to collect information about every vehicle stop, including those ending without a citation or arrest. They had to record the reason for the stop before contacting the occupants and document how long the encounter lasted. Audits and quality checks would test the accuracy of the records. The monitor and plaintiffs’ representatives were entitled to the collected data, with identifying information kept confidential. Traffic patrol vehicles were to receive video and audio equipment. Deputies had to start recording as soon as they decided to initiate a stop and continue until it ended. The sheriff’s office had to repair or replace equipment that did not work. These requirements gave the monitor a way to compare the written account with the recorded encounter. A community advisory board would also hear residents’ concerns and recommend changes to policing and compliance with the court’s orders. Wang and her colleagues had sought that channel despite the sheriff’s office’s opposition. The order required regular public meetings and participation by representatives of both the plaintiffs and the agency. ###### When the Sheriff Defied the Orders Wang’s work continued through the proceedings to enforce the judgment. On May 13, 2016, Snow found Arpaio and senior deputies in civil contempt for repeatedly violating the racial-profiling orders. The case now required scrutiny of how the sheriff and his commanders handled misconduct within their own agency. Wang specified the remedy she wanted: “Strong remedies are needed to protect the community’s rights, starting with internal investigations that root out and punish misconduct.” On July 31, 2018, the Ninth Circuit upheld an injunction reforming the internal affairs department and addressing other problems established in the civil-contempt trial. Maricopa County had to continue implementing those reforms. The relief Wang and her co-counsel defended thus covered both the original policing practices and the agency’s response when officers violated their obligations. ###### Criminal Defense and Immigration Law Wang’s earlier practice had placed individual defendants at the center of her work. After an ACLU fellowship in 1997–98, she worked in the federal public defender’s office in New York and at Keker & Van Nest in San Francisco. In private practice, she also served on the federal Criminal Justice Act panel for the Northern District of California. She had graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992, studying English and biology, and from Yale Law School in 1995. She clerked for Ninth Circuit Judge William A. Norris and for retired Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun while working in Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s chambers. Returning to the ACLU as a staff attorney in 2004, Wang later became managing attorney and director of its Immigrants’ Rights Project. She also taught immigration law as an adjunct lecturer at Stanford and Berkeley. ###### A National Legal Department From 2016 to 2024, Wang served as an ACLU deputy legal director and directed its Center for Democracy. Her responsibilities encompassed immigrants’ rights, voting rights, national security, human rights, and speech, privacy and technology. She became National Legal Director on October 15, 2024, succeeding David Cole and becoming the first woman and first woman of color to hold the position. Based professionally in San Francisco, Wang now oversees the national ACLU’s legal department, works with legal staff across its fifty-four state affiliates and leads its Supreme Court work. In accepting the appointment, she described herself as a daughter of immigrants carrying forward work made possible by earlier generations. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** National Legal Director - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Practice:** Civil Rights, Constitutional Litigation, Immigrants’ Rights - **Location:** San Francisco, California ##### Contact - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Address:** 425 California Street, Suite 700, San Francisco, CA 94104 - **Website:** aclu.org --- ## 28. Sherrilyn A. Ifill — `900005199` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `cf5d5a265bc5ed032b9ae305c2bf9aeec229831bd492ffc59fa9ef051d138956` - **After/current hash:** `a8f9d6689a43eaf6dfeca301466dd62714b3d4239ebd7f196844c44be8241104` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005199/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Program design and professional preparation**: Consolidate the expense and service explanations into the opening while retaining all dates, institutions and the two-year plus at-least-eight-year commitment. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **The geographic choice and first cohort**: Use Ifill's own regional explanation, her Chambers example and Briana Hayes's published background to show the program's relationship to Southern communities. - `rewrite` — **Maryland teaching and Westminster Hall**: Place the full teaching history beside the faculty appointment and present the documented Baltimore town hall as a distinct public exchange. - `rewrite` — **LDF research and the historical record**: Combine repeated institutional explanations while keeping the institute, organizing division, archives and full book reference. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **The Howard symposium closing**: End with the actual March 28 conversation about DuVernay's films as classroom tools and a selective quotation about the subjects those films address. ### BEFORE #### Sherrilyn A. Ifill Voting Rights · Constitutional Law · Racial Justice > “It is a battle as robustly fought today as ever in the courts, in states, and in the halls of Congress. ##### Fifty Lawyers for the South Sherrilyn A. Ifill helped establish the Marshall-Motley Scholars Program to fund and train civil rights lawyers for Black communities in the South. Her work now continues at Howard Law, where she leads the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy. On January 18, 2021, Sherrilyn Ifill helped launch a program that would pay for the education and training of fifty aspiring civil rights lawyers committed to serving Black communities in the South. Ifill, then president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, developed the Marshall-Motley Scholars Program with Janai Nelson, the organization’s associate director-counsel. An anonymous donor committed $40 million to the program. The scholarship covered law school tuition, room, board, and incidental expenses. Students would also receive summer internships and specialized training, followed by a two-year fellowship with a civil rights organization practicing in the South. The commitment extended beyond the fellowship. Scholars agreed to spend at least eight additional years practicing civil rights law in the region. The program joined financial support to supervised experience and sustained service in the communities it was established to reach. ###### From Selection to Practice The program took the names of Thurgood Marshall, LDF’s founder and the first Black Supreme Court justice, and Constance Baker Motley, the civil rights litigator who became the first Black woman to serve as a federal judge. Its professional preparation included training offered by LDF and the National Academy of Sciences. LDF announced the first ten scholars on May 17, 2021, the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. The scholarship paid living expenses as well as tuition, addressing costs that could otherwise push graduates toward jobs outside civil rights practice. By May 6, 2025, the fifth cohort had brought the program to its initial goal of fifty selected scholars. Their backgrounds included environmental justice, voting rights, public service, organizing, and community advocacy. ###### A Practice Built in the South Ifill earned her undergraduate degree in English at Vassar College in 1984 and her law degree at New York University in 1987. She began her career with an ACLU fellowship, then joined LDF as an assistant counsel in 1988. At LDF, she litigated voting rights cases in the South, working with senior attorneys Pamela Karlan and Lani Guinier. She spent five years in that practice before joining the University of Maryland law faculty in Baltimore in 1993. She returned to LDF in 2013 as its seventh president and director-counsel and led the organization until 2022. The Marshall-Motley program was launched during that tenure, drawing on the organization’s longstanding work with Southern lawyers and communities. ###### Students, Clients, and Community Testimony During her twenty years at Maryland, Ifill taught Civil Procedure and Constitutional Law and developed clinical and practice courses. She co-founded a clinic addressing legal barriers faced by people returning to their communities after incarceration. Her teaching and advocacy also addressed environmental justice, voting rights, judicial diversity and impartiality, and the relationship between civil rights and the criminal legal system. Her work brought residents into discussions about the institutions exercising power over them. While leading LDF, she co-hosted a Baltimore town hall with the law school and Congressman Elijah Cummings that brought city residents together with lawyers from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. The meeting addressed federal findings about unconstitutional policing of Black residents. Justice Department attorneys used what residents told them in negotiations over the consent decree between the federal government, Baltimore, and its police department. ###### Research and the Legal Record Under Ifill’s leadership, LDF established the Thurgood Marshall Institute as a multidisciplinary research arm, developed a grassroots organizing division, and created an archives department to preserve its legal history. These became additional institutional resources alongside its litigation and policy work. Her own scholarship examined how racial violence continued to affect communities long after the immediate events. Her 2007 book, On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century, addressed the legacy of lynching and the work of reconciliation. ###### The Fourteenth Amendment at Howard Ifill now works at Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C., as the Vernon Jordan Distinguished Professor in Civil Rights and founding director of the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy. Howard announced the center’s launch on March 27, 2025, after development that began in 2023. Its work brings legal study together with education, business, the arts, and public participation in democratic institutions. The center organizes its work around law and policy; education and curriculum; art, imagination, and narrative; and democratic institutions. It invites law students, advocates, community activists, business leaders, artists, and other members of the public into teaching and scholarship about the amendment. Ifill directs that work at the law school where Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall helped develop the litigation strategy against legal segregation. The center’s program extends her teaching and institution-building to the amendment’s promises of citizenship, equal protection, and due process. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Vernon Jordan Distinguished Professor in Civil Rights; Founding Director, 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy - **Organization:** Howard University School of Law - **Practice:** Voting Rights, Constitutional Law, Racial Justice - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Organization:** Howard University School of Law - **Office:** Washington, D.C. - **Website:** profiles.howard.edu - **Email:** Sherrilyn.Ifill@howard.edu ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Sherrilyn A. Ifill Voting Rights · Constitutional Law · Racial Justice > “It is a battle as robustly fought today as ever in the courts, in states, and in the halls of Congress. ##### Fifty Lawyers for the South Sherrilyn A. Ifill helped design a route into civil rights practice that paid for law school, provided supervised experience and asked graduates to make a lasting commitment to Black communities in the South. At Howard Law, she now brings lawyers, students, artists and community members into the study of the Fourteenth Amendment. The program Sherrilyn Ifill helped launch on January 18, 2021, joined a law school scholarship to at least a decade of work after graduation. Developed with Janai Nelson, then associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Marshall-Motley Scholars Program would support fifty aspiring civil rights lawyers. Ifill was LDF’s president and director-counsel. An anonymous donor committed $40 million. The funding covered tuition, room, board and incidental expenses. Students would receive summer internships and specialized training, then a two-year postgraduate fellowship with a civil rights organization practicing in the South. Scholars agreed to at least eight additional years of civil rights practice in the region. The support addressed costs that could otherwise steer graduates away from the work they had entered law school to do. Ifill explained the geographic choice: “The majority of Black people in this country still live in the South.” She pointed to continuing barriers to voting, education equity, and racial and economic justice. She also recalled LDF’s earlier investment in Southern Black law firms, including support for Julius Chambers’s practice in North Carolina. The new program renewed that commitment to lawyers rooted in the communities they would serve. ###### From Selection to Practice The program honors Thurgood Marshall, LDF’s founder and the first Black Supreme Court justice, and Constance Baker Motley, the civil rights litigator who became the first Black woman to serve as a federal judge. Its professional preparation included training offered by LDF and the National Academy of Sciences. LDF announced the first ten scholars on May 17, 2021, the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Hundreds had applied, and every member of the first cohort came from or had grown up in the South. Briana Hayes, from Baxley, Georgia, had already worked on rural students’ access to higher education and founded 12Tomorrow to improve Black voter turnout in Georgia’s 12th Congressional District. By May 6, 2025, the fifth cohort had brought the program to its initial goal of fifty selected scholars. They brought experience in environmental justice, voting rights, public service, organizing and community advocacy. ###### A Practice Built in the South Ifill had entered civil rights practice through a fellowship herself. After earning an English degree from Vassar College in 1984 and a law degree from New York University in 1987, she began her career at the ACLU. She joined LDF as an assistant counsel in 1988 and spent five years litigating voting rights cases in the South with senior attorneys Pamela Karlan and Lani Guinier. In 1993, she joined the University of Maryland law faculty in Baltimore. Over twenty years, she taught Civil Procedure and Constitutional Law and developed clinical and practice courses. She co-founded a clinic challenging legal barriers faced by people returning to their communities after incarceration. Her teaching and advocacy also addressed environmental justice, voting rights, judicial diversity and impartiality, and the relationship between civil rights and the criminal legal system. Ifill returned to LDF in 2013 as its seventh president and director-counsel and led the organization until 2022. Marshall-Motley was launched during that tenure, drawing on LDF’s longstanding work with Southern lawyers and communities. ###### Listening in Westminster Hall While leading LDF, Ifill returned to the Maryland law school to co-host a Baltimore town hall with the school and Congressman Elijah Cummings. Residents packed Westminster Hall to speak with lawyers from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division about federal findings of unconstitutional policing of Black residents. The Justice Department attorneys used what they heard in negotiations over the consent decree between the federal government, Baltimore and its police department. Ifill’s part was to help bring the residents and negotiating lawyers into the same room, where community experience could inform the terms of reform. ###### Research and the Legal Record Ifill also expanded the resources supporting LDF’s litigation and policy work. Under her leadership, the organization established the Thurgood Marshall Institute as a multidisciplinary research arm, developed a grassroots organizing division and created an archives department to preserve its legal history. Her own scholarship examined how communities continued to live with the consequences of racial violence. In her 2007 book, On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century, she addressed the continuing effects of lynching and the work of reconciliation. ###### The Fourteenth Amendment at Howard Ifill now serves at Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C., as the Vernon Jordan Distinguished Professor in Civil Rights and founding director of the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy. Howard announced the center’s launch on March 27, 2025, after development that began in 2023. Its four areas of work are law and policy; education and curriculum; art, imagination and narrative; and democratic institutions. Teaching and scholarship bring law students, advocates, community activists, business leaders, artists and other members of the public into discussions of the amendment and participation in democratic life. Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall had helped develop a litigation strategy against legal segregation at Howard. Ifill’s teaching and the center’s public work address the same amendment’s promises of citizenship, equal protection and due process. At the March 28 launch symposium, Ifill led discussions with historians, judges and community activists and spoke with filmmaker Ava DuVernay. She described 13TH and Selma as classroom tools and recalled her students’ responses to DuVernay’s work. “They’re all just dealing with these subjects — who we are, the constructs that hold us, the stories that are told about us.” ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Vernon Jordan Distinguished Professor in Civil Rights; Founding Director, 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy - **Organization:** Howard University School of Law - **Practice:** Voting Rights, Constitutional Law, Racial Justice - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Organization:** Howard University School of Law - **Office:** Washington, D.C. - **Website:** profiles.howard.edu - **Email:** Sherrilyn.Ifill@howard.edu --- ## 29. Alec Karakatsanis — `900005228` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `ff6c88cb3b3b4ad1b4104929e721423edc87669d4e51f0740812025a38e53b04` - **After/current hash:** `474a0dc2fdbbee15104969c5e69cc24ad727b2f90e3601cdac792ad222bbeea8` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005228/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **O'Donnell's hearing and original complaint**: Consolidate the opening, give her exact reply its request-for-counsel context and correct employment duration and original-signatory attribution. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Public defense and the Montgomery conversation**: Use current official biography, the original signature block and Karakatsanis's own published client recollection to bring his professional formation into focus. - `rewrite` — **Payment, risk and the hearing evidence**: Merge repeated payment/risk explanations into Ford's example and combine related figures while preserving every count, percentage and competing expert calculation. - `rewrite` — **The decree's operative protections**: Distinguish actual exception categories, other lawful holds and affordable versus unaffordable secured bail using the court's approval order and full official Rule 9. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Continued work in the enforcement proceedings**: End with Karakatsanis's actual May 22, 2026 appearance and retain the original expressly dated July status and scheduling record. - `rewrite` — **O'Donnell's hearing and original complaint**: Consolidate the opening, give her exact reply its request-for-counsel context and correct employment duration and original-signatory attribution. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Public defense and the Montgomery conversation**: Use current official biography, the original signature block and Karakatsanis's own published client recollection to bring his professional formation into focus. - `rewrite` — **Payment, risk and the hearing evidence**: Merge repeated payment/risk explanations into Ford's example and combine related figures while preserving every count, percentage and competing expert calculation. - `rewrite` — **The decree's operative protections**: Distinguish actual exception categories, other lawful holds and affordable versus unaffordable secured bail using the court's approval order and full official Rule 9. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Continued work in the enforcement proceedings**: End with Karakatsanis's actual May 22, 2026 appearance and retain the original expressly dated July status and scheduling record. ### BEFORE #### Alec Karakatsanis Constitutional Litigation · Money Bail · Civil Rights > “I have long been interested in the chasm between how the law is written and how the law is lived. ##### Fifty Seconds Alec Karakatsanis and his co-counsel challenged Harris County’s money-bail process through the records of misdemeanor arrestees, 121 hearing recordings, and eight days of evidence. Their litigation produced a 2019 consent decree requiring prompt release for most misdemeanor defendants and counseled, individualized hearings for those who remained detained. At about seven in the morning on May 19, 2016, Maranda O’Donnell appeared by video before a Harris County hearing officer. A Pretrial Services report completed hours earlier recommended release on a personal bond, without money posted in advance. O’Donnell had been arrested for driving with an invalid license. The secured amount attached to the charge schedule was $2,500. Deputies told her not to speak during the proceeding, and no lawyer stood beside her to present her finances or challenge the scheduled figure. The hearing officer said she did not qualify for a personal bond and would have to pay the money. O’Donnell’s only recorded words were “Seeking help.” The hearing ended after roughly fifty seconds, leaving the scheduled secured amount unchanged and unexplained. Her financial condition was not obscure. She had no money available, relied on food assistance, stayed with a friend, and had recently obtained work that the employer would hold for only seven days. The schedule converted those circumstances into continued custody. Later that day, O’Donnell filed the federal complaint. Alec Karakatsanis signed it with Elizabeth Rossi, Susanne Pringle, Michael Gervais, Lexie White, and Rebecca Bernhardt. The pleading challenged a countywide process rather than asking only for one person’s release. ###### The Price of the Door Texas bail could be secured or unsecured. A secured bond required money from the arrested person or a third-party surety before release. An unsecured bond required no advance payment, but made the person liable for the amount after nonappearance or breach of conditions. Commercial sureties usually charged a nonrefundable premium near ten percent, sometimes more on smaller bonds. The customer permanently lost that payment even after every required court appearance. Release required access to cash or credit to cover the bond or the surety’s premium. Robert Ford made the distinction concrete. The record described safety concerns, yet a $5,000 secured bond allowed immediate release if he could post the full amount or pay a bondsman roughly $500. Without either sum, the same information produced detention. The payment changed custody without changing the facts available to the decisionmaker. A premium purchased a surety’s undertaking; it supplied no new testimony about flight, no additional evidence about safety, and no explanation for rejecting less restrictive conditions. The plaintiffs had to show that scheduled money functioned as an unreviewed detention order for people who lacked it, while people with the same assessed risk could leave by purchasing access to the door. ###### One Hundred Twenty-One Recordings The plaintiffs placed 121 initial-hearing recordings before the district court. Twenty-six lasted less than one minute. Ninety-eight ended within two and a half minutes, and 115 within four; several in-absentia proceedings consumed only twenty to twenty-eight seconds. On paper, Texas law required individual assessment. The schedule was formally nonmandatory, and officials were supposed to consider ability to pay, the charge, community safety, and information from Pretrial Services. The County relied on those written safeguards as evidence that the system allowed discretion. The recordings and outcome data described a different operating rule. The plaintiffs’ expert calculated 88.9 percent adherence to the prescheduled amount; the defense expert calculated 80.7 percent. The court credited the higher figure but found either measure reflected dominant schedule conformity. Pretrial Services recommendations rarely overcame that pattern. In 2016, hearing officers rejected standard personal-bond recommendations in 50.4 percent of cases and enhanced-condition recommendations in 78.9 percent. Across recommendation categories, the court found 66.3 percent of personal-bond recommendations rejected. Downward movement at the lowest end was almost nonexistent. Bail below $500 appeared in four cases among nearly 51,000 misdemeanor filings in 2015 and six among almost 50,000 in 2016. The schedule’s floor was functioning as a custody threshold. ###### What Followed the Hearing A nominal review occurred at the next-business-day appearance before a County Judge. In practice, arrested people often waited days. Judges adjusted bail or granted unsecured bonds in fewer than one percent of the cases the district court examined. Counsel usually arrived only later. Until appointment, people confronted the choice without an advocate who could gather records, propose conditions, or test the basis for detention. Time-served plea offers at the review hearing added pressure to resolve the criminal case rather than remain jailed. More than 26,000 misdemeanor detainees had waited beyond forty-eight hours for a first County Judge appearance; more than 6,800 waited beyond ninety-six hours. On a typical day, substantial numbers had already spent three, five, or ten days in custody. Pretrial detention carried consequences before guilt was adjudicated: missed work, disrupted caregiving, lost housing, and pressure to plead. The district court treated those effects as part of the practical difference between a person who could buy release and one who could not. O’Donnell left after three days when a commercial surety posted the bond following the lawsuit’s filing. No intervening individualized explanation had transformed the scheduled number into a risk finding. ###### Eight Days of Proof The preliminary-injunction hearing lasted eight days. The parties presented fact and expert witnesses, hundreds of exhibits, thousands of hearing recordings, and competing accounts of whether the formal rules or the recurring outcomes best described Harris County’s bail process. The system processed roughly 50,000 Class A and Class B misdemeanor arrests each year. At that volume, the short hearing was a design question: could the process perform the individualized work its written rules demanded? The risk-assessment structure sharpened the inquiry. Poverty indicators such as not owning a car could receive the same point value as prior criminal violations or failures to appear. A tool intended to estimate risk could therefore translate economic instability into a recommendation against release. The court certified a class of misdemeanor arrestees detained because they could not pay secured money bail. Common questions concerned the schedule, the hearing process, the absence of findings, and whether wealth determined release before an adequate inquiry into alternatives. Karakatsanis supplied an affidavit with the original class motion, obtained pro hac vice admission, appeared at hearings, and remained in the case through settlement proceedings. The work was collective: named plaintiffs, local counsel, Civil Rights Corps, the Texas Civil Rights Project, Susman Godfrey, experts, and community partners built different parts of the record. ###### Local Rule Nine After elected County leadership changed, the parties negotiated a settlement approved in November 2019. Local Rule 9 replaced the old schedule-driven pathway for most misdemeanor arrests with prompt personal-bond release, while preserving specified exceptions requiring judicial review. Those exceptions included categories tied to criminal history, prior nonappearance or noncompliance, intoxication, family-violence and protective-order circumstances, other bond conditions, immigration detainers, and relevant holds. The decree did not create automatic release for every misdemeanor case. For a person who remained detained, the rule required a counseled individualized hearing within forty-eight hours, notice of the issues, an opportunity to present and confront evidence, and recorded reasons. Ability to pay and less restrictive alternatives had to enter the decision. Secured money could remain only after clear-and-convincing findings that no other condition or combination would reasonably assure appearance and prevent new criminal activity. Any financial requirement had to be narrowly tailored rather than imported automatically from the charge schedule. The decree established seven years of monitoring, six-month reports during the first three years, later annual review, public meetings, and data access for monitors and class counsel. The court approved the negotiated system as fair and reasonable over objections that it exceeded federal authority or conflicted with Texas law. ###### Monitoring the Decree The monitoring record continued. A corrected ninth report was filed in March 2026; the Attorney General objected, and the court overruled those objections in May. It also denied a request to expedite a ruling and stay enforcement while the vacatur dispute proceeded. The May 26 scheduling order set expert designations for August 10, fact discovery for August 24, amended motions for October 1, and a hearing for November 16, 2026. The court held a status conference on July 17 and entered a further order on July 23. As of July 25, 2026, the decree remained in effect. Karakatsanis remains Civil Rights Corps’ founder and executive director. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founder and Executive Director - **Organization:** Civil Rights Corps - **Practice:** Constitutional Litigation, Money Bail, Civil Rights - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Organization:** Civil Rights Corps - **Office:** Washington, D.C. - **Website:** civilrightscorps.org - **Email:** contact@civilrightscorps.org - **Phone:** 202-844-4975 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Alec Karakatsanis Constitutional Litigation · Money Bail · Civil Rights > “I have long been interested in the chasm between how the law is written and how the law is lived. ##### Fifty Seconds Alec Karakatsanis and his co-counsel used misdemeanor arrestees’ accounts, 121 hearing recordings and eight days of evidence to challenge Harris County’s money-bail process. The 2019 consent decree they secured required prompt release for most misdemeanor defendants and counseled, individualized hearings for those who remained detained. At about seven in the morning on May 19, 2016, Maranda O’Donnell appeared by video before a Harris County hearing officer. A Pretrial Services report completed four hours earlier recommended a personal bond, which would allow her release without money paid in advance. She had been arrested for driving with an invalid license. The charge schedule set secured bail at $2,500. Deputies told her not to speak, and no lawyer was there to present her finances or challenge the amount. The hearing officer said she did not qualify for a personal bond. Asked whether she would hire a lawyer or seek appointed counsel, she answered, “Seeking help.” Those were her only recorded words. After roughly fifty seconds, the scheduled amount remained in place, without explanation. O’Donnell had no money available. She relied on food assistance, stayed with a friend and had held her new job for only seven days. The release recommended by Pretrial Services was beyond her means once the hearing officer required payment. Alec Karakatsanis signed the federal complaint filed that day. He and the other lawyers sought relief for a class of people detained because they could not pay, reaching beyond O’Donnell’s individual release. His co-counsel in the litigation included Elizabeth Rossi, Susanne Pringle, Michael Gervais, Lexie White, Rebecca Bernhardt and Neal Manne. ###### A Public Defender’s Work Karakatsanis had worked as a federal public defender in Alabama and as a civil rights lawyer and public defender in the District of Columbia’s Public Defender Service, including its Special Litigation Division. He graduated from Yale in 2005, studying Ethics, Politics and Economics, and from Harvard Law School in 2008. Before founding Civil Rights Corps, he co-founded Equal Justice Under Law, the organization listed beside his name on O’Donnell’s original complaint. He later recalled an evening in a Montgomery jail early in his career, preparing a client for court the next morning. A joke made them both laugh. Then the client said quietly, “I don’t think anyone has smiled at me in a couple weeks.” Years later, Karakatsanis was still considering what that remark said about the society outside the jail. ###### The Price of Release Texas bail could be secured or unsecured. Secured bail required money from the arrested person or a third-party surety before release. An unsecured bond required no advance payment, but made the person liable for the amount after nonappearance or breach of conditions. Commercial sureties usually charged a nonrefundable premium of about ten percent, sometimes more on smaller bonds. Even a person who made every court appearance permanently lost that payment. Release depended on access to cash or credit. Robert Ford’s risk assessment described safety concerns, yet a $5,000 secured bond allowed immediate release if he could post the full amount or pay a bondsman roughly $500. He could afford neither. The payment would have changed his custody without adding testimony about flight, evidence about safety or a reason to reject less restrictive conditions; it purchased the surety’s undertaking. Karakatsanis and his co-counsel had to establish that scheduled money operated as detention for people who lacked it. A person with the same assessed risk and sufficient money could leave. The plaintiffs tested the county’s claim that its hearing process already allowed meaningful individual decisions. ###### One Hundred Twenty-One Recordings The plaintiffs submitted 121 recordings of initial hearings. Twenty-six lasted less than a minute; ninety-eight ended within two and a half minutes, and 115 within four. Several proceedings held in the arrested person’s absence took only twenty to twenty-eight seconds. Texas law called for individual assessment. Officials were supposed to consider ability to pay, the charge, community safety and information from Pretrial Services. The schedule was formally nonmandatory. Harris County relied on those written safeguards to defend the discretion available to its hearing officers. The parties’ experts examined what the officers actually did. The plaintiffs’ expert, Stephen Demuth, calculated that officers followed the prescheduled amount in 88.9 percent of cases. The defense expert, Robert Morris, calculated 80.7 percent. U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal credited the higher figure, while finding that either showed the schedule dominating decisions. Recommendations for personal bonds often went unheeded. In 2016, hearing officers rejected 50.4 percent of recommendations for standard conditions and 78.9 percent for enhanced conditions. Reviewing the earlier annual data, the court found an overall rejection rate of 66.3 percent. Below the schedule’s $500 minimum, officers set bail in only four of nearly 51,000 misdemeanor cases in 2015 and six of almost 50,000 in 2016. ###### What Followed the Hearing A further review was supposed to occur at the next-business-day appearance before a County Criminal Court judge. People often waited days for it. The judges adjusted bail or granted unsecured bonds in fewer than one percent of the cases examined by the district court. More than 26,000 misdemeanor detainees had waited beyond forty-eight hours for that first appearance, and more than 6,800 beyond ninety-six hours. On a typical day, substantial numbers had spent three, five or ten days in custody. Counsel generally arrived only later, leaving people without an advocate to gather records, propose conditions or test the basis for detention. At the review hearing, time-served plea offers could make an immediate guilty plea the route home. Detention disrupted work and caregiving, threatened housing and increased pressure to plead before guilt had been adjudicated. The district court considered those consequences when comparing the treatment of people who could pay with those who could not. O’Donnell was released after three days, when a commercial surety posted her bond following the lawsuit’s filing. Her release followed payment; no intervening individualized explanation had turned the scheduled amount into a finding about risk. ###### Eight Days of Proof Over eight days at the preliminary-injunction hearing, the parties presented fact and expert witnesses, hundreds of exhibits and thousands of hearing recordings. The county processed roughly 50,000 Class A and Class B misdemeanor arrests a year. The evidence tested whether its short hearings performed the individual assessment its written rules required. The plaintiffs also examined the risk-assessment tool. Poverty indicators, including not owning a car, could receive the same point value as prior criminal violations or failures to appear. Economic instability could therefore contribute to a recommendation against release. Rosenthal certified a class of misdemeanor arrestees detained because they could not pay secured money bail. Their common questions concerned the schedule, hearing procedures, missing findings and whether wealth determined release before adequate consideration of alternatives. Karakatsanis supplied an affidavit with the original class motion, obtained permission to appear in the case and participated in hearings and settlement proceedings. Named plaintiffs, local counsel, Civil Rights Corps, the Texas Civil Rights Project, the Texas Fair Defense Project, Susman Godfrey, experts and community partners contributed to the litigation. ###### Local Rule Nine After elected county leadership changed, the parties negotiated the settlement Rosenthal approved in November 2019. Local Rule 9 required prompt personal-bond release for most misdemeanor arrests, with specified exceptions permitting detention for an individualized hearing. The exceptions addressed particular family-violence and protective-order circumstances, specified repeat intoxicated-driving charges, new offenses while on pretrial release, warrants following bond forfeiture or revocation, and arrest while under community supervision. Separate provisions addressed temporary detention for sobriety and other lawful holds, including immigration detainers. Release in the misdemeanor case did not necessarily mean release from another lawful hold. A person who remained detained had to receive an individualized hearing within forty-eight hours, with counsel, notice, an opportunity to present and confront evidence, and reasons placed on the record. The decision had to address ability to pay and less restrictive alternatives. When secured money bail was permitted, the judicial officer had to find by clear and convincing evidence either that the person could pay or that no less restrictive conditions could reasonably protect community safety or guard against flight. Unaffordable bail could not be imposed without the latter findings. Financial conditions required individual justification and had to be narrowly tailored; the charge schedule could no longer supply the answer automatically. The decree required seven years of monitoring, reports every six months during the first three years and annual review thereafter, public meetings, and access to data for monitors and class counsel. Rosenthal approved the agreement as fair and reasonable over objections that it exceeded federal authority or conflicted with Texas law. ###### Monitoring the Decree A corrected ninth monitor’s report was filed in March 2026. In May, the court overruled the Attorney General’s objections to it and denied a request to expedite a ruling and stay enforcement while the dispute over vacating the decree proceeded. The May 26 scheduling order set expert designations for August 10, fact discovery for August 24, amended motions for October 1 and a hearing for November 16, 2026. The court held a status conference on July 17 and entered a further order on July 23. As of July 25, the decree remained in effect. Karakatsanis continues to lead Civil Rights Corps as its founder and executive director. His work in Harris County extended from the original complaint and class affidavit to proceedings over the decree’s continued enforcement. At the May 22, 2026 status conference, he appeared with other counsel before Rosenthal, nearly ten years to the day after O’Donnell filed suit. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founder and Executive Director - **Organization:** Civil Rights Corps - **Practice:** Constitutional Litigation, Money Bail, Civil Rights - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Organization:** Civil Rights Corps - **Office:** Washington, D.C. - **Website:** civilrightscorps.org - **Email:** contact@civilrightscorps.org - **Phone:** 202-844-4975 --- ## 30. Alphonse A. Gerhardstein — `900005227` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `2411537317087ac99a45e83909096927b5152f96e5974e94b4ce3dacfed18bdb` - **After/current hash:** `30d69af09fab0735091aab3de2fa5eb57c4f39757f3aaa0781986685a99751ce` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005227/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Wedding-news opening**: Use the documented news coverage that drew Gerhardstein's attention and his recognition of the approaching certificate problem. - `rewrite` — **Emergency orders and chronology**: Explain the comparison with other out-of-state marriages once and place August and September events before Arthur's October death. - `rewrite` — **Funeral director and permanent relief**: Explain Grunn's actual client standing and consolidate repeated certificate uses and implementation summaries without losing any obligation. - `rewrite` — **Appeals and Supreme Court**: Combine repeated procedural sections while keeping all six cases, four States, two questions, counsel roles, date, vote and resulting holdings. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Client recollection closing**: End with Obergefell's 2020 account of his thought of Arthur and walking arm in arm with Gerhardstein after the 2015 decision. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Wedding-news opening**: Use the documented news coverage that drew Gerhardstein's attention and his recognition of the approaching certificate problem. - `rewrite` — **Emergency orders and chronology**: Explain the comparison with other out-of-state marriages once and place August and September events before Arthur's October death. - `rewrite` — **Funeral director and permanent relief**: Explain Grunn's actual client standing and consolidate repeated certificate uses and implementation summaries without losing any obligation. - `rewrite` — **Appeals and Supreme Court**: Combine repeated procedural sections while keeping all six cases, four States, two questions, counsel roles, date, vote and resulting holdings. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Client recollection closing**: End with Obergefell's 2020 account of his thought of Arthur and walking arm in arm with Gerhardstein after the 2015 decision. ### BEFORE #### Alphonse A. Gerhardstein Civil Rights · Marriage Equality · Police Accountability > “The last record of a person’s life on Earth should accurately state if the decedent is married and accurately name the surviving spouse. ##### The Surviving Spouse Ohio would mark John Arthur unmarried and leave the surviving-spouse field blank, omitting James Obergefell from his husband’s death record. Al Gerhardstein built the case outward from that threatened omission—through emergency relief, a funeral director’s data terminal, and two Supreme Court questions. When John Arthur and James Obergefell sued Ohio officials on July 19, 2013, the State’s marriage-recognition ban threatened two fields on Arthur’s future death record. “Marital status at time of death” would read “unmarried.” “Surviving spouse” would be blank, excluding Obergefell. Arthur and Obergefell had shared a life in Cincinnati for more than twenty years. Arthur had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, was receiving hospice care, and faced a terminal disease whose progression made the timing of the record dispute immediate rather than theoretical. On July 11, 2013, friends and family helped finance a medically equipped flight to Maryland. Arthur and Obergefell married inside the aircraft while it sat on the tarmac in Anne Arundel County, then returned to Ohio the same day. Maryland recognized the marriage. Ohio statutes and a state constitutional amendment denied it legal force, even though Ohio ordinarily recognized out-of-state marriages that its own law would not authorize, including certain marriages of cousins and minors. Alphonse Gerhardstein filed the federal action with the couple on July 19. The defendants included the local registrar charged with accepting death certificates and ensuring the accuracy of the personal information entered into Ohio’s vital-record system. ###### Three Days to an Order Three days later, Judge Timothy Black ruled on the request for emergency relief. The speed came from the document’s approaching finality: Arthur was expected to die soon, and Ohio’s ordinary processing rules would convert the recognition ban into an official record. The court applied the four familiar injunction factors: likelihood of success, irreparable harm, harm to others, and the public interest. The certificate would be created at death and used immediately, giving the threatened constitutional injury unusual finality. Ohio’s treatment of other out-of-state marriages supplied the comparator. The State accepted some marriages between first cousins and some involving minors when valid where celebrated, yet singled out lawful same-sex marriages for nonrecognition. The threatened harm extended beyond terminology. The order connected the certificate to Arthur’s burial wishes: his family plot permitted descendants and married spouses, and an inaccurate marital record could obstruct or delay the arrangements he had made. The operative order remained narrow. It applied to the two plaintiffs, restrained the local registrar from accepting a certificate that omitted “married” and Obergefell as surviving spouse, required no bond, and initially carried a defined expiration date. ###### After Arthur Died Arthur died on October 22, 2013. His death certificate was issued in compliance with the court’s order, recording the marriage and Obergefell’s status rather than the entries Ohio law would otherwise have required. Death changed the procedural posture but did not erase the system that had produced the dispute. Ohio sought dismissal, while the plaintiffs argued that the certificate remained vulnerable and that the same rules would confront other couples without time to prepare an emergency case. David Michener supplied that second circumstance. He and William Ives had married in Delaware; Ives died unexpectedly on August 27. While cremation awaited a death certificate, Michener joined the pending action and obtained a second emergency recognition order. Judge Black emphasized the difference. Arthur’s gradual decline allowed him and Obergefell to forecast the record problem. Michener could act on short notice because a live case, prepared lawyers, and an existing restraining order were already in place. The litigation therefore moved from preserving one certificate to examining a recurring administrative process. A third plaintiff, funeral director Robert Grunn, placed the person who actually originated death records inside the case. ###### The Person Who Entered the Record Grunn used Ohio’s Electronic Death Registration System. He collected marital status and a surviving spouse’s name from next of kin, entered the information, signed the certificate, and delivered completed records into the State’s filing structure. Those certified records carried consequences through other institutions. Families used them for life-insurance payments, Social Security survivor benefits, wills, automobile titles, real property, and estate administration—transactions for which the marital field served as evidence rather than ornament. Grunn intended to record future lawful same-sex marriages accurately. Ohio law, however, exposed a funeral director to criminal consequences for a purposely false entry, and the State had not disavowed enforcement if he listed a same-sex spouse contrary to the recognition ban. His clients could not enter the electronic system themselves and lacked statutory authority to register a death. The court described them as dependent on the funeral director for a function that grief and urgency often forced them to understand only after certified copies arrived. That dependence answered the standing problem. The threatened prosecution was neither imaginary nor speculative, and Grunn’s place in the workflow allowed the case to reach future records without waiting for another spouse to litigate during a death. ###### A Remedy Built Into the Workflow On December 23, 2013, the district court entered final declaratory and injunctive relief. The ruling was expressly as applied and confined to recognition on death certificates; it was not a nationwide license mandate or a facial invalidation of every Ohio marriage provision. The judgment required the covered records to identify a decedent as married or widowed and to acknowledge the surviving spouse by name. Without permanent relief, even Arthur’s court-compliant certificate could have been amended to remove Obergefell and the marriage. Grunn received a parallel protection. State officials were barred from initiating criminal prosecution or administrative discipline when he accurately recorded a lawful same-sex marriage and surviving spouse on a certificate completed in his professional work. The order also assigned implementation. Ohio’s health director had to make a best-faith effort to notify everyone who assisted with completing death certificates and then file an affidavit documenting compliance by March 31, 2014. Gerhardstein led the representation of Arthur, Obergefell, Michener, and Grunn. Jacklyn Gonzales Martin and the firm’s lawyers, clerks, paralegals, graduates, and staff worked on the Ohio case with him. ###### The Ohio Appeals The Sixth Circuit consolidated six marriage cases from Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee. Some concerned licenses, others recognition; some arose from births, others deaths. The combination enlarged the constitutional question without dissolving each record’s distinct injury. Gerhardstein personally argued for the Ohio appellees in the Obergefell and Henry appeals, presenting both the death-certificate ruling and the separate Ohio birth-certificate litigation before the circuit panel. ###### Counsel of Record Gerhardstein served as counsel of record for James Obergefell and the Ohio petitioners in the Supreme Court. Their petition for certiorari asked the Court to review the recognition ban that had begun with the death-certificate fields. On January 16, 2015, the Court granted review and separated the consolidated dispute into two questions: whether States must license same-sex marriages and whether they must recognize lawful same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. The consolidated team assigned oral presentation by question. Mary Bonauto presented the petitioners’ licensing case, with Solicitor General Donald Verrilli appearing for the United States; Douglas Hallward-Driemeier argued recognition. Gerhardstein remained responsible for the Ohio petitioners as counsel of record. Couples and legal teams from four States supplied different facts, claims, briefs, and advocates. Gerhardstein carried the Ohio petitioners’ case from the Cincinnati emergency filing through district-court implementation, Sixth Circuit argument, and Supreme Court counsel-of-record responsibility. ###### Two Questions, Five Votes On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court held by five votes to four that the Fourteenth Amendment required every State to license marriages between two people of the same sex and to recognize lawful same-sex marriages performed in another State. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion organized the right around four principles and traditions. It also described marriage as the source of a constellation of governmental rights and responsibilities, expressly including survivor interests and birth and death certificates. The opinion returned to Arthur and Obergefell. Ohio’s rule would have made them legal strangers at death, placing a state-imposed separation into the permanent record. The consolidated cases concerned licenses denied, spouses omitted, children left with incomplete parentage, and state systems distributing marriage’s legal consequences unequally. The Court’s holding required those systems to recognize the marriages on equal terms. ###### The Certificate After Obergefell Two years later, Pavan v. Smith tested the holding inside another vital-record system. Arkansas generally placed a married birth mother’s male spouse on a child’s birth certificate even when an anonymous donor, rather than the husband, supplied the genetic relationship. Arkansas described the certificate as a record of biology and omitted the female spouses of women who gave birth. The existing husband rule exposed the mismatch: the State was already using the certificate to confer marital parentage when genetics pointed elsewhere. The Supreme Court summarily reversed. Obergefell promised civil marriage on the same terms and conditions, and birth certificates were among the linked benefits the Court had named. Once Arkansas used the form to recognize married parents, it could not reserve that recognition for opposite-sex spouses. For the Ohio couples Gerhardstein represented, recognition meant a death certificate that recorded the marriage and named the surviving spouse. The orders also protected the funeral director who entered that information and directed the health department to make a best-faith effort to notify those who completed the records. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Of Counsel - **Organization:** Friedman, Gilbert + Gerhardstein - **Practice:** Civil Rights, Marriage Equality, Police Accountability - **Location:** Cincinnati, Ohio ##### Contact - **Firm:** Friedman, Gilbert + Gerhardstein - **Office:** Cincinnati, Ohio - **Website:** fggfirm.com ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Alphonse A. Gerhardstein Civil Rights · Marriage Equality · Police Accountability > “The last record of a person’s life on Earth should accurately state if the decedent is married and accurately name the surviving spouse. ##### The Surviving Spouse Al Gerhardstein saw what Ohio would leave out of John Arthur’s death certificate: the marriage he had just celebrated and the husband who would survive him. The case grew from an emergency order for one couple to protection for a funeral director’s clients, then to the Supreme Court’s recognition of marriages across state lines. The wedding news caught Al Gerhardstein’s attention. John Arthur and James Obergefell had flown from Cincinnati to Maryland to marry, a journey made possible by a medical aircraft that friends and family helped finance. Gerhardstein, a Cincinnati civil rights lawyer, recognized a problem waiting for them at home. Ohio would treat Arthur as unmarried when he died and leave Obergefell out of the space for his surviving spouse. The couple had been together for more than twenty years. Arthur had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and was receiving hospice care. On July 11, 2013, they married inside the aircraft on the tarmac in Anne Arundel County and returned to Ohio the same day. Maryland recognized their marriage; Ohio’s statutes and constitution denied it legal force. Gerhardstein filed their federal lawsuit on July 19. It identified the threatened entries precisely. “Marital status at time of death” would read “unmarried.” “Surviving spouse” would be blank. Among the defendants was Cincinnati’s local registrar, responsible for accepting death certificates and ensuring the accuracy of the personal information entered into Ohio’s records. The requested order would reach the official who had to accept Arthur’s certificate. ###### Three Days to an Order Judge Timothy Black granted emergency relief on July 22. Arthur was expected to die soon; the certificate would be created at his death and put to use immediately. Gerhardstein and his colleagues had to address the four factors the court weighed: likelihood of success on the constitutional claim, irreparable harm without an injunction, harm to others, and the public interest. Ohio’s own treatment of marriages performed elsewhere supplied a comparison. The State recognized certain marriages between first cousins and some involving minors when they were valid where celebrated, although Ohio would not permit those weddings itself. Its refusal to recognize a lawful same-sex marriage singled out Arthur and Obergefell for different treatment. The couple also had burial arrangements to protect. Arthur wanted to be buried in his family plot and to have Obergefell beside him someday. The plot was reserved for descendants and married spouses. A death record that denied their marriage could obstruct those wishes or delay Arthur’s burial. Black’s order applied to the two plaintiffs. It barred the registrar from accepting a certificate that failed to identify Arthur as married and Obergefell as his surviving spouse. No bond was required. The initial order would expire on August 5 unless extended, giving the couple immediate protection while the litigation continued. ###### A Second Husband, a Second Emergency On August 27, William Ives died unexpectedly. He and David Michener had married in Delaware; now his cremation awaited a death certificate. Michener joined the pending action, and on September 3 the court issued a second temporary order requiring recognition of their marriage on the record. For Gerhardstein’s team, preparation for Arthur’s approaching death made a response to Ives’s sudden death possible. Black later described the difference: Arthur and Obergefell had time to anticipate the problem, while Michener could obtain help quickly because lawyers had already prepared the issue and a live case with an existing restraining order was available to him. The lawyers added Cincinnati funeral director Robert Grunn as a plaintiff on September 26. His work would bring him more couples facing the same problem. By including him, they sought protection that could remain available after the deaths at the center of the original claims. Arthur died on October 22. His certificate recorded the marriage and named Obergefell, as the court had ordered. Ohio then sought dismissal, arguing that the deaths of Arthur and Ives left no live controversy and that Grunn could not pursue the claims. The plaintiffs still needed permanent protection for the certificates already issued and a way to protect the couples who would next require them. ###### The Funeral Director’s Signature Grunn gathered personal information from next of kin, including marital status and the surviving spouse’s name. He entered it into Ohio’s Electronic Death Registration System, signed the certificate, and submitted it for registration. His clients could neither enter that system themselves nor exercise the statutory authority to register a death. Families used the certified copies to claim life-insurance payments and Social Security survivor benefits, administer wills and estates, and transfer automobile titles, real property, and other assets. Grief and inexperience often meant they learned how much the certificate mattered only after Grunn returned the copies to them. Grunn intended to identify future clients’ lawful same-sex marriages accurately. Yet a purposely false entry could expose a funeral director to criminal penalties, and Ohio had not disavowed enforcing that law against him if he named a same-sex spouse. The man responsible for signing the record faced a threat of prosecution for recording the marriage his clients had legally entered. Black allowed Grunn to pursue the rights of his clients and future clients. His fear of prosecution was concrete, his professional relationship with those couples was close, and their dependence on him—combined with the urgency surrounding a death—hindered their ability to bring their own lawsuits. These circumstances gave him standing to challenge the rules on their behalf. Another bereaved spouse would not have to assemble a new emergency case before the court could address the recurring injury. ###### The Permanent Order On December 23, 2013, Black entered a declaratory judgment and permanent injunction. The relief was confined to marriage recognition on death certificates for the plaintiffs and the same-sex married clients Grunn served. This was an as-applied ruling, addressing those circumstances; it did not require nationwide marriage licensing or invalidate every application of Ohio’s marriage provisions. The covered records had to identify the decedent as married or widowed and name the surviving spouse. Permanent relief also secured the certificates already issued: without it, Arthur’s record remained subject to amendment that would remove Obergefell and their marriage. The judgment protected Grunn’s work. Officials could not initiate criminal prosecution or administrative discipline against him for accurately recording a lawful same-sex marriage and surviving spouse on a death certificate he completed as a funeral director. Ohio’s health director was ordered to make a best-faith effort to notify everyone in the State who assisted with completing death certificates. By March 31, 2014, he had to file an affidavit documenting compliance. Gerhardstein led the representation of Arthur, Obergefell, Michener, and Grunn. Jacklyn Gonzales Martin and the firm’s other lawyers, clerks, paralegals, graduates, and staff worked with him. ###### Two Questions Before the Supreme Court The Sixth Circuit consolidated six marriage cases from Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee. Gerhardstein argued for the Ohio plaintiffs in the Obergefell and Henry appeals, presenting the death-certificate case alongside separate litigation over birth certificates. Across the four States, couples challenged denied licenses, unrecognized marriages, and records that failed to acknowledge spouses or children’s parents. Gerhardstein then served as counsel of record for Obergefell and the Ohio petitioners in the Supreme Court, asking it to review the refusal to recognize their marriages. On January 16, 2015, the Court granted review of two questions: whether States must license same-sex marriages and whether they must recognize lawful same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. The legal teams divided the oral argument by question. Mary Bonauto presented the petitioners’ licensing case, with Solicitor General Donald Verrilli appearing for the United States. Douglas Hallward-Driemeier argued recognition. Gerhardstein’s responsibility remained the Ohio petitioners’ case as counsel of record, following his work on the emergency filing, district-court relief, and Sixth Circuit argument. The consolidated effort brought together the facts, claims, briefs, and advocates supplied by couples and lawyers from all four States. On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court answered both questions in the couples’ favor, five votes to four. The Fourteenth Amendment required every State to license marriages between two people of the same sex and to recognize lawful same-sex marriages performed in another State. Justice Anthony Kennedy organized the opinion around four principles: personal choice, the intimate union of two people, protection of children and families, and marriage’s place in the legal and social order. The rights and responsibilities attached to marriage included survivor interests and birth and death certificates. Equal recognition reached the state systems that distributed those consequences. Kennedy returned to Arthur and Obergefell’s circumstances. Ohio’s rule would have left them legal strangers at death, imposing a separation in the permanent record after more than two decades together. Their request to have Obergefell named as the surviving spouse was now part of the Court’s explanation of the constitutional right. ###### The Names on the Certificate In 2017, Pavan v. Smith applied Obergefell to birth certificates in Arkansas. The State generally listed a married birth mother’s husband even when a child was conceived with an anonymous sperm donor. Yet it omitted the female spouses of women who gave birth and defended the certificate as a record of biological parentage. The Supreme Court summarily reversed the state court’s judgment. Arkansas already used birth certificates to recognize married parents whose relationship to a child was not genetic. Under Obergefell, it had to extend that marital recognition to same-sex couples on equal terms. Looking back in 2020, Obergefell recalled hearing the decision that June morning five years earlier. In the courtroom, his first thought had been of Arthur: “John, I wish you were here.” He described walking onto the Supreme Court plaza arm in arm with Gerhardstein. Other plaintiffs and lawyers followed. The crowd recognized them, opened a path, and greeted them with cheers, tears, and high fives. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Of Counsel - **Organization:** Friedman, Gilbert + Gerhardstein - **Practice:** Civil Rights, Marriage Equality, Police Accountability - **Location:** Cincinnati, Ohio ##### Contact - **Firm:** Friedman, Gilbert + Gerhardstein - **Office:** Cincinnati, Ohio - **Website:** fggfirm.com --- ## 31. Constance Rice — `900005226` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `dd341af6e415131bf47571010ff6668b7007f5373c2e0e5c991ddc6ffbd93263` - **After/current hash:** `35104cb7baf03249106bb06f8dcbff3738e678824883334041d066234fb50434` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005226/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 3 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Opening and reconstruction of the missing Rampart report**: Consolidate repeated timing and mandate explanations while preserving the report promise, archival search, interview obstacle, quantitative evidence and limits of reconstruction. - `rewrite` — **After-action recommendations and federal consent decree**: Connect each recommendation to the investigative problem and combine the decree and compliance explanations without losing a required system or legal distinction. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **The policy team and official support for prevention**: Use the Ludlow meetings, Rice and Susan Lee's seven working groups, named official supporters and Bratton's endorsement to reveal her choices and working relationships. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Rice's reflection and the congressional closing**: Select a verified 21-word quotation about her engagement with police and end with her actual response to Bobby Scott and prepared description of children's daily safety. - `rewrite` — **Opening and reconstruction of the missing Rampart report**: Consolidate repeated timing and mandate explanations while preserving the report promise, archival search, interview obstacle, quantitative evidence and limits of reconstruction. - `rewrite` — **After-action recommendations and federal consent decree**: Connect each recommendation to the investigative problem and combine the decree and compliance explanations without losing a required system or legal distinction. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **The policy team and official support for prevention**: Use the Ludlow meetings, Rice and Susan Lee's seven working groups, named official supporters and Bratton's endorsement to reveal her choices and working relationships. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Rice's reflection and the congressional closing**: Select a verified 21-word quotation about her engagement with police and end with her actual response to Bobby Scott and prepared description of children's daily safety. - `rewrite` — **Opening and reconstruction of the missing Rampart report**: Consolidate repeated timing and mandate explanations while preserving the report promise, archival search, interview obstacle, quantitative evidence and limits of reconstruction. - `rewrite` — **After-action recommendations and federal consent decree**: Connect each recommendation to the investigative problem and combine the decree and compliance explanations without losing a required system or legal distinction. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **The policy team and official support for prevention**: Use the Ludlow meetings, Rice and Susan Lee's seven working groups, named official supporters and Bratton's endorsement to reveal her choices and working relationships. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Rice's reflection and the congressional closing**: Select a verified 21-word quotation about her engagement with police and end with her actual response to Bobby Scott and prepared description of children's daily safety. ### BEFORE #### Constance Rice Civil Rights · Police Accountability · Public Safety > “Los Angeles could not arrest its way out. ##### The Second Report A March 2000 memorandum called LAPD’s first Rampart inquiry “the first of at least two reports.” The promised sequel would disclose the nature and disposition of every corruption allegation within roughly a year. Six years later, Constance Rice’s panel found three unusable drafts, no centralized archive and no official willing to explain why the accounting had vanished. On March 1, 2000, the Los Angeles police chief transmitted the Rampart Board of Inquiry with a promise. It was “the first of at least two reports.” A public second report would disclose the exact nature and disposition of each corruption allegation. The department expected that accounting approximately one year later. It never appeared. More than six years after the first report, Rice’s panel concluded that LAPD would probably never release the promised after-action report and that the panel’s work would be the closest available substitute. The missing document left a precise public question unanswered. Los Angeles lacked a consolidated account of which allegations had been investigated, how they had been resolved, what the institution had learned and where inquiries had ended without reliable answers. The Police Commission created a blue-ribbon panel in 2003 to assess earlier Rampart reviews, identify obstacles and decide whether sufficient remedies were operating or in progress. Its assignment began after the best moment for reconstructing the scandal had already passed. ###### Reconstructing the Rampart Records The panel traced three attempted drafts: one on administrative investigations, one on criminal matters and one on the Boards of Rights. A former commander recalled rejecting all three because their conclusions were largely unsupported. That commander said he could not remember who had responsibility for completing the drafts or who delivered them. Given the pressure surrounding the report and his own account of rejecting the work, the panel found that assertion incredible and said it limited the inquiry. The underlying records were no easier to assemble. The panel identified approximately 400 internal investigations connected to Rampart and obtained information for eighty-six Boards of Rights, while emphasizing that LAPD itself could not supply a complete count. No centralized repository preserved the Rampart material. Investigators reconstructed complaint numbers, names and disciplinary proceedings from the District Attorney, City Attorney, LAPD Risk Management and private attorneys’ files. Professional Standards personnel then spent more than 300 overtime hours filling gaps. The broken archive set the evidentiary limit. Recurring failures in supervision, investigation, discipline and recordkeeping remained visible, but the definitive contemporaneous account promised while evidence was fresher and responsibility easier to locate was beyond recovery. ###### A Panel After the Moment The Police Commission announced in July 2003 that attorney Connie Rice would head the proposed review. The panel’s public mandate was prospective as well as historical: assess past reviews, identify obstacles and determine whether existing remedies reduced the likelihood of another organizational failure. Rice served as chair alongside panel members and emeriti, an executive director, a lead investigator, additional investigators and staff. Several members brought prior experience examining Rampart, while others contributed criminal-law, civil-rights and institutional expertise. Police Chief William Bratton later called Rice the report’s primary author and thanked both her and the committee. Investigators, panel members, records custodians and interviewees supplied its factual foundation. Rampart Reconsidered examined why the earlier accounting had failed, which reforms had taken hold and where organizational vulnerability remained. The panel reconstructed that history from the records and witnesses still available in 2006. Bratton described his initial reaction as favorable and placed the report inside an existing departmental action plan. ###### What an After-Action Report Is For An after-action report would connect allegations to investigations, evidentiary conclusions, criminal dispositions, administrative findings and discipline. Those categories would show how each matter progressed and where an inquiry ended. The original Board of Inquiry relied on selected interviews and reviews of arrest and force reports. Complaint tracking, integrity stings and independent development of suspicious cases were absent before investigators returned to Rafael Perez, whose credibility was itself central to the cases. Its recommendations began with early warnings and investigative integrity: adopt a conflicts policy, protect whistleblowers against retaliation, strengthen evidence-storage safeguards and treat serious misconduct allegations as possible corruption cases with systemic implications. For the next large crisis, the panel proposed a properly resourced independent multi-agency investigation and priority for criminal inquiries. Internal analysis would follow developed criminal work, with an unrestricted systems review and outside experts testing institutional explanations. Public distribution completed the sequence. The after-action account would make the institution answerable for what it examined, the methods it used, the dispositions it reached and the reforms connected to the failures uncovered. ###### The Federal Consent Decree Federal oversight had already begun when Rice’s panel assembled. The United States and Los Angeles entered a consent decree in June 2001; Rice’s later panel reviewed the reform environment under its separate commission mandate. The United States alleged a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct enabled by deficient management. The decree established a program of operational change and independent review. The decree converted broad constitutional commitments into assigned systems: management and risk assessment, performance evaluation, force and arrest documentation, complaint investigation, discipline, internal affairs, gang-unit management, informants, mental-health response, training, integrity audits, public outreach and independent monitoring. Those systems made organizational conduct measurable. A force report, complaint, stop record, disciplinary outcome or audit could be examined across time and personnel. The question shifted from whether a policy existed on paper to whether information moved through supervisors and reviewers in a usable form. Rampart Reconsidered assessed that reform environment under the Police Commission’s mandate. The panel synthesized evidence and recommended changes, while the federal court enforced the decree. ###### Sustained Compliance The decree’s five-year term was only nominal. If the Justice Department sought an extension and Los Angeles contested it, the City bore the burden of proving substantial performance of every material provision and at least two years of maintained compliance. The standard distinguished durability from perfection. A technical lapse during otherwise sustained compliance would not defeat termination. Brief compliance inside a longer pattern of failure would not suffice. Materiality depended on the decree’s overall objectives rather than mechanical completion of isolated tasks. That structure echoed the panel’s concern about institutional memory. A department could issue a rule, demonstrate it during close supervision and revert once attention moved elsewhere. Durable reform required personnel, records, audits and authority that survived the external pressure that created them. LAPD’s Constitutional Policing and Policy Bureau traces its lineage to the Rampart response and consent-decree era. Its organization includes policy, risk-management and audit functions. Force Investigation Division offers a narrower example. Established in 2004 to conduct administrative investigations of categorical force under the decree, it now handles deadly force, serious force injuries and in-custody deaths. An externally compelled function became a named internal unit with continuing review duties. ###### From Audit to Prevention Rice helped establish Advancement Project in 1999 with Penda Hair, Molly Munger and Stephen English after work at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The organization paired litigation with research, organizing and policy design aimed at structural change. Los Angeles later commissioned Advancement Project to examine gang-reduction efforts spread across twenty-three programs costing about $82 million annually. A Call to Action described fragmented responsibility, weak measurement and a strategy unable to connect suppression, prevention and intervention. Rice told Congress that the “war on gangs” was the wrong organizing paradigm. Police would retain a central role in removing people committing serious violence, but enforcement alone could not reduce recruitment, trauma or the neighborhood conditions that repeatedly exposed children to harm. The proposed alternative treated violence as a public-health problem requiring coordinated work among police, schools, families, service providers, intervention workers and community organizations. It focused resources on residents living amid violence. The Mayor’s Office established GRYD in 2007. The current program coordinates prevention and intervention through community-based providers in twenty-three zones and also includes safe passage and reentry partnerships. Rice and Advancement Project helped shape the research and reception; the City and its partners built and operate the system. ###### Evaluating the Programs A Call to Action proposed a research and policy institute to determine whether programs were effective. Public funds, service responsibilities and results were to be visible enough to permit evaluation, termination and redesign. ###### Two Systems on the Same Map Police accountability and violence prevention require different information. The first follows force, complaints, discipline, supervision and audit trails after state power is exercised. The second follows geography, trauma, service access and conflict patterns before enforcement becomes the only remaining response. Rice, a civil-rights lawyer and co-founder of Advancement Project, chaired and helped author the collective Rampart review, then assembled and advocated for a separate policy team examining neighborhood violence. The federal parties administered the consent decree, while the City and its partners built and operate GRYD. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Civil-rights lawyer; co-founder, Advancement Project - **Organization:** Advancement Project - **Practice:** Civil Rights, Police Accountability, Public Safety - **Location:** Los Angeles, California ##### Contact - **Organization:** Advancement Project - **Office:** Los Angeles, California - **Website:** advancementproject.org ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Constance Rice Civil Rights · Police Accountability · Public Safety > “Los Angeles could not arrest its way out. ##### The Second Report Constance Rice chaired the panel charged with finding out what Los Angeles had learned from the Rampart corruption scandal. Its investigators had to reconstruct the department’s own investigations from scattered files. The work led to specific proposals for police accountability—and ran alongside Rice’s effort to bring police, community workers, and public agencies together to prevent neighborhood violence. Constance Rice’s panel went looking for an accounting Los Angeles had been promised. On March 1, 2000, the police chief had transmitted the Rampart Board of Inquiry as “the first of at least two reports.” The second would tell the public the exact nature and disposition of every corruption allegation. LAPD expected to issue it about a year later. In July 2003, the Police Commission announced that Rice would head a blue-ribbon review. The commission wanted an assessment of earlier Rampart inquiries, the obstacles that had frustrated them, and whether remedies already operating or underway could prevent corruption and improve the department’s response when misconduct was uncovered. Rice’s panel would have to reconstruct the response after the opportunity for a timely accounting had passed. Rice chaired a group whose members and emeriti brought experience in earlier Rampart reviews, criminal law, civil rights, and institutions. Executive director Kathleen Salvaty, lead investigator Brent A. Braun, additional investigators, and staff worked with the panel. Records custodians and interviewees helped supply the evidence. By 2006, more than six years after the original promise, the second report still had not appeared. The panel concluded that LAPD would probably never release it and that its own report would be the closest available substitute. The missing account left Los Angeles unable to trace each allegation through investigation, resolution, and the lessons the department had drawn—or to identify where a reliable answer had never been reached. ###### Three Drafts and Scattered Files Panel investigators interviewed a former commander responsible for the follow-up report. He remembered receiving three drafts: one about administrative investigations, one about criminal matters, and one about the disciplinary proceedings known as Boards of Rights. He had rejected them because their conclusions had little or no factual support. But he said he could not remember who was responsible for completing the drafts or who had delivered them. The panel did not find that credible. He recalled the pressure to produce the report and his dissatisfaction with what he received, yet could not identify the people who had written it. That refusal limited the investigation. The panel identified approximately 400 internal Rampart investigations and obtained information for eighty-six Boards of Rights. LAPD could not supply a complete count. With no centralized repository, investigators assembled complaint numbers, names, and disciplinary records from the District Attorney’s Office, the City Attorney’s Office, LAPD Risk Management, and private attorneys’ files. Professional Standards personnel then spent more than 300 overtime hours filling gaps. Those records exposed recurring failures in supervision, investigation, discipline, and recordkeeping. They could not restore the definitive contemporary account that should have been made while evidence was fresher and responsibility easier to locate. Rice and the panel had to assess what the surviving material established and what the intervening years had made impossible to recover. ###### Following Each Allegation Rampart Reconsidered examined both the failed accounting and the reforms that followed: which changes had taken hold and where the department remained vulnerable. A proper after-action report would connect each allegation to its investigation, evidence, criminal disposition, administrative findings, and discipline. Readers could then see how a matter had progressed and where an inquiry had stopped. The earlier Board of Inquiry had relied on selected interviews and reviews of arrest and force reports. Investigators had not tracked complaints or conducted integrity stings. When they found a suspicious report, they took it to Rafael Perez before independently investigating the case, although his credibility was itself a central question. The panel recommended acting on early warnings, adopting a conflicts policy, protecting whistleblowers from retaliation, and strengthening evidence-storage safeguards. Serious misconduct allegations should be investigated as possible corruption cases with wider implications, including failures of supervision and practices that could shield the officer involved. For the next large corruption crisis, it proposed a properly resourced, independent investigation involving multiple agencies. Criminal investigations would take priority; internal analysis would follow once that work was largely complete. An unrestricted review of departmental systems, tested by outside experts, would culminate in a public account of the allegations, methods, findings, dispositions, and resulting reforms. At a July 2006 Police Commission meeting, Chief William Bratton identified Rice as the report’s primary author and thanked her and the committee. He described his initial reaction as favorable. LAPD would review the recommendations within the departmental action plan already in place. ###### Two Years of Sustained Compliance Rice’s panel worked alongside a separate system of federal oversight. The United States and Los Angeles had entered a consent decree in June 2001 after the federal government alleged a pattern or practice of unlawful police conduct enabled by deficient management. The decree required changes in police practice and independent review. Rice’s panel examined how the department had responded to Rampart and recommended further reforms; the federal court enforced the decree. The decree required managers to assess risk and evaluate officer performance. It set rules for documenting force and arrests, investigating complaints, imposing discipline, and running internal affairs. It also governed gang units, informants, responses to people with mental illness, training, integrity audits, public outreach, and independent monitoring. These requirements produced information that supervisors and reviewers could use: force reports, complaints, stop records, disciplinary outcomes, and audits could be examined across personnel and over time. A written policy could be tested against what the department recorded and what its managers did with that information. The agreement was to end after five years unless the Justice Department sought an extension. If Los Angeles contested that request, the City had to demonstrate substantial performance of every material provision and at least two years of maintained compliance. Materiality depended on the agreement’s overall objectives. A technical lapse, or a temporary failure during otherwise sustained compliance, would not defeat termination; a brief period of compliance amid continuing failure would not satisfy the standard. For reforms to last beyond outside scrutiny, the department needed records, personnel, audits, and officials responsible for using them. LAPD’s Constitutional Policing and Policy Bureau traces its lineage to the Rampart response and consent-decree era; its functions include policy, risk management, and audit. The Force Investigation Division began in 2004 to conduct the administrative investigations of categorical force required by the decree. It continues to investigate deadly force, force causing injuries that require hospitalization, and deaths in LAPD custody. A function established under outside oversight became a named internal unit with continuing review duties. ###### Preparing the Ground for Prevention Rice had helped establish Advancement Project in 1999 with Penda Hair, Molly Munger, and Stephen English after working at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The organization combined litigation with research, organizing, and policy design to change the policies and practices of public agencies. In Los Angeles, her work on police accountability developed alongside an effort to address the violence facing neighborhood children. In 2005, she met with City Council member Martin Ludlow about a community strategy. He led nine months of public meetings where residents described life amid gang violence. The City later commissioned Advancement Project to examine anti-gang efforts scattered across twenty-three programs costing about $82 million a year. Rice assembled the policy team. With Susan Lee, she organized experts into seven working groups, giving each questions and responsibility for its own recommendations. Their subjects included education, public safety, and demographics. Rice and Lee brought the groups’ work together in A Call to Action. Before the report appeared in January 2007, Rice sought support from officials who would be important to its reception: Police Chief Bratton, Sheriff Lee Baca, City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, District Attorney Steve Cooley, and California Attorney General Jerry Brown. She had worked with—and sued—law-enforcement leaders. Persuading them required a different kind of engagement. Rice later described deciding to “learn to love these cops if I was ever going to get them to follow me in change.” Bratton held a press conference to endorse A Call to Action. ###### Coordinating the City’s Response A Call to Action identified fragmented responsibility, weak measurement, and a failure to connect suppression with prevention and intervention. Rice would later tell Congress that the “war on gangs” was the wrong organizing principle. Police still had a central role in removing people committing serious violence. Enforcement alone could not reduce recruitment, trauma, or the neighborhood conditions that repeatedly exposed children to harm. The proposed approach treated violence as a public-health problem. Police, schools, families, service providers, intervention workers, and community organizations would coordinate their work, directing resources to residents living amid violence. The report also proposed a research and policy institute to evaluate programs. Public spending, service responsibilities, and results had to be visible enough to support evaluation, termination, and redesign. The Mayor’s Office established Gang Reduction and Youth Development, or GRYD, in 2007. Today it contracts with community-based providers for prevention and intervention in twenty-three zones. It also works with schools on safe passage and intervention and with the county’s probation department on juvenile reentry. Rice and Advancement Project helped shape the research and build support; the City and its partners built and operate the program. ###### The Children in Each Neighborhood The two undertakings required different kinds of evidence. Police accountability followed force, complaints, discipline, supervision, and audits after officers exercised state power. Violence prevention required an understanding of geography, trauma, access to services, and patterns of conflict before another injury. In July 2012, Representative Bobby Scott asked Rice what the services she advocated would involve. She began with the neighborhood: identify the dynamics of violence and the people involved, then design a response for each group of children. The aim was safety for children throughout the area, including those at risk of joining a gang. Her prepared testimony described the everyday freedom she wanted those children to have: walking to school, playing in a park, and going to the corner store without fear of being shot or accosted. The civil-rights lawyer who had investigated how police used their power was asking public agencies to organize their work around those journeys. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Civil-rights lawyer; co-founder, Advancement Project - **Organization:** Advancement Project - **Practice:** Civil Rights, Police Accountability, Public Safety - **Location:** Los Angeles, California ##### Contact - **Organization:** Advancement Project - **Office:** Los Angeles, California - **Website:** advancementproject.org --- ## 32. Mitchell Garabedian — `900005225` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `74e032a38143e62ba8b5637fca5e47a378a415a7c94a68789662e0d2b89b5089` - **After/current hash:** `99238636ae7352aa9d60ef5369cfff95616be9710b3f2fc635bb0c61aa10910c` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005225/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Opening client interviews and the1996complaint**: Use Garabedian's own1994account and the complaint's party allegations to show listening, developing client relationships and identifying those responsible for supervision. - `rewrite` — **Requests, confidentiality order and public access**: Connect the evidence already in hand to further requests, then preserve the complete seal, Globe motion, appeal and delay chronology with a brief verified judicial quotation. - `rewrite` — **Client authority and the September settlement**: Combine repeated explanations of assent and distinct claims while keeping the amount, all category allocations, approval date and criminal/civil distinction. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Robert Hoatson's account of client interviews**: End with a named client's verified recollection of Garabedian's careful questioning and collection of school, medical and criminal records. ### BEFORE #### Mitchell Garabedian Survivor Representation · Civil Litigation > “It’s time for them to leave this darkness and move on with their lives. ##### Eighty-Six Decisions In September 2002, Mitchell Garabedian secured every client’s assent to a $10 million settlement of eighty-six Geoghan-related civil claims. Their litigation had also generated the institutional files and depositions that became a public archive through the Boston Globe’s access request and judicial unsealing orders. In September 2002, Mitchell Garabedian’s eighty-six clients agreed to a $10 million settlement of their civil claims connected to former priest John J. Geoghan. Garabedian obtained formal approval or assent from every client before the Archdiocese and claimants presented the result for judicial approval. Sixteen relatives retained payments of $10,000 each. Twenty claimants in a separate category averaged approximately $27,000. The remaining fifty divided $9.3 million, with reported individual amounts ranging from $94,000 to $313,000. Judge Constance Sweeney approved the settlement on September 19, resolving the civil claims through negotiated compensation. ###### Eighty-Six Individual Claims Garabedian represented people and parents pursuing individual civil claims connected to former priest John J. Geoghan. Each claim retained its own allegations, asserted injury and relationship to the institutional defendants. The group nevertheless shared an evidentiary center. The lawsuits examined what Archdiocesan officials allegedly knew about Geoghan, how he was assigned and whether church leaders failed to protect children despite information available to them. Geoghan's criminal conviction concerned a particular incident prosecuted by the state under the criminal burden of proof. Garabedian's eighty-six clients pursued their own civil allegations and claims against the church defendants. Each client retained authority over whether to settle. Garabedian negotiated common terms for people whose allegations, asserted injuries and relationships to the institutional defendants differed. ###### The Files Under Seal The civil suits generated an extensive discovery record. Estimates before release ranged from ten thousand to twenty thousand pages; the preserved Geoghan archive now comprises 8,478 pages of depositions and institutional files. A 2000 confidentiality order had sealed virtually all case documents and restricted even the parties’ access. The order covered material produced because the civil actions remained active long enough to reach discovery. The Boston Globe moved to open the records. In November 2001, Judge Sweeney reversed the prior order, reasoning that secrecy had impeded public and press access to a case involving matters of intense public interest. The Archdiocese appealed and argued, among other things, that church relationships belonged under ecclesiastical rather than secular authority. A single justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court rejected the challenge in December. When church counsel later requested another delay to review the volume and consider protection for people named in the documents, Sweeney refused. The files moved into public view through three distinct acts: survivor litigation created the discovery record, a newspaper sought access and judges decided the seal could not continue. ###### The Public Archive The discovery record remained publicly accessible after the settlement under the access rulings the Globe had obtained. Garabedian later represented 120 claimants in the broader 2003 Archdiocese settlement, working with other survivor lawyers on claims involving different clergy, clients and negotiated terms. He continues to lead the Law Offices of Mitchell Garabedian in Boston, representing survivors in clergy, school, scouting and other institutional settings. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founder and Principal Attorney - **Organization:** The Law Offices of Mitchell Garabedian - **Practice:** Survivor Representation, Civil Litigation - **Location:** Boston, Massachusetts ##### Contact - **Firm:** The Law Offices of Mitchell Garabedian - **Address:** 100 State Street, 6th Floor, Boston, Massachusetts 02109 - **Website:** garabedianlaw.com - **Phone:** 888-995-2214 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Mitchell Garabedian Survivor Representation · Civil Litigation > “It’s time for them to leave this darkness and move on with their lives. ##### Eighty-Six Decisions Mitchell Garabedian’s work on the John J. Geoghan cases began with children and parents seeking help. Their civil claims produced a discovery record that the Boston Globe and the courts brought into public view. When eighty-six clients settled in September 2002, each retained the authority to decide whether to accept the agreement. In 1994, a mother asked Mitchell Garabedian to speak with her three children. He asked about baseball, school, friends, and the people who visited them. When the conversation reached the priest, he later recalled, their manner changed: they became nervous and stopped talking freely. The mother introduced him to neighbors and relatives. Other children had been visited by the same priest, John J. Geoghan. Garabedian had built a general practice representing individuals after becoming a lawyer in 1979. On July 9, 1996, he filed a complaint against Geoghan on behalf of three children and their mother. It also named an unidentified defendant alleged to be responsible for Geoghan’s hiring, supervision, or retention, reserving an amendment once that identity was known. As more people came forward, the civil cases examined what Archdiocesan officials allegedly knew about Geoghan, how he was assigned, and whether church leaders had failed to protect children despite the information available to them. The people and parents Garabedian represented brought individual claims, each with its own allegations, asserted injury, and relationship to the church defendants. ###### Requests for the Church’s Records Garabedian later described building his requests for documents from evidence already in hand. Each disclosure gave him grounds to seek more, until he could ask the court for access to the church’s secret files. The civil suits produced an extensive discovery record, but a 2000 confidentiality order kept virtually all case documents under seal. Even the parties could not inspect them without signing promises against disclosure. The lawsuits had reached the records; the public still could not see them. In November 2001, Judge Constance Sweeney reversed the order on the Boston Globe’s motion. She found that secrecy had impeded public and press access to a case involving matters of intense public interest. The Archdiocese appealed, arguing among other things that relationships between Geoghan and his superiors belonged under ecclesiastical rather than secular authority. A single justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court rejected the challenge in December. When church counsel sought another delay in January to review the volume and consider protection for people named in the documents, Sweeney refused. Her order had been issued in November. “I expect my order to be complied with,” she told counsel. Garabedian’s clients had sustained the litigation that generated the discovery record. The Globe sought public access, and the judges required disclosure. Before release, estimates ranged from ten thousand to twenty thousand pages. ###### Each Client’s Assent Garabedian negotiated a common agreement for eighty-six clients, each of whom retained the right to decide whether to settle. In September 2002, he obtained formal approval or assent from all of them to a $10 million settlement with the Archdiocese over their civil claims involving the former priest. The settlement allocated $10,000 to each of sixteen relatives. Twenty claimants in a separate category averaged approximately $27,000. The remaining fifty divided $9.3 million, with reported individual amounts ranging from $94,000 to $313,000. Judge Sweeney approved the settlement on September 19, resolving the civil claims through negotiated compensation. Geoghan’s criminal conviction had concerned a particular incident prosecuted by the state under the criminal burden of proof. Garabedian’s clients had pursued their own civil allegations and claims against the church defendants. ###### The Records and the People The discovery record remained publicly accessible after the settlement under the access rulings the Globe had obtained. The preserved Geoghan archive comprises 8,478 pages of depositions and church files. In the broader 2003 Archdiocese settlement, Garabedian represented 120 claimants, working with other survivor lawyers on claims involving different clergy, clients, and negotiated terms. He continues to lead the Law Offices of Mitchell Garabedian in Boston, representing survivors of abuse in clergy, school, scouting, and other settings. In a 2017 interview, his client Robert Hoatson described the care that accompanied the search for evidence. Garabedian would say, “I’m very sorry to have to ask you this,” then explain, “But I have to know the whole story.” With clients’ permission, he sought school and medical records and criminal reports to support their accounts. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founder and Principal Attorney - **Organization:** The Law Offices of Mitchell Garabedian - **Practice:** Survivor Representation, Civil Litigation - **Location:** Boston, Massachusetts ##### Contact - **Firm:** The Law Offices of Mitchell Garabedian - **Address:** 100 State Street, 6th Floor, Boston, Massachusetts 02109 - **Website:** garabedianlaw.com - **Phone:** 888-995-2214 --- ## 33. Janet L. Goldstein — `900005223` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `09d60f71555d2bc650a731a43f8f475536ec3840c0a00fb59bb177319ef6eec2` - **After/current hash:** `824645430178898da6a58cd1a6be285ec9705f8b12785ca7f64dcbf0e934549b` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005223/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Origin and prosecutorial preparation**: Separate the modern statute's early history from Goldstein's documented courtroom preparation and the early firm's book history so each paragraph carries a distinct fact sequence. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **CA and Gallup client evidence and recoveries**: Name Shaw and Lindley, explain overlapping maintenance charges and internal labor projections, credit co-counsel, and place the 2013 award with Gallup and Pfizer. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Novartis and EmCare medical arrangements**: Name Kester and other firms, distinguish the Novartis and pharmacy payments, and use Goldstein's actual explanation for suing the executive to reveal a documented strategic choice. - `rewrite` — **Teaching and client motivation ending**: Preserve every teaching and speaking role, identify the Medicaid association correctly, and conclude with documented choices Goldstein taught at the 2013 NELA conference. ### BEFORE #### Janet L. Goldstein Whistleblowers · Health Care · Government Contracts > “I draw my energy from our clients, propelled by their deep sense of right and wrong… ##### Present at the Creation Health-care, pharmaceutical, and government-contract qui tam litigation — Partner, Vogel, Slade & Goldstein LLP, Washington, D.C. The modern False Claims Act was three years old when Janet L. Goldstein began practicing under it. Congress revived the Civil War-era statute in 1986; by 1989 she was representing whistleblowers, and she has continued that work as a founding partner of Phillips, Cohen & Goldstein, the firm now known as Phillips & Cohen, and later at Vogel, Slade & Goldstein. The team's early campaigns against contractor and health-care fraud became the subject of Giantkillers, published by Atlantic Monthly Press, which chronicled the lawyers who helped whistleblowers recover what its subtitle called America's stolen billions. Before that, she spent ten years as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, trying government-contractor fraud, financial fraud, political corruption, racketeering, and environmental crimes — service that earned her a Justice Department Special Achievement Award, a Treasury Department Director's Award, and the EPA's Bronze Medal. A Brandeis graduate magna cum laude with a Harvard law degree cum laude, she has tried more than fifty jury cases in federal and state courts. ###### Which Representation Opened the Government's Hand? Every case she takes narrows, sooner or later, to one question: which representation opened the government's hand? In medicine, software, survey work, and contracted services, the answer may hide in a pricing term, a labor category, a clinical arrangement, or a performance certification. Goldstein finds that representation and proves how far the defendant's own knowledge stood from it. As a member of the Vogel, Slade & Goldstein team, she shared in the firm's signature pharmaceutical result: the $390 million Novartis settlement resolving allegations that the company used rebates and discounts to induce specialty pharmacies to push refills of its drugs — a kickback theory aimed not at doctors but at the pharmacies dispensing the medicine — along with the related resolutions the case produced from the pharmacies themselves. The award that field peers can give, Taxpayers Against Fraud's Whistleblower Lawyer of the Year, went to Goldstein and her partners Robert Vogel and Shelley Slade in 2013. In the EmCare case, Goldstein represented two insiders — Jacqueline Meyer, a former EmCare administrator, and Michael Cowling, a former division vice-president at the hospital chain involved. They alleged that the emergency-physician staffing company received remuneration from the chain in exchange for pressuring emergency-room doctors to admit patients to the hospital rather than treat and release them. Goldstein's clients filed under seal in South Carolina in 2011; the case ran six years before EmCare agreed in 2017 to pay $30 million, with client shares totaling $6.2 million, and Meyer separately resolved retaliation claims arising from the loss of her job. The matter demanded a clear showing of how business and compensation decisions moved the claims paid by public health programs — that admissions climbing at the ER threshold reflected economics, not medicine. ###### Beyond the Clinic Door Goldstein represented the relator in an $11 million federal and multistate settlement with CA Technologies over software billing fraud — a case that carried False Claims Act discipline into enterprise licensing, where the decisive falsehood sits in invoicing terms rather than diagnosis codes. She also represented the whistleblower in the $10.5 million Gallup settlement of 2013, resolving allegations that the polling organization inflated the labor-hour estimates underlying its noncompetitive contracts with the State Department and the U.S. Mint; her client, a former Gallup executive, received a $1.9 million share. Software licenses, labor classifications, contract pricing, survey work, performance representations: all can become false claims when payment depends on terms a contractor knowingly has not met. She learns each industry until she can put her finger on the decisive discrepancy, then sets it out in a form investigators can follow. Across pharmacy economics, enterprise software and polling contracts, she asks what the government paid because it was told something untrue. ###### Teaching the Practice She has served as national co-chair of the qui tam subcommittee of the American Bar Association's Criminal Justice Section and taught the craft she practices — as guest faculty in Harvard Law School's trial advocacy program, at the National Institute for Trial Advocacy, and at the University of Southern California's law school — while speaking regularly before the ABA's False Claims Act institute, the Health Care Compliance Association, and the state Medicaid fraud units whose investigators pick up where her filings leave off. Whistleblowers arrive at her door carrying knowledge that has already cost them sleep and often a job; their cases can remain under seal for years while the government tests what they know. Goldstein has said she draws her energy from those clients, propelled by their deep sense of right and wrong. The EmCare relators waited six years; the Novartis case unfolded across a web of related resolutions; the Gallup client saw his internal warnings vindicated in a public settlement. Goldstein continues to investigate the industries her clients know, the representations made to the government and the evidence of what was true. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner - **Organization:** Vogel, Slade & Goldstein LLP - **Practice:** Whistleblowers, Health Care, Government Contracts - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Firm:** Vogel, Slade & Goldstein LLP - **Address:** 1828 L Street NW, Suite 270, Washington, DC 20036 - **Website:** vsg-law.com - **Email:** jgoldstein@vsg-law.com - **Phone:** 202-537-5906 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Janet L. Goldstein Whistleblowers · Health Care · Government Contracts > “I draw my energy from our clients, propelled by their deep sense of right and wrong… ##### Present at the Creation Health-care, pharmaceutical, and government-contract qui tam litigation — Partner, Vogel, Slade & Goldstein LLP, Washington, D.C. Janet L. Goldstein began representing whistleblowers in 1989, three years after Congress revived the False Claims Act. The Civil War-era statute allowed private citizens to bring claims on the government’s behalf; the 1986 amendments strengthened their role and increased their incentives to report fraud. Goldstein became a founding partner of Phillips, Cohen & Goldstein, now Phillips & Cohen, and later continued the practice at Vogel, Slade & Goldstein in Washington. She had spent the preceding ten years prosecuting cases in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles: government-contractor fraud, financial fraud, political corruption, racketeering, and environmental crimes. That service earned her a Justice Department Special Achievement Award, a Treasury Department Director’s Award, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Bronze Medal. She graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis and cum laude from Harvard Law School, and has tried more than fifty jury cases in federal and state courts. The Phillips, Cohen & Goldstein team’s early campaigns against contractor and health-care fraud became the subject of Giantkillers, published by Atlantic Monthly Press, whose subtitle described helping whistleblowers recover America’s stolen billions. In Goldstein’s later cases, the question of what induced a government payment would take her into software maintenance agreements, estimates for survey work, pharmacy discounts, and the decisions made in hospital emergency rooms. ###### Renewals and Estimates Goldstein represented Ann-Marie Shaw, a former CA Technologies technical sales specialist, in a case about government customers being charged for software services they had already bought. Maintenance contracts entitled agencies to upgrades and technical assistance for a specified period. When CA processed a renewal before that period ended, it started the new term immediately, producing overlapping charges. The case also concerned Defense Department customers steered away from prepaid software inventory and toward more costly purchases. Working with her partners and Phillips & Cohen, Goldstein helped Shaw pursue claims that produced an $11 million settlement in 2013: $8 million for the federal government and $3 million for state and local governments. The billing arrangements connected customers of very different sizes. Goldstein described the affected agencies as “ranging from local libraries to the Defense Department.” At Gallup, the disputed figures were estimates of the labor needed for government work. Goldstein represented Michael Lindley, the polling organization’s former director of client services, with her firm and Katz, Marshall & Banks. His case alleged that Gallup’s proposals to the State Department and U.S. Mint overstated its own expected labor hours, increasing the prices of contracts awarded without competition. Internal budgets projecting lower costs supplied a way to test what the government had been told. Lindley had raised concerns inside Gallup. His lawsuit brought the allegations into a government investigation and a $10.5 million settlement in July 2013; he received approximately $1.9 million as his share. Later that year, Taxpayers Against Fraud named Goldstein and her partners Robert Vogel and Shelley Slade Whistleblower Lawyers of the Year for their work in the Gallup and Pfizer cases. Goldstein continues to investigate software licenses, labor categories, contract pricing, and representations about a contractor’s performance. Each industry has its own terms. Her work with these clients connects their knowledge of the business to evidence of what the government was told, what the company knew, and what was paid. ###### Payments Behind Medical Decisions The Novartis litigation concerned the financial arrangements behind pharmacy recommendations. Goldstein and her partners, working with Susman Godfrey, represented former Novartis sales manager David Kester. The case challenged rebates and discounts used to induce specialty pharmacies to promote refills of Novartis drugs. The alleged kickbacks went to the pharmacies dispensing the medicine, rather than to prescribing doctors. Novartis resolved the government’s claims in November 2015 for $390 million, comprising $370 million in civil settlement payments and $20 million in forfeiture. Related settlements with the specialty pharmacies Accredo and BioScrip had already produced $60 million and $15 million. The resolutions reached both the manufacturer offering the incentives and pharmacies whose conduct the incentives were intended to influence. In the EmCare case, Goldstein’s clients knew the relationship between a hospital chain and the company staffing its emergency rooms. Jacqueline Meyer had managed EmCare’s contracts with twenty Health Management Associates hospitals. Michael Cowling had been an HMA division vice-president and chief executive at three of its hospitals. They alleged that HMA paid EmCare to press emergency-room doctors to admit patients who could be treated and released or cared for as outpatients. Physician bonuses and the prospect of retaining or winning hospital contracts were alleged means of increasing admissions, which generated higher Medicare payments. Goldstein and her co-counsel at Wyche filed the clients’ lawsuit under seal in South Carolina in July 2011. It named HMA’s then-chief executive, Gary Newsome, as well as the companies. When the Justice Department joined the claims against HMA and Newsome in 2014, Goldstein explained the choice to pursue an individual’s responsibility: “We must put names and faces to the alleged perpetrators and seek to hold these individuals accountable in a court of law.” Six years after the filing, EmCare agreed in December 2017 to pay nearly $30 million to resolve the allegations against it in this and a related whistleblower action. Meyer and Cowling shared in the $6.2 million relators’ award; Meyer also separately settled retaliation claims arising from the loss of her job. The case connected business and compensation decisions to the admission of patients and the resulting claims on public health programs. ###### Teaching the Decisions Goldstein has served as national co-chair of the qui tam subcommittee of the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section. She has been guest faculty in Harvard Law School’s trial advocacy program, at the National Institute for Trial Advocacy, and at the University of Southern California’s law school. Her speaking engagements have included the ABA’s False Claims Act Institute, the Health Care Compliance Association, and the National Association of Medicaid Fraud Control Units. Goldstein has said that her clients’ sense of right and wrong gives her energy. Their cases can spend years under seal while the government investigates. At a 2013 National Employment Lawyers Association conference, she taught the practical choices involved in representing them: recognizing a viable claim, encouraging Justice Department intervention, answering jurisdictional challenges, and selecting the district in which to sue. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner - **Organization:** Vogel, Slade & Goldstein LLP - **Practice:** Whistleblowers, Health Care, Government Contracts - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Firm:** Vogel, Slade & Goldstein LLP - **Address:** 1828 L Street NW, Suite 270, Washington, DC 20036 - **Website:** vsg-law.com - **Email:** jgoldstein@vsg-law.com - **Phone:** 202-537-5906 --- ## 34. Marcella Auerbach — `900005222` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `8c2557163b3016e7a6af11c6274358d66b7b55a89c048f25e883a35ad0b7f249` - **After/current hash:** `39942124061604a8118874e5bd4bc06ae8cfb4b8dc01c726874f8cefb642f493` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005222/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Opening 2009 television explanation**: Use Auerbach's actual hypothetical cough/cold appointment and differing bill to show how she explains a discrepancy, while dating the enforcement-return estimate precisely. - `rewrite` — **Government preparation and screening work**: Preserve the complete professional and educational history and consolidate repeated screening explanations into actual evidence, damages and payment questions. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Hospital, device and hospice cases**: Name Hawkins, Donigian and Dingus and explain the admissions, study payments and continuous-care allegations, retaining every original recovery and adding Dignity's compliance review. - `rewrite` — **Allergan and Tarceva closing comparison**: Separate Allergan's criminal and civil components and use Auerbach's verified Tarceva quotation to show the particular allegation about survival data. ### BEFORE #### Marcella Auerbach Health Care Fraud · Whistleblower Litigation > “There's a return of $15 for every dollar spent on investigators and prosecutors. ##### A Quarter Century in the Government's Chair Pharmaceutical and hospital-fraud qui tam litigation — Managing partner, Nolan Auerbach & White, Fort Lauderdale. Before Marcella Auerbach ever filed a qui tam complaint, she had spent more than twenty-five years inside the institution that decides what happens to one. Her Justice Department career in South Florida ran from the street-level to the executive suite: a Special Attorney in the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, Chief of Narcotics, Special Counsel to the United States Attorney, and ultimately First Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, where she managed an office of 210 lawyers across its criminal and civil divisions. Along the way the department gave her its John Marshall Award for litigation — among the highest honors it bestows on its own attorneys — and she was named Law Enforcement Woman of the Year. She spent eight years in the office's Civil Division representing the United States in health-care-fraud qui tam cases. There she evaluated whistleblower evidence, determined what an investigation needed and learned which cases would draw government intervention. ###### Taking the Other Chair When Auerbach moved into private practice as a partner — now managing partner — of Nolan, Auerbach & White, the Fort Lauderdale firm devoted exclusively to health-care whistleblower cases, she carried that institutional knowledge across the table. The passage from investigating fraud on the government's behalf to representing the people whose evidence gives those investigations direction informs both the cases she litigates and the judgment she applies before any case is filed. Her government years supply a disciplined sense of what an investigative team needs before it will move: a supported theory of falsity, documents corroborating the client, a plausible damages path, and materiality tied to the public program's actual payment decision. Auerbach represented relators in the Allergan Botox litigation that contributed to a $600 million global criminal and civil resolution in 2010, in which the company pleaded guilty in connection with the off-label promotion of Botox. The following year, Taxpayers Against Fraud named her and her partner Ken Nolan its Lawyers of the Year. She represented the relator in the Genentech and OSI Pharmaceuticals matter concerning the cancer drug Tarceva, resolved for $67 million over allegations that misleading statements had been made about the drug's effectiveness. She represented the relator in the $37 million Dignity Health resolution, a case about hospital admissions billed as inpatient stays for care that could have been delivered on an outpatient basis, and was counsel in a $16 million St. Jude Medical settlement concerning payments to physicians alleged to induce use of the company's cardiac devices. An Odyssey Healthcare matter added a $25 million hospice-care resolution. ###### Screening the Evidence As managing partner, Auerbach screens and develops information before a complaint is filed. She distinguishes regulatory lapses from fraud and assesses whether a prospective client's evidence can sustain a qui tam action. Drawing on her government experience, she refines a company's complicated inner history into a focused claim that serves the whistleblower and the public enforcement effort. She excludes theories that cannot be documented and damages calculations that cannot withstand an economist's scrutiny, preparing a case an Assistant United States Attorney can investigate. The government intervenes in only a fraction of filed cases; her clients' settlement agreements follow this work of screening and developing the evidence. Auerbach lectured at the Justice Department's Advocacy Institute and at the University of Miami's law school; she serves on the advisory board of Samford University's Cumberland School of Law, where she earned her law degree, and on the advisory board of Bloomberg BNA's Health Care Fraud Report. In 2020, she chaired the fraud subcommittee of the anti-fraud task force convened by the Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund, helping the whistleblower bar organize its response to COVID-relief fraud. She earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Miami, where she joined several honor societies, her law degree at Cumberland and an LL.M. at New York University. ###### The Arithmetic of Enforcement In a July 2009 television interview, Auerbach put the return from health-care-fraud enforcement at fifteen dollars for every dollar spent on investigators and prosecutors. Her work on both sides of the False Claims Act has involved the government’s investigative resources and the insiders whose evidence gives investigators a place to begin. The settlements that followed — Allergan, Tarceva, Dignity Health, St. Jude, Odyssey — returned hundreds of millions of dollars to the programs that pay for the nation's medicine. Auerbach represented whistleblowers in those cases after more than twenty-five years evaluating and prosecuting cases for the United States. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Managing Partner - **Organization:** Nolan Auerbach & White - **Practice:** Health Care Fraud, Whistleblower Litigation - **Location:** Fort Lauderdale, Florida ##### Contact - **Firm:** Nolan Auerbach & White - **Address:** 101 NE 3rd Avenue, Suite 1500, Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33301 - **Website:** whistleblowerfirm.com - **Phone:** 800-372-8304 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Marcella Auerbach Health Care Fraud · Whistleblower Litigation > “There's a return of $15 for every dollar spent on investigators and prosecutors. ##### A Quarter Century in the Government’s Chair Pharmaceutical and hospital-fraud qui tam litigation — Managing partner, Nolan Auerbach & White, Fort Lauderdale. Explaining Medicare fraud on television in July 2009, Marcella Auerbach offered a hypothetical patient with a cough or cold. The doctor spent ten minutes with the patient, who then went home. The bill, in her example, told a different story: severe bronchitis, an hour-long visit, and a nebulizer. She also made an argument for the investigators and prosecutors who could examine such claims. Speaking about the federal enforcement efforts then underway, she put their return at fifteen dollars for every dollar spent. The interview aired on Nightly Business Report on July 29, 2009. Before representing whistleblowers in private practice, Auerbach had spent more than twenty-five years at the Justice Department. In South Florida she served as a Special Attorney in the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, Chief of Narcotics, Special Counsel to the United States Attorney, and First Assistant United States Attorney. In the last role, she managed 210 lawyers across the Southern District of Florida’s criminal and civil divisions. She received the department’s John Marshall Award for litigation, one of its principal attorney honors, and was named Law Enforcement Woman of the Year. Eight years in the Civil Division brought her into health-care-fraud qui tam cases as counsel for the United States. She evaluated whistleblower evidence, determined what an investigation needed, and learned how the government chose cases for intervention. Her preparation included an undergraduate degree from the University of Miami, where she belonged to several honor societies, a law degree from Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law, and an LL.M. from New York University. Auerbach has lectured at the Justice Department’s Advocacy Institute and the University of Miami’s law school. She serves on advisory boards for Cumberland School of Law and Bloomberg BNA’s Health Care Fraud Report. In 2020, she chaired the Hospitals and TeleMedicare Fraud subcommittee of the Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund’s COVID-19 Anti-Fraud Task Force, helping organize the whistleblower bar’s response to fraud as pandemic relief expanded public spending. ###### Taking the Other Chair Auerbach joined Nolan, Auerbach & White as a partner and now serves as managing partner of the Fort Lauderdale firm, which devotes its practice exclusively to health-care whistleblower cases. Prospective clients speak directly with her or Ken Nolan. Before accepting a matter, the firm considers the alleged fraud, the company involved, the client’s position, and whether pursuing the case would serve the client as well as justify the investigation. Her screening work connects a company’s complicated history to a claim the government can investigate. That requires distinguishing a regulatory lapse from fraud, identifying documents that corroborate the client, and assessing whether the alleged falsehood mattered to a public program’s payment decision. A theory needs evidence; a damages calculation needs a basis that can withstand an economist’s scrutiny. The firm assembles clinical and reimbursement experts, investigators, and additional counsel as the case requires. Government intervention remains selective, and the work of developing the evidence begins before a complaint is filed. Kathleen Hawkins brought knowledge of how a hospital system reviewed admissions. A nurse and former director of medical management at Catholic Healthcare West, later Dignity Health, she had spent about six years raising concerns within the organization. She believed its admission-review practices allowed patients to be hospitalized without medical necessity. Auerbach and her firm represented her in a suit filed in Northern California that challenged the resulting bills to public health programs. Five years after the filing, Dignity agreed in October 2014 to pay $37 million. The settlement resolved allegations that thirteen hospitals in California, Nevada, and Arizona billed Medicare and TRICARE for inpatient care that should have been provided on a less costly outpatient basis. The claims included scheduled cardiovascular procedures, certain spinal procedures, and admissions for common diagnoses. Dignity also undertook five years of compliance obligations, including independent review of the accuracy of its claims. Hawkins’s concern about admission decisions had produced both a recovery and a requirement to examine future billing. Auerbach also represented whistleblowers whose evidence concerned the incentives behind treatment. In the St. Jude Medical matter, the firm’s client was former sales representative Charles Donigian. The company paid $16 million in 2011 to settle allegations that it used post-market studies and a device registry to pay physicians to choose its pacemakers and defibrillators. The government alleged that data collection had become a means of retaining doctors’ business or drawing it away from competitors. The Odyssey Healthcare matter concerned the level of hospice care billed. Auerbach’s firm represented former executive director Bryan Dingus in one of three whistleblower suits resolved by the company’s $25 million settlement in 2012. The allegations involved claims for continuous home care that was unnecessary or did not meet Medicare requirements. That level of care carried a higher payment than routine hospice services. ###### What the Drug Company Told the Doctor In the Allergan Botox litigation, Auerbach represented relators whose case contributed to the company’s $600 million criminal and civil resolution in 2010. Her firm represented two of the whistleblowers across three related suits. Allergan pleaded guilty to misdemeanor misbranding in connection with promoting Botox Therapeutic for unapproved uses. The resolution comprised $375 million in criminal fine and forfeiture and $225 million to settle civil claims, including allegations that the company instructed doctors to use inappropriate diagnosis codes to obtain payment for uncovered uses. Taxpayers Against Fraud named Auerbach and Nolan its Lawyers of the Year in 2011. Their pharmaceutical work later included Brian Shields, a former Genentech product manager, whose case challenged representations about the lung-cancer drug Tarceva. Genentech and OSI Pharmaceuticals agreed in June 2016 to pay $67 million to resolve allegations that they had misled health-care providers about the drug’s effectiveness for certain patients with non-small cell lung cancer. The government’s claims concerned patients for whom there was little evidence of benefit unless they had never smoked or had a particular mutation in the epidermal growth factor receptor. Auerbach distinguished Shields’s allegations from earlier cases about marketing drugs for unapproved uses. The disputed evidence concerned what doctors had been told about patients’ chances of survival. In this case, she said, “the manufacturers allegedly marketed their lung cancer drug with knowingly inflated survival data.” ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Managing Partner - **Organization:** Nolan Auerbach & White - **Practice:** Health Care Fraud, Whistleblower Litigation - **Location:** Fort Lauderdale, Florida ##### Contact - **Firm:** Nolan Auerbach & White - **Address:** 101 NE 3rd Avenue, Suite 1500, Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33301 - **Website:** whistleblowerfirm.com - **Phone:** 800-372-8304 --- ## 35. David J. Caputo — `900005221` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `8e0aaa5c139a2218280bf10e699182942c71fa94fb96ef29c2875ce131a0e91e` - **After/current hash:** `98896616d180270a174ed09001343757cc506cd65fea14690ac185d06190638b` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005221/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Teva opening and professional preparation**: Move the original Teva participation into a concrete 2015 opening, then preserve the full career while adding the documented 2010 return and creation of Kline's whistleblower practice. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Teva discovery and trial preparation**: Explain the team's actual speaker-prescribing records, repeated attendance, discovery and Wendel's trial role, and distinguish the ruling requiring trial from a liability verdict. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Two Arizona hospital inquiries**: Name Bloink and clarify rehabilitation coverage; explain how Kuzma learned of the transactions and the alleged matching-fund and foundation transfers. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **New York taxes and CareMed pharmacy**: Identify the tax-services client and taxable activity, distinguish the tax categories, and explain CareMed's actual admissions, alleged rebilling and quantity audit. - `rewrite` — **Firm formation, personal life and ending**: Preserve every firm, professional, teaching and family detail while consolidating the discussion of client responsibilities and ending with Caputo's verified prescription-choice quotation. ### BEFORE #### David J. Caputo Health Care Fraud · Tax · Whistleblowers > “It took courage for our client to come forward. ##### Both Sides of the Caption Health-care and tax False Claims Act litigation — Founding partner, Youman & Caputo LLC, Philadelphia. David J. Caputo has worked on health-care fraud matters as defense counsel, a federal prosecutor, and a lawyer for whistleblowers. A Harvard Law School graduate who clerked for Judge J. Curtis Joyner of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, he began at Dechert in civil and criminal litigation, including health-care fraud defense, then joined Kline & Specter to try catastrophic-injury cases. In 2008, he became an Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in the section handling government, environmental, and health-care fraud. He helped prosecute the Synthes medical-device case, which ended in corporate penalties of $23.2 million. His later whistleblower practice has involved developing documentary evidence, working with investigating agents, and preparing cases for government review and trial. ###### Arizona's Largest As lead relator's counsel in the Carondelet Health Network case, Caputo represented a whistleblower whose allegations concerned inpatient rehabilitation billing at St. Joseph's and St. Mary's hospitals in Tucson. The case involved charges to federal health programs for patients who did not qualify for the services. It resolved in 2014 for $35 million, the largest False Claims Act settlement in Arizona at the time, and his client received approximately $5.9 million. In another Arizona matter, Caputo represented Gregory Kuzma, a former chief financial officer of Northern Arizona Healthcare, as lead counsel. The allegations concerned a Medicaid disproportionate-share payment to Flagstaff Medical Center obtained through an unlawful provider-related donation. That matter settled for $4.5 million in 2022. ###### Prepared to Try It Caputo joined the private trial team in a Teva False Claims Act case after the government declined to intervene. Two former sales representatives, Charles Arnstein and Hossam Senousy, alleged that the company used sham speaker programs, including payments presented as honoraria, to induce physicians to prescribe Copaxone and Azilect. After the complaint was unsealed in 2015, Caputo joined as co-counsel. The case survived a motion to dismiss and then summary judgment in a seventy-page opinion by Chief Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York in 2019. With trial approaching, Teva agreed to pay $54 million, roughly $40 million of which went to federal and state governments. Caputo prepared to try the case alongside lead counsel James Miller. His trial and settlement experience includes more than fifty clients whose cases produced seven-figure or larger results and a $21.8 million medical-malpractice verdict. ###### Where the Statute Reaches Next As lead counsel in a New York tax case involving Lantheus Medical Imaging and Bristol-Myers Squibb, Caputo used the state False Claims Act's application to tax obligations to pursue unpaid state taxes. The matter resolved for $6.2 million, with a relator's share of $1.137 million. The work required connecting company transactions and their tax treatment to an obligation under state law and the whistleblower statute's requirements. In the CareMed pharmacy matter, he served as lead counsel in a $10.19 million resolution, with a $1.85 million share for his client. His practice has encompassed health-care billing, hospital finance, kickbacks, specialty pharmacy, and state tax claims. ###### The Whistleblower Inside a Plaintiff Firm In January 2017, Caputo founded Youman & Caputo with Andrew Youman. The firm combines a whistleblower practice with catastrophic-injury and medical-malpractice litigation, including work requiring medical evidence and damages analysis. Its lawyers work with whistleblowers through investigations, case strategy, and litigation. Caputo has taught as an adjunct professor at Drexel's law school, served on the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania's Civil Procedural Rules Committee, and sat on the board of the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia. A Delaware County native, he lives there with his wife and three children and coaches youth baseball. Caputo's whistleblower clients have included sales representatives, finance officers, and health-care professionals with information about payment practices inside their organizations. The cases can involve years of confidential investigation and sealed proceedings, alongside risks to the client's employment or reputation. His representation includes pursuing the government's recovery and protecting the relator's interests throughout that process. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner - **Organization:** Youman & Caputo - **Practice:** Health Care Fraud, Tax, Whistleblowers - **Location:** Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ##### Contact - **Firm:** Youman & Caputo - **Address:** Two Logan Square, 100–120 N. 18th Street, Suite 1925, Philadelphia, PA 19103 - **Website:** youmancaputo.com - **Email:** dcaputo@youmancaputo.com - **Phone:** 215-302-1999 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### David J. Caputo Health Care Fraud · Tax · Whistleblowers > “It took courage for our client to come forward. ##### Both Sides of the Caption Health-care and tax False Claims Act litigation — Founding partner, Youman & Caputo LLC, Philadelphia. In March 2015, after a whistleblower complaint against Teva Pharmaceuticals was unsealed, David J. Caputo joined the lawyers preparing to pursue it. The government had declined to intervene. Two former sales representatives, Charles Arnstein and Hossam Senousy, alleged that payments to physicians through sham speaker programs had induced prescriptions for Copaxone and Azilect. Caputo would help carry their case toward trial. He had previously handled health-care fraud from the defense and prosecution sides. After Harvard Law School and a clerkship with Judge J. Curtis Joyner of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Caputo joined Dechert, where his civil and criminal work included health-care fraud defense. He moved to Kline & Specter in 2002 to represent people with catastrophic injuries. In 2008, he became an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District’s government, environmental, and health-care fraud section. He helped prosecute the Synthes medical-device case, which ended in corporate penalties of $23.2 million. When Caputo returned to Kline & Specter as a partner in 2010, he started its whistleblower practice while continuing to litigate injury cases. His work for relators—the people bringing fraud claims on the government’s behalf—combined developing documentary evidence, working with investigating agents, and preparing for government review and trial. ###### Prepared to Try It In the Teva litigation, the whistleblowers’ legal team reviewed millions of pages, took scores of depositions, and developed expert evidence. The physicians’ payments were described as honoraria for speaking about the drugs. The evidence included sales representatives’ tracking of speakers’ prescribing and their use of that information in deciding whom to retain as paid speakers. Program attendance records also showed physicians returning repeatedly to presentations about the same drug, sometimes alternating between speaking and sitting in the audience. The case survived dismissal and then Teva’s motion for summary judgment. In a seventy-page opinion issued in February 2019, Chief Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York found factual disputes requiring trial. Caputo prepared to try the case with lead counsel James Miller and fellow trial lawyer Heidi Wendel. After further motions and trial preparation, the parties reached an agreement shortly before trial was to begin. Announced in January 2020, the settlement required Teva to pay $54 million, nearly $40 million of it to federal and state governments. Caputo’s trial preparation drew on a continuing plaintiffs’ practice. More than fifty of his clients have obtained seven-figure or larger verdicts or settlements. Those results include a $21.8 million medical-malpractice verdict in 2015. Medical records, expert testimony, and the calculation of damages were part of his injury work as well as the health-care matters he pursued for whistleblowers. ###### Arizona’s Largest At Carondelet Health Network, the disputed payments concerned who qualified for inpatient rehabilitation. Caputo served as lead counsel for whistleblower Jacqueline Bloink, whose allegations involved St. Joseph’s and St. Mary’s hospitals in Tucson. The government said the hospitals had billed Medicare and other public programs for intensive rehabilitation services provided to patients who did not meet the coverage requirements. Carondelet’s $35 million resolution in 2014 was Arizona’s largest False Claims Act settlement at the time. Bloink received approximately $5.9 million. Gregory Kuzma brought a different kind of hospital knowledge. A former chief financial officer of Northern Arizona Healthcare, he learned of the transactions underlying his case while working for a nonprofit that operated a clinic. His allegations concerned a Medicaid disproportionate-share payment to Flagstaff Medical Center. The payment came from a program intended to support hospitals serving uninsured patients, but the financing depended on the source of the money used to obtain federal matching funds. Kuzma alleged that Williams Hospital District transferred $2.2 million to Arizona’s Medicaid agency, securing about $4.775 million in federal funds for Flagstaff Medical Center. A related foundation then granted the district $6 million, allegedly returning its contribution along with part of the federal money. The suit challenged that arrangement as an unlawful provider-related donation. Caputo served as lead counsel with Nathan Zipperian as co-counsel. Northern Arizona Healthcare, Flagstaff Medical Center, and the foundation agreed to pay $4.5 million in 2022. ###### Where the Statute Reaches Next In New York, Caputo represented a tax-services provider whose information concerned Lantheus Medical Imaging, formerly Bristol-Myers Squibb Medical Imaging. The companies’ New York business included sales of medical-imaging products to hospitals and clinics and work training customers and servicing equipment. The whistleblower alleged that the companies had failed to pay taxes owed on that activity. New York’s False Claims Act allowed the case to reach tax obligations. Caputo served as lead counsel, connecting the transactions and their tax treatment to the state-law obligations and the whistleblower statute’s requirements. The attorney general’s investigation found more than $2.2 million in unpaid taxes for 2002 through 2006. The $6.2 million settlement in 2014 resolved state franchise, New York City corporation, and Metropolitan Transportation Authority tax claims. His client received approximately $1.137 million. The CareMed specialty-pharmacy case concerned the information supplied to obtain coverage for expensive drugs and the claims submitted afterward. CareMed admitted that some employees seeking prior authorization had posed as staff from prescribing physicians’ offices. Some answered clinical questions from their knowledge of coverage criteria instead of obtaining the patient’s actual information. The government also alleged that the pharmacy had restocked and rebilled unused Procrit and Rituxan and sought payment for refills that patients and doctors had not received. An audit overseen by the government found that CareMed had received payment for quantities of certain dosages exceeding what it had purchased. Caputo was lead counsel for the whistleblower in the $10.19 million resolution; the government’s claims accounted for $10 million paid to the United States and New York. His client received a $1.85 million share. The inquiry required following both the representations used to secure approval and the quantities purchased, supplied, and billed. ###### Building Youman & Caputo In January 2017, Caputo and Andrew Youman founded their Philadelphia firm with both whistleblower and catastrophic-injury practices, including medical-malpractice litigation. The combination kept medical evidence and damages analysis within the same practice as health-care billing, hospital finance, kickback, specialty-pharmacy, and state-tax claims. Its lawyers work with whistleblowers through investigations, case strategy, and litigation. Caputo has taught as an adjunct professor at Drexel’s law school, served on the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania’s Civil Procedural Rules Committee, and sat on the board of the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia. A Delaware County native, he lives there with his wife and three children and coaches youth baseball. His whistleblower clients have included sales representatives, finance officers, and health-care professionals. Their cases can require years of confidential investigation and sealed proceedings while their employment and reputations are at stake. Caputo’s responsibilities include pursuing the public recovery and protecting the relator’s interests throughout that process. When the Teva case settled, he identified the patient’s interest, too: “physicians’ prescription drug choice must remain free from financial influence.” ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner - **Organization:** Youman & Caputo - **Practice:** Health Care Fraud, Tax, Whistleblowers - **Location:** Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ##### Contact - **Firm:** Youman & Caputo - **Address:** Two Logan Square, 100–120 N. 18th Street, Suite 1925, Philadelphia, PA 19103 - **Website:** youmancaputo.com - **Email:** dcaputo@youmancaputo.com - **Phone:** 215-302-1999 --- ## 36. Michael Ronickher — `900005220` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `c397a20d7a4cf2fd19baa42dd266510456e3e62d47e54b255271988be5c0c4b8` - **After/current hash:** `02934f5ffd295bc228c75777ad234a9ed1f65e65d4980d45b5282f7ad82d7bda` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005220/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Kaiser opening and Taylor narrative**: Use the government's concrete allegations about delayed diagnosis queries, addenda, targets and incentives, retaining every original outcome and both lawyer quotations. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Independent Health and Ross**: Name Ross, DxID and Gaffney and explain Ronickher's documented judgment about including a vendor and executive in the settlement. - `rewrite` — **Professional formation and personal biography**: Bring textbook editing and both degrees beside the government career, order the testimony and founding chronologically, and preserve every honor, publication and family detail. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Cisco and DaVita case mechanisms**: Name Glenn and Kogod, use Ronickher's direct explanation of the security issue, date the later DOJ initiative and identify the three DaVita kickback allegations. - `rewrite` — **Last-resort frame and IRS ending**: Consolidate the repeated Taylor chronology, retain the original quotation and client categories, and end with the precise tax recovery, shared award and documented effort to deliver it promptly. - `rewrite` — **Opening and Kaiser investigation**: Introduce Ronickher as Taylor’s lead counsel and connect clinical documentation to submitted codes; replace the inherited hypothetical lead with documented roles and allegations. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Independent Health resolution**: Name Teresa Ross, DxID and Gaffney, preserve the up-to amount and five-year contingency, and use Ronickher’s exact short deterrence judgment. - `restructure` — **Education and Tax Division service**: Collect the complete educational and professional chronology, preserving every original award, publication, testimony, firm-formation and coaching fact. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Cisco and DaVita**: Explain Ronickher’s own technical account of possible access and identify Kogod and the three distinct alleged kickback arrangements. - `correct` — **Confidential IRS resolution and ending**: Use the verified $263.7 million amount, clarify the shared $79 million award and identify Ronickher’s colleagues and explanation of prompt payment. ### BEFORE #### Michael Ronickher Medicare Advantage · Tax · Cybersecurity > “This is usually the last resort for people who find things that just aren't being fixed. ##### Money That Moves by Formula Medicare Advantage, tax, and cybersecurity whistleblower litigation — Partner, Whistleblower Partners LLP, Washington, D.C. Medicare Advantage payments depend on diagnosis codes that affect patient risk scores and the rates paid to health plans. Michael Ronickher represents whistleblowers whose information concerns the data and representations used to obtain government payments. His practice also includes tax matters and cybersecurity requirements in federal contracts, where an insider may know that a company's submissions differ from its actual conduct. ###### The Doctor Who Wouldn't Let It Go In January 2026, Kaiser Permanente entities agreed to pay $556 million to resolve False Claims Act allegations concerning Medicare Advantage risk adjustment, the largest Medicare Advantage settlement in the statute's history. Ronickher served as lead counsel for Dr. James Taylor, a longtime Kaiser physician and former medical director with responsibilities in coding governance, compliance, and revenue-cycle management. The litigation alleged that Kaiser added and retained diagnosis codes unsupported by patients' medical records, inflating beneficiaries' risk scores and Medicare payments. The case required comparing clinical documentation with the codes ultimately submitted, including later addenda to medical records. The whistleblowers' shares totaled $95 million, among the largest relator recoveries. "Dr. Taylor raised concerns internally long before he went to the government," Ronickher said when the settlement was announced. "His persistence and commitment to justice are inspiring." Ronickher was also counsel in the Independent Health matter, a Medicare Advantage resolution providing for payments of up to $100 million. Both matters involved allegations about the information used to obtain risk-adjusted government payments. ###### Nine Years at the Tax Division Ronickher spent roughly nine years as a trial attorney in the Justice Department's Tax Division, litigating tax and financial-fraud cases for the United States. He received the division's Outstanding Attorney Award in 2010, 2013, and 2015, and his work on the Wells Fargo tax-shelter trial earned a commendation from the IRS. That work gave him experience developing tax evidence and taking financial disputes through trial. In private practice, Ronickher represented a client in a confidential IRS whistleblower matter that returned $263 million to the Treasury and generated a $79 million whistleblower award, among the largest in the program's history. He testified before the D.C. Council in 2018 in support of tax provisions in the District's False Claims Act, which allowed whistleblower enforcement involving local tax fraud. He has written in Fortune, Bloomberg Tax, The Washington Post, and Law360 about whistleblower programs, tax enforcement, and anti-money-laundering policy. ###### A New Theory Every Few Years Ronickher worked on the Cisco Systems case that settled for $8.6 million in 2019, the first successful False Claims Act case based on undisclosed cybersecurity defects in a product sold to government agencies. The Justice Department later established a civil cyber-fraud enforcement initiative. In health care, he represented a whistleblower in the $34.5 million DaVita kickback resolution involving referral arrangements. Ronickher graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in comparative literature and began his career editing pre-med and pre-nursing textbooks. At Stanford Law School, he graduated with distinction as a public-interest fellow and co-edited the civil-rights journal. After his Tax Division service, he developed a whistleblower practice at Constantine Cannon. In 2024, he joined colleagues in launching Whistleblower Partners LLP. ###### The Last Resort, Made to Work Ronickher has described whistleblowing as "the last resort for people who find things that just aren't being fixed." His clients have included a coding-compliance physician, a tax insider, and a network engineer with information about a company's submissions to the government. Taylor raised concerns internally before reporting them to the government, and the Kaiser litigation continued for years before its public resolution. Ronickher's work involves developing an insider's information into documentary evidence and a claim under the applicable whistleblower program. Outside his practice, he coaches his daughters' youth soccer. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner - **Organization:** Whistleblower Partners LLP - **Practice:** Medicare Advantage, Tax, Cybersecurity - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Firm:** Whistleblower Partners LLP - **Office:** Washington, D.C. - **Website:** whistleblower.law - **Email:** mike@whistleblower.law - **Phone:** 202-935-5446 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Michael Ronickher Medicare Advantage · Tax · Cybersecurity > “This is usually the last resort for people who find things that just aren't being fixed. ##### Money That Moves by Formula Medicare Advantage, tax, and cybersecurity whistleblower litigation — Partner, Whistleblower Partners LLP, Washington, D.C. As lead counsel for Dr. James Taylor, Michael Ronickher represented a Kaiser Permanente physician whose responsibilities had included coding governance, compliance, and revenue-cycle management. Taylor, a longtime physician and former medical director, alleged that Kaiser added and retained diagnosis codes unsupported by patients’ medical records. Developing his case required comparing what clinicians had documented with the codes ultimately submitted for payment, including additions made after a patient’s visit. ###### The Doctor Who Wouldn’t Let It Go Medicare Advantage pays health plans monthly amounts adjusted in part for each patient’s diagnoses. A diagnosis associated with greater medical need can increase the patient’s risk score and the plan’s payment. The government alleged that Kaiser sought additions to medical records months, and sometimes more than a year, after appointments, including diagnoses that physicians had neither considered nor addressed during those visits. The allegations concerned practices from 2009 through 2018. Kaiser allegedly mined patients’ histories for diagnoses, sent physicians requests to add them, and set goals for physicians and facilities to increase risk-adjustment diagnoses. The government also alleged that financial incentives were tied to those goals and that internal warnings and compliance audits had identified improper addenda. In January 2026, after years of litigation, Kaiser entities agreed to pay the government $556 million to resolve the False Claims Act allegations, the largest Medicare Advantage settlement under the statute at the time. The resolution included claims brought by Taylor and fellow whistleblower Ronda Osinek; their combined relator share was $95 million, among the largest whistleblower recoveries. “Dr. Taylor raised concerns internally long before he went to the government,” Ronickher said. “His persistence and commitment to justice are inspiring.” Ronickher also served as lead counsel for Teresa Ross, a former Group Health Cooperative employee, in litigation involving Independent Health and its diagnosis-coding subsidiary, DxID. The government alleged that DxID supplied unsupported diagnoses that increased Medicare payments. The December 2024 settlement provided for payments of up to $100 million from Independent Health, DxID, and former DxID chief executive Betsy Gaffney, with part of the amount dependent on Independent Health’s financial performance over five years. Explaining the result, Ronickher emphasized that it included both a vendor and an individual executive: “That’s key for deterrence.” ###### Nine Years at the Tax Division Before law school, Ronickher edited pre-med and pre-nursing textbooks for the publisher Benjamin Cummings. He had graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in comparative literature. At Stanford Law School, he graduated with distinction, held a public-interest fellowship, and co-edited the Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. He spent roughly nine years as a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Tax Division, developing tax evidence and taking tax and financial-fraud disputes through trial for the United States. He received the division’s Outstanding Attorney Award in 2010, 2013, and 2015, and his work on the Wells Fargo tax-shelter trial earned an IRS commendation. After government service, Ronickher built his whistleblower practice at Constantine Cannon, representing insiders with information about tax fraud, health-care payments, and compliance with cybersecurity requirements in federal contracts. He testified before the D.C. Council in 2018 in support of tax provisions in the District’s False Claims Act, which opened local tax fraud to whistleblower enforcement. In 2024, he joined colleagues in launching Whistleblower Partners LLP. He has written in Fortune, Bloomberg Tax, The Washington Post, and Law360 about whistleblower programs, tax enforcement, and anti-money-laundering policy. Outside his practice, he coaches his daughters’ youth soccer. ###### A New Theory Every Few Years In the Cisco Systems litigation, Ronickher represented James Glenn, a network and video-surveillance specialist who had identified security defects in software sold to government agencies. Ronickher explained that someone with limited access could acquire administrative privileges without the creation of that account being logged. Depending on the installation, an intruder could also reach connected physical-security systems, including electronic card readers and alarms. The case resolved for $8.6 million in 2019, the first successful False Claims Act case based on undisclosed cybersecurity defects in a government-purchased product. In October 2021, the Justice Department launched its Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative to pursue contractors and grant recipients that knowingly supplied deficient cybersecurity products or services, misrepresented their practices, or violated monitoring and reporting obligations. In health care, Ronickher represented Dennis Kogod, a former chief operating officer of DaVita Kidney Care. DaVita’s $34.5 million settlement in 2024 resolved three sets of kickback allegations: a transaction tied to pharmacy referrals, uncollected management fees benefiting physician-owners of vascular-access centers, and compensation to a nephrology practice connected to dialysis referrals. ###### The Last Resort, Made to Work Ronickher has described whistleblowing as “the last resort for people who find things that just aren't being fixed.” His clients have included a coding-compliance physician, a tax insider, and a network engineer. Their cases require developing specialized knowledge into documentary evidence and a claim under the applicable whistleblower program. In one confidential IRS matter, Ronickher represented the first whistleblower to expose an offshore structure used in a complex tax fraud. He worked with Chris McLamb and Eric Havian, with assistance from paralegal Karen Yang. The government recovered $263.7 million in taxes, penalties, and interest. His client and two other whistleblowers shared a $79 million award, among the largest in the IRS program’s history. The IRS recognized information connecting transactions and parties it was unlikely to identify through ordinary examination, along with the whistleblowers’ assistance in the investigation. After the taxpayer had paid and waived further challenges, Ronickher commended the whistleblower office’s collaborative approach to paying the award without years of additional administrative proceedings or litigation. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner - **Organization:** Whistleblower Partners LLP - **Practice:** Medicare Advantage, Tax, Cybersecurity - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Firm:** Whistleblower Partners LLP - **Office:** Washington, D.C. - **Website:** whistleblower.law - **Email:** mike@whistleblower.law - **Phone:** 202-935-5446 --- ## 37. Kenneth J. Nolan — `900005219` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `4a3beba09eef744f55ff7f049978ab7f905b2f77fd1fb1beb09d5e8dc80eca1b` - **After/current hash:** `95937fde87925f99e46b9ad045e6062f2543a2a3626b68dc0912df232661ea4d` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005219/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Consumer committee and Novartis opening**: Identify Nolan's committee offices and explain his recorded reason for filing in Tampa and assessment of sales volume, rather than adding generalized praise. - `correct` — **Novartis, Allergan and Schering-Plough resolutions**: Distinguish civil settlements from combined criminal fines and forfeiture, and correct Schering to $435 million total with $255 million civil and $180 million criminal. - `restructure` — **Complete firm case inventory**: Separate pharmaceutical, hospital-billing and hospice/device matters; add verified client identities and evidence details while preserving every original company, result and occupation. - `rewrite` — **Teaching, publications and final paragraph**: Replace an unsupported numerical publication count with documented subjects and Nolan's 2001 and 2004 discussions of case assessment and evidence preparation; consolidate the repeated general closing into earlier evidence passages. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Consumer committee and Novartis opening**: Identify Nolan's committee offices and explain his recorded reason for filing in Tampa and assessment of sales volume, rather than adding generalized praise. - `correct` — **Novartis, Allergan and Schering-Plough resolutions**: Distinguish civil settlements from combined criminal fines and forfeiture, and correct Schering to $435 million total with $255 million civil and $180 million criminal. - `restructure` — **Complete firm case inventory**: Separate pharmaceutical, hospital-billing and hospice/device matters; add verified client identities and evidence details while preserving every original company, result and occupation. - `rewrite` — **Teaching, publications and final paragraph**: Replace an unsupported numerical publication count with documented subjects and Nolan's 2001 and 2004 discussions of case assessment and evidence preparation; consolidate the repeated general closing into earlier evidence passages. ### BEFORE #### Kenneth J. Nolan Health Care Fraud · Pharmaceutical Litigation > “We knew that the percentage of off-label sales was robust and the damages would be high. ##### A Name in the Credits Health-care and pharmaceutical qui tam litigation — Founding partner, Nolan Auerbach & White, Fort Lauderdale. When Icarus won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2018, Kenneth J. Nolan was credited as a co-executive producer. The documentary follows Grigory Rodchenkov, the Russian laboratory director whose disclosures exposed a state-run doping program. Nolan's involvement accompanied his legal work representing whistleblowers from his practice in Fort Lauderdale. A Yale graduate with a law degree from the University of Florida, Nolan began by representing nonprofits and consumers in litigation over fraud and deceptive practices. He helped lead the Florida Bar's consumer protection law committee from 1997 to 2003. ###### Trileptal, Botox, and the Sales Floor In the Novartis litigation, which began with a filing in Tampa, Nolan represented sales-force relators with information about the marketing of Trileptal. The allegations concerned promotion of the anti-seizure medication for unapproved uses and illegal remuneration to health-care providers. The case contributed to a $422.5 million resolution in 2010: a $237.5 million civil settlement, a $185 million criminal fine, and a guilty plea to misbranding. Nolan said that if the allegations were true, the damages would be astronomical. The same year, he represented two whistleblowers in the Allergan Botox litigation, part of a $600 million criminal and civil resolution: a $375 million criminal component with a misbranding plea and a $225 million civil settlement. That matter concerned off-label promotion and payments to physicians who injected the product. The relators' work on the sales floor gave them information about marketing practices and payments to prescribers. The litigation connected that information to marketing documents, transactions, and claims paid by government health programs. Nolan worked with his clients to present the evidence to the government. ###### A Firm Built for One Kind of Case Nolan founded Nolan Auerbach & White as a firm devoted to representing health-care fraud whistleblowers. Its attorneys, working with clients and the Justice Department, have handled the Schering-Plough matter, in which the firm represented two of three whistleblowers in a $435 million civil resolution accompanied by a $180 million criminal fine; the Johnson & Johnson and Scios case over the cardiac drug Natrecor, resolved for $184 million alongside an $85 million criminal fine; a $67 million Genentech and OSI Pharmaceuticals settlement involving the lung-cancer drug Tarceva; and a $39 million Daiichi Sankyo kickback resolution. The firm's provider and device work includes a $104.5 million Vencor and Kindred cost-report recovery, a $36.9 million Dignity Health settlement over inpatient billing classifications, a $27.5 million resolution with Universal Health Services and its South Texas hospitals over physician-referral arrangements, a $25 million Odyssey Healthcare hospice matter, a $16 million St. Jude Medical kickback settlement, and a $33 million Alere resolution involving a process analyst who pursued her case for seven years. Its clients have included sales representatives, directors of medical management, hospice executive directors, and senior process analysts, with relator shares reaching millions of dollars. Nolan's earlier matters include the Nova Southeastern University case, in which he represented a psychologist in a $4.1 million resolution over billing for psychological services. In the Lifeline Healthcare matter, he represented four clinicians whose allegations concerned home-health visits billed for patients who were not homebound. Across academic institutions, home-health agencies, and manufacturers, the work requires examining the applicable reimbursement rules and establishing falsity, knowledge, materiality, and government loss. ###### The Teacher's Side of the Table Taxpayers Against Fraud, the national organization of the whistleblower bar, named Nolan Lawyer of the Year, and he chairs its President's Council. He has served as an adjunct professor of trial practice at Nova Southeastern University's law school and on the faculty of the National Institute for Trial Advocacy. Between 2000 and 2008, he published sixteen articles on health-care fraud and False Claims Act enforcement. His civic work in Fort Lauderdale includes serving as vice-president of Florida Girls Giving Back. He is a past board member of ChildNet and the American Cancer Society and a past president of the Yale Club of Fort Lauderdale. Nolan's representation involves investigating how a company's internal commercial practices affect the claims submitted to public health programs. His clients supply information from their work inside those organizations, and his firm develops that information through records, testimony, and reimbursement analysis. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner - **Organization:** Nolan Auerbach & White - **Practice:** Health Care Fraud, Pharmaceutical Litigation - **Location:** Fort Lauderdale, Florida ##### Contact - **Firm:** Nolan Auerbach & White - **Address:** 101 NE 3rd Avenue, Suite 1500, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301 - **Website:** whistleblowerfirm.com - **Phone:** 800-372-8304 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Kenneth J. Nolan Health Care Fraud · Pharmaceutical Litigation > “We knew that the percentage of off-label sales was robust and the damages would be high. ##### A Name in the Credits Health-care and pharmaceutical qui tam litigation — Founding partner, Nolan Auerbach & White, Fort Lauderdale. When Icarus won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2018, Kenneth J. Nolan was credited as a co-executive producer. The documentary follows Grigory Rodchenkov, the Russian laboratory director whose disclosures exposed a state-run doping program. Nolan’s involvement accompanied his legal work representing whistleblowers from his practice in Fort Lauderdale. A Yale graduate with a law degree from the University of Florida, Nolan began by representing nonprofits and consumers in litigation over fraud and deceptive practices. He helped lead the Florida Bar’s consumer protection law committee from 1997 to 2003, serving as chairman, vice-chairman, and continuing-legal-education chairman. ###### Trileptal, Botox, and the Sales Floor Nolan represented three sales-force whistleblowers in litigation over Novartis’s marketing of Trileptal, an anti-seizure medication. Their allegations concerned promotion for unapproved uses and payments to health-care providers. In explaining the initial filing in Tampa, Nolan pointed to the local U.S. Attorney’s Office’s experience pursuing health-care fraud. He had assessed the volume of off-label sales and said that, if the allegations were true, the damages would be astronomical. The sales representatives knew how the company marketed its products and paid prescribers. Nolan worked with his clients to present their information to the government, connecting their accounts to marketing documents, transactions, and claims paid by public health programs. The government alleged that Novartis promoted Trileptal for psychiatric and pain uses that those programs did not cover, and paid kickbacks to induce prescriptions of Trileptal and five other drugs. In 2010, Novartis agreed to a $422.5 million resolution: a $237.5 million civil settlement and a combined criminal fine and forfeiture of $185 million, with a guilty plea to misbranding. The settlement resolved several whistleblower suits, including the litigation Nolan’s clients had brought. That same year, Nolan represented two whistleblowers in the Allergan Botox litigation, part of a $600 million resolution comprising a $225 million civil settlement and a combined criminal fine and forfeiture of $375 million, with a misbranding plea. The allegations connected off-label promotion and payments to physicians with the billing instructions Allergan supplied. The government alleged that the company taught doctors and their staffs how to obtain reimbursement for uncovered uses, including through inappropriate diagnosis codes. ###### A Firm Built for One Kind of Case Nolan founded Nolan Auerbach & White as a firm devoted to representing health-care fraud whistleblowers. His earlier clients included a psychologist in the Nova Southeastern University case, which resolved for $4.1 million over billing for psychological services, and four clinicians in the Lifeline Healthcare matter, whose allegations concerned home-health visits billed for patients who were not homebound. Those cases required examining the reimbursement rules governing the services, the accuracy of the claims, what the providers knew, and whether any misrepresentation was material to the government’s payment decision. The firm also had to establish the amount of public money lost. The firm’s attorneys have continued that work with clients and the Justice Department across pharmaceutical, hospital, hospice, and medical-device cases. In the Schering-Plough matter, the firm represented two of three whistleblowers in a $435 million resolution: $255 million to resolve civil claims and a $180 million criminal fine. Its two clients received more than $12 million in relator shares. The firm’s representation of former Scios area manager Joe Strom led to a $184 million civil settlement with Johnson & Johnson and Scios over off-label promotion of the cardiac drug Natrecor. Scios had separately paid an $85 million criminal fine. Other pharmaceutical clients brought information about a drug’s effectiveness and the incentives offered to prescribers. Former product manager Brian Shields’s case against Genentech and OSI Pharmaceuticals concerned the lung-cancer drug Tarceva and resolved for $67 million. Former sales representative Kathy Fragoules’s case against Daiichi Sankyo resulted in a $39 million kickback settlement. Her allegations concerned payments to physicians through speaking programs; the legal team reviewed tens of thousands of documents in pursuing the case. Hospital billing required different evidence. The firm’s work included a $104.5 million Vencor and Kindred recovery involving cost reports, and a $36.9 million Dignity Health settlement over inpatient billing classifications. Dignity’s former director of medical management, Kathleen Hawkins, challenged claims for patients who could have received less costly outpatient care. In South Texas, the firm represented a whistleblower in a $27.5 million resolution with Universal Health Services and its hospitals over physician-referral arrangements. The firm also represented a hospice executive director in a $25 million Odyssey Healthcare matter and a sales representative in a $16 million St. Jude Medical kickback settlement. Senior process analyst Amanda Wu pursued her Alere case for seven years before a $33 million resolution. ###### The Teacher’s Side of the Table Taxpayers Against Fraud, the national organization of the whistleblower bar, named Nolan Lawyer of the Year, and he chairs its President’s Council. He has served as an adjunct professor of trial practice at Nova Southeastern University’s law school and on the faculty of the National Institute for Trial Advocacy. His civic work in Fort Lauderdale includes serving as vice-president of Florida Girls Giving Back. He is a past board member of ChildNet and the American Cancer Society and a past president of the Yale Club of Fort Lauderdale. Nolan’s writing between 2000 and 2008 addressed health-care fraud and False Claims Act enforcement through particular problems: standing to sue, confidentiality when disclosing medical records, off-label sales, pharmaceutical kickbacks, and manufacturing standards. In 2001, he explained how a lawyer evaluating an insider’s account had to distinguish knowing false claims from mistakes, determine whether the government had suffered a loss, and examine how the agency responsible for payment understood the billing rules. In a 2004 article for health-care purchasers, Nolan described preparing a disclosure memorandum with the whistleblower: assembling documents and witness accounts, and using consultants to test whether the suspected conduct could be substantiated. He urged employees to gather evidence lawfully and ethically, staying within company policy and the records they would encounter in their ordinary work. He described preparation that could take weeks or months before filing, as lawyer and client developed the information that investigators would need. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner - **Organization:** Nolan Auerbach & White - **Practice:** Health Care Fraud, Pharmaceutical Litigation - **Location:** Fort Lauderdale, Florida ##### Contact - **Firm:** Nolan Auerbach & White - **Address:** 101 NE 3rd Avenue, Suite 1500, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301 - **Website:** whistleblowerfirm.com - **Phone:** 800-372-8304 --- ## 38. Julie Keeton Bracker — `900005218` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `4f1466aa3cc103bb3362111cc3f26c1deeed6bda168a5aa133831e830bfb857c` - **After/current hash:** `aedbc20ec69e84866a73bb45f6e6606ba0a194b294397038abf7e8232e0554f4` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005218/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Education and first representation**: Add Bracker's verified middle-school teaching awards and make her completed defense case and subsequent choice of relator practice clear without inventing an intellectual effect of her degree. - `restructure` — **Complete Felten section and former final paragraph**: Place the post-recovery risk explanation next to Felten's alleged difficulties, identify Bracker as the appellate advocate and Marcus on brief, and describe the dated holding and remand precisely. - `correct` — **PPP and DermaTran settlement passages**: State the government's actual employee-aggregation allegation, name the relevant parties and use the exact $6,876,564 multi-defendant pharmacy settlement instead of a truncated figure. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Infusion work and cyber teaching**: Name the infusion practice, add the firm's November 2021 filing and security-footage review, and identify Bracker's 2024 cyber panel rather than relying on general expertise claims. - `rewrite` — **Final section and closing**: Preserve all mentoring, advisory, speaking and family material and replace the repeated Felten recap with Bracker's own explanation of teaching employment lawyers to ask about government billing. ### BEFORE #### Julie Keeton Bracker False Claims Act · Whistleblower Retaliation > “Whistleblowers are courageous individuals who expose fraud against the government. ##### The Study of How People Know Health-care, retaliation, and pandemic-relief False Claims Act litigation — Founding partner, Bracker & Marcus, Atlanta. Julie Keeton Bracker graduated magna cum laude from Vanderbilt University's Peabody College in 1993 with a degree in cognitive studies and education, receiving the program's Outstanding Promise award. She returned to Vanderbilt for law school and graduated summa cum laude in 2002, was elected to the Order of the Coif, and served as executive student writing editor of the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law. Bracker began by defending a False Claims Act defendant before moving to represent relators. At the qui tam boutique where she spent roughly eight years, she made partner after two years and closed more than thirty cases that returned over $80 million to taxpayers. In 2015, she and Jason Marcus founded Bracker & Marcus LLC in Atlanta, a firm devoted to representing whistleblowers under the False Claims Act and handling cases nationwide. ###### The Felten Question Bracker represented Dr. David Felten, a relator in the qui tam cases connected to William Beaumont Hospitals' $84.5 million settlement in 2018, which resolved allegations of improper financial relationships with referring physicians. She also represented him in the appeal addressing whether the False Claims Act's anti-retaliation provision protects a whistleblower after employment ends. Retaliation can include damaged references, blacklisting, and communications to prospective employers that affect later work. In 2021, the Sixth Circuit held in the Felten appeal that the Act's protection reaches post-employment conduct. Bracker's work in the matter encompassed both the public fraud claim and the relator's protection from retaliation. ###### Emergency Money, Ordinary Rules After Congress authorized hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency relief in 2020, Bracker's firm brought False Claims Act cases involving pandemic funding. Bracker & Marcus secured a $9 million Paycheck Protection Program settlement resolving allegations that a national roofing operation's commonly owned companies applied for separate loans without aggregating employees and revenues as the affiliation rules required. The amount tied the largest PPP settlement then on record, and the firm's client received a $1 million relator share. In 2024, Bracker published "Guarding the Henhouse: False Claims Act Accountability for PPP Processors and Lenders" in The Federal Lawyer, addressing liability for those who processed and issued the loans. Her health-care work includes a matter brought by the firm that an Atlanta infusion clinic resolved for $2.18 million in 2026. She also served as counsel in the compounding-pharmacy litigation that contributed to a $6.87 million DermaTran resolution concerning waived copays and inflated charges to government payers. The matters required examining billing and compensation records against the applicable payment rules. Since the Justice Department launched its Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative in 2021, Bracker has also spoken and consulted on the intersection of the False Claims Act and cybersecurity regulation, including certifications of compliance made to the government. ###### The Life of the Case After the Recovery Bracker served on the board of Georgia's chapter of the National Employment Lawyers Association, led it as president in 2014, and mentors younger lawyers through the organization's national program. Since 2021, she has sat on Vanderbilt Law School's advisory board. She speaks regularly at national conferences on qui tam law. She lives in East Cobb, outside Atlanta, with her husband, a former technologist who became a privacy attorney, and their two children. Bracker's representation continues through the fraud litigation and any related retaliation claims. A relator who supplies decisive evidence may spend years waiting while a case remains sealed and may face continuing risks to reputation and employment even after a public recovery. Her work on Felten addressed one of those risks by securing appellate protection against retaliation after the employment relationship ends. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner - **Organization:** Bracker & Marcus - **Practice:** False Claims Act, Whistleblower Retaliation - **Location:** Atlanta, Georgia ##### Contact - **Firm:** Bracker & Marcus - **Address:** 3355 Lenox Road NE, Suite 660, Atlanta, GA 30326 - **Website:** fcacounsel.com - **Email:** info@FCACounsel.com - **Phone:** 770-988-5035 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Julie Keeton Bracker False Claims Act · Whistleblower Retaliation > “Whistleblowers are courageous individuals who expose fraud against the government. ##### The Study of How People Know Health-care, retaliation, and pandemic-relief False Claims Act litigation — Founding partner, Bracker & Marcus, Atlanta. Julie Keeton Bracker graduated magna cum laude from Vanderbilt University's Peabody College in 1993 with a degree in cognitive studies and education, receiving the program's Outstanding Promise award. Before returning to Vanderbilt for law school, she was twice named Teacher of the Year at Ridgeview Middle School. She graduated summa cum laude from the law school in 2002, was elected to the Order of the Coif, and served as executive student writing editor of the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law. Bracker's first False Claims Act case was on the defense side. After completing it, she changed her practice to represent relators—the people who bring fraud claims on the government's behalf. At the qui tam boutique where she spent roughly eight years, she made partner after two years and closed more than thirty cases that returned over $80 million to taxpayers. In 2015, she and Jason Marcus founded Bracker & Marcus LLC in Atlanta, a firm devoted to representing whistleblowers under the Act and handling cases nationwide. ###### The Felten Question Bracker represented Dr. David Felten in one of the whistleblower suits resolved by William Beaumont Hospitals' $84.5 million settlement in 2018. The litigation concerned improper financial relationships with referring physicians, including compensation above fair market value. Felten had filed his complaint in 2010, and the public recovery did not end his own employment claims. A relator may wait years while a case remains under seal, then face damaged references or communications to prospective employers even after a public recovery. Felten alleged that Beaumont had undermined his applications to almost forty institutions after he left the hospital, preventing him from obtaining a comparable position in academic medicine. Bracker continued to represent him as he sought protection against that alleged blacklisting. Bracker argued Felten's appeal in October 2020, with Marcus joining her on the brief. The question was whether the Act's protection against retaliation extended beyond the end of employment. In March 2021, the Sixth Circuit held that it did: threats and harassment can occur after a person leaves a job, and the statute's remedies are not confined to current employees. The court sent the case back for further proceedings, including consideration of the blacklisting allegations. ###### Emergency Money, Ordinary Rules After Congress authorized hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency relief in 2020, Bracker's firm brought False Claims Act cases involving pandemic funding. Its client Sidesolve challenged Paycheck Protection Program loans obtained by the national Empire Roofing network. The government alleged that commonly owned affiliates applied separately, each certifying that it had fewer than 500 employees, although the affiliated companies exceeded that limit when counted together. The $9 million settlement, announced in December 2023, tied the largest PPP settlement then on record, and Sidesolve received a $1 million relator share. Her 2024 article, "Guarding the Henhouse: False Claims Act Accountability for PPP Processors and Lenders," published in The Federal Lawyer, examined the responsibility of those who processed and issued the loans. ###### Tracing the Treatment In her health-care work, Bracker served as counsel in compounding-pharmacy litigation that contributed to a $6,876,564 resolution with DermaTran and other defendants in 2022. A former accountant brought the case. The government alleged that copays were improperly waived and that prices reported to government payers exceeded those charged to uninsured patients paying cash. The billing records had to be assessed against the programs' payment rules. Another client, a front-office employee at Atlanta-area Arthritis & Rheumatology Center, reported that medical assistants were performing infusions they were not qualified to administer under Georgia law. Bracker & Marcus filed the case in November 2021 and reviewed hundreds of hours of security footage to help the government identify which Medicare beneficiaries had received those treatments. The clinic and its owner agreed to a $2.18 million settlement announced in January 2026. ###### The Questions She Teaches Lawyers to Ask Since the Justice Department launched its Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative in 2021, Bracker has also spoken and consulted on the relationship between the False Claims Act and cybersecurity requirements, including contractors' certifications of compliance to the government. At the Anti-Fraud Coalition's 2024 conference, she moderated a panel examining such cases, including false security-assessment scores submitted to a Defense Department database. Bracker served on the board of Georgia's chapter of the National Employment Lawyers Association, led it as president in 2014, and mentors younger lawyers through the organization's national program. Since 2021, she has sat on Vanderbilt Law School's advisory board. She speaks regularly at national conferences on qui tam law. She lives in East Cobb, outside Atlanta, with her husband, a former technologist who became a privacy attorney, and their two children. In a 2025 legal-education discussion, Bracker described clients who had questioned a billing practice at work and sought an employment lawyer when they feared losing their jobs. "A lot of times that's why they find me," she said. Part of her teaching is helping employment lawyers recognize when a complaint about unfair treatment may also involve fraud. When the reason for an employee's treatment seems obscure, she urges the lawyer to ask whether the employee had raised concerns about how the employer was billing the government. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner - **Organization:** Bracker & Marcus - **Practice:** False Claims Act, Whistleblower Retaliation - **Location:** Atlanta, Georgia ##### Contact - **Firm:** Bracker & Marcus - **Address:** 3355 Lenox Road NE, Suite 660, Atlanta, GA 30326 - **Website:** fcacounsel.com - **Email:** info@FCACounsel.com - **Phone:** 770-988-5035 --- ## 39. Suzanne E. Durrell — `900005217` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `e9c587e6d0dd3bcf9d62d6ebb7fffa4edc41474cc7c2217eebc997037c3bf044` - **After/current hash:** `154e88ccdd3d258c2b855bb5b7cf3a881480d1be36e5e51cc7d1fab5369c0cf8` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005217/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **NMC opening and government work**: Consolidate three repeated explanations into two connected paragraphs, retaining all responsibilities and adding the specific billing/referral issue and compliance terms. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Private-practice transition and case portfolio**: Distinguish 2003 collaboration from later LLC formation and make the Cardinal financial arrangement concrete while retaining every case, amount, client type and original government-career fact. - `correct` — **Pharmacy amount, TAF attribution and publications**: Use the precise joint pharmacy settlement, identify the shared 2017 honor and replace unsupported publication/presentation thresholds with documented subjects. - `rewrite` — **Complete final section**: Retain the client's sealed-case restrictions and evidence preparation, develop Durrell's own investigative-cooperation proposal, and end with the Ensign client's contract concerns and recovery after continued litigation. ### BEFORE #### Suzanne E. Durrell Health Care Fraud · Pharmaceutical Whistleblowers > “I love wielding the law to help clients, the government, and the public. ##### The Lawyer the Whistleblowers Had to Persuade Pharmaceutical and health-care qui tam litigation — Co-founder and managing member, Whistleblower Law Collaborative, Boston. In January 2000, the United States announced a $486 million resolution with National Medical Care and its parent Fresenius, then the largest health-care fraud settlement in American history. Suzanne E. Durrell was the government's lead civil attorney. The investigation gathered five qui tam cases and coordinated criminal and civil proceedings over conduct in the dialysis industry. As a federal prosecutor, Durrell evaluated the whistleblowers' allegations and helped decide which cases the government would pursue. As chief of the Civil Division of the United States Attorney's Office in Boston, Durrell supervised and prosecuted major qui tam matters, weighed intervention decisions, coordinated parallel proceedings, and calculated government losses. She later brought that experience to representing employees, executives, and clinicians who report fraud. Her work has included both evaluating a relator's evidence for the government and preparing that evidence on the relator's behalf. ###### From Swarthmore to Main Justice Durrell graduated with honors from Swarthmore College in 1975 and cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center in 1978, where she served as a notes editor of the American Criminal Law Review and worked on the staff of Senator Patrick Leahy. She spent six years as an associate at Boston's Hill & Barlow in complex civil litigation and five years as an Assistant Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In 1989, she joined the United States Attorney's Office in Boston. From 1991 to 1992, she served in Washington as a Deputy Associate Attorney General before returning to Boston as deputy chief and then chief of the Civil Division. Her government service earned her the Attorney General's Award for Exceptional Service, the Justice Department's highest honor. The National Medical Care resolution required coordination of intervention decisions, damages calculations, criminal pleas, civil releases, and the information supplied by multiple relators. Durrell left the Justice Department in 2002 with experience directing those investigations and negotiations. ###### Twenty Years of the Collaborative With Robert M. Thomas Jr., a fellow former federal prosecutor, Durrell founded the Whistleblower Law Collaborative in Boston. The firm has spent two decades representing relators nationwide, and she has practiced False Claims Act law in government and private practice for more than three decades. Her cases include the $137.5 million WellCare resolution, a $150 million Amedisys settlement, the $214.5 million Elan and Eisai pharmaceutical resolution, and the $465 million Mylan EpiPen matter. They concern insurers, home-health providers, manufacturers, and their financial arrangements. A later Cardinal Health case resolved for $13.125 million. In the Ensign Group matter, resolved in 2024 for $47.3 million, Durrell represented a former contracts manager whose allegations concerned kickbacks to physicians for patient referrals within a skilled-nursing enterprise. After the government declined to intervene, the plaintiffs' team continued the case and assembled the referral, compensation, and billing evidence. In 2022, she was counsel in the DermaTran compounding-pharmacy litigation that produced a $6.87 million resolution over copay waivers and inflated government pricing. She and Thomas also co-represented an anonymous client who received a $17 million award from the Securities and Exchange Commission's whistleblower program. The Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund named Durrell its Lawyer of the Year in 2017. A fellow of the American Bar Foundation, she chaired the pharmaceuticals, biologics, and device fraud subcommittee of the anti-fraud coalition's COVID-19 task force. She has published more than fifteen articles and delivered more than forty conference presentations on whistleblower law. ###### Steadying the Person Behind the Case Durrell's representation includes preparing evidence and helping clients through the demands of a sealed investigation. Whistleblowers may still work for the employer whose conduct they are reporting and can face professional isolation and prolonged confidentiality. She helps organize a coherent account, corroborating documents, a damages calculation, and an explanation of the industry for government investigators. She also guides clients through periods when the investigation's confidentiality limits what they can discuss and the government's role limits their control over the case. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Co-founder and Managing Member - **Organization:** Whistleblower Law Collaborative - **Practice:** Health Care Fraud, Pharmaceutical Whistleblowers - **Location:** Boston, Massachusetts ##### Contact - **Firm:** Whistleblower Law Collaborative - **Address:** 20 Park Plaza, Suite 438, Boston, MA 02116 - **Website:** whistleblowerllc.com - **Email:** suzanne@whistleblowerllc.com - **Phone:** 617-371-0936 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Suzanne E. Durrell Health Care Fraud · Pharmaceutical Whistleblowers > “I love wielding the law to help clients, the government, and the public. ##### The Lawyer the Whistleblowers Had to Persuade Pharmaceutical and health-care qui tam litigation — Co-founder and managing member, Whistleblower Law Collaborative, Boston. In January 2000, the United States announced a $486 million resolution with National Medical Care and its parent Fresenius, then the largest health-care fraud settlement in American history. Suzanne E. Durrell was the government's lead civil attorney. Five whistleblower cases had contributed to an investigation of the dialysis company's laboratory billing and payments to induce referrals. The resolution combined civil payments with criminal penalties and required the company to submit to audits and report its compliance with government health-care rules. Durrell's work involved evaluating the relators' information, helping decide which claims the government would pursue, calculating its losses, and coordinating civil releases with criminal pleas. As chief of the Civil Division of the United States Attorney's Office in Boston, she supervised and prosecuted qui tam cases alongside parallel criminal investigations. ###### From Swarthmore to Main Justice Durrell graduated with honors from Swarthmore College in 1975 and cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center in 1978, where she served as a notes editor of the American Criminal Law Review and worked on the staff of Senator Patrick Leahy. She spent six years as an associate at Boston's Hill & Barlow in complex civil litigation and five years as an Assistant Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In 1989, she joined the United States Attorney's Office in Boston. From 1991 to 1992, she served in Washington as a Deputy Associate Attorney General before returning to Boston as deputy chief and then chief of the Civil Division. Her government service earned her the Attorney General's Award for Exceptional Service, the Justice Department's highest honor. When Durrell left the Justice Department in 2002, she chose to represent whistleblowers rather than companies defending fraud claims. The following year, she opened Durrell Law Office and began working with Robert M. Thomas Jr., another former federal prosecutor. They later founded the Whistleblower Law Collaborative in Boston. Their collaboration has spanned more than two decades, representing relators nationwide; Durrell has practiced False Claims Act law in government and private practice for more than three decades. ###### Twenty Years of the Collaborative Durrell's clients have included employees, executives, and clinicians with information about health-care fraud. Her cases include the $137.5 million resolution with the insurer WellCare and a $150 million settlement with the home-health provider Amedisys. Pharmaceutical matters include the $214.5 million Elan and Eisai resolution and the $465 million Mylan EpiPen case. A later Cardinal Health case resolved for $13.125 million over allegations that the company paid physician practices in advance to induce them to purchase specialty drugs. In 2022, Durrell served as counsel in the DermaTran compounding-pharmacy litigation, which produced a $6,876,564 resolution with DermaTran and other defendants over copay waivers and inflated prices reported to government payers. She and Thomas also co-represented an anonymous client who received a $17 million award from the Securities and Exchange Commission's whistleblower program. The Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund named Durrell and Thomas its 2017 Lawyers of the Year. A fellow of the American Bar Foundation, she chaired the pharmaceuticals, biologics, and device fraud subcommittee of the anti-fraud coalition's COVID-19 task force. Her writing and conference presentations address whistleblower investigations, settlements, damages calculations, and health-care fraud. During the pandemic, she spoke about clinical-trial fraud and medical devices as the government funded the development and purchase of new treatments and equipment. ###### Steadying the Person Behind the Case Durrell prepares clients' evidence for government investigators: a coherent account, corroborating documents, a calculation of losses, and an explanation of the industry. Whistleblowers may still work for the employer whose conduct they report, facing professional isolation and years of confidentiality while an investigation proceeds under seal. She guides them through those restrictions and the limited control they have over the government's investigation. In a 2012 paper for the American Bar Association, Durrell argued for giving relators a more active part in that investigation. She proposed agreeing on assignments early and revisiting them as the evidence developed. Clients could help identify witnesses, explain a company's organization, and connect documents to events investigators needed to understand. Her proposal also required careful coordination over privileged material and the limits on what a client could collect or disclose. In the Ensign Group case, Durrell represented a former contracts manager who also served on the company's compliance committee. The client alleged that the skilled-nursing enterprise paid physicians inflated monthly amounts to induce patient referrals. She had tried to replace those payments with hourly rates tied to actual work and fair market value, but alleged that the company overrode her efforts. After the government declined to intervene in 2020, Durrell and Thomas continued the case with Hirst Law Group and Bird Marella. The team developed the referral, compensation, and billing evidence over four more years of litigation. The case was still in discovery when it settled for more than $47.3 million in 2024, and the government awarded the client a share of the recovery. She had pursued her allegations for nine and a half years. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Co-founder and Managing Member - **Organization:** Whistleblower Law Collaborative - **Practice:** Health Care Fraud, Pharmaceutical Whistleblowers - **Location:** Boston, Massachusetts ##### Contact - **Firm:** Whistleblower Law Collaborative - **Address:** 20 Park Plaza, Suite 438, Boston, MA 02116 - **Website:** whistleblowerllc.com - **Email:** suzanne@whistleblowerllc.com - **Phone:** 617-371-0936 --- ## 40. Robert M. Thomas Jr. — `900005216` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `130360a2bcae139b7b864ffd533fafc24d542cb3b6cb5860cd1159d7b65a4594` - **After/current hash:** `8fd63c210ab54134187c56bab79df9b43b165cc80f430707fa4a376880983452` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005216/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Opening and original closing**: Open with the actual Ensign continuation, consolidate the repeated intake and private-litigation explanations, and preserve the recovery/industry material in the portfolio. - `correct` — **Ensign account**: Identify the single contracts-manager client and referral-fee allegations; remove the unsupported medical-necessity/clinical-record descriptions associated with an insufficiently distinguished case history. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Union investigations and MORSECORP**: Add the actual investigative and disciplinary responsibilities and the government-reported cybersecurity score discrepancy; preserve personal versus firm attribution. - `rewrite` — **Teaching and final section**: Retain every teaching and civic fact, clarify the joint 2017 award, explain the interview assignment and close with the documented Tran/Ellsberg interview and subsequent mentorship. ### BEFORE #### Robert M. Thomas Jr. Health Care Fraud · Whistleblower Litigation > “Sometimes the government declines to intervene in an FCA case for reasons unrelated to the merits of the case. ##### The Intake Decision Health-care and pharmaceutical False Claims Act litigation — Co-founder and managing member, Whistleblower Law Collaborative, Boston. A federal prosecutor deciding whether to pursue a fraud case needs documents, witnesses, and a way to establish damages. Robert M. Thomas Jr. spent nearly a decade making those decisions for the United States. As co-founder and managing member of the Whistleblower Law Collaborative in Boston, he now helps whistleblowers assemble the evidence and industry explanations that government investigators need to evaluate their cases. Thomas has observed that the government sometimes declines a case for reasons unrelated to its merits. A relator can continue a False Claims Act case after the government declines to intervene, with private counsel taking responsibility for the litigation. Thomas has represented whistleblowers through that process as well as in cases the government joined. ###### From Wetlands to White Collar Thomas graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University in 1980 and cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1985, clerked for Judge Walter E. Black Jr. of the United States District Court in Maryland, and practiced at Covington & Burling in Washington before joining the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Maryland in 1989. For eight years he prosecuted white-collar fraud and environmental crime. His work on United States v. Wilson, a Clean Water Act prosecution over the destruction of federally protected wetlands that reached the Fourth Circuit, earned him the EPA's Bronze Medal. For roughly a decade, Thomas then worked with a team of former federal prosecutors engaged to remove organized-crime influence from labor unions, trying dozens of corruption cases in arbitration proceedings. The investigations involved reluctant witnesses, concealed records, and resistance within the organizations being investigated. He brought that experience in investigating conduct inside large organizations to the Whistleblower Law Collaborative, which he founded with Suzanne Durrell. ###### Carrying the Declined Case In the Ensign Group matter, Thomas represented relators alleging kickbacks and medically unnecessary services across a skilled-nursing enterprise. The government declined to intervene, and the plaintiffs' team continued the litigation, assembling the clinical records, referral patterns, compensation arrangements, and billing data without a government litigation team. The case resolved for $47.3 million. Thomas was counsel in litigation contributing to a $137.5 million civil resolution with WellCare, the Florida managed-care company, and served as relator's counsel in the $214.5 million resolution of off-label promotion claims involving Elan and Eisai. His firm's portfolio includes the $885 million AmerisourceBergen resolution, which grew from allegations about the repackaging of injectable cancer drugs, and the $465 million Mylan EpiPen settlement over the misclassification that understated the company's Medicaid rebates. These multi-party enforcement matters involved multiple relators and government teams. Thomas represented insiders whose information helped investigators examine practices within national health-care operations. In 2025, the firm also secured a $4.6 million settlement with a defense contractor over misrepresented compliance with federal cybersecurity requirements. ###### The Classroom in Boston As adjunct faculty at Boston University School of Law, Thomas has taught Health Care Fraud and Abuse for well over a decade, added a course on Whistleblower Law and Practice in 2020, and teaches criminal law to international LL.M. students. In 2022, the school gave him its award for part-time faculty teaching. The Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund named him a Lawyer of the Year in 2017, the year of the EpiPen resolution. He has also served for years on the board of the ACLU of Massachusetts. Thomas writes and speaks about False Claims Act enforcement. His commentary addresses government intervention trends, cybersecurity enforcement, and annual recovery statistics, drawing on his experience evaluating and litigating whistleblower cases. ###### Both Sides of the Table Thomas's experience as a prosecutor informs the preparation of his whistleblower matters. He helps clients organize a coherent account of the alleged conduct, corroborating documents, a damages theory, and an explanation of the industry for government investigators. When the government declines to intervene, he has also undertaken the discovery and litigation required to pursue the case privately. His firm's matters have helped return billions of dollars to federal and state health programs. Its clients include health-care workers who provide information about conduct within their employers' operations. Thomas represents them through case preparation, government investigation, and, when necessary, private litigation. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Co-founder and Managing Member - **Organization:** Whistleblower Law Collaborative - **Practice:** Health Care Fraud, Whistleblower Litigation - **Location:** Boston, Massachusetts ##### Contact - **Firm:** Whistleblower Law Collaborative - **Address:** 20 Park Plaza, Suite 438, Boston, MA 02116 - **Website:** whistleblowerllc.com - **Email:** bob@whistleblowerllc.com - **Phone:** 617-371-0934 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Robert M. Thomas Jr. Health Care Fraud · Whistleblower Litigation > “Sometimes the government declines to intervene in an FCA case for reasons unrelated to the merits of the case. ##### The Intake Decision Health-care and pharmaceutical False Claims Act litigation — Co-founder and managing member, Whistleblower Law Collaborative, Boston. When the government declined to intervene in the Ensign Group case in 2020, Robert M. Thomas Jr. and Suzanne Durrell continued representing the whistleblower. Their client, a former contracts manager, alleged that the skilled-nursing enterprise paid physicians inflated consulting and medical-director fees to obtain patient referrals. The plaintiffs' team pursued the referral patterns, compensation arrangements, and billing evidence without a government litigation team. Four years later, while the case was still in discovery, it settled for more than $47.3 million. Thomas has observed that the government sometimes declines a case for reasons unrelated to its merits. A relator—the person bringing a False Claims Act suit on the government's behalf—can then proceed with private counsel responsible for the litigation. At the Whistleblower Law Collaborative in Boston, which he co-founded with Durrell, Thomas prepares cases for either course. He helps clients organize their account, corroborating documents, witnesses, a damages theory, and an explanation of the industry for investigators, drawing on his own years evaluating cases as a federal prosecutor. ###### From Wetlands to White Collar Thomas graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University in 1980 and cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1985, clerked for Judge Walter E. Black Jr. of the United States District Court in Maryland, and practiced at Covington & Burling in Washington before joining the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Maryland in 1989. For eight years he prosecuted white-collar fraud and environmental crime. His work on United States v. Wilson, a Clean Water Act prosecution over the destruction of federally protected wetlands that reached the Fourth Circuit, earned him the EPA's Bronze Medal. Beginning in 1997, Thomas spent roughly a decade on a team of former federal prosecutors working to remove organized-crime influence from labor unions. Under Robert D. Luskin, the team's General Executive Board Attorney, Thomas identified subjects for investigation and brought internal disciplinary charges and trusteeship actions before an independent hearing officer. He tried dozens of corruption cases in arbitration proceedings. The investigations involved reluctant witnesses, concealed records, and resistance within the organizations being investigated. In 2003, while that work continued, he began representing whistleblowers with Durrell. ###### The Cases the Government Joined Thomas was counsel in litigation contributing to a $137.5 million civil resolution with WellCare, the Florida managed-care company, and served as relator's counsel in the $214.5 million resolution of off-label promotion claims involving Elan and Eisai. His firm's portfolio includes the $885 million AmerisourceBergen resolution over the repackaging of injectable cancer drugs and the $465 million Mylan EpiPen settlement over a drug classification that understated Medicaid rebates. These multi-party enforcement matters involved several relators and government teams. Thomas represented health-care workers and other insiders whose knowledge of their employers helped investigators examine national health-care operations. The firm's cases have helped return billions of dollars to federal and state health programs. In March 2025, the firm also secured a $4.6 million settlement with MORSECORP, a defense contractor accused of misrepresenting its compliance with federal cybersecurity requirements. The government said the company had reported a security-assessment score of 104 to the Defense Department; a later outside assessment put the score at minus 142. ###### The Classroom in Boston Thomas has taught at Boston University School of Law for well over a decade. He designed and taught Health Care Fraud and Abuse, added Whistleblower Law and Practice in 2020, and has taught criminal law to international LL.M. students. In 2022, the school gave him its award for part-time faculty teaching. The Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund named Thomas and Durrell its Lawyers of the Year in 2017, the year of the EpiPen resolution. He has also served for years on the board of the ACLU of Massachusetts. His writing and speaking address government intervention trends, cybersecurity enforcement, and annual False Claims Act recovery statistics. In his whistleblower seminar, he asks students to choose a case that interests them and interview a whistleblower, a lawyer, or both. He helps them identify subjects and people who might be willing to talk, bringing those accounts into their research papers. ###### An Interview Beyond the Casebook In November 2020, Thomas joined his student Andrew Tran on a video call with Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department researcher who had disclosed the Pentagon Papers. Tran was writing his final paper for the first offering of Thomas's whistleblower course. Their interest in the Vietnam War had emerged in a conversation after the first class: Thomas had written undergraduate papers about the war, including the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and Tran had interviewed Ellsberg while still in high school. Tran's paper examined the Espionage Act and proposed allowing a whistleblower's motive or intent to be raised as a defense. After the course, he joined Thomas's firm as an extern, working on responses to a motion to dismiss and revising briefs. Tran described Thomas as a mentor who made office hours available for conversations about "our careers, our lives, or anything else we wanted to discuss." ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Co-founder and Managing Member - **Organization:** Whistleblower Law Collaborative - **Practice:** Health Care Fraud, Whistleblower Litigation - **Location:** Boston, Massachusetts ##### Contact - **Firm:** Whistleblower Law Collaborative - **Address:** 20 Park Plaza, Suite 438, Boston, MA 02116 - **Website:** whistleblowerllc.com - **Email:** bob@whistleblowerllc.com - **Phone:** 617-371-0934 --- ## 41. Claire M. Sylvia — `900005215` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `382b0cda69d18f45301c5433b417398f6ada9c375c9fec3d75a8bc1b1daca3b1` - **After/current hash:** `ba7fc9dfef2c5057c090b7481c487026c6f2fd48045eef66b1300b33d60100dc` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005215/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Opening and Humana case**: Replace the certification metaphor and short declarative fragments with the client's actual actuarial evidence, move the Humana result forward and preserve the comparison between what contractors promised and delivered. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Cisco and Alliant**: Name the clients, explain their evidence and Sylvia's own recorded judgments, and distinguish Alliant's cash and repair components. - `correct` — **ACA insurance resolution**: Identify the April 2026 combined civil/criminal resolution, actual enrollment allegations and team representation, rather than implying the whole amount was civil. - `rewrite` — **Book, teaching and final section**: Preserve all career, title, treatise, teaching, testimony and award details and end with Sylvia's actual policy judgment and exact patient-interest quotation instead of repeated general summaries. - `restructure` — **Opening and Humana case**: Replace the certification metaphor and short declarative fragments with the client's actual actuarial evidence, move the Humana result forward and preserve the comparison between what contractors promised and delivered. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Cisco and Alliant**: Name the clients, explain their evidence and Sylvia's own recorded judgments, and distinguish Alliant's cash and repair components. - `correct` — **ACA insurance resolution**: Identify the April 2026 combined civil/criminal resolution, actual enrollment allegations and team representation, rather than implying the whole amount was civil. - `rewrite` — **Book, teaching and final section**: Preserve all career, title, treatise, teaching, testimony and award details and end with Sylvia's actual policy judgment and exact patient-interest quotation instead of repeated general summaries. ### BEFORE #### Claire M. Sylvia Medicare · Cybersecurity · False Claims Act > “This is a fantastic decision overall for both taxpayers and whistleblowers. ##### Unfolding the Certification Medicare, cybersecurity, and defense-contract qui tam litigation — Partner, Phillips & Cohen, Oakland. A certification is a compression — an entire operating reality folded into one statement the government is asked to trust. The bid is honest. The software is secure. The flares will ignite. The diagnosis codes are supported. Claire M. Sylvia's cases unfold it. She works down through the patient records, pricing assumptions, software functions, security defects, or product performance beneath the statement and shows exactly where the condition represented diverged from the one that existed. A partner in the Oakland office of Phillips & Cohen, she has spent her career at that seam — and she has also written the book on it: she is the author of The False Claims Act: Fraud Against the Government, the Thomson Reuters treatise, now in its fourth edition, that judges and lawyers on both sides of the "v." reach for when the statute's hard questions arise. ###### From the Senate to the Seal A graduate of Harvard Law School, where she served on the Harvard Law Review, Sylvia clerked for Judge Mariana Pfaelzer of the United States District Court for the Central District of California, then spent six years as an Assistant Senate Legal Counsel in Washington — the small office that represents the United States Senate in litigation. She followed that with a decade as a Deputy City Attorney in San Francisco, working in the office's ethics unit, before joining Phillips & Cohen. Sylvia co-taught one of the first False Claims Act courses offered at a major American law school and continues to teach the subject at Berkeley Law after earlier teaching at New York University. She has testified before Congress on Medicaid fraud enforcement and advised on amendments to California's own False Claims Act. In 2025, The Anti-Fraud Coalition — the national organization of the whistleblower bar — honored her with its Lifetime Achievement Award. ###### Cybersecurity and Defense Contracts Sylvia represented the whistleblower in one of the first successful cybersecurity matters under the False Claims Act: the case against Cisco Systems, which resolved for $8.6 million in 2019. The suit alleged that Cisco knowingly sold government agencies video-surveillance software with serious security flaws despite the contractual and regulatory requirements the product was supposed to meet. Those flaws could have allowed unauthorized access to the systems used to protect public facilities. The case put before government investigators both the security defects and the allegation that Cisco had known about them for years. It gave engineers and analysts an example of using a qui tam suit to challenge government purchases of technology that allegedly failed the security requirements it was sold under. The Justice Department subsequently expanded civil cyber-fraud enforcement. In the Alliant Techsystems case, Sylvia represented a whistleblower alleging that military illumination flares — equipment on which soldiers' visibility and safety depend — were defective. The matter resolved for approximately $37 million and required the retrofitting of roughly 76,000 flares. Other matters have included a $12.5 million resolution with Northrop Grumman over inadequately tested military components and an $11 million settlement with AAR Corp. concerning aircraft maintenance, along with health-care cases against Adventist Health, Aetna, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center that policed kickbacks, unsupported diagnosis codes, and billing for surgeries physicians did not properly attend. ###### Ninety Million from a Bid Sylvia represented the whistleblower in the case alleging that Humana submitted fraudulent bids for Medicare Part D prescription-drug contracts, keeping for itself savings it had promised to deliver to the program and its beneficiaries. The matter, litigated for years without government intervention, resolved for $90 million in 2024 — one of the largest declined-case recoveries in the statute's modern history. The case tested the actuarial assumptions inside the insurer's bids against what it actually knew. She followed it with a still larger insurance result: a $135 million settlement in 2026 with AssuredPartners and AP of South Florida resolving allegations of fraud on the Affordable Care Act's programs — among the most significant recoveries yet connected to the ACA marketplace. Her clients supplied evidence about Medicare drug benefits, marketplace subsidies, military hardware and network security that the government had been unable to check before payment. ###### The Measured Distance Courts cite her treatise, law students study the False Claims Act in her classroom, and other lawyers bring whistleblower cases based on theories her cases established. Sylvia tests compliance claims against data, code, product function and patient documentation, comparing what the government was told with what it received. Her treatise brings that analysis to other practitioners and courts. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner - **Organization:** Phillips & Cohen - **Practice:** Medicare, Cybersecurity, False Claims Act - **Location:** Oakland, California ##### Contact - **Firm:** Phillips & Cohen - **Address:** 492 Ninth Street, Suite 200, Oakland, CA 94607 - **Website:** phillipsandcohen.com - **Email:** lawyers@phillipsandcohen.com - **Phone:** 415-836-9000 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Claire M. Sylvia Medicare · Cybersecurity · False Claims Act > “This is a fantastic decision overall for both taxpayers and whistleblowers. ##### Two Sets of Assumptions Medicare, cybersecurity, and defense-contract qui tam litigation — Partner, Phillips & Cohen, Oakland. Claire M. Sylvia's client Steven Scott, a former Humana actuary, alleged that the insurer used two sets of assumptions to project the costs of its Medicare Part D drug plans. One accurately informed its internal budgets; the other supported its bids to the government. In the complaint Sylvia and her colleagues filed in 2016, Scott alleged that the bid assumptions made Humana's promised coverage look more generous than the company intended to provide, leaving the government and Medicare beneficiaries to pay costs the insurer had committed to bear. Sylvia's team pursued the case for years without government intervention. Humana agreed to pay $90 million in 2024, one of the largest recoveries in a declined False Claims Act case. A partner in the Oakland office of Phillips & Cohen, Sylvia has represented whistleblowers with the patient records, software knowledge, product-testing evidence, and pricing information needed to test whether government contractors delivered what they promised. ###### From the Senate to the Seal Sylvia graduated from Harvard Law School, where she served on the Harvard Law Review, and clerked for Judge Mariana Pfaelzer of the United States District Court for the Central District of California. She spent six years as an Assistant Senate Legal Counsel in the office that represents the United States Senate in litigation, followed by a decade as a Deputy City Attorney in San Francisco, including work in the office's ethics unit. She then joined Phillips & Cohen. She is the author of The False Claims Act: Fraud Against the Government, the Thomson Reuters treatise, now in its fourth edition. Courts cite it, and lawyers on both sides of the "v." consult it. She co-teaches one of the first False Claims Act courses offered at a major law school, at the University of California, Berkeley, and previously taught a similar course at New York University. She has testified to Congress on Medicaid fraud enforcement and to California lawmakers on amendments to the state's False Claims Act. In 2025, the Anti-Fraud Coalition gave her its Lifetime Achievement Award. ###### Cybersecurity and Defense Contracts In the Cisco case, Sylvia represented James Glenn, a security consultant who reported flaws in video-surveillance software sold to government agencies. The complaint alleged that Cisco knew for years that the software failed to meet contractual and regulatory security requirements. Sylvia explained that the defects could allow unauthorized access to computer systems connected to the cameras, putting the security of public facilities at risk. The 2019 resolution required Cisco to pay $8.6 million and was one of the first successful cybersecurity cases under the False Claims Act. Cisco also addressed the software problems Glenn had identified. Sylvia described the suit as a way for technical employees to alert the government to defects in products it bought while receiving whistleblower protections. The Justice Department later expanded its work in this area through the Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative, launched in 2021. In the Alliant Techsystems case, her client Kendall Dye had become a military-flare program manager and discovered that the company had known of a potential ignition defect for years. Tests eventually showed that the illumination flares could ignite when dropped, endangering the service members handling them. Dye urged disclosure to military customers and brought his concerns to Phillips & Cohen. The 2012 resolution was valued at about $37 million: a $21 million payment to the government and roughly $16 million in repairs to 76,000 flares. Sylvia emphasized that the company, rather than taxpayers, would bear the cost of correcting the defect. Her other defense-contract cases include a $12.5 million Northrop Grumman settlement over military components that had not been adequately tested and an $11 million AAR resolution over aircraft maintenance. ###### Claims for Patient Care Sylvia's health-care cases have involved Adventist Health System, Aetna, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, addressing kickbacks, unsupported diagnosis codes, and surgeries not properly attended by the physicians who billed for them. The work required comparing patient documentation and the services delivered with the representations supporting government payments. In April 2026, a whistleblower she represented with colleagues Jeffrey Dickstein and Amy Easton contributed to the $135 million civil and criminal resolution involving AssuredPartners and AP of South Florida. The government alleged that the brokerage submitted false income information to enroll people in subsidized Affordable Care Act plans and undermined their Medicaid applications to obtain denials. Some consumers lost access to coverage they could afford and faced costs that disrupted their treatment. Sylvia described her client's careful presentation of evidence about conduct the government could not readily detect from the insurance applications alone. ###### The Conditions for Payment In testimony to a House subcommittee in 2018, Sylvia addressed proposals to relax the Stark Law's restrictions on physician self-referrals as Medicare moved toward coordinated, value-based care. She asked lawmakers to identify the specific barriers they sought to remove and to examine whether existing exceptions or agency guidance already addressed them. Her testimony drew on hospital cases in which compensation formulas rewarded physicians for the value of the business they referred. Sylvia urged the committee to hear from affected groups before changing the conditions attached to public payment. Coordinating care, she told lawmakers, "does not eliminate the risk that the profit motive will cause health care providers to overlook or ignore the interests of patients." ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner - **Organization:** Phillips & Cohen - **Practice:** Medicare, Cybersecurity, False Claims Act - **Location:** Oakland, California ##### Contact - **Firm:** Phillips & Cohen - **Address:** 492 Ninth Street, Suite 200, Oakland, CA 94607 - **Website:** phillipsandcohen.com - **Email:** lawyers@phillipsandcohen.com - **Phone:** 415-836-9000 --- ## 42. Colette G. Matzzie — `900005214` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **MEDIUM** — Manifest history contains at least one substantive correction/addition. - **Before hash:** `9529211eb72e49fee4ce949dafa370e0fe6280a2b3676146ecf24fc52efc81aa` - **After/current hash:** `01ab30f243b0c9261c5f15020716c5b21b881d2282f342c44a5fecb6d344bc22` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005214/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Opening eClinicalWorks account**: Replace the abstract software thesis with the actual client, certification discrepancy, public-payment connection and Matzzie's stated priority for customer warnings. - `rewrite` — **Education, government practice and later EHR cases**: Preserve every career and case detail while replacing speculative job-by-job lessons and distinguishing each product's actual alleged defect and referral arrangement. - `restructure` — **Government contracts and school-meal ending**: Retain all pharmaceutical, telecommunications, aviation and school-food recoveries, develop Mills's documented work, and give Matzzie's CBS quotation the context of the children's meals. ### BEFORE #### Colette G. Matzzie Health Technology · False Claims Act > “A whistleblower lawsuit is a very effective enforcement tool for stopping sales of unapproved drugs. ##### When Fraud Ships as Software Digital-health, health-care, and government-services qui tam litigation — Partner, Phillips & Cohen, Washington, D.C. Fraud can now ship as software. In modern public programs, a false statement may never touch paper — it can be repeated automatically, thousands of transactions at a time, by a product sold as compliant. A billing engine rounds in one direction; a certification test is gamed once and the result echoes through every installation; a data field defaults to whatever the reimbursement rule rewards. Colette G. Matzzie litigates the moment at which code, data, or technical performance becomes a representation to the government, giving whistleblowers a way to explain hidden defects in terms investigators can test and courts can enforce. A partner at Phillips & Cohen in Washington, she represents whistleblowers in health-care technology cases under the False Claims Act, including compliance representations embedded in products purchased through public programs. Matzzie represented the whistleblower in the eClinicalWorks matter, the first major False Claims Act case centered on electronic health records. The company's software was certified as meeting federal requirements — certification on which thousands of health-care providers relied to qualify for federal incentive payments — and the case alleged that the product did not do what the certification said it did. The $155 million resolution in 2017 rested on allegations about functionality, testing protocols, and certification criteria: whether public money had been paid for software that met the promised requirements. ###### An Advocate's Education Matzzie's route to the qui tam bar ran through the institutions of public-interest law. She graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a senior articles editor of the Georgetown Law Journal, and received the Frederick B. Abramson Public Service Award in 1995. She clerked for Judge Dolores K. Sloviter of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, then spent four years as a staff attorney at the Public Citizen Litigation Group, the storied public-interest firm, litigating health, safety, consumer-protection, and access-to-justice cases. From there she went to the Department of Justice, serving on the Civil Division's appellate staff and as a trial attorney on the government's landmark tobacco litigation team, where she earned a Special Commendation Award. Public Citizen taught her to litigate against well-resourced industries on behalf of diffuse public interests; the appellate staff taught her how the government defends its programs in the courts of appeals; the tobacco team taught her how a vast, document-heavy case against a sophisticated industry is actually assembled. When she came to Phillips & Cohen, she brought all three disciplines to the representation of whistleblowers — and she has kept a foot in the academy, teaching seminars on public-interest advocacy as adjunct faculty at Georgetown. ###### The Certification and the Code Matzzie went on to represent whistleblowers in the Modernizing Medicine matter, an electronic-health-records kickback and misconduct case that resolved for $45 million, and in the NextGen Healthcare case, which resolved for $31 million. The allegations differed across the three matters: eClinicalWorks and NextGen concerned certification testing and missing functions as well as referral payments; Modernizing Medicine involved laboratory and software referrals, paid recommendations, and failures to use required clinical vocabularies. The whistleblowers supplied technical and commercial knowledge that investigators could test against software behavior, certification criteria and payment records. Matzzie has also spoken frequently on cybersecurity and technology fraud. Matzzie represented the whistleblower in an off-label promotion and kickback case against Boehringer Ingelheim that resolved for $95 million. In the Hawthorn Pharmaceuticals case, she described a whistleblower lawsuit as an effective tool for stopping sales of unapproved drugs. A government-contract case against Verizon, alleging overbilling on federal telecommunications invoices, produced a $93.5 million settlement. Other matters have reached school-meal programs, aviation maintenance, and food-service kickbacks — cases resolving for $19.4 million against Chartwells, $11 million against AAR Corp., and $20 million against Sodexo. In each case she compared a technical or commercial practice with the representation made to a public program. ###### Making the Machine Testify Matzzie's cases examine software behavior, data and written certification criteria. Software can be tested, and data can be re-run against a product's stated requirements. She uses those records to translate an engineer's or clinician's account of a product's failures into a claim about what the government paid for and what it received. She has appeared in CBS's documentary series on whistleblowers and spoken at conferences where the False Claims Act bar, compliance officers, and government lawyers compare notes on where enforcement goes next. ###### Where Procurement Is Going Matzzie's practice tracks the changing shape of government purchasing itself. The United States increasingly buys systems rather than things — software that certifies its own compliance, platforms that generate the very records on which payment depends, products whose performance can only be judged by people with technical fluency. Fraud in that economy lives in code, data exchange, performance metrics, and compliance claims embedded in the product, and the witnesses who can see it are engineers, informaticists, and analysts rather than bookkeepers. Her health-technology cases apply the False Claims Act to the performance and certification of software used by providers receiving federal payments. Her electronic-health-records cases have produced settlements totaling more than $200 million, including eClinicalWorks, Modernizing Medicine and NextGen Healthcare. Those cases address certification, software performance and payments intended to influence providers' purchasing decisions. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner - **Organization:** Phillips & Cohen - **Practice:** Health Technology, False Claims Act - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Firm:** Phillips & Cohen - **Address:** 2000 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20036 - **Website:** phillipsandcohen.com - **Email:** lawyers@phillipsandcohen.com - **Phone:** 202-833-4567 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Colette G. Matzzie Health Technology · False Claims Act > “A whistleblower lawsuit is a very effective enforcement tool for stopping sales of unapproved drugs. ##### The eClinicalWorks Certification Case Digital-health, health-care, and government-services qui tam litigation — Partner, Phillips & Cohen, Washington, D.C. In 2015, Colette G. Matzzie and her colleagues filed a whistleblower lawsuit for Brendan Delaney, a software technician who had helped implement electronic health records at Rikers Island. Delaney alleged that the eClinicalWorks system mixed information from different patients, mishandled medication records, and failed to track laboratory results accurately. He had documented problems that could put patients at risk; Matzzie's team worked with him and federal investigators to examine the software and the company's representations about its performance. Federal incentive payments encouraged health-care providers to adopt certified electronic records. Certification required a vendor to satisfy federal criteria and pass independent testing; providers relied on that certification to qualify for the payments. The government alleged that eClinicalWorks had concealed deficiencies from its certifier, including entering the sixteen drug codes needed for a test rather than enabling the software to retrieve any code from a complete database. Investigators could compare the test version, the software in use, and the written requirements. The government also alleged failures involving audit logs, imaging orders, drug-interaction checks, and the transfer of records to other vendors, as well as payments to customers for recommending the product. The case resolved for $155 million in 2017, the first major False Claims Act recovery involving an electronic-health-records vendor's certification. The accompanying agreement required independent software oversight, safety notices to customers, free updates, and the option to transfer records to another vendor without additional charges. Matzzie called the steps alerting customers to patient-safety risks the most important outcome. She credited the close collaboration among Delaney, his lawyers, and the government team, singling out Assistant U.S. Attorney Owen Foster's work. ###### Public-Interest and Government Practice Matzzie graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a senior articles editor of the Georgetown Law Journal, and clerked for Judge Dolores K. Sloviter of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She received the Frederick B. Abramson Public Service Award in 1995. For the next four years, she worked at Public Citizen Litigation Group on public health and safety, consumer protection, access to information, and access to the civil justice system. She then spent five years on the Justice Department's civil appellate staff and also served as a trial attorney on its tobacco litigation team, earning a Special Commendation Award. She subsequently joined Phillips & Cohen, where she is a partner in the Washington office, and has also taught a public-interest advocacy seminar as an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown. ###### Clinical Records and Referral Payments In the Modernizing Medicine case, Matzzie and Tristram Coffin represented Amanda Long, the company's former vice president of product management. The government alleged that the vendor accepted payments to steer clinicians toward a preferred laboratory, helped subsidize software to generate laboratory orders, and paid customers and others to recommend its electronic records. It also alleged that the software did not always permit use of the standard drug and clinical vocabularies required for federal incentive payments. The case settled for $45 million in 2022. Matzzie emphasized the risk that undisclosed laboratory arrangements could influence clinical decisions. The NextGen Healthcare case began with two clinical providers, Elizabeth Ringold and Toby Markowitz, who used the software in South Carolina's prison system. The government alleged that NextGen passed certification testing with functions embedded in a temporary version of a related product, while the software released to providers lacked required capabilities. The alleged deficiencies affected problem lists, family medical histories, referral summaries, and the recording of vital signs. The case also involved payments for software referrals and resolved for $31 million in 2023. Together with eClinicalWorks, those resolutions exceeded $200 million. Matzzie represented clients who could identify failures in clinical use or explain a vendor's product and sales decisions, allowing investigators to test their accounts against software behavior, certification rules, and payment records. She has addressed cybersecurity, technology fraud, and health-care enforcement at conferences attended by whistleblower lawyers, compliance officers, and government attorneys. ###### Drugs and Government Contracts Matzzie's pharmaceutical work includes representing a whistleblower in the $95 million Boehringer Ingelheim resolution over off-label promotion — marketing approved drugs for unapproved uses — and kickbacks. In the separate Hawthorn Pharmaceuticals case, she described whistleblower litigation as a means of stopping sales of drugs that had not received the required approval. Her government-contract cases include the $93.5 million Verizon settlement over alleged overbilling on federal telecommunications invoices and the $11 million AAR resolution over aircraft maintenance. In the Sodexo case, which settled with New York for $20 million, whistleblowers challenged the company's retention of supplier rebates that should have reduced costs for public schools and universities. Matzzie later represented Jeffrey Mills, the former director of food and nutritional services for Washington's public schools, in his challenge to the district's food-service contractor, Chartwells. ###### The School-Meal Contract Mills had introduced breakfast in classrooms, after-school suppers, and salad bars during his three years with the school district. His 2013 lawsuit alleged that Chartwells caused the schools to overpay while meals arrived late, in insufficient numbers, or in poor condition. Matzzie identified the conflict between the contractor's purchasing arrangements with suppliers and its obligation to provide nutritious meals at the lowest available price. The District's attorney general joined the case after an investigation, and Chartwells paid $19.4 million in 2015. Matzzie and Mills credited the government lawyers who helped recover the funds. In 2018, both his case and Delaney's were featured in an episode of CBS's Whistleblower that included interviews with Matzzie. Discussing the school-meal case, she explained that although the suit sought recovery for the government, "our goal was always to ensure quality school food programs for the kids." ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner - **Organization:** Phillips & Cohen - **Practice:** Health Technology, False Claims Act - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Firm:** Phillips & Cohen - **Address:** 2000 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20036 - **Website:** phillipsandcohen.com - **Email:** lawyers@phillipsandcohen.com - **Phone:** 202-833-4567 --- ## 43. Lee Gelernt — `900005229` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `18874af493fe5bda48c8fc70c46e4c0a77f8e7c23e3e83ec817b3421844bf818` - **After/current hash:** `a0b57826219a2ac42c8e0a5a5aafb11163e7b3f1d3b7252c364fb513ba38bbbb` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005229/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Opening and class proceedings**: Bring Gelernt into the account through the actual preparation to meet Ms. L. and the documented reunion; retain Ms. C.'s distinct claim, the constitutional question, class criteria and co-counsel. - `restructure` — **Injunction, records and continuing jurisdiction**: Combine repeated custody and supervision explanations while retaining every exception, procedure, deadline, database count and source of family-identification evidence. - `rewrite` — **Settlement, 2025 breaches, 2026 enforcement and ending**: Keep the original remedies and legal distinctions; separate the January hearing from the February order; clarify the present LASRF role and end with Gelernt's exact 2019 testimony. ### BEFORE #### Lee Gelernt Immigrants’ Rights · Family Reunification · Civil Litigation > “No family should be forced to go through this nightmare and tragedy ever again. ##### The Child in the Other Database In February 2018, Ms. L. was held in San Diego while her young daughter remained in federal care in Chicago. Their lawsuit became a nationwide operating order: identify parents and children stored in different agency systems, restore contact within ten days, reunify younger children in fourteen and older children in thirty, then preserve the same family relationship through years of settlement administration. In February 2018, Ms. L. was in immigration detention in San Diego while her seven-year-old daughter remained in federal care in Chicago, approximately 2,000 miles away. The government had divided one family into two custody records before either member’s asylum claim was resolved. The February 2018 complaint sought reunion. Release of the mother from custody in March solved only one part of the emergency; her daughter remained elsewhere, and the government’s custody systems still treated the two members of one family as separate administrative cases. A second named parent, Ms. C., exposed a related boundary. Her initial separation followed a criminal prosecution that the plaintiffs left outside their challenge. The claim began when her twenty-five-day sentence ended and the government continued holding her apart from her child. Lee Gelernt appeared for the plaintiffs in the class proceedings and remained in the case through settlement enforcement. The court appointed the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project and the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties as class counsel. The common legal question concerned family integrity under the Fifth Amendment. Immigration and criminal enforcement remained available. Separation required a child-protection justification—parental unfitness or danger—or an affirmative, knowing, and voluntary decision by the parent to remain apart. ###### A Class Built Around the Missing Justification By June 2018, referral of adults for improper-entry prosecutions had converted individual separations into a nationwide practice. Parents moved into DHS or criminal custody. Children entered the Office of Refugee Resettlement system as unaccompanied minors even when they had arrived with a parent. Judge Dana Sabraw certified a Rule 23(b)(2) class of detained adult parents whose minor children were held separately by DHS or ORR without an unfitness or danger determination. The initial definition excluded specified criminal-history, communicable-disease, interior-enforcement, and executive-order circumstances. Class treatment supplied one proceeding for one recurring act: federal officials maintaining parent-child separation without the individualized finding the plaintiffs said due process required. Questions of identity, safety, and each family’s immigration case remained individualized, but the challenged practice and requested injunction operated across the class. The government’s strongest account began with lawful enforcement power. Officials needed to confirm relationships, address safety concerns, prosecute criminal offenses, manage detention, and protect children when a parent presented danger. The certified theory preserved those functions while challenging unsupported separation as a distinct government act. Certification resolved procedure rather than ultimate liability. It identified class representatives, counsel, a common constitutional question, and a form of classwide relief. The same day’s preliminary injunction supplied the first judicial findings and operational commands, subject to later litigation and continuing supervision. ###### Ten, Fourteen, Thirty On June 26, 2018, the court preliminarily barred detention of covered parents apart from their children unless an exception applied. When the government released a parent, the child likewise had to be released to that parent absent unfitness, danger, or a voluntary refusal of reunion. The injunction imposed three clocks. Parents lacking contact had to receive telephone communication within ten days. Children younger than five had to be reunified within fourteen days. Children five and older had to be reunified within thirty. Those periods turned family integrity into assigned work. ICE, Customs and Border Protection, the Bureau of Prisons, and ORR had to exchange information about the location and well-being of parents and children rather than wait for a family or lawyer to locate both sides independently. The order also restricted removal of a covered parent without the child. Departure apart remained possible when the parent knowingly and voluntarily declined reunion or when a safety determination justified continued separation. The court retained jurisdiction to issue whatever further orders implementation required. The injunction regulated separation; it was not a universal release order. Parents could remain in lawful custody with their children, immigration proceedings could continue, and criminal enforcement retained its ordinary role. The remedy joined family members without adjudicating each asylum claim or removal defense. ###### Reconstructing the Family Records Compliance revealed an institutional defect beneath the policy. HHS’s inspector general found no existing integrated data system capable of tracking separated families across HHS and DHS. Parent records and child records had been created in different agencies without one durable family identifier. The emergency reconstruction reached across more than sixty federal data sets. Staff also reviewed files for roughly twelve thousand children in ORR care and asked shelters to identify possible separations. That work produced an initial pool of about 3,600 potentially separated children. ORR certified 2,654 children in July 2018. Later reviews added children, removed mistaken classifications, and raised the verified count of separated children of class members to 2,737. Another 946 records had carried some indication of separation without satisfying every certification criterion at that time. The inspector general estimated that thousands of additional separated children had entered and left ORR care before the June order. Informal spreadsheets and a limited SharePoint database had supported operations, but their design could not reconstruct every earlier family or placement with precision. Litigation therefore became data recovery. Names, apprehension dates, locations, sponsor releases, criminal-history attestations, parentage records, and shelter files had to converge before transport could begin. The injunction’s deadlines moved uncertainty from internal databases into public status conferences and court-enforceable reports. ###### Reunification and Continued Custody The right enforced in 2018 was the relationship between parent and child, not freedom from every form of federal custody. The government could hold a family together when other law permitted detention. The decisive question was why the family remained divided. When a parent left DHS custody, the child could no longer remain apart on the same unsupported basis. When both remained in federal custody, agencies still had to restore communication, assess safety, confirm parentage where genuinely disputed, and execute reunion on the court’s schedule. The reunification process included background review, confirmation of parentage, a parent interview, fitness assessment, and child-safety review. Judge Sabraw streamlined procedures designed for unaccompanied children because parents and children separated by the government presented a different placement problem from ordinary third-party sponsorship. Retained jurisdiction made those distinctions enforceable. A missed date, an incomplete list, a disputed safety classification, or a proposed removal could return to the same court. The remedy depended on repeated measurement rather than one declaration of constitutional principle. The case began with one mother seeking one child. Gelernt and his co-counsel sought orders that accounted for families’ locations, agency responsibilities, safety exceptions and individual immigration status, with reunification deadlines the court could supervise across thousands of families. ###### A Settlement Made of Services On December 11, 2023, the court approved an arm’s-length settlement, certified the settlement class, dismissed the injunctive claims with prejudice, and incorporated the agreement into final judgment. Jurisdiction survived for enforcement, future modifications, pending applications, and specified obligations extending beyond the general termination date. The ACLU estimated that the settlement covered 4,500 to 5,000 children, along with their parents. The agreement created research and registration procedures for families still unidentified, reunification assistance inside the United States, and government-funded return when reunion required a family member to reenter the country. Legal services covered individual consultation, document preparation, interview preparation, interpretation, friend-of-court participation, remote or in-person access, and referral for representation. The program linked family restoration to the immigration proceedings that determined whether reunified relatives could remain together. Behavioral-health care, assistance with medical costs, temporary housing, parole applications, aligned work authorization, rescission requests, and reopening of certain asylum matters formed separate settlement benefits. Eligibility created an opportunity to seek those forms of relief; it never guaranteed every discretionary immigration result. The agreement released injunctive and declaratory claims while preserving damages claims. It also contained an express nonadmission provision and retained federal enforcement authority consistent with law. Future-separation duties ran for eight years; the broader agreement operated on a six-year termination structure, subject to later extensions. ###### The Contract Was Part of the Remedy The settlement treated legal and social services as operative provisions rather than goodwill. A class member facing parole, work authorization, an old removal order, or a reopened asylum application needed a lawyer capable of translating the agreement into the filing, interview, deadline, and evidence required in that individual case. In 2025, termination of the Acacia Center for Justice contract interrupted the legal-services system. Judge Sabraw found a breach and ordered restoration. Termination of the Seneca Family of Agencies arrangement produced a second enforcement dispute over social services promised to separated families. The August 2025 remedy extended service deadlines by six months and downstream registration, relief-request, service, and termination dates by one year. The final registration deadline moved to December 11, 2027; final services to December 11, 2028; and general termination to December 11, 2030. The court also extended or reinstated affected parole and work-authorization periods while preserving DHS’s individual discretion when new criminal conduct or other evidence warranted a different result. The order compensated for time lost to breach without transferring ordinary eligibility decisions wholesale to the judiciary. The government argued that the requested extensions were premature, insufficiently tailored, and intrusive upon statutory authority over parole and employment authorization. The court tied the remedy to delayed services and downstream consequences, leaving case-by-case discretion in federal hands. ###### Return, Release, Explain Enforcement acquired a physical dimension in February 2026. After a hearing at which Gelernt, Daniel Galindo, and Natalie Behr appeared for the plaintiffs, the court ordered three disputed family units returned to the United States at government expense and noted agreements concerning two additional returns. The government challenged the court’s authority and invoked immigration-law jurisdictional limits; it also characterized one departure as voluntary. The order applied its earlier wrongful-removal test, found the relevant removals unlawful on the presented record, and concluded that return was necessary to restore access to settlement benefits. The same order required the government to provide plaintiffs’ counsel with reasons for detention of specified class members and qualifying relatives. Repeated calls to detention officials had produced no explanation. The court treated prompt information as necessary to determine whether settlement enforcement belonged before it. By June, a release motion initially concerned seven people. Two were released after the motion without explanation. The court ordered the remaining five released, finding their detention incompatible with settlement status and benefits on the records before it and noting that the cited misdemeanor circumstances did not fit the agreement’s exclusion categories. The government argued that detention challenges belonged in individual habeas cases, that 8 U.S.C. §1252(f)(1) limited relief, and that the agreement preserved detention authority. The court characterized the dispute as settlement enforcement, confined relief to named individuals, and required prompt disclosure whenever future detention might justify another enforcement motion. ###### Jurisdiction After Judgment Final judgment ended the original injunctive claims while preserving a forum for implementation. Retained jurisdiction allowed the court to issue return, deadline, information, and release orders in 2025 and 2026 in the case filed in 2018 without reopening every issue decided at the beginning. The Justice Department’s Legal Access Services for Reunified Families program offers consultations, orientations, workshops, and representation pathways for eligible unrepresented families. Gelernt remains Deputy Director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. He continues to represent families in the case that began with Ms. L. seeking her daughter in another agency’s custody. The court’s orders require the government to identify separated families, justify separation, provide the promised services, and carry out reunification. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Deputy Director, Immigrants’ Rights Project - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Practice:** Immigrants’ Rights, Family Reunification, Civil Litigation - **Location:** New York, New York ##### Contact - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Address:** 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10004 - **Website:** aclu.org ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Lee Gelernt Immigrants’ Rights · Family Reunification · Civil Litigation > “No family should be forced to go through this nightmare and tragedy ever again. ##### Finding the Separated Families In Ms. L. v. ICE, Lee Gelernt and his colleagues sought reunion for a mother and daughter, then pursued the records, services and court orders needed by thousands of other families. In February 2018, Lee Gelernt learned of a Congolese woman in immigration detention near San Diego whose daughter had been taken from her. He arranged for an asylum lawyer and a Lingala interpreter and flew to California to meet her. The mother, identified in the litigation as Ms. L., was barely eating or sleeping. Her daughter was in a government facility in Chicago, roughly two thousand miles away; she turned seven during the separation. They had reached the United States together to seek asylum, but were held by different agencies before their claims had been resolved. The ACLU filed suit on February 26. Ms. L. was released from detention in March, but her release did not secure her daughter's: the child remained in the Office of Refugee Resettlement's custody. Gelernt later visited Ms. L. at a Chicago shelter and was there on March 16 when the girl arrived. After mother and daughter embraced, Ms. L. pointed toward him, and the child came over to hug him. The lawyers had already moved to expand the case into a nationwide class action. Another plaintiff, Ms. C., had served twenty-five days for improper entry before returning to immigration detention, still separated from her son. Her claim did not challenge the initial separation during criminal custody. It challenged the government's failure to reunite them after that custody ended. Gelernt and his colleagues sought protection of the parent-child relationship under the Fifth Amendment, while leaving the government able to decide asylum claims and enforce criminal and immigration law. ###### A Common Claim for Different Families By June 2018, the government's zero-tolerance prosecution policy had greatly increased the separations. Parents were held by the Department of Homeland Security or in criminal custody, while children who had arrived with them were sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement as unaccompanied minors. At the June 22 hearing, Gelernt and Bardis Vakili appeared for the families. They asked the court to address a practice shared by the proposed class: separation without a determination that a parent was unfit or dangerous to the child. On June 26, Judge Dana M. Sabraw certified a class under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(b)(2), which permits a common injunction against conduct affecting a class as a whole. The class covered adult parents detained in immigration custody whose minor children had been separated from them and placed in DHS or ORR custody or ORR foster care, absent an unfitness or danger determination. The initial definition excluded specified criminal-history, communicable-disease, interior-enforcement and executive-order circumstances. The court appointed lawyers from the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project and the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties as class counsel. The government stressed its duties to confirm parentage, protect children, prosecute offenses and make lawful detention decisions. Those individual inquiries could continue under the plaintiffs' approach; they did not answer whether the government could keep families apart without a child-safety justification. Certification allowed that common question to be litigated together. A separate order that day addressed the evidence supporting preliminary relief and imposed the reunification requirements. ###### Ten, Fourteen, Thirty The preliminary injunction barred DHS from holding covered parents apart from their children unless a parent was unfit, posed a danger, or affirmatively, knowingly and voluntarily declined reunion. A child whose parent was released had to be released to that parent, subject to the same exceptions. Parents still out of contact were to receive telephone access within ten days; children under five were to be reunited within fourteen days, and those five or older within thirty. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, the Bureau of Prisons and ORR had to exchange information about the children's locations and well-being. The order also restricted removal of a parent without the child unless the parent affirmatively, knowingly and voluntarily declined reunion or an unfitness or danger determination justified separation. Sabraw retained jurisdiction to enforce these duties through further orders. The injunction protected family unity without ordering every family released from all custody. Lawful family detention and individual immigration proceedings could continue. Reunification still involved background checks, confirmation of parentage, parent interviews and assessments of fitness and child safety, but the court required those procedures to be streamlined rather than simply applying the slower sponsor-approval process used for children who had arrived without a parent. Through public status conferences and reports, Gelernt and his colleagues could identify missing families, dispute a claimed justification for separation, or seek action on a missed deadline. ###### Reconstructing the Family Records Investigators from the Department of Health and Human Services found no integrated system linking HHS and DHS records to identify and track the separated families. The agencies' records followed adults and children through different custodial systems without a reliable shared identifier, leaving the government unable to produce a complete list from a single database. To assemble the initial list, federal staff searched more than sixty databases, manually reviewed the files of approximately twelve thousand children in ORR care, and asked shelters to identify separated children. That work produced roughly 3,600 possible cases. ORR certified 2,654 children in July 2018; later additions and corrections brought the count to 2,737. Another 946 children had some indication of separation but did not meet all criteria for the July list. Officials also estimated that thousands of separated children had entered and left ORR care before the June order. Informal spreadsheets and a limited SharePoint tracking system could not establish the full earlier count. Lawyers seeking those families needed records of apprehension, detention, transfers, release to sponsors, criminal proceedings and claimed parentage, together with shelter attestations and contact information. In his February 2019 congressional testimony, Gelernt described the work of a court-approved steering committee and other organizations trying to locate parents who had already been deported. They searched by telephone and on the ground in Central America, sometimes without basic information the government possessed. He asked Congress to require a full accounting of the children and a reliable tracking system, and to fund medical and other help for families whose distress continued after reunion. ###### The Services in the Settlement On December 11, 2023, Sabraw approved the parties' settlement and certified a settlement class covering, by the ACLU's estimate, 4,500 to 5,000 children and their parents. Identification and registration procedures were designed to reach families not yet located, with reunification in the United States and government-funded return for eligible families. The agreement followed arm's-length negotiations and became part of the final judgment. The government undertook to provide legal consultations, preparation and review of documents, preparation for asylum interviews, interpreters, friend-of-court participation, remote and in-person assistance, and referrals for representation. The agreement also provided behavioral health services, help with medical costs, temporary housing, opportunities to seek parole and work authorization aligned with parole, requests to rescind old removal orders, and reopening of certain asylum claims. Eligibility for a process or service did not guarantee every discretionary immigration decision. The settlement dismissed the injunctive claims with prejudice and released covered claims for injunctive and declaratory relief while preserving damages claims. It was not an admission of liability and did not prevent federal enforcement consistent with law and the agreement. Future-separation restrictions were to last eight years; the general term was initially six. The court retained authority to enforce the promises, review agreed modifications, resolve pending applications and oversee specified obligations continuing beyond the termination date. The Justice Department's Legal Access Services for Reunified Families program offers orientations, workshops and referrals for representation to eligible families. The consultations and other legal services promised in the agreement help families seek parole and work authorization, address prior removal orders and pursue reopened asylum claims. When those services were interrupted, Gelernt's team returned to court to enforce the judgment. ###### Restoring the Lost Time In 2025, the government terminated its contract with Acacia Center for Justice, interrupting legal services. Sabraw found a breach and ordered restoration. The termination of a separate contract with Seneca Family of Agencies, which provided social services, produced a second breach ruling. Gelernt explained that children whose families lacked legal help faced a renewed risk of separation. Gelernt and Anand Balakrishnan appeared at the August hearing seeking extensions to replace the time families had lost. The August 25 order added six months to affected service periods and one year to later registration, relief-request, final-services and termination deadlines. It moved the final registration deadline to December 11, 2027, the final services date to December 11, 2028, and the general termination date to December 11, 2030. The court also ordered extension or reinstatement of affected parole and work authorization. The government argued that the requests were premature, insufficiently tailored to the breaches and beyond the court's authority over parole and work authorization. Sabraw tied the extensions to the interrupted services and the resulting delays in later applications. DHS retained discretion to consider an intervening crime or other evidence that parole was unwarranted in an individual case; the order restored lost time without deciding those applications itself. ###### Return and Release At a January 2026 hearing, Gelernt, Daniel Galindo and Natalie Behr appeared for families removed from the United States despite their claimed protections under the settlement. The February 5 order directed the government to return three family units at its own expense; two additional returns had been agreed upon. Applying its earlier wrongful-removal test, the court rejected the government's jurisdictional objections and its contention that one family had left voluntarily. The evidence established unlawful removals that had prevented the families from obtaining settlement benefits. The lawyers also sought the reasons for other class members' detention. One attorney, Molly Kammien, described repeated unanswered or disconnected calls to a detention facility and the absence of any explanation for her client's custody. The court required the government to provide that information to plaintiffs' counsel, so they could determine whether detention interfered with the families' rights under the agreement. In June, counsel sought release of seven class members and qualifying additional family members. The government released two after the motion was filed, without explanation. On June 22, Sabraw ordered the remaining five released because the circumstances did not justify revoking their settlement status and their detention obstructed access to its benefits. The misdemeanor conduct discussed in two cases did not establish a criminal-history exclusion under the agreement. The government contended that each person needed a separate habeas petition in the district of detention, and that 8 U.S.C. § 1252(f)(1) restricted the requested injunction. The court treated the motion as enforcement of the settlement for five identified individuals, not a new classwide restraint on immigration enforcement. It also required prompt explanations when the government detained class members or qualifying relatives, allowing counsel to decide whether to seek relief. These orders enforced promises incorporated into the 2023 judgment; they did not reopen the original constitutional claims. Gelernt remains deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project and counsel in Ms. L. v. ICE. In 2019, when the government questioned the effort required to identify additional separated children, he told Congress: "It is not sufficient for the agency to say it is not worth the effort, not when children are at stake." ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Deputy Director, Immigrants’ Rights Project - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Practice:** Immigrants’ Rights, Family Reunification, Civil Litigation - **Location:** New York, New York ##### Contact - **Organization:** American Civil Liberties Union - **Address:** 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10004 - **Website:** aclu.org --- ## 44. Eric R. Havian — `900005213` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **MEDIUM** — Manifest history contains at least one substantive correction/addition. - **Before hash:** `60d02043134a80c2c9bebb019aa552d18c18941754ece83858ca67bccf2cc684` - **After/current hash:** `36b60c717fc5bd3509dd77ee6c4f223a337ec695b86c3cd11e3826cf4c9fea50` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005213/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Opening and private-case discussion**: Replace the general complexity motif with the clients' specific inventory knowledge and the KBR discovery and litigation work, preserving the full settlement, client share, duration and federal-declination distinction. - `rewrite` — **Career and technical case inventory**: Retain education, consulting, prosecution and practice leadership; use the documented Phillips conversation and accurately distinguish the Ferro, LADWP, James Jones, DaVita and Poehling matters. - `restructure` — **Korean bids, cumulative results and ending**: Preserve the competition/FCA distinction, awards and publication record while giving the ending a practical example from his own coauthored writing. ### BEFORE #### Eric R. Havian Government Contracts · Healthcare Fraud > “Stopping fraud shouldn't be a partisan issue. ##### Complexity Is a Hiding Place Government-contract, health-care, and competition whistleblower litigation — Partner, Whistleblower Partners, San Francisco. Defense procurement, dialysis reimbursement, overseas fuel contracting, satellite engineering — each speaks a technical language that can conceal misconduct from anyone outside the walls, and Eric R. Havian has spent more than three decades bringing what happens inside them into court. He turns what a worker knows into proof that public money moved because of false representations, unlawful arrangements or manipulated competition. His cases have required him to learn flare chemistry, risk-adjustment coding, Korean fuel-bid mechanics and satellite component testing. In each, he asks what the contractor promised, what it knew and what the United States paid because of the difference. Havian graduated from Stanford University in 1977 near the top of his class and spent time as a business consultant at Bain & Company before Harvard Law School, where he graduated cum laude in 1981 and won the Ames Moot Court competition as one of its two final oralists. Drawing on that consulting experience, he reads a fraud scheme as a business model first, asking what the arrangement was designed to produce before asking what statute it violated. ###### A Prosecutor's Apprenticeship As a lead Assistant United States Attorney in San Francisco, Havian specialized in defense-procurement fraud, prosecuting the contractors who supplied the military from the government's side of the table. When he moved into private whistleblower practice, he carried the prosecutor's standards with him — an insistence that a case be provable — and eventually built and led the whistleblower practice at Constantine Cannon before joining Whistleblower Partners, the specialist firm he now serves as partner, in 2024. He has taught fraud seminars as an adjunct professor at both Stanford Law School and Berkeley Law, served as a Wasserstein Fellow at Harvard Law School, and written on whistleblower law for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Havian specializes in qui tam cases that proceed after the Justice Department declines to intervene. Counsel continuing those cases must carry the discovery, expert work and trial risk that the United States would otherwise shoulder. His recoveries in declined cases are among the largest on record. ###### Twelve Years Against KBR Havian represented whistleblowers from the Iraq-war logistics contracts who alleged that KBR, the government's principal wartime contractor, had billed the United States improperly on a vast scale. The government declined to intervene, and the case ran for twelve years — through evidence scattered across overseas operations, layers of subcontractors, and mountains of cost records — before settling for $108.75 million, with a $31.5 million share for the whistleblowers. It stands among the largest recoveries ever obtained in a declined False Claims Act case. In Ferro v. TRW, a defense-contract fraud matter involving defective satellite components — litigation in which Havian, as lead counsel, held a top-secret security clearance to handle the evidence — the case resolved for $350 million, with a $48.7 million share for his client. In the DaVita dialysis litigation, his whistleblower's kickback allegations contributed to recoveries approaching $400 million. And as lead counsel for the State of California in its false claims case against the James Jones Company over substandard waterworks parts, he won a $224 million verdict in 2008. ###### Rigging Exposed from Seoul Havian served as co-lead counsel for the whistleblower in Koo v. GS Caltex, a matter alleging that South Korean refiners had rigged bids on contracts to supply fuel to American military installations in Korea. The case combined competition law and False Claims Act enforcement: the alleged fraud concerned prices held up by collusion among the bidders the government relied on to compete for its business. The litigation produced more than $160 million in recoveries for the United States and a relator's award of roughly $37 million. ###### The Questions That Stay Plain Havian is lead counsel in pending risk-adjustment litigation against UnitedHealth concerning how Medicare Advantage insurers code patient diagnoses. He has said that "stopping fraud shouldn't be a partisan issue"; the False Claims Act was signed by Abraham Lincoln and strengthened under presidents of both parties, and whistleblowers of any political affiliation can use it. Havian tests government contractors' representations against the evidence and the payments they received. Thirty years into the work, the matters in which he has served as counsel have produced well over a billion dollars in public recoveries taken together, and his clients — engineers, accountants, executives, and physicians who risked their careers on what they knew — have received some of the largest whistleblower awards ever paid. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner - **Organization:** Whistleblower Partners - **Practice:** Government Contracts, Healthcare Fraud - **Location:** San Francisco, California ##### Contact - **Firm:** Whistleblower Partners - **Address:** 1 Embarcadero Center, Suite 1200, San Francisco, CA 94111 - **Website:** whistleblower.law - **Email:** eric@whistleblower.law - **Phone:** 415-707-6861 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Eric R. Havian Government Contracts · Healthcare Fraud > “Stopping fraud shouldn't be a partisan issue. ##### Supplies Already in the Warehouse Government-contract, health-care, and competition whistleblower litigation — Partner, Whistleblower Partners, San Francisco. Eric R. Havian's clients in the KBR case knew different parts of the contractor's supply system. Geoffrey Howard, an information-technology employee in Kuwait, wrote programs that exposed overordering. Zella Hemphill Anderson, working in Iraq, oversaw the checks for existing supplies before new purchases. Their lawsuit alleged that KBR bought materials the Army did not need, then charged the government the cost plus profit, despite a contract requiring it first to look for excess stock already in the country. The clients alleged that KBR's inventory system concealed supplies that could have filled new orders. Electrical wire was one example: the company kept buying it despite having decades' worth on hand. After the Justice Department declined to intervene, Havian and lawyers from Constantine Cannon, Goldberg Kohn, and Phillips & Cohen pursued the case privately. They reviewed more than 2.7 million documents and took sworn testimony from dozens of witnesses. The litigation lasted twelve years and settled for $108.75 million in 2023, with approximately $31.5 million for the whistleblowers. Havian credited his clients with securing a public recovery that had proved rare among Iraq-war contracting cases. The government monitored the litigation and participated in the settlement, although the private team had carried the discovery and trial preparation. Continuing cases after federal declination has become a substantial part of his practice: private counsel must arrange the expert work and bear the risk of trial. His recoveries in these cases are among the largest in that category. ###### From Prosecution to Whistleblower Counsel Havian graduated near the top of his Stanford class in 1977 and worked as a consultant at Bain & Company before attending Harvard Law School. He graduated cum laude in 1981 and was one of the two oralists on the team that won the Ames Moot Court competition. A fellowship at the Center for Law in the Public Interest brought him into contact with John Phillips, who later helped develop the strengthened federal False Claims Act. As a lead Assistant United States Attorney in San Francisco, Havian prosecuted defense-procurement fraud. When he and another prosecutor, Stephen Meagher, considered starting a private firm, he contacted Phillips hoping for referrals. Phillips instead invited them to open a San Francisco office of Phillips & Cohen. Havian later built and led the whistleblower practice at Constantine Cannon before joining Whistleblower Partners in 2024. He is a partner in its San Francisco office. ###### Technical Evidence, Different Claims For scientist Robert Ferro's case against TRW, later acquired by Northrop Grumman, Havian needed top-secret compartmented clearance to examine evidence concerning military and intelligence satellites. Ferro alleged that the contractor knowingly supplied defective components. As lead counsel, Havian could review the classified documents only in a secure facility. The case settled for $325 million in 2009, with $48.7 million for Ferro. Other cases involved the prices and quality of routine public purchases. Havian helped win a $224 million verdict against the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power over electricity charges to schools and other public agencies. The team compared the utility's elaborate cost accounting with the actual cost of serving those customers. In the separate California false claims case against the James Jones Company, he was lead counsel for municipalities challenging high-lead waterworks parts sold for use in their drinking-water systems. In health care, Havian represented David Barbetta in the DaVita dialysis case, which resolved for nearly $400 million over alleged kickbacks. He is also one of the lead lawyers representing Benjamin Poehling in the UnitedHealth risk-adjustment case. That complaint alleges that inaccurate information about Medicare Advantage patients' diagnoses generated inflated government payments. In his own writing about the case, Havian has explained the financial incentive: insurers receive higher payments for patients recorded as sicker, making the support for a diagnosis important to both the clinical record and the government's bill. ###### The Korean Fuel Bids Havian served as co-lead counsel in Koo v. GS Caltex, alleging that South Korean refiners rigged bids to supply fuel to American military installations in Korea. The case combined competition law and False Claims Act enforcement. The government's purchasing process depended on rivals submitting competitive prices; the alleged coordination among those rivals prevented that process from working. The litigation produced more than $160 million for the United States and an award of roughly $37 million for the whistleblower. Across more than three decades, the cases in which Havian has served as counsel have returned well over a billion dollars to public funds. His clients — engineers, accountants, executives, and physicians — have received some of the largest whistleblower awards after bringing forward information that put their careers at risk. ###### Advising the Insider Havian has taught fraud seminars as an adjunct at Stanford and Berkeley law schools, served as a Wasserstein Fellow at Harvard, and written about whistleblower law for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. In a 2012 commentary, he argued that "stopping fraud shouldn't be a partisan issue." The statute's history supported his point: Abraham Lincoln signed the original False Claims Act, and presidents of both parties later signed measures strengthening it. A whistleblower's political allegiance is not a condition of bringing a case. His writing also addresses the decisions that precede a lawsuit. In a 2023 Journal of Accountancy guide coauthored with Chris McLamb, the lawyers described clients who had first tried to resolve problems inside their organizations. They urged accountants to document the suspected violation, their judgment in evaluating it, the steps taken to raise it, and management's response. Before disclosing confidential information, they advised considering the governing professional duties and consulting counsel. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner - **Organization:** Whistleblower Partners - **Practice:** Government Contracts, Healthcare Fraud - **Location:** San Francisco, California ##### Contact - **Firm:** Whistleblower Partners - **Address:** 1 Embarcadero Center, Suite 1200, San Francisco, CA 94111 - **Website:** whistleblower.law - **Email:** eric@whistleblower.law - **Phone:** 415-707-6861 --- ## 45. Shelley R. Slade — `900005212` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `241a2f5dd0b26596d005e2e042513bc4231b0bec701ffbaea03e9f45c5997a84` - **After/current hash:** `9176f5d7da6ac121682b2591bec285d747aa360c5d71c9bfec58e20a32c1f4c2` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005212/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Opening and Novartis account**: Replace the abstract disguise motif with Slade's recruitment of trial counsel, distinguish partial intervention and identify the actual pharmacy incentives. - `correct` — **Settlement totals and client share**: Explain the Novartis and CVS components and Accredo's inclusion in the Kester total; preserve statutory share entitlement without the unsubstantiated $66.4 million figure or ranking. - `rewrite` — **Government preparation, later pharmacy matters and public service**: Keep every supported career, award, testimony and service fact, develop her actual engineer/billing illustration and Omnicare role, and distinguish Vogel's CVS representation. ### BEFORE #### Shelley R. Slade False Claims Act · Healthcare Fraud > “I enjoy the investigative process, and more generally, the search for truth. ##### The Disguises of a Bribe Pharmaceutical-kickback and health-care False Claims Act litigation — Partner, Vogel, Slade & Goldstein, Washington, D.C. A kickback rarely announces itself. It arrives dressed as ordinary commerce — a rebate, a consulting fee, a data-services agreement, a patient-support program with a legitimate surface and a persuasive rationale. By the time it reaches a lawyer's desk it has usually acquired contracts, invoices, and often a compliance memo blessing the arrangement. Shelley R. Slade's cases press past that surface to the economic purpose beneath: what the money actually purchased, how it moved prescriptions or referrals, and whether Medicare and Medicaid were then asked to pay claims born of that influence. Over more than two decades at Vogel, Slade & Goldstein, the Washington firm where she has been a partner since 2000, she has made a career of that excavation, and the totals recovered through her cases have run well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Slade has said she enjoys "the search for truth" in the investigative process. She builds a kickback case by reading the service agreement against the payment ledger, the payment ledger against the prescription data, and the prescription data against the reimbursement rules, until the arrangement's real function stands free of its stated one. She developed that investigative approach at the United States Department of Justice. ###### The Government's Chair Slade graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, took her law degree at Stanford Law School, and began her career as an associate at Arnold & Porter in Washington. At the Justice Department, she served as a trial attorney in the Civil Fraud Section and rose to become the Department's Senior Counsel for Health Care Fraud — a position at the center of the government's civil enforcement against hospitals, drug makers, and health systems. Her government service earned her the Department's Meritorious Award, an Integrity Award from the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, and a Public Service Award from the General Services Administration. Slade builds each matter for the government's intervention decision, with the damages theory and evidence considered from the investigator's chair. If the government declines to intervene, the whistleblower can continue the litigation. She prepares a case so that an employee's story can become documents, transaction paths, and an enforcement theory a government lawyer can carry. She testified before the House Judiciary Committee in 2008 and 2013 on the False Claims Act and its amendments. She has also addressed the New York City Council and the National Association of Attorneys General on fraud enforcement. From 2018 to 2022, she co-chaired the American Bar Association's committee on procurement fraud and false claims. ###### The Novartis Web Slade represented whistleblower David Kester in litigation alleging that Novartis had paid kickbacks to specialty pharmacies to push its drugs — arrangements threaded through the pharmacies that handle complex, high-cost medications for transplant patients and others whose therapies are reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid. Novartis paid $390 million to resolve the claims. Related settlements with the pharmacies themselves brought the recovery associated with the allegations to approximately $465 million, and Kester received a relator's share of roughly $66.4 million — among the largest individual whistleblower awards in the history of health-care enforcement. Specialty pharmacies sit between manufacturer and patient, and the case required tracing manufacturer payments through those intermediaries and showing how the arrangements shaped the handling of federally reimbursed medications — which patients were called, which refills were pushed, which therapies were steered. The pharmacies provided real services to real patients; the legal question was whether the compensation reflected fair value for that work or served as a conduit for influence. ###### The Ledger Behind the Counter Slade represented the relator in a case against Accredo, a specialty pharmacy, that resolved for $60 million over kickback allegations. Her firm's case against Omnicare, the institutional pharmacy giant, settled for $21.05 million over allegations of Medicaid fraud in Massachusetts and Michigan — a resolution that brought the firm's Omnicare recoveries at that time to $197.5 million across successive cases. In late 2025, her firm announced that CVS would pay $37.76 million to resolve a pharmacist-whistleblower's allegations that it had systematically dispensed insulin pens in quantities beyond what prescriptions supported, overbilling Medicare and Medicaid across a decade. Slade examines days'-supply fields in dispensing software, rebate schedules and recurring ledger entries to trace how a pharmacy's business practices produced claims on public programs. Those records allow her to reconstruct transactions that may appear routine when considered one at a time. ###### The Search for Truth In 2013, the Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund — the national organization of the False Claims Act bar, on whose boards and advisory council she has long served — named her Whistleblower Lawyer of the Year. The D.C. Bar has honored her as a Pro Bono Lawyer of the Year, and she has published widely on health-care fraud and qui tam enforcement. Slade also serves as vice chair of the Potomac Riverkeeper Network and chairs its litigation and strategic-planning committees. She applies her investigative experience to protecting the river that runs past the city where she has spent her career. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner - **Organization:** Vogel, Slade & Goldstein - **Practice:** False Claims Act, Healthcare Fraud - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Firm:** Vogel, Slade & Goldstein - **Address:** 1828 L Street NW, Suite 270, Washington, DC 20036 - **Website:** vsg-law.com - **Email:** sslade@vsg-law.com - **Phone:** 202-537-5903 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Shelley R. Slade False Claims Act · Healthcare Fraud > “I enjoy the investigative process, and more generally, the search for truth. ##### Assembling the Novartis Case Pharmaceutical-kickback and health-care False Claims Act litigation — Partner, Vogel, Slade & Goldstein, Washington, D.C. When the federal government joined part of David Kester's whistleblower case against Novartis, Shelley R. Slade and her colleagues still had claims to pursue on his behalf. They brought Susman Godfrey into the litigation, adding trial lawyers who shared the discovery work with the existing team, federal prosecutors and participating states. Kester, a former Novartis sales manager, alleged that the manufacturer was paying specialty pharmacies to recommend its drugs and encourage patients to order refills. Accredo, one of the pharmacies, was initially outside the government's case. The private lawyers prosecuted the claims against it before the government joined that portion at settlement. They also participated in discovery on the Novartis claims, while the government led the settlement negotiations and obtained the company's factual admissions. ###### Referrals and Refill Rates Kester's allegations concerned medications for cancer, transplant patients and people with cystic fibrosis, with prescriptions reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid. The pharmacies dispensed drugs and counseled patients, but the payments at issue rewarded recommendations and refills. Novartis controlled referrals of patients taking Exjade and tracked the pharmacies' refill rates. The government alleged that pharmacies obtaining more refills received more referrals and higher rebates, while nurses called patients to encourage continued use without adequately explaining serious side effects. For Myfortic, a drug used after kidney transplants, the alleged inducement was a rebate in exchange for recommending that doctors switch patients from competing medicines. Slade and her colleagues had to connect the pharmacies' agreements and financial incentives with the recommendations they made and the prescriptions billed to public programs. Their inquiry distinguished payment for genuine pharmacy services from compensation intended to influence treatment. Slade described Kester's contribution as exposing a way for manufacturers to buy influence over pharmacies that recommended refills, compromising the independent medical judgment patients expected. Novartis paid $390 million in 2015: $370 million to resolve federal and state false claims and $20 million in civil forfeiture. Accredo's $60 million settlement and BioScrip's $15 million settlement brought the total recovery in Kester's litigation to $465 million, with Kester entitled to a statutory whistleblower share. Novartis also accepted responsibility for factual admissions concerning its pharmacy relationships and agreed to independent review of those relationships under an extended corporate integrity agreement. ###### Government Service and the Insider's Evidence Slade graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, earned her law degree at Stanford and began practice at Arnold & Porter in Washington. She spent ten years at the Justice Department, working as a Civil Fraud Section trial attorney and as Senior Counsel for Health Care Fraud. Her work earned the Department's Meritorious Award, an Integrity Award from the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, and a Public Service Award from the General Services Administration. She has been a partner at Vogel, Slade & Goldstein since 2000. In representing whistleblowers, Slade considers the evidence and damages a government lawyer would need to evaluate intervention. The client may know how a transaction worked without possessing all the records needed to prove the resulting claim for payment. She has described her enjoyment of the investigative process as "the search for truth." Her pharmacy cases require testing an account against agreements, payments, prescription records and reimbursement requirements. Testifying before House Judiciary subcommittees in June 2008, Slade used an engineer and a billing employee to explain a problem with demanding actual invoices at the outset of a case. An engineer might know that a military product was defective but lack access to billing files; a billing employee might have the invoices without knowing that the engineers had supplied false information. She urged Congress to allow insiders to bring cases despite that division of knowledge. She also cautioned lawmakers that a case counted as government-intervened might have been litigated privately for years before the government joined. ###### Pharmacy Prices and Quantities In the Omnicare litigation, Slade represented a former financial analyst who challenged the prices charged to Medicaid. Massachusetts and Michigan required the pharmacy to give their programs its most favorable customer price. The complaint alleged that Omnicare nevertheless charged those programs more than private insurers. The company paid $21.05 million to settle the two states' claims in 2010, bringing its settlements in lawsuits involving the firm's client and other whistleblowers to $197.5 million since 2006. Slade credited the state investigative teams and urged other public programs to seek comparable pricing protections. A later case at her firm concerned the quantity of medication dispensed. Pharmacist Adam Rahimi, represented by her partner Robert Vogel, alleged that CVS recorded a shorter days' supply of insulin pens than it actually provided, causing its computer system to schedule refills before patients needed them. At one Maryland pharmacy, he alleged, a fifty-day supply was entered as thirty days and followed by seven premature refills over eight months. The comparison was between the prescription, the amount supplied, the computer entry and the subsequent reimbursement claims. The resolution announced in December 2025 totaled $37.76 million: $36.5 million for the federal and state False Claims Act cases and $1.26 million for additional insulin-pen claims resolved with the California Department of Insurance. The allegations covered 2010 through 2020. CVS acknowledged that understating the days' supply had caused some pharmacies to dispense refills before patients needed them and before government plans would have approved reimbursement. ###### Enforcement and Public Service Slade returned to the House Judiciary Committee in 2013 and has also addressed the New York City Council and the National Association of Attorneys General on fraud enforcement. From 2018 to 2022, she co-chaired the American Bar Association's committee on procurement fraud and false claims. Her writing has addressed health-care fraud, civil investigative demands and the conduct of qui tam litigation, alongside service on the boards and advisory council of Taxpayers Against Fraud and its Education Fund. The Education Fund named her Whistleblower Lawyer of the Year in 2013, and the D.C. Bar has honored her as a Pro Bono Lawyer of the Year. Her public-interest work in Washington also extends to the Potomac watershed. She serves as vice chair of the Potomac Riverkeeper Network and chairs its litigation and strategic-planning committees. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner - **Organization:** Vogel, Slade & Goldstein - **Practice:** False Claims Act, Healthcare Fraud - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Firm:** Vogel, Slade & Goldstein - **Address:** 1828 L Street NW, Suite 270, Washington, DC 20036 - **Website:** vsg-law.com - **Email:** sslade@vsg-law.com - **Phone:** 202-537-5903 --- ## 46. Andre M. Mura — `900005097` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `094848151afaf124a90b381601c502a7451b364e0d912246ab14b9628922c833` - **After/current hash:** `430ae7180e685a10a0a58dc52c88ed32cc342802be6723f34f5892fa8e98f726` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005097/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 3 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Opening and water-rate account**: Bring Mura's trial work into the opening through the actual cost assumptions, retain the original judgment and appeal, and add the dated city settlement authorization. - `rewrite` — **Appellate, privacy and trial-team passages**: Separate the formerly crowded lending and mass-tort inventory, preserve the legal distinctions, and explain the actual product changes obtained in CLEAR and Vizio. - `correct` — **Current professional service and ending**: Preserve Mura's NCJI presidency as a past role, identify immediate past president for 2026–2027, and close with current committee and TikTok discovery work. - `restructure` — **Opening and water-rate account**: Bring Mura's trial work into the opening through the actual cost assumptions, retain the original judgment and appeal, and add the dated city settlement authorization. - `rewrite` — **Appellate, privacy and trial-team passages**: Separate the formerly crowded lending and mass-tort inventory, preserve the legal distinctions, and explain the actual product changes obtained in CLEAR and Vizio. - `correct` — **Current professional service and ending**: Preserve Mura's NCJI presidency as a past role, identify immediate past president for 2026–2027, and close with current committee and TikTok discovery work. - `rewrite` — **Case-linked legal-media award sentence**: Remove the prohibited third-party legal-media endorsement and keep the actual work and outcomes of the two cases. - `correct` — **Patz water-rate settlement status paragraph**: Correct the procedural posture by distinguishing San Diego's September 2, 2026 authorization of the $40 million settlement from the court's still-future December 11, 2026 final-approval hearing. ### BEFORE #### Andre M. Mura Privacy · Consumer Protection > “Consumers did not deserve for their personal information to be treated so recklessly. ##### Privacy, Water Rates, and Consumer Lending Consumer protection, privacy, public-law, and complex plaintiff appeals — Partner, Gibbs Mura, Oakland. Andre M. Mura challenges the collection and sale of personal information, municipal water rates, and high-cost consumer loans. His cases require him to trace how data moves, how a city calculates a customer's bill, or how a lender sets an interest rate. He handles that work at trial and on appeal, seeking compensation and changes to the practices that caused the harm. A Williams College graduate who took his law degree from the George Washington University Law School in 2004, Mura spent his early career as senior litigation counsel at the Center for Constitutional Litigation in Washington. He represented plaintiffs in state supreme courts and federal appellate courts, challenging legislative and doctrinal restrictions on civil remedies. He later joined the Oakland class-action firm then known as Gibbs Law Group, combining appellate work with trial-level complex litigation. In 2025 the firm renamed itself Gibbs Mura, A Law Group. ###### The Dossier Business In Brooks v. Thomson Reuters, Mura served as court-appointed class counsel for Californians whose personal information, including addresses and associations, was gathered and made searchable through the company's CLEAR platform without their knowledge or consent. Thomson Reuters sold access to that information to third parties. The settlement that received final approval on February 21, 2025 provided $27.5 million along with substantial injunctive relief governing the product itself. In the separate 2019 case concerning the First American data exposure, Mura said that consumers did not deserve for their personal information to be treated so recklessly. As co-lead counsel in In re Vizio Consumer Privacy Litigation, Mura helped negotiate a $17 million fund and classwide changes to how the company's smart televisions collected viewing data. Courts have also appointed him to plaintiffs' steering committee leadership in the social-media adolescent-addiction litigation against the major platforms and to the executive committee in the Meta Pixel healthcare-data privacy case. In the latter case, patients allege that a tracking tool transmitted their medical portal activity to a social network. ###### Challenging San Diego's Water Rates In Patz v. City of San Diego, Mura served as lead trial counsel for single-family water customers who alleged that the city's tiered rate structure charged them more than the cost of serving them, in violation of the California Constitution's voter-enacted limits on government charges. He examined cost-of-service studies, tier multipliers, and the hydraulics of the municipal utility, testing the city's charges against its own consultants' work. The trial produced a $79.5 million verdict. Mura then successfully defended liability on appeal, litigated the remand, and helped bring the case to a settlement in principle. In De La Torre v. CashCall, Mura played a central briefing role in a unanimous California Supreme Court decision holding that the absence of a numerical interest-rate cap on larger consumer loans did not insulate those loans from unconscionability challenges. A 96 percent interest rate could still be challenged as unconscionable even where the Legislature had set no numerical cap. In the federal mass-tort arena, courts appointed him to the law-and-briefing committee in the 3M Combat Arms earplug litigation, the largest MDL in American history, where he participated in bellwether trials. He also served on the steering committee in the Taxotere products litigation and co-chaired law and briefing. ###### Teaching and Civil Justice Work Mura serves as president of the National Civil Justice Institute, the research and education foundation devoted to protecting the civil justice system, and sits on the boards of the Impact Fund, which finances public-interest class actions, and the Civil Justice Research Initiative at Berkeley Law. He is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, a member of the Lawyers Committee of the National Center for State Courts, a past chair of the American Association for Justice's LGBT Caucus, and a frequent teacher on class actions, discovery, and legal writing. California Lawyer has twice named him an Attorney of the Year — in 2019 for De La Torre v. CashCall and in 2023 for Patz v. City of San Diego. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner, Gibbs Mura - **Practice:** Privacy · Consumer Protection - **Education:** Williams College; George Washington University Law School - **Location:** Oakland, California ##### Contact Gibbs Mura Professional profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Andre M. Mura Privacy · Consumer Protection > “Consumers did not deserve for their personal information to be treated so recklessly. ##### Water Rates and the Cost of Service Consumer protection, privacy, public-law, and complex plaintiff appeals — Partner, Gibbs Mura, Oakland. As lead trial counsel for single-family water customers in Patz v. City of San Diego, Andre M. Mura examined the studies behind the city's tiered rates. California's voter-enacted constitutional limits prohibited charging a property more than its proportional cost of service. The city therefore had to justify the amounts assigned to different levels of household use, including the assumptions about water supply, demand and delivery on which its consultants relied. One disputed assumption assigned cheaper local water to the lowest tier and more expensive supplies to higher tiers. The sources were mixed in reservoirs before delivery, however, and the city's expert acknowledged that local supplies could not cover all first-tier use and were not delivered exclusively to those customers. The plaintiffs also challenged multipliers intended to account for peak demand when the city lacked time-of-use data establishing how the customer groups contributed to those peaks. Mura's team tested the cost studies against the utility's actual supply and delivery system. The trial produced a $79.5 million judgment in 2022. Mura successfully defended the liability finding on appeal and litigated the case on remand. After the parties reached a settlement in principle, San Diego authorized a $40 million settlement on September 2, 2026. A final-approval hearing is scheduled for December 11, 2026. ###### Appellate Work and Trial Preparation Mura graduated from Williams College and earned his law degree at the George Washington University Law School in 2004. As senior litigation counsel at the Center for Constitutional Litigation in Washington, he represented plaintiffs in state supreme courts and federal appellate courts, challenging legislative and doctrinal restrictions on civil remedies. He later joined Gibbs Law Group in Oakland, where he combined that appellate work with complex trial litigation. He became a partner in 2015, and the firm adopted the name Gibbs Mura, A Law Group, in 2025. His appellate briefing in De La Torre v. CashCall addressed a different limit on consumer remedies. The loans at issue included $2,600 loans carrying annual interest rates of 96 percent. Under the law then in force, loans of $2,500 or more had no numerical interest-rate ceiling. Mura and his colleagues argued that the absence of a ceiling did not eliminate the courts' authority to examine whether a loan term was unconscionable. In 2018, the California Supreme Court unanimously agreed that such a challenge could proceed. It required attention to the loan and the circumstances in which it was made, rather than treating the absence of a statutory cap as an exemption from review. The court answered the legal question without itself deciding that every 96 percent loan was unlawful. ###### Changing the Collection of Personal Data In Brooks v. Thomson Reuters, Mura represented Californians who alleged that their personal information, including addresses and associations, had been gathered without their knowledge or consent. Thomson Reuters sold third parties access to that information through its CLEAR search platform. Mura and Geoffrey Graber negotiated a settlement providing $27.5 million and changes to the product. The court appointed them as settlement class counsel and granted final approval on February 21, 2025. The agreement required improvements to the process for reviewing and deleting personal information from CLEAR, clearer explanations of how information was used, and changes to product settings and management practices. Those terms addressed consumers' control over information already collected, alongside compensation for the class. Mura had also served as co-lead counsel in the Vizio consumer-privacy litigation, which alleged that smart televisions collected and sold viewing histories and digital identifiers without informed consent. He helped negotiate a $17 million fund, deletion of the contested viewing data and limits on future collection requiring consent after prominent notice. Discussing that agreement, he emphasized both the compensation and the changes giving viewers a choice about collection. The separate First American data-exposure case prompted his 2019 statement that consumers did not deserve for their personal information to be treated so recklessly. ###### Briefing Within a Trial Team Courts appointed Mura to the plaintiffs' law-and-briefing committee in the 3M Combat Arms earplug litigation, the largest multidistrict litigation in American history. He also participated in bellwether trial teams representing service members and veterans who alleged that defective earplugs had damaged their hearing. In the Taxotere litigation, he served on the plaintiffs' steering committee, co-chaired law and briefing, and participated in a federal jury trial involving breast-cancer survivors who alleged permanent hair loss after using the chemotherapy drug. His teaching has covered class actions, discovery and legal writing, including pretrial writing for newer lawyers. He serves on the boards of the Impact Fund, which finances public-interest class actions, and Berkeley Law's Civil Justice Research Initiative. He is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, a member of the National Center for State Courts' Lawyers Committee and a past chair of the American Association for Justice's LGBT Caucus. Mura has also served as president of the National Civil Justice Institute, the research and education organization devoted to access to civil justice. For 2026–2027, he serves as its immediate past president. He also participated in a May 2026 symposium on secrecy and transparency in civil litigation at Stanford Law School. ###### Health Data and Social-Media Discovery In the Meta Pixel healthcare-data privacy litigation, Mura serves on the plaintiffs' executive committee. Patients allege that a tracking tool transmitted their activity in medical portals to a social network without consent. He also serves in plaintiffs' steering committee leadership in the social-media adolescent-addiction litigation, representing children and families. His responsibilities include law and briefing and managing discovery concerning the TikTok defendants. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner, Gibbs Mura - **Practice:** Privacy · Consumer Protection - **Education:** Williams College; George Washington University Law School - **Location:** Oakland, California ##### Contact Gibbs Mura Professional profile --- ## 47. Deepak Gupta — `900001646` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `0b98ad1203fca1244333496e8edfd97d40a11b5a7db86262e86f692817c3087a` - **After/current hash:** `9113e8b830f990c8a03ae46a49d2be01b677c2d1e154e5c49a6dc648a624056a` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900001646/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Concepcion opening**: Preserve the charge, date, role and existing decision while distinguishing individual arbitration from class proceedings and explaining Gupta's actual contract-defense argument. - `restructure` — **Career, appellate cases and verdict defense**: Bring his documented assembly of appellate counsel forward, separate the different Supreme Court tasks and distinguish the teachers' particular verdict from related school claims. - `rewrite` — **Teaching, writing and ending**: Keep Harvard, the Khan article and the 2022 statute, replacing vague causal influence claims and the repeated threshold ending with his actual proposal for specialist/trial-lawyer coordination. ### BEFORE #### Deepak Gupta Supreme Court · Civil Justice > “This ruling upholds the Constitution's separation of powers and preserves the Bureau's vital work. ##### Thirty Dollars and Twenty-Two Cents Consumer, worker, civil-rights, and complex plaintiff-side appeals — Founding Principal, Gupta Wessler, Washington, D.C. The phones were advertised as free. The sales tax on them came to $30.22. From that small charge on a California family's wireless bill grew AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, one of the most consequential Supreme Court cases of its era — a fight not about whether the charge was deceptive, but about whether anyone would ever be allowed to prove it. On November 9, 2010, the lawyer standing at the lectern for the Concepcions was Deepak Gupta, then of Public Citizen Litigation Group, arguing that a state's ordinary contract law could still protect the collective procedures that make small claims worth bringing at all. The Court divided five to four against him, and the dissent adopted the heart of his argument, asking what rational lawyer would take a case whose practical ceiling was $30.22. Gupta has since built a national practice litigating whether consumers, workers and injured people can get their claims heard. Arbitration, preemption, personal jurisdiction, class certification and standing determine whether a case can reach a jury or another forum in which the injury can be proved. ###### A Philosopher's Route to the Lectern Gupta studied philosophy at Fordham University and Sanskrit at Oxford before taking his law degree from Georgetown, then clerked for Judge Lawrence K. Karlton of the Eastern District of California. His early work included voting-rights cases in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, prisoners' rights litigation at the ACLU's National Prison Project, and religious-liberty cases at Americans United for Separation of Church and State. During seven years at Public Citizen Litigation Group, he founded the organization's Consumer Justice Project and served as the Alan Morrison Supreme Court Assistance Project Fellow. When Elizabeth Warren began building the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, she hired Gupta as its first appellate litigator; as senior counsel he launched the new agency's amicus program. In 2012 he founded the firm that became Gupta Wessler to give plaintiffs the specialized appellate representation long available to corporate defendants. ###### Arguing for the Forum Itself In Expressions Hair Design v. Schneiderman, Gupta prevailed in a First Amendment challenge concerning how merchants may communicate credit-card pricing to their customers. In Smith v. Berryhill, the Justices appointed him to brief and argue a question of judicial review of Social Security determinations. He was the first Asian American lawyer the Court appointed to argue a case, representing a position that otherwise lacked an advocate. In Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District Court, he helped secure a unanimous jurisdictional ruling preserving state-court access for people injured by products a manufacturer extensively markets and services in the forum — a decision that stopped a decade-long campaign to shrink where corporations can be sued. In Cantero v. Bank of America, he obtained a unanimous 2024 decision requiring a careful, practical analysis before federal banking law displaces state consumer protections. During the 2024–2025 term, he challenged the suitability of the Labcorp and Nvidia cases for Supreme Court review. His advocacy helped produce post-argument dismissals, preventing adverse nationwide rulings on the patients' and investors' claims. ###### Defending the Verdict Gupta's firm also defends plaintiffs' verdicts on appeal. In 2024, the Nevada Supreme Court affirmed an approximately $200 million insurance bad-faith verdict his team defended. In 2025, the Washington Supreme Court reinstated a $185 million verdict for teachers and students poisoned by PCB contamination at a school — a ruling with consequences for more than a billion dollars in related claims against Monsanto. The firm's appellate defense work has preserved verdicts for survivors of sexual abuse, victims of elder neglect and policyholders abandoned by their insurers. As lead counsel in the PACER litigation, Gupta also secured a $125 million settlement over unlawful federal court-records fees. Gupta has defended the CFPB against efforts to dismantle it through scholarship, litigation on behalf of the agency's employees and allies, and public advocacy. In March 2025, he welcomed a preliminary injunction blocking the administration's dismantling plan, saying the ruling protected the separation of powers and the Bureau's work. ###### A Bar Built to Last He teaches the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Harvard Law School and seminars on forced arbitration and the civil justice system, training the next generation to see that an appeal begins with the record built below. His writing — including "Arbitration as Wealth Transfer," co-authored with Lina Khan in the Yale Law & Policy Review — has shaped how courts, scholars, and Congress understand what mandatory arbitration actually does to dispersed claims. When Congress in 2022 restored the right of sexual-assault and harassment survivors to elect court over forced arbitration, it was legislating against the backdrop his generation of advocates had documented case by case. Since Concepcion, the fight Gupta took over for a family with a $30.22 claim has continued in new forms. Arbitration clauses, preemption arguments, and jurisdictional rules still determine whether small claims reach a court. Gupta remains at those thresholds, arguing for the consumers, workers, and injured people whose opportunity to prove their claims depends on the answer. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Principal, Gupta Wessler - **Practice:** Supreme Court · Civil Justice - **Education:** Fordham University; University of Oxford; Georgetown University Law Center - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact Gupta Wessler Professional profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Deepak Gupta Supreme Court · Civil Justice > “This ruling upholds the Constitution's separation of powers and preserves the Bureau's vital work. ##### The Concepcions' $30.22 Claim Consumer, worker, civil-rights, and complex plaintiff-side appeals — Founding Principal, Gupta Wessler, Washington, D.C. Vincent and Liza Concepcion were charged $30.22 in sales tax for phones advertised as free. Their contract with AT&T allowed individual arbitration but prohibited class proceedings. Deepak Gupta argued for them in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion at the Supreme Court on November 9, 2010, seeking to preserve California's rule against class waivers that effectively insulated a company from responsibility for small, widespread injuries. Gupta, then at Public Citizen Litigation Group, began with the Federal Arbitration Act's preservation of ordinary contract defenses. His argument distinguished choosing arbitration as a forum from using a contract to avoid legal responsibility. The Court ruled five to four in 2011 that federal law displaced California's rule. Justice Stephen Breyer's dissent emphasized the difficulty of finding a lawyer to pursue a claim arising from a $30.22 charge, even with the incentives AT&T offered individual claimants. ###### Building a Plaintiffs' Appellate Practice Gupta studied philosophy at Fordham University and Sanskrit at Oxford before earning his law degree at Georgetown and clerking for Judge Lawrence K. Karlton in the Eastern District of California. His early work included voting-rights cases in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, prisoners' rights litigation at the ACLU's National Prison Project, and religious-liberty cases at Americans United for Separation of Church and State. During seven years at Public Citizen Litigation Group, he founded the Consumer Justice Project and served as the Alan Morrison Supreme Court Assistance Project Fellow. Elizabeth Warren later hired him as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's first appellate litigator. As senior counsel, he launched the agency's program for filing friend-of-the-court briefs. In 2012, he founded the firm that became Gupta Wessler, representing consumers, workers and injured people in appeals involving arbitration, preemption, personal jurisdiction, class certification and standing. In a 2016 article about developing a plaintiffs' appellate bar, Gupta described how the firm assembled lawyers with experience in public-interest organizations, private firms and government. Existing professional networks and referrals connected that small team with trial lawyers across the country, from solo practitioners to national class-action firms. He wanted plaintiffs to have access to the specialist appellate representation already available to corporate defendants. ###### Choosing the Question for Review In Expressions Hair Design v. Schneiderman, Gupta prevailed in a First Amendment challenge to restrictions on how merchants communicated credit-card prices. In Smith v. Berryhill, the Supreme Court appointed him to brief and argue an otherwise undefended position concerning judicial review of Social Security determinations. He was the first Asian American lawyer the Court appointed to argue a case. His argument in Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District Court helped secure a unanimous ruling allowing residents injured in Montana and Minnesota to sue Ford in their home states. The company had extensively marketed and serviced the vehicle models there. The Court rejected Ford's attempt to confine jurisdiction to places where the particular vehicles had been designed, manufactured or originally sold. In Cantero v. Bank of America, Gupta obtained a unanimous 2024 decision requiring a practical assessment of whether a state consumer-protection law prevented or significantly interfered with a national bank's powers before treating the state law as preempted. During the 2024–2025 term, Gupta argued that the Labcorp and Nvidia cases were unsuitable vehicles for the questions presented to the Supreme Court. The Court dismissed both after argument as improvidently granted. Those orders left the lower-court rulings in place without announcing new nationwide rules on the patients' and investors' claims. ###### Preserving the Judgment Gupta's appellate work also begins after a plaintiff has proved a case at trial. In 2024, the Nevada Supreme Court affirmed the approximately $200 million insurance bad-faith verdict his team defended against Sierra Health and Life. In October 2025, the Washington Supreme Court reinstated a $185 million verdict arising from three teachers' exposure to PCB contamination at a school. Gupta and his colleagues defended the application of Missouri law to particular issues and the admissibility of expert testimony reconstructing historic exposure. The ruling affected more than a billion dollars in related school-contamination claims involving teachers and students. The firm's verdict-defense work also encompasses survivors of sexual abuse, victims of elder neglect and policyholders whose insurers denied coverage. As lead counsel in the PACER litigation, Gupta secured a $125 million settlement over unlawful federal court-records fees. He has continued to defend the CFPB through scholarship, litigation for its employees and allies, and public advocacy. In March 2025, he welcomed a preliminary injunction blocking the administration's plan to dismantle the agency, describing it as a protection of the separation of powers and the Bureau's work. ###### Specialists Working with Trial Lawyers Gupta teaches the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Harvard Law School and has taught seminars on forced arbitration and the civil justice system. In "Arbitration as Wealth Transfer," coauthored with Lina Khan and published in the Yale Law & Policy Review in 2017, he examined the economic consequences of preventing consumers and workers from combining their claims. The authors argued that procedural restrictions could transfer wealth by suppressing claims that otherwise would have been brought. Congress addressed one part of the arbitration problem in 2022. For covered disputes arising on or after enactment, people alleging sexual assault or sexual harassment could elect court proceedings despite a predispute arbitration agreement or joint-action waiver. The change preserved a choice of forum for those disputes without eliminating the broader questions Gupta had litigated and studied. In his 2016 article, Gupta urged appellate specialists to build lasting relationships with trial lawyers and coordinate their work on recurring questions such as arbitration, preemption and class-action rules. Appeals, he argued, were a setting in which a small, experienced team could counter a much larger firm. His proposal was to make that expertise available through the relationships among lawyers already representing plaintiffs. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Principal, Gupta Wessler - **Practice:** Supreme Court · Civil Justice - **Education:** Fordham University; University of Oxford; Georgetown University Law Center - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact Gupta Wessler Professional profile --- ## 48. Nathan Freed Wessler — `900005098` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `461eb7c6b194bbf2889f87d1c76fa2b01bf3f24c3ad7be1c76e8b6399ebc393d` - **After/current hash:** `e2ffe5652f23e4ebcb9c43b8c5d34a47dc32d9fbea1c79a824d300374b787bcb` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005098/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Carpenter opening and surveillance investigation**: Show the documented record analysis and Wessler's conversation; correct the judicial process and make the early Stingray investigation concrete while preserving the full career sequence. - `correct` — **Baltimore and Clearview remedies**: Retain the favorable results with the actual scope of access restrictions, deletion conditions, agency coverage and opt-out protections. - `restructure` — **Border searches and concluding advocacy**: Preserve the original border-search qualification and privacy statement, place data-broker concerns in Wessler's actual advocacy, and conclude with his documented Williams representation. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **New final section: Surveillance Inside the Home**: Add the September 2, 2026 LaValley public-housing surveillance class action because it is a material current continuation of Wessler's documented Fourth Amendment and technology-privacy practice and postdates the earlier same-day full profile review. ### BEFORE #### Nathan Freed Wessler Digital Privacy · Fourth Amendment > “You don't have to have committed a felony to want to keep some parts of your life private from meddling government agents. ##### One Hundred and One Points a Day Digital privacy, surveillance, biometric technology, and Fourth Amendment litigation — Deputy Director, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, New York. The records ran to 12,898 location points — an average of 101 for every day across more than four months of one man's life. Prosecutors had obtained them from Timothy Carpenter's wireless carriers without a warrant, on nothing more than a records request, and from those points they could reconstruct where he slept, where he worshipped, whom he visited, and when. Any single point revealed almost nothing. Gathered persistently and searched at scale, the same data reconstructed movement, association, identity, and private life. On November 29, 2017, Nathan Freed Wessler stood before the Supreme Court and asked the Justices to recognize the power of that accumulated record: years of movements could be retrieved after the fact, without an officer ever having followed the person. Seven months later, the Court agreed. Carpenter v. United States held that government acquisition of historical cell-site location information is a Fourth Amendment search generally requiring a warrant. Chief Justice Roberts's majority opinion declined to extend the old third-party doctrine — the rule that information shared with a business loses constitutional protection — to the detailed, involuntary, all-encompassing location record a phone generates simply by being on. A person's movements, the Court recognized, do not forfeit constitutional protection merely because a wireless provider holds the data in the course of running its network. Wessler won the case as a young ACLU lawyer after years of work on digital surveillance. ###### The Education of a Surveillance Lawyer Wessler's route to that lectern began at Swarthmore College and ran through the ACLU twice. Before law school he worked as a field organizer in the organization's Washington Legislative Office, learning surveillance policy from the advocacy side. He then attended New York University School of Law as a Root-Tilden-Kern public-interest scholar, clerked for Judge Helene N. White of the Sixth Circuit, and returned to the ACLU as a legal fellow in its National Security Project before joining the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, where he now serves as deputy director. Wessler's early surveillance work focused on the cell-site simulator, or "stingray," a suitcase-sized device that impersonates a cell tower and tricks every phone in a neighborhood into revealing its location. Police departments were deploying the devices under nondisclosure agreements so strict that prosecutors concealed their use from courts and defendants alike. Wessler's litigation and public-records campaigns forced disclosures across the country and helped drive new warrant requirements. In those cases and in Carpenter, he documented surveillance systems' capabilities and asked courts to assess the searches they enabled. He has said that people need not have committed a felony to want parts of their lives kept private from government agents. ###### Eyes Over Baltimore, Faces in a Database After Carpenter, Wessler turned the aggregation principle on surveillance systems that watch entire populations at once. Baltimore's police department had contracted for wide-area aerial surveillance — aircraft photographing thirty-two square miles of the city at a time, retaining imagery that allowed analysts to retrace the movements of anyone below. In Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department, Wessler and his colleagues, representing Black community organizers, persuaded the en banc Fourth Circuit in 2021 that the program violated the Fourth Amendment: precisely because it enabled the retrospective tracking of everyone, it crossed the line Carpenter had drawn. The subsequent settlement barred a similar program and required the restriction and deletion of the collected data. Clearview AI had scraped billions of photographs from the internet and built a face-search engine sold to private companies and government agencies — a tool that could put a name to a stranger on a sidewalk. As plaintiffs' counsel in the ACLU's suit under Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act, Wessler helped negotiate a structural settlement that permanently bars Clearview from providing its faceprint database to most private entities nationwide, imposed a five-year restriction on access for Illinois government agencies, and created opt-out protections for Illinois residents. At the border, his team's suit in Alasaad documented the breadth of searches of travelers' phones and laptops and won a district-court ruling restricting suspicionless device searches. The relief was later narrowed on appeal. ###### The Standing Power In his surveillance cases, Wessler asks courts to examine what the systems can do across entire populations: hold five years of location records, photograph a city continuously, or search photographs posted online for a matching face. Those systems can reconstruct movements and associations long after the events occurred, without the physical trespass or contemporaneous stakeout around which older Fourth Amendment rules developed. His litigation addresses how privacy safeguards apply when repeated collection and later analysis reveal more than any single observation. Wessler and the project he helps lead litigate, testify, and publish on surveillance technologies, from automatic license-plate readers that log the daily travels of entire regions to data-broker sales that let agencies buy what the Constitution would forbid them to seize. He also comments publicly as new tools emerge. Carpenter's 12,898 location points gave the Court a concrete record of accumulated tracking. In requiring a warrant for such records as a general rule, the decision made the cumulative reach of digital surveillance a question the Fourth Amendment must answer. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Deputy Director, Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, American Civil Liberties Union - **Practice:** Digital Privacy · Fourth Amendment - **Education:** Swarthmore College; New York University School of Law - **Location:** New York, New York ##### Contact American Civil Liberties Union Professional profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Nathan Freed Wessler Digital Privacy · Fourth Amendment > “You don't have to have committed a felony to want to keep some parts of your life private from meddling government agents. ##### One Hundred and One Points a Day Digital privacy, surveillance, biometric technology, and Fourth Amendment litigation — Deputy Director, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, New York. Before Nathan Freed Wessler argued Carpenter v. United States at the Supreme Court, he examined what Timothy Carpenter's phone records could disclose about activities unrelated to the criminal investigation. Prosecutors had obtained 12,898 location points from wireless carriers, an average of 101 a day across 127 days. They used court orders under the Stored Communications Act, which required specific and articulable facts showing reasonable grounds to believe the records were relevant and material to an investigation, rather than warrants based on probable cause. In a 2015 friend-of-the-court brief to the Sixth Circuit, Wessler and his colleagues compared the records with Carpenter's account of attending church, which Wessler had obtained in a telephone conversation. On several Sunday afternoons, Carpenter's phone connected to towers near the church; those connections did not routinely appear on other days. The brief argued that even without precise coordinates, a pattern of tower connections could reveal religious activity. The same records could suggest where a person slept or whom he visited, exposing private routines beyond the locations under investigation. Wessler presented the argument to the Supreme Court on November 29, 2017. In June 2018, Chief Justice John Roberts's majority opinion held that acquiring the historical cell-site location record was a Fourth Amendment search generally requiring a warrant. The Court declined to extend the third-party doctrine, which ordinarily denies constitutional protection to information voluntarily shared with a business, to the pervasive, largely involuntary location records generated through phone use. It also emphasized the ability to reconstruct movements after the fact: carriers then retained records for up to five years, whether or not anyone had been suspected of a crime when those records were created. ###### Finding the Surveillance in the File Wessler graduated from Swarthmore College and worked as a field organizer in the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office before law school. He attended New York University School of Law as a Root-Tilden-Kern public-interest scholar, clerked for Judge Helene N. White of the Sixth Circuit and returned to the ACLU as a National Security Project fellow. He later joined the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, where he is now a deputy director. His early work examined the cell-site simulator, often called a "stingray," a device that imitates a cell tower to identify and locate nearby phones, including those of bystanders. These suitcase-sized devices could be deployed without a clear description in the records given to a judge or defense lawyer. Wessler helped lead litigation and public-records investigations into their use across the country, confronting nondisclosure agreements with the FBI and the equipment manufacturer. In a 2015 report on records obtained from Florida agencies, he compared Tallahassee investigative files with a transcript the ACLU had persuaded a court to unseal. One file said an investigator had determined that a phone was on an apartment building's second floor, without explaining how. The transcript identified that investigator as the department's Stingray operator. The applications supplied by Tallahassee likewise omitted a description of the technology. Wessler used the documents to argue for disclosure and warrants; later that year, the Justice Department adopted a general probable-cause warrant requirement for its own use of cell-site simulators, with limited exceptions. ###### A City's Retained Images Wessler and his colleagues invoked Carpenter in Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department, representing Black community advocates challenging an aerial-surveillance program. Aircraft photographed about thirty-two square miles at a time during daylight hours, leaving analysts a record from which to trace movements through the city. People appeared as blurred dots, but the photographs could be combined with ground cameras and license-plate records to identify them and reconstruct routes. In June 2021, the en banc Fourth Circuit held that access to the program's accumulated data was a search and its warrantless operation violated the Fourth Amendment. The ruling established the plaintiffs' entitlement to preliminary relief. The subsequent settlement barred resumption of the program and restricted access to the collected records, while preserving their availability for existing prosecutions and criminal-defense discovery. Deletion was tied to completion of the relevant prosecutions and direct appeals. ###### Faces and Devices As plaintiffs' counsel in the ACLU's case against Clearview AI, Wessler helped negotiate restrictions on a face-search database built from billions of photographs scraped from the internet and offered to businesses and government agencies. The suit used Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act to challenge collection without consent. Its 2022 settlement established a permanent nationwide restriction on access for most private entities and a five-year ban covering Illinois state and local agencies and their contractors. The Illinois restriction did not extend to federal agencies. The agreement also required an opt-out process through which Illinois residents could submit a photograph to block search results identifying them. Clearview had to use its best efforts to prevent further collection of their photographs and restrict use of the submitted images to administering the opt-out protection and meeting specified litigation obligations. In Alasaad, Wessler and his ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation colleagues challenged searches of travelers' phones and laptops at the border. They obtained a 2019 district-court ruling requiring reasonable suspicion that a device contained digital contraband, although the First Circuit narrowed those protections in 2021. His 2022 public explanation of border searches stressed that wanting to keep personal information private did not imply that a traveler had committed a felony. ###### Tracing the Basis for an Identification Wessler's project continues to litigate, testify and publish about surveillance, including automatic license-plate readers that accumulate travel records and the government's purchase of data from commercial brokers. In a 2020 public-records suit, the ACLU sought contracts, policies and legal analyses explaining federal agencies' purchase of phone-location data. Wessler argued that the government should not be able to avoid Carpenter's protections by paying for access instead of requesting the records from a carrier. In April 2026, he and colleague Lauren Yu described their work for Kimberlee Williams, an Oklahoma resident wrongly identified as a suspect in Maryland bank fraud. A bank investigator had circulated a security-camera image through an investigators' mailing list. An unidentified recipient ran a facial-recognition search and returned Williams's name. As the identification passed to police in different counties, the explanation that it came from a facial-recognition search was reduced or omitted. The ACLU and its Maryland affiliate filed administrative complaints on Williams's behalf seeking an apology and changes to investigative practices. Their proposals included barring reliance on facial-recognition searches performed by outside entities and prohibiting arrests based only on a computer match followed by a person's visual comparison. Wessler and Yu pointed to social-media posts geotagged to Oklahoma that the investigators had failed to check. ###### Surveillance Inside the Home On September 2, 2026, Wessler and lawyers from the ACLU, the ACLU of New Hampshire, and New Hampshire Legal Assistance filed a class action on behalf of public-housing residents challenging surveillance devices installed inside apartments owned by the Concord Housing and Redevelopment Authority. The Minut Monitor devices recorded motion, sound levels, smoke, humidity, and nearby-device signals and gave housing-authority employees remote access to activity data from tenants' homes. The residents allege that the authority accumulated hundreds of millions of data points and retained the information indefinitely. The residents seek a New Hampshire Superior Court ruling that the nonconsensual collection violated their rights under the state constitution and an injunction stopping the surveillance. Minute-by-minute motion and sound records from the devices can reveal when residents wake, leave, return, receive visitors, and engage in intimate activity. The case is ongoing. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Deputy Director, Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, American Civil Liberties Union - **Practice:** Digital Privacy · Fourth Amendment - **Education:** Swarthmore College; New York University School of Law - **Location:** New York, New York ##### Contact American Civil Liberties Union Professional profile --- ## 49. Allison M. Zieve — `900005095` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `6cd69b2cf80aeca47b624ee166626d0938a6cf1febc5eeb4679504b462d7b87c` - **After/current hash:** `c7ac6b92e30afd2985e22f580907b976318c00b3fdcea3a916245f5f58f40efa` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005095/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Opening and assistance project**: Replace a generalized account of post-appeal assistance with Zieve's documented Blackburn opposition and preserve the project's practical role, beneficiaries and representation imbalance. - `rewrite` — **Career, Hallock, Kent and public-health writing**: Keep the complete career and institutional record, develop each case's distinct legal question and use her own argument and coauthored writing to explain the original complementary-remedies idea. - `correct` — **Executive-action chronology and conclusion**: Retain the rapid-response point with the verified four-day health-data filing and date the visa complaint accurately, preserving its exact existing quoted name and her documented role. - `rewrite` — **Doctors for America current-status paragraph**: Update the existing February 2025 filing account through the temporary restoration order, July 3 summary judgment and policy vacatur, completed webpage restoration and closed status shown on Public Citizen's current litigation page. - `rewrite` — **Gold Card current-status paragraphs**: Preserve the February 2026 challenge, clients and statutory theory while updating the current posture to the government's standing motion, the plaintiffs' August 3 opposition and ongoing briefing. ### BEFORE #### Allison M. Zieve Consumer Protection · Supreme Court Litigation > “When even the federal government can't make up its mind on the plain meaning of the statute, it shows the need for an authoritative voice. ##### The Second Phone Call Consumer protection, public health, federal preemption, open government, and Supreme Court litigation — Director, Public Citizen Litigation Group, Washington, D.C. After a consumer, patient or whistleblower wins in a federal court of appeals, an opponent may ask the Supreme Court to reverse the judgment. Allison M. Zieve helps the lawyers who won prepare for that possibility. A concession or an imprecise sentence in a brief opposing review can put the judgment at risk, with consequences for similar cases nationwide. As director of Public Citizen Litigation Group and its Supreme Court Assistance Project, Zieve helps public-interest lawyers across the country preserve issues, weigh the risk of Supreme Court review, and present their cases in the exacting form the Court demands. Public-interest plaintiffs often face institutional litigants represented by veteran Supreme Court counsel. Zieve's project brings that specialized experience to regulatory beneficiaries, injured patients and consumers whose individual claims can raise questions that govern many others. ###### From Providence to the Marble Steps After Brown University and Yale Law School, Zieve joined Public Citizen Litigation Group in 1994. Ralph Nader and Alan Morrison had founded the public-interest law firm in 1972; its work had helped strike down legislative vetoes, defend the right of lawyers to advertise, and build modern Freedom of Information Act practice. During fifteen years as a staff attorney, Zieve litigated drug and device safety, food labeling, tobacco regulation, consumer financial protection, class-action standards and open government. Much of her work concerned federal preemption: corporate defendants' argument that federal regulation displaced the state-law remedies on which injured people relied. In 2009, she became director of the Group and its Supreme Court Assistance Project. In Will v. Hallock, Zieve argued for a family whose lawsuit the government sought to halt through an immediate collateral-order appeal. She won a unanimous decision limiting that maneuver and the resulting disruption of cases before a final judgment. In Warner-Lambert Co. v. Kent, she argued for Michigan patients injured by the diabetes drug Rezulin against a manufacturer's claim of federal immunity; the Court's affirmance left standing the Second Circuit's rejection of that defense, and the patients' claims went forward. Five times she has stood at the Supreme Court lectern, repeatedly representing consumers in cases in which industry argued that federal agency oversight displaced the state tort law that compensates the injured. ###### The Complementary Machinery For three decades, Zieve has argued that state remedies and federal regulation work together. An FDA approval reflects the evidence an agency had at one moment; a tort suit can surface what a company learned afterward and what its warnings failed to say. A federal labeling rule sets a floor for information; a state consumer statute can address deception in how a product is marketed. In briefs, arguments and articles, Zieve has opposed readings of federal statutes that strip injured people of state remedies. Her writing has appeared in N.Y.U.'s Annual Survey of American Law and Duke's Law & Contemporary Problems, among other publications. She is a senior member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, the body that studies and improves federal administrative procedure, and a member of the American Law Institute, where the doctrines she litigates are restated and refined. She has taught as an adjunct professor at Yale Law School, Georgetown, and American University's Washington College of Law. Her teaching draws on appellate work in which the record must be built long before oral argument and questions of standing, preemption, appealability and class certification can determine whether a claim is heard. ###### Keeping the Courthouse Lit The Group represents no corporate clients. Under Zieve's direction, it has sued agencies that withhold public records, companies accused of misleading consumers, and the federal executive over exercises of its authority. Through 2025 and 2026, the Group has challenged executive actions as unlawful within days of their announcement, including a suit against a pay-to-play "gold card" visa scheme that put a price tag on immigration law. Many public-interest cases turn on questions resolved before a jury hears the facts. Zieve helps plaintiffs respond to government appeals that would delay their cases, patients contest manufacturers' immunity defenses, and legal-aid lawyers answer certiorari petitions drafted by firms with a thousand lawyers. ###### At a Glance - **Current role:** Director, Public Citizen Litigation Group - **Practice:** Consumer Protection · Supreme Court Litigation - **Education:** Brown University; Yale Law School - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ###### Contact Public Citizen Litigation Group Professional profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Allison M. Zieve Consumer Protection · Supreme Court Litigation > “When even the federal government can't make up its mind on the plain meaning of the statute, it shows the need for an authoritative voice. ##### Keeping Blackburn's Claim in Court Consumer protection, public health, federal preemption, open government, and Supreme Court litigation — Director, Public Citizen Litigation Group, Washington, D.C. Mark Blackburn developed serious kidney disease after taking Lialda. His lawsuit alleged that the manufacturer, Shire, had failed to give physicians adequate instructions about testing patients' kidney function. When Shire asked the Supreme Court to review a decision allowing his claim to proceed, Allison M. Zieve prepared the opposition with his lawyers. Shire argued that the lower court had allowed changes to the label's Highlights without prior Food and Drug Administration approval. Blackburn's claim concerned the Warnings and Precautions in the full prescribing information. Zieve pointed to the changes-being-effected rules, under which a manufacturer could strengthen qualifying warnings while notifying the agency rather than waiting for permission. She also emphasized the case's unfinished factual disputes: the appeal had allowed a trial, and no final judgment had been entered. The Court declined review in 2023. As director of Public Citizen Litigation Group and its Supreme Court Assistance Project, Zieve helps public-interest and legal-aid lawyers assess the prospect of Supreme Court review, preserve issues and prepare their briefs. The project offers free assistance with petitions for review, briefs opposing review, merits briefing and practice arguments. For consumers, injured patients, whistleblowers and people protected by regulation, that work can place experienced Supreme Court advocates alongside their existing lawyers when an opponent arrives with a specialized appellate team. ###### A Public-Interest Appellate Practice Zieve joined the Litigation Group in 1994 after Brown University and Yale Law School. Ralph Nader and Alan Morrison had founded the Group in 1972. Its earlier work had helped invalidate legislative vetoes, protect lawyers' right to advertise and develop Freedom of Information Act practice. During fifteen years as a staff attorney, Zieve litigated drug and device safety, food labeling, tobacco regulation, consumer financial protection, class-action standards and open government. She became director of the Group and the assistance project in 2009. She has argued five cases before the Supreme Court. Her work often concerns federal preemption: a manufacturer's contention that compliance with federal regulation displaces a state-law remedy. Other cases turn on whether an appeal can interrupt ongoing litigation, or whether a plaintiff has standing to bring a claim. She has taught as an adjunct at Yale Law School, Georgetown and American University's Washington College of Law, and serves as a senior member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, which studies federal administrative procedure. She is also a member of the American Law Institute. ###### An Appeal Before Judgment In Will v. Hallock, Zieve represented a family alleging that federal agents had destroyed computer data used by its software business. The agents asserted that a judgment in the family's related case against the United States barred the suit against them. When the district court allowed the case to continue, they sought an immediate appeal under the collateral-order doctrine, an exception to the rule that parties ordinarily must await a final judgment before appealing. Zieve's brief distinguished a defense that could be reviewed after judgment from an immunity intended to protect an official from trial itself. Treating the asserted judgment bar as an immediate route to appeal would interrupt the case before the facts had been resolved. The Supreme Court unanimously agreed in 2006 that the agents' appeal fell outside the narrow collateral-order exception. It decided appealability without deciding whether the judgment bar ultimately barred the family's claims. ###### The Rezulin Patients' Claims In Warner-Lambert Co. v. Kent, Zieve argued for Michigan patients injured by the diabetes drug Rezulin. Michigan law protected a manufacturer from liability for an FDA-approved drug, subject to an exception for intentionally withholding or misrepresenting information that would have changed the agency's decision. Warner-Lambert argued that federal law prevented the patients from relying on that exception. The Second Circuit rejected the defense, and the manufacturer sought Supreme Court review. At the February 2008 argument, the Justices questioned the respective roles of the FDA and a state jury. Zieve acknowledged the agency's authority to demand information, impose sanctions and withdraw approval. Those powers, she explained, did not compensate a patient for medical expenses or a death. When Justice Stephen Breyer questioned the consequences of a jury's judgment about the agency's decision, she returned to what the patients sought: "the result is that Ms. Kent and the other Plaintiffs get to litigate their claims." The Court affirmed the Second Circuit's judgment by an equally divided vote in March 2008. The patients could continue their claims; the disposition did not establish a majority Supreme Court rule on preemption. Zieve's briefs and writing have continued to argue that federal regulation and state remedies can work together: approval addresses the evidence before the agency, while litigation can examine later safety information, inadequate warnings or deceptive marketing. A federal labeling requirement, in her account, need not eliminate the protection supplied by a state consumer statute. Her writing has appeared in N.Y.U.'s Annual Survey of American Law and Duke's Law and Contemporary Problems. In a 2006 article with physician Peter Lurie, she examined efforts to obtain pharmaceutical data from the FDA under the Freedom of Information Act. The authors described requests for postmarketing study protocols that required lawsuits before the agency began releasing such material on request. They argued for disclosure that would allow physicians and independent researchers to examine safety information themselves. ###### Public Records and Executive Authority The Litigation Group represents no corporate clients. Under Zieve's direction, its work has included suits against agencies withholding public records, companies accused of misleading consumers and executive actions alleged to exceed federal authority. On February 4, 2025, the Group filed for Doctors for America after federal agencies removed health information from their websites. A judge ordered temporary restoration a week later. On July 3, the court granted summary judgment for Doctors for America and the City and County of San Francisco, ordered restoration of the webpages on which they relied and vacated the federal policies that had caused the removals. By December 2025, the agencies reported that the required webpages had been restored, and the case is closed. Zieve and colleague Adam Pulver joined lawyers from Democracy Defenders Fund and Colombo & Hurd in a February 2026 challenge to the administration's "gold card" visa program. They represent the American Association of University Professors and six immigrant professionals who allege that giving priority to wealthy applicants displaces the qualifications Congress enacted. The program treats a million-dollar individual donation as evidence of eligibility within existing employment-based visa categories. The plaintiffs seek to have the program set aside. Their challenge concerns both the statutory qualifications and the annual limits on visas: moving applicants forward because they can pay would, they argue, delay professionals already waiting for places based on their work and qualifications. The government moved to dismiss the case for lack of standing; the plaintiffs filed their opposition on August 3, 2026, and briefing on that motion remains underway. ###### At a Glance - **Current role:** Director, Public Citizen Litigation Group - **Practice:** Consumer Protection · Supreme Court Litigation - **Education:** Brown University; Yale Law School - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ###### Contact Public Citizen Litigation Group Professional profile --- ## 50. Michael D. Hausfeld — `900001645` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **LOW** — Recent manifest reads primarily as stylistic/structural editing; expert should compare before/after closely. - **Before hash:** `17b1e23f84492a1da87927896f65df230ce37d85bf9bfbabd4b6c04dc8ac134d` - **After/current hash:** `21f6d99250ae2d6bd232e17102b086865a4a7f1dfbf09c890193f4393a5c239f` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900001645/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **O'Bannon opening and trial**: Preserve the client recognition and introduce Hausfeld's actual questioning and the trial findings before the biographical sections. - `rewrite` — **Professional formation and restitution**: Retain every original teacher, mentor quotation, early client matter, recovery, represented state and service honor while preserving the family-record evidence and removing repeated general explanation. - `restructure` — **Sports remedies, firm and closing**: Separate the actual sports remedies and later proceedings, preserve the transatlantic recoveries and end on the supported university service and cy pres award. ### BEFORE #### Michael D. Hausfeld Antitrust · Collective Redress > “Global wrongs must be accountable to global rights. ##### The Avatar Wearing Number 31 Antitrust, human rights, environmental accountability, and complex collective litigation — Chair Emeritus, Hausfeld, Washington, D.C. Ed O'Bannon was standing in a friend's living room when he saw himself. On the television screen, a college basketball video game was running, and there on the virtual UCLA roster was a player with his height, his skin tone, his left-handed shot, his old number. The name was missing; the permission had never been asked; the payment was zero. The NCAA's rules barred schools from paying athletes for the commercial use of their names, images, or likenesses, on terms O'Bannon had never been able to negotiate. Michael D. Hausfeld carried O'Bannon v. NCAA from that living-room recognition to a federal antitrust judgment. Across more than five decades of antitrust, civil-rights, environmental, sports, and international human-rights litigation, he has assembled claims arising from harms shared by large groups of people. His clients have included consumers paying cartel overcharges, families seeking wartime bank assets, and college athletes barred from compensation for the commercial use of their identities. Collective proceedings allow those individual losses to be examined together and remedies to address the practice that caused them. ###### An Education in Power Hausfeld earned his law degree from the George Washington University's National Law Center in 1969, where he studied constitutional law with Jerome Barron, legal ethics and social justice with Monroe Freedman, and corporate law with Henry Manne. His formative professional influence was Jerry Cohen, the Washington lawyer he credits with shaping his character in the profession, a man Hausfeld remembers as "a person and a lawyer of great distinction with a mastery of common sense." Hausfeld was among the first lawyers in the United States to argue that sexual harassment was a form of discrimination prohibited by Title VII, and he tried the pioneering case establishing that principle, years before the theory became settled doctrine. He went on to represent Native Alaskans whose subsistence way of life was damaged by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, and to negotiate the $176 million settlement of the racial-discrimination case against Texaco. At the time the largest resolution of its kind, the Texaco case paired compensation with scrutiny of the company's own culture. ###### Ledgers of the Dead In the Holocaust victim-assets litigation against the Swiss banks, Hausfeld helped lead the reconstruction of accounts and transactions obscured by war, secrecy, bank practice, the passage of half a century, and the deaths of most of the original depositors. The banks had the records, or had lost them, or had closed the accounts into their own coffers; the survivors and heirs had fragments — a name, a city, a family story about money placed somewhere safe before the deportations. Payments under the settlement ultimately totaled approximately $1.29 billion, reaching more than 458,000 victims and heirs in the United States and more than eighty other countries. The case also restored a financial history that the banks had failed to preserve for the people entitled to it. Hausfeld carried the work forward in the slave-labor and forced-labor negotiations arising from Nazi-era persecution, representing Poland, the Czech Republic, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia in the multinational talks that followed. That advocacy was honored with the B'nai B'rith Humanitarian of the Year Award and the Simon Wiesenthal Center's award for distinguished service. ###### The Zero-Price Rule O'Bannon v. NCAA was filed in 2009. The NCAA's rules removed one term from every school's negotiation with every recruit: no institution could pay for the commercial use of an athlete's name, image, or likeness. The common price was zero, and it was set collectively. At trial before Judge Claudia Wilken, Hausfeld's team proved that the restraint was commercial, that it fixed part of the exchange between schools and athletes, and that narrower alternatives existed, beginning with letting schools cover the full cost of attendance. Hausfeld personally argued the merits appeal for the plaintiff class in the Ninth Circuit. In 2015 the court affirmed antitrust liability and the full-cost-of-attendance injunction, holding that the NCAA's compensation rules were subject to ordinary Rule of Reason scrutiny. The claimed benefits of "amateurism" required evidence, and the court described a scholarship ceiling below the legitimate cost of an education as patently stricter than necessary. A related resolution with Electronic Arts created a $40 million fund for athletes whose likenesses had appeared in video games, and in 2018 the Ninth Circuit affirmed a fee award recognizing the class's substantial success. In 2021 the Supreme Court unanimously subjected the NCAA to ordinary antitrust principles. The multibillion-dollar House settlement began moving revenue to college athletes in 2025. Both followed the antitrust analysis established in O'Bannon: NCAA restraints receive antitrust review, claimed benefits require proof, and courts must compare each restraint with workable alternatives. ###### Scale as the Measure In 2008, Hausfeld founded the firm that bears his name as a transatlantic plaintiffs' practice committed, in his words, to social and economic justice pursued with the highest integrity. The firm's antitrust results include a $2.67 billion settlement in the Blue Cross Blue Shield subscriber litigation, more than $2.3 billion in settlements in the foreign-exchange benchmark-rate manipulation cases, and hundreds of millions more in the LIBOR litigation. Those cases brought together losses spread across subscribers and market participants, allowing the challenged practices and their aggregate effects to be examined in collective proceedings. The American Bar Association's antitrust bar honored him with a lifetime achievement award in 2022. He writes prolifically on private enforcement and competition policy, and a multimillion-dollar cy pres award he helped secure endowed a center for competition law at his alma mater. Hausfeld now serves as Chair Emeritus in the firm's Washington office. His stated conviction remains: "Global wrongs must be accountable to global rights." ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Chair Emeritus, Hausfeld - **Practice:** Antitrust · Collective Redress - **Education:** George Washington University Law School - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact Hausfeld Professional profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Michael D. Hausfeld Antitrust · Collective Redress > “Global wrongs must be accountable to global rights. ##### The Avatar Wearing Number 31 Antitrust, human rights, environmental accountability, and complex collective litigation — Chair Emeritus, Hausfeld, Washington, D.C. In 2008, Ed O'Bannon was standing in a friend's living room when he recognized the player wearing number 31 for UCLA in a college basketball video game. The avatar had his height, skin tone and left-handed shot, though it did not carry his name. He had neither authorized the use nor been paid for it. Michael D. Hausfeld represented him in the lawsuit filed the following year, challenging the NCAA rules that prevented schools from negotiating payment for the commercial use of an athlete's name, image or likeness. The antitrust case concerned the schools' collective agreement to set that payment at zero. At the June 2014 trial, Hausfeld asked economist Roger Noll to show why there was a market for players' identities. Noll pointed to schools selling jerseys bearing the numbers of prominent quarterbacks. Hausfeld's questioning connected those sales to a licensing market in which the athletes were barred from receiving payment. Judge Claudia Wilken found that the restraint was commercial and that less restrictive alternatives existed, including scholarships covering the full cost of attendance. The case required evidence about what colleges bought from athletes, what they sold to broadcasters and fans, and whether the compensation limit was needed to preserve college sports. Hausfeld's team contested the NCAA's claim of "amateurism" within that economic record. ###### Teachers, Clients and Collective Claims Hausfeld earned his law degree at the George Washington University's National Law Center in 1969. He studied constitutional law with Jerome Barron, professional ethics and social justice with Monroe Freedman, and corporate law with Henry Manne. He credits Jerry Cohen with shaping his professional character and integrity, remembering his mentor as "a person and a lawyer of great distinction with a mastery of common sense." Early in his career, Hausfeld argued and tried a pioneering case establishing that sexual harassment was discrimination prohibited by Title VII. His later clients included Native Alaskans whose subsistence way of life was damaged by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. He also helped negotiate the $176 million Texaco racial-discrimination settlement, then the largest resolution of its kind, which addressed the company's employment practices as well as compensation. Over more than five decades, he has represented people in antitrust, civil-rights, environmental, sports and international human-rights disputes. Consumers facing cartel overcharges, families seeking wartime assets and athletes subject to common compensation rules brought different claims, but each required a way to examine shared conduct and obtain relief reaching more than one person. ###### Reconstructing Wartime Accounts In the Holocaust victim-assets litigation against Swiss banks, Hausfeld helped lead work to reconstruct accounts and transactions obscured by war, banking secrecy and the passage of half a century. Many original depositors had died. Survivors and heirs brought fragments — a name, a city, a family account of money placed somewhere safe before deportation. The banks' records could be missing or incomplete, and some accounts had been closed with their balances absorbed by the institutions. The claims required connecting the surviving information to assets that had not been returned to their owners or families. Payments under the settlement ultimately totaled approximately $1.29 billion and reached more than 458,000 victims and heirs in the United States and more than eighty other countries. The litigation also reconstructed financial histories that families had been unable to recover for themselves. Hausfeld subsequently represented Poland, the Czech Republic, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia in multinational negotiations over Nazi-era slave and forced labor. In his account of those talks, hundreds of participants sometimes took part, representing victims with different interests across Europe. His restitution work received the B'nai B'rith Humanitarian of the Year Award and the Simon Wiesenthal Center's award for distinguished service. ###### Enforcing the Sports Judgment Hausfeld personally argued the O'Bannon merits appeal in the Ninth Circuit in March 2015. That September, the court affirmed antitrust liability and the injunction permitting schools to provide scholarships up to the full cost of attendance. The NCAA's rules were subject to the Rule of Reason: the claimed benefits needed evidentiary support, and the court had to consider a less restrictive way to achieve them. A ceiling below the legitimate cost of attending college restricted compensation more than those benefits required. A related Electronic Arts settlement created a $40 million fund for athletes whose likenesses had appeared in video games. In 2018, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the statutory fee award in O'Bannon, recognizing the class's substantial success in obtaining enforceable relief. Later cases applied antitrust law to further limits on athletes' compensation. In 2021, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld relief against NCAA restrictions on education-related benefits in NCAA v. Alston. The House settlement approved in June 2025 provided multibillion-dollar compensation and a framework for direct payments from schools to athletes. These were separate proceedings, following O'Bannon's application of antitrust scrutiny to compensation rules rather than an exemption based on the NCAA's description of its mission. ###### A Transatlantic Practice Hausfeld founded his firm in 2008 as a transatlantic plaintiffs' practice. He described its commitments as social and economic justice pursued with the highest professional integrity, and stated the principle: "Global wrongs must be accountable to global rights." Its recoveries include the $2.67 billion Blue Cross Blue Shield subscriber settlement, more than $2.3 billion in foreign-exchange benchmark cases and hundreds of millions of dollars in LIBOR litigation. Those proceedings examined practices affecting many subscribers or market participants at once. In a 2019 interview, he described the foreign-exchange work as requiring an understanding of unequal access to information, its effect on market prices and the consequences for tens of thousands of transacting parties. He also distinguished U.S. and European rules on monopolization, dominance and collective litigation, which could require different approaches to conduct affecting both markets. Hausfeld now serves as Chair Emeritus in the firm's Washington office. The American Bar Association's antitrust section gave him a lifetime achievement award in 2022, and he has written extensively on private enforcement and competition policy. At GW, he has taught as an adjunct, served on the Dean's Advisory Council and hired students as interns. He also helped secure a $5.1 million cy pres award that endowed a center for competition law at the university. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Chair Emeritus, Hausfeld - **Practice:** Antitrust · Collective Redress - **Education:** George Washington University Law School - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact Hausfeld Professional profile --- ## 51. Abha Khanna — `900005096` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `28f7732070a55f42eeb07ac5d83837f2da9f4f97dac4bbd93e3b66adf28e374f` - **After/current hash:** `d06260cdbd08d97ba2baceb5badc20455bb19e284d608311ee3c1cae3517f97b` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005096/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Opening and Alabama evidence**: Replace the speculative map metaphor with a verified argument exchange and show the expert evidence underlying the alternative district. - `rewrite` — **Ruling, replacement and professional formation**: Preserve every original dated ruling and qualification, consolidate repeated descriptions of her method and add her own account of teaching before law. - `restructure` — **Yakima and ending**: Preserve mentoring and teaching while adding the actual discovery, deposition and argument work and the resulting council election, ending with an exact short quote. - `rewrite` — **Caster current procedural-posture paragraph**: Update the May 2026 remand account through the renewed May 26 preliminary injunction, Khanna's documented declaration and June 1 Supreme Court stay opposition, and the Supreme Court's June 2 stay so the profile no longer stops before the material current proceedings. ### BEFORE #### Abha Khanna Voting Rights · Redistricting > “Every American, regardless of race, must have an equal opportunity to elect representatives of choice. ##### The Map as the Argument Voting-rights and redistricting trials and appeals — Partner and Redistricting Practice Chair, Elias Law Group, Seattle. A congressional map looks like settled geography — clean lines, numbered districts, the neutral furniture of civic life. Abha Khanna reads maps the way other lawyers read contracts: for what they promise, what they withhold, and whom they quietly write out of the deal. Alabama's map was a case in point. Black citizens made up more than a quarter of the state's population, yet the map gave them a realistic chance to elect their preferred candidate in exactly one of seven districts — an arrangement essentially unchanged since 1992. Those boundaries allocated political power, and the legislators who drew them benefited from that allocation. On October 4, 2022, at the opening of the Supreme Court's term, Khanna stood at the lectern for the Caster plaintiffs, whom she had represented as lead trial counsel. Their case proceeded alongside Milligan, in which a three-judge panel — two of its members appointed by President Trump — found that Alabama's map likely diluted Black voting strength in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Alabama sought a different approach to Section 2, relying on race-blind computer simulations and arguing for proof of discriminatory intent. Khanna defended the preliminary ruling and the established framework for proving vote dilution. ###### Five Votes for Section 2 On June 8, 2023, the Court ruled for her clients. Allen v. Milligan affirmed the preliminary Section 2 ruling against Alabama's congressional map, five to four, with the Chief Justice writing. The Court retained the results-based test and totality-of-circumstances framework and rejected the state's proposed race-neutrality requirement. Khanna had helped build the trial record, including the expert maps, on which the ruling rested. Khanna develops demographic evidence, examines experts, tests alternative districts and traces legislative decisions to establish a vote-dilution claim. She carries that record through trial, appeal and the proceedings that determine a replacement map. As lead counsel through the Caster remedial proceedings, she and her team returned to court when Alabama's legislature enacted another map with only one majority-Black district. The 2024 elections proceeded under a court-drawn map with a second district of opportunity. That November, Alabama elected two Black members of Congress simultaneously for the first time in its history. In 2025, the lower courts permanently barred the state's map, with findings detailing its resistance to providing a second district in which Black voters could elect their preferred candidate. After its 2026 decision in Louisiana v. Callais changed the Section 2 framework, the Supreme Court vacated the Caster judgment and sent the case back for further consideration. ###### From Yale to the War Room Khanna graduated from Yale Law School in 2007, joined Perkins Coie's Seattle office in 2010, and made partner in its political-law practice in 2017. When Marc Elias launched Elias Law Group in 2021 as a firm devoted to democracy-side representation, she joined as a founding partner and took charge of the redistricting practice. New maps following the 2020 census brought litigation across the country. She has overseen nearly twenty redistricting matters across that cycle, from trial through appeal, in state and federal courts alike. In Ohio, she was part of the team that persuaded the state supreme court in 2022 to strike down the congressional map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and order a replacement. Her work has also taken her through Georgia, Texas, Washington and other states, each with distinct demographics, procedures and political histories. During remedial proceedings, her team may have days to test proposed districts against community boundaries, demographic patterns and electoral behavior before a court's deadline. ###### Holding Both Ends of the Case At the Milligan argument, Khanna drew on the expert testimony and alternative maps she had examined at trial. Her preparation connected the legal questions before the Justices to the precincts and communities in the record. She also mentors lawyers in the field, guest-lectures in election law at the University of Washington School of Law, and speaks at law schools and civil rights symposiums about the Voting Rights Act. Khanna has said that every American, regardless of race, must have an equal opportunity to elect representatives of choice. Her redistricting work tests that promise against the lines a state draws: whether a community can elect its preferred candidate, whether a lawful alternative is feasible, and whether the evidence supports relief. In Alabama, that work continued after the Supreme Court argument, through the replacement map and the election conducted under it. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner and Redistricting Practice Chair, Elias Law Group - **Practice:** Voting Rights · Redistricting - **Education:** Yale Law School - **Location:** Seattle, Washington ##### Contact Elias Law Group Professional profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Abha Khanna Voting Rights · Redistricting > “Every American, regardless of race, must have an equal opportunity to elect representatives of choice. ##### Defending an Alternative Map Voting-rights and redistricting trials and appeals — Partner and Redistricting Practice Chair, Elias Law Group, Seattle. At the Supreme Court on October 4, 2022, Abha Khanna explained why preserving Alabama's old congressional districts could not be the decisive test for a proposed replacement. Justice Sonia Sotomayor had asked about boundaries carrying forward earlier racial inequality. Khanna answered that a plaintiff required to demonstrate a new district would necessarily produce a different map. Treating the old boundaries as controlling, she argued, would allow a state to perpetuate the very arrangement challenged under the Voting Rights Act. Khanna was arguing for the Caster plaintiffs, whom she had represented as lead trial counsel. Black Alabamians comprised more than a quarter of the state's population but had an opportunity to elect their preferred candidate in only one of seven congressional districts, a pattern largely unchanged since 1992. Caster proceeded alongside Milligan, where a three-judge panel, including two judges appointed by President Trump, had found likely vote dilution under Section 2. Her clients' evidence included maps prepared by Bill Cooper. He had considered race alongside compactness, connected territory, equal population and other districting criteria, testifying that he gave the factors equal weight. The courts credited that explanation. At argument, Khanna drew on the alternative maps and expert testimony to oppose Alabama's proposed race-neutral benchmark and its attempt to make discriminatory intent necessary to the statutory claim. Her clients' record showed how an additional opportunity district could be drawn while respecting other districting requirements. ###### The Ruling and the Replacement Map On June 8, 2023, the Court affirmed the preliminary ruling in Allen v. Milligan by five votes to four, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing. It retained the results-based test and the totality-of-circumstances framework, rejecting Alabama's proposed race-neutrality requirement. The alternative-map evidence that Khanna and her colleagues had developed remained central to the decision. As lead counsel through the Caster remedial proceedings, she returned to court with her team after Alabama enacted another map with only one majority-Black district. The 2024 election instead used a court-drawn map providing a second district of opportunity. That November, Alabama elected two Black members of Congress simultaneously for the first time in its history. Obtaining the remedy required testing proposed districts against community boundaries, demographic patterns and voting behavior, sometimes within days of a court's deadline. In 2025, the lower courts permanently barred the state's map, with findings addressing its resistance to a second opportunity district. On May 11, 2026, after Louisiana v. Callais changed the Section 2 framework, the Supreme Court vacated the Caster judgment and directed further consideration in the lower courts. The three-judge court then reconsidered the claims on an emergency schedule and on May 26 again preliminarily enjoined Alabama's 2023 plan. Khanna filed a declaration supporting the Caster voters' renewed motion and signed their June 1 opposition to Alabama's stay application. On June 2, the Supreme Court stayed the May 26 order, leaving the state's 2023 map in effect for the 2026 election while the renewed appeals proceed. ###### Teaching and Legal Practice Before law school, Khanna taught high school English and planned to pursue a doctorate in literature. She later explained that the teaching and its effect on students mattered to her more than the academic subject alone. She changed course toward law, where she could use her writing and analytical skills in work affecting other people's lives. She graduated from Yale Law School in 2007, joined Perkins Coie's Seattle office in 2010 and became a partner in its political-law practice in 2017. When Marc Elias established Elias Law Group in 2021 to represent voters, Democratic clients and organizations working to protect democracy, she joined as a founding partner and led the redistricting practice. The post-2020 census cycle brought nearly twenty redistricting matters under her supervision, in state and federal courts from trial through appeal. In Ohio, Khanna was part of the team that obtained the state supreme court's July 2022 decision striking down the congressional map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and ordering a replacement. Her work has also extended through Georgia, Texas and Washington, each with distinct demographics, election histories and legal procedures. Preparing those cases involves examining experts, developing demographic evidence and tracing legislative choices, with the eventual appeal in view. ###### Yakima's New Council Khanna mentors lawyers, guest-lectures in election law at the University of Washington School of Law and speaks at law schools and civil-rights symposiums. Her early work in Yakima gave her experience with the different stages she now supervises. In 2014, she and colleagues at Perkins Coie worked with the ACLU of Washington to challenge the city's council election system for Latino voters. She handled discovery, took depositions and argued for judgment on the record without a trial. The court ruled for the voters, and the first election under the new districting plan brought three Latinas onto a council that had never elected a Latino member. Recalling that election in a 2022 interview, Khanna described watching the community's response and recognizing what the changed system made possible: "We are actually making room for others to have a seat at the table." ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner and Redistricting Practice Chair, Elias Law Group - **Practice:** Voting Rights · Redistricting - **Education:** Yale Law School - **Location:** Seattle, Washington ##### Contact Elias Law Group Professional profile --- ## 52. Danielle Lang — `900005092` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW** — Primarily currentness additions/chronology updates. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Arizona Supreme Court argument and September USPS injunction chronology. - **Before hash:** `5eca36b0c47d8eac2303669a89420cbee2c515cd806e8d0da4f472d5aa399454` - **After/current hash:** `06b29c43f851131ee8451e9726ace636def92be5c9577322e978ad12fcf52e2c` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005092/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **North Dakota opening and remedy**: Open with the documented Jackson meeting and address evidence, then separate the operative decree from free identification, education, training and compliance measures. - `rewrite` — **Career, registration-list cases and federal forms**: Preserve all supported education, admissions, defendants, counts, dates, legal distinctions and remedies while giving each different program its own intelligible paragraph. - `correct` — **May 2026 hearing quotation**: Replace the unsupported wording with the exact phrase independently reported at the May 14 hearing, preserving the argument for timely intervention. - `restructure` — **Mail-voting evidence and teaching ending**: Retain Watson and its two verified quotations, add a dated brief that documents the team's practical calendar analysis, and replace an unsourced classroom generalization with actual course work. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Citizens Caught in Registration Lists — 2026 Arizona Supreme Court paragraph**: Add the current H.B. 2492 Supreme Court matter because review was granted after the prior profile was written, Lang is counsel of record for CLC-represented respondents, and argument is now scheduled for December 8, 2026. - `rewrite` — **Mail Ballots and the Election Calendar — September 2026 USPS paragraph**: Preserve the existing September 1 amicus evidence while updating the same live controversy through the September 4 Massachusetts injunction, appellate filings and September 14 District of Columbia injunction. ### BEFORE #### Danielle Lang Voting Rights · Election Law > “No president has the authority to dictate our election systems and processes. ##### A Map Instead of an Address Voting rights, election administration, and protection against disenfranchisement — Vice President, Voting Rights & Rule of Law, Campaign Legal Center, Washington, D.C. On parts of the tribal lands in North Dakota, streets carry no posted names and homes bear no numbers the state recognizes — an ordinary fact of rural geography that became a legal crisis when the state demanded a residential street address on every voter's identification. Danielle Lang was among the leaders of the case teams that answered. In Spirit Lake Tribe v. Jaeger, the Campaign Legal Center, the Native American Rights Fund, and co-counsel represented the Spirit Lake Nation, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and individual voters, and the court-approved consent decree they secured rebuilt the system around the voters it had excluded. Tribal identification and tribally designated addresses count. A voter who lacks or does not know a residential address may locate home on a map and have officials supply the documentation. Ballots cast through that process must be counted. Free identification, public education, poll-worker training, and compliance review hold the rest in place. The Campaign Legal Center estimated that more than 7,000 residents of the two nations stood to benefit. Lang represents voters facing database mismatches, registration forms they cannot satisfy, purge notices and administrative offices too far from home. She seeks remedies that specify what election officials must do to remove those barriers. ###### Trained on the Fine Print Lang graduated with honors from New York University in 2008 and from Yale Law School in 2012, then clerked for Judge Richard A. Paez of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. As a Skadden Fellow in the Employment Rights Project at Bet Tzedek Legal Services in Los Angeles, she represented low-wage immigrant workers in wage-and-hour, discrimination and human-trafficking matters. She joined the Campaign Legal Center in 2015 and later became vice president for voting rights and rule of law. She is admitted in the District of Columbia, New York, and Pennsylvania, before the U.S. Supreme Court, the federal district court in Washington, and seven federal courts of appeals. ###### The Quiet Period Federal law restricts systematic voter-list removals shortly before federal elections. In Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice v. Allen, Lang's organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Fair Elections Center challenged a program launched shortly before the 2024 election that placed 3,251 registrants — many of them naturalized citizens — on a path toward removal from the rolls and referral for criminal investigation. The district court entered a preliminary injunction under the National Voter Registration Act's quiet-period protections, requiring the state to halt the program, reactivate affected voters subject to specified exceptions, notify them, and issue corrective guidance to every county. Alabama never restarted the program. In March 2025, after the state abandoned it, the private plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed their case. In Texas, Lang helped lead the challenge to the state's use of a stale driver-license list that initially flagged roughly 95,000 registered voters for citizenship review. A federal judge halted the threatened purge, and a binding settlement ended the program and restricted future use of driver-license data so that naturalized citizens would not be singled out for documents they had presented before becoming citizens. In Arizona, LULAC v. Reagan produced a 2018 consent decree dismantling the state's unequal dual-registration system, requiring officials to treat state- and federal-form applicants alike for federal elections and to check existing citizenship records before limiting anyone to a federal-only ballot. ###### When Orders Come From Above In March 2025 an executive order attempted to rewrite federal election administration from the White House. Lang's teams at the Campaign Legal Center, with the Democracy Defenders Fund, sued on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Secure Families Initiative, and the Arizona Students' Association. Relief came in stages. On October 31, 2025, the district court granted partial summary judgment and permanently enjoined the provision directing the Election Assistance Commission to add a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement to the national mail voter-registration form. On January 30, 2026, the same court permanently enjoined a companion provision that would have imposed citizenship-document requirements on the federal form used by military and overseas voters. The broader case remains active and appeals from those injunctions are pending. When a further executive order sought to reshape voting by mail ahead of the 2026 midterms, Lang argued the challenge in federal court, telling the judge the order was "drafted to cause maximum damage and chaos"; that litigation is still unfolding. When the Supreme Court took up a challenge to Mississippi's practice of counting ballots postmarked by Election Day but received shortly after, the Campaign Legal Center filed an amicus brief with Protect Democracy; the Court's decision in June 2026 left the receipt deadlines of more than thirty states intact. "All voters, no matter how they cast their ballot, deserve the freedom to make their voices heard," Lang said. "This is a cornerstone of American democracy." ###### Widening the Electorate, Training the Bar In 2018, Lang co-founded the Campaign Legal Center's Restore Your Vote project with Blair Bowie, helping Americans with past convictions navigate state restoration rules and reclaim ballots many did not know they were entitled to cast. As an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, she co-teaches the Election Law Practicum. She teaches students to trace a rule from its constitutional basis to its effect on an individual voter and to seek relief while there is still time to cast a ballot. ###### At a Glance - **Current role:** Vice President, Voting Rights and Rule of Law, Campaign Legal Center - **Practice:** Voting Rights · Election Law - **Education:** New York University; Yale Law School - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Organization:** Campaign Legal Center - **Office:** Washington, D.C. - **Website:** campaignlegal.org ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Danielle Lang Voting Rights · Election Law > “No president has the authority to dictate our election systems and processes. ##### A Map Instead of an Address Voting rights, election administration, and protection against disenfranchisement — Vice President, Voting Rights & Rule of Law, Campaign Legal Center, Washington, D.C. In 2018, Danielle Lang sat at Dion Jackson's kitchen table while he held his baby and showed her the letter rejecting his absentee-ballot application. He had used the address on his identification, but officials had rejected it as invalid. Jackson had never voted before; a political event on the Spirit Lake Reservation had encouraged him to participate. He assumed the letter meant he could not vote. After discussing his options, he joined the lawsuit, and a court order allowed him and his fellow plaintiffs to cast ballots. Lang and her colleagues spent the weeks around the election driving between North Dakota reservations. She found a street with different names on two online maps, her client's state-issued ID, the state's mapping system and a nearby sign. Many residents used post-office boxes because their homes lacked reliable street addresses. The residential-address requirement assumed a system of addresses that the government had not consistently supplied. In Spirit Lake Tribe v. Jaeger, Lang helped lead the Campaign Legal Center team working with the Native American Rights Fund and other counsel for the Spirit Lake Nation, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and individual voters. The 2020 consent decree required acceptance of tribal identification and tribally designated addresses. A voter who lacked or did not know a residential address could mark a home on a map, at the polls or when applying for an absentee ballot, and receive the address documentation from county officials. Ballots cast through that process had to be counted. The agreement also provided for free identification, public education, poll-worker training and compliance review. Those measures addressed obstacles beyond the application itself, including the distance to an office that issued identification. CLC estimated that more than 7,000 voting-age residents of the two nations would benefit. ###### From Employment Rights to Voting Rights Lang graduated with honors from New York University in 2008 and from Yale Law School in 2012, then clerked for Judge Richard A. Paez of the Ninth Circuit. As a Skadden Fellow in the Employment Rights Project at Bet Tzedek Legal Services in Los Angeles, she represented low-wage immigrant workers in wage-and-hour, discrimination and human-trafficking matters. She joined the Campaign Legal Center in 2015 and became its vice president for voting rights and rule of law. She is admitted in the District of Columbia, New York and Pennsylvania, before the Supreme Court, the federal district court in Washington and seven federal courts of appeals. ###### Citizens Caught in Registration Lists In Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice v. Allen, CLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Fair Elections Center challenged a program that flagged 3,251 registered voters for removal and criminal investigation before the 2024 election. Alabama relied on records showing that people had once been issued noncitizen identification numbers, even though many had since become citizens. Lang explained that outdated data had also swept up U.S.-born voters. The district court entered a preliminary injunction under the National Voter Registration Act's restrictions on systematic removals within ninety days of a federal election. It required the state to halt the program, reactivate affected registrations subject to specified exceptions, notify voters and send corrective guidance to the counties. By March 2025, the state had abandoned the program without restarting it, and the private plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed their case. Lang had helped lead a related challenge in Texas, where a stale driver-license list initially flagged about 95,000 registered voters for citizenship review. A federal judge halted the threatened purge. A binding settlement ended the program and restricted future use of driver-license information obtained before a person became a citizen, so naturalized voters would not again be singled out on that basis. In Arizona, the problem involved two registration forms treated differently. The 2018 consent decree in LULAC v. Reagan required equal treatment of state- and federal-form applicants for federal elections. Officials also had to check citizenship information already in their records before limiting an applicant to a federal-only ballot. Arizona returned to the Supreme Court in 2026 after H.B. 2492 again imposed documentary proof-of-citizenship requirements on voter registration. CLC and its partners challenged the law for voters and community organizations, and the Ninth Circuit in 2025 affirmed rulings against several provisions. The Supreme Court granted review on June 29, 2026. Lang is counsel of record for CLC-represented respondents in the consolidated disputes, which the Court set for argument on December 8, 2026. ###### The President and the Federal Forms After the March 2025 executive order directing changes to election administration, Lang's CLC team and Democracy Defenders Fund sued for the League of United Latin American Citizens, Secure Families Initiative and Arizona Students' Association. They argued that the Constitution assigned the relevant election powers to Congress and the states, not the president. On October 31, 2025, the district court granted partial summary judgment and permanently barred the Election Assistance Commission from implementing the order's documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement for the national mail voter-registration form. On January 30, 2026, it permanently enjoined the companion requirement for the federal form used by military and overseas voters. The rulings addressed presidential direction; they did not prevent agencies from acting independently under their lawful statutory powers. The government appealed, while other claims remained for further proceedings. ###### Mail Ballots and the Election Calendar At a May 14, 2026 hearing on a further executive order, Lang urged the court to act before new mail-voting rules arrived in the middle of the election cycle. She warned that the proposed changes would produce the "maximum amount of chaos and confusion" for election officials, who would have little time to adapt after the rules became final. The litigation accelerated after the Postal Service finalized its rule. In a September 1, 2026 amicus brief, Lang and her colleagues presented the assessment of election-administration expert Tammy Patrick. Election offices had already budgeted for the election and ordered ballot envelopes; a new federal portal would require technical systems, data-transfer procedures, staff training and authorization arrangements. On September 4, the Massachusetts court entered a new preliminary injunction blocking the rule, relying in part on the expert evidence. The government appealed, and CLC filed amicus briefs in the First Circuit and the Supreme Court. On September 14, the judge in CLC's own District of Columbia case entered a second preliminary injunction blocking the USPS rule. The challenges to the second executive order remain ongoing. In the separate Watson v. Republican National Committee case, CLC and Protect Democracy filed an amicus brief defending Mississippi's practice of counting ballots postmarked by Election Day but received within five business days afterward. The Supreme Court's June 29, 2026 decision rejected the challenge, leaving the receipt deadlines of more than thirty states intact. "All voters, no matter how they cast their ballot, deserve the freedom to make their voices heard," Lang said. "This is a cornerstone of American democracy." ###### Restoring Votes and Training Lawyers In 2018, Lang co-founded CLC's Restore Your Vote project with Blair Bowie. It helps people with past convictions navigate state restoration rules, including those who do not know that they are already entitled to vote. At Georgetown University Law Center, she co-teaches the Election Law Practicum as an adjunct professor. Students study constitutional and statutory protections, then prepare work tied to current election disputes: complaints, briefs, legislative proposals, administrative notices and materials explaining voters' rights. ###### At a Glance - **Current role:** Vice President, Voting Rights and Rule of Law, Campaign Legal Center - **Practice:** Voting Rights · Election Law - **Education:** New York University; Yale Law School - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact - **Organization:** Campaign Legal Center - **Office:** Washington, D.C. - **Website:** campaignlegal.org --- ## 53. Rebecca S. Williford — `900005093` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff - **Voice-flattening concern:** **NONE** — Verification-only in the GPT-5.6 continuation; no new body edit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **NONE** — No GPT-5.6 body change. - **Before hash:** `b34e4328ece67809afc066e696fe5e15628ecf574b7361d48aedc41ae5b721e8` - **After/current hash:** `3fdbbf7db3a6277f6f7a3b8def7015fe98d4692f26a3449db8aca549025e7a70` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005093/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 3 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Emergency-planning opening**: Replace the imagined plan-reading habit with Williford's account of working on every part of the trial and develop the actual planning deficiencies and settlement duties. - `rewrite` — **Professional formation, Santa Rita and Hulu**: Retain all personal, educational and professional facts and each access requirement while explaining the different physical, communication and engineering tasks. - `correct` — **Subway settlement**: Replace the unsupported 95-percent uptime promise with the actual July outage measures and the separate 2022 agreement's station-access target. - `restructure` — **Leadership and ending**: Retain judicial, professional and community service, book and quotations, adding the specific committee role and her explanation of cross-community work. - `restructure` — **Emergency-planning opening**: Replace the imagined plan-reading habit with Williford's account of working on every part of the trial and develop the actual planning deficiencies and settlement duties. - `rewrite` — **Professional formation, Santa Rita and Hulu**: Retain all personal, educational and professional facts and each access requirement while explaining the different physical, communication and engineering tasks. - `correct` — **Subway settlement**: Replace the unsupported 95-percent uptime promise with the actual July outage measures and the separate 2022 agreement's station-access target. - `restructure` — **Leadership and ending**: Retain judicial, professional and community service, book and quotations, adding the specific committee role and her explanation of cross-community work. - `restructure` — **Emergency-planning opening**: Replace the imagined plan-reading habit with Williford's account of working on every part of the trial and develop the actual planning deficiencies and settlement duties. - `rewrite` — **Professional formation, Santa Rita and Hulu**: Retain all personal, educational and professional facts and each access requirement while explaining the different physical, communication and engineering tasks. - `correct` — **Subway settlement**: Replace the unsupported 95-percent uptime promise with the actual July outage measures and the separate 2022 agreement's station-access target. - `restructure` — **Leadership and ending**: Retain judicial, professional and community service, book and quotations, adding the specific committee role and her explanation of cross-community work. ### BEFORE #### Rebecca S. Williford Disability Rights · Equal Access > “Cultivating disabled leaders … is key to increasing representation of our community in all aspects of modern life. ##### The Plan Decides First Disability access, emergency planning, detention conditions, and digital equality — President and Chief Executive Officer, Disability Rights Advocates, Berkeley. Every city keeps plans on a shelf — evacuation routes, shelter rosters, communication protocols, transportation contingencies — and those documents quietly decide, years in advance, who will get out and who will be left behind. Rebecca S. Williford reads such plans the way an engineer reads a blueprint, looking for the people the designers forgot. As a litigator on the Disability Rights Advocates team in Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled v. Bloomberg, she helped try a class action brought on behalf of an estimated 900,000 or more New Yorkers with disabilities. In November 2013 the court held that New York City's emergency-preparedness program violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, and the city's own Human Rights Law in evacuation, shelter accessibility, and communications, among other respects. The comprehensive settlement that followed, finally approved in March 2015, required structural reform across high-rise evacuation, shelters, transportation, canvassing, communications, and recovery planning. The case made preparedness itself an enforceable civil-rights obligation: a city may not wait for the storm to discover whom its plan excludes. ###### The Lawyer on Your Side Williford became a wheelchair user as a teenager and began encountering, building by building, a world that had not been designed with her in mind. What redirected her was watching disabled people face discrimination with no counsel to call, and then seeing what happened in the rare instances when counsel arrived. "I saw what a difference it made when a person had a lawyer on their side," she has said. She graduated with highest honors in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned her law degree there as a Jack Kent Cooke Scholar. As a student she co-founded the National Association of Law Students with Disabilities and served as its president, and she accepted a governor's appointment to North Carolina's Statewide Independent Living Council, serving from 2006 to 2009. She joined Disability Rights Advocates as a legal fellow. Over more than fifteen years she has held eight different roles at the organization, and in April 2023 she became its President and CEO, leading a national nonprofit with offices in Berkeley, Chicago, and New York that takes on widespread, systemic disability discrimination and charges its clients nothing. Its cases often take years — four years is an ordinary span — as its lawyers pursue changes to institutions' policies and practices. ###### Access Behind Walls In Legal Services for Prisoners with Children v. Ahern, Williford litigated a taxpayer action challenging inaccessible conditions and disability-based segregation at Alameda County's Santa Rita Jail. A court-enforceable settlement reached in 2016 required wheelchair-accessible cells, toilets, showers, dining and recreation areas, visiting areas, entrances, and health-care facilities. It also required sign-language interpretation where needed and videophones for incarcerated people who are Deaf or hard of hearing and communicate in ASL. Revised policies and grievance procedures, together with review by an outside compliance expert, provided ways to identify and address continuing barriers. ###### The Interface Is the Doorway Representing blind and low-vision users in American Council of the Blind v. Hulu, Williford and colleagues at Disability Rights Advocates and the Disability Law Center negotiated a settlement in October 2018. The streaming service committed to bring its website and applications into conformity with recognized accessibility standards and to build accessibility testing and bug-response procedures into its engineering. It also agreed to train customer-service staff, publish accessibility support information, increase audio-described content, and add the playback controls and search filters that let blind viewers find described titles. ###### Building the Bench Williford serves as a lawyer representative to the Ninth Circuit Judicial Council for the Northern District of California and sits on the board of Disability Lead. She previously served as a commissioner on the American Bar Association's Commission on Disability Rights and as a board member of the Disability Rights Bar Association. She co-edited Lawyers, Lead On: Lawyers with Disabilities Share Their Insights, published by ABA Press in 2011, and has been named to Diversability's D-30 Disability Impact List. As a disabled attorney addressing both the profession and the community it serves, she has said: "I often find myself translating across those communities." Disability Rights Advocates' class action over elevator reliability in the New York City subway addressed whether riders could depend on the elevators at accessible stations. A settlement announced in July 2026 and submitted for court approval would require the transit authority to keep elevator availability above 95 percent and give riders advance notice of outages. The organization's lawyers have also worked to protect incarcerated young people with disabilities from abuse and neglect. Williford pursues access through planning, testing, monitoring and measurable standards, seeking to address foreseeable barriers before a disabled person has to bring an individual complaint. That work extends from emergency plans and jail facilities to streaming menus and reliable elevators. Alongside it, she supports disabled lawyers and leaders who can help decide how those systems are designed and run. ###### At a Glance - **Current role:** President and CEO, Disability Rights Advocates - **Practice:** Disability Rights · Equal Access - **Education:** University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; University of North Carolina School of Law - **Location:** Berkeley, California ###### Contact Disability Rights Advocates Professional profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Rebecca S. Williford Disability Rights · Equal Access > “Cultivating disabled leaders … is key to increasing representation of our community in all aspects of modern life. ##### Trying the Emergency-Planning Case Disability access, emergency planning, detention conditions, and digital equality — President and Chief Executive Officer, Disability Rights Advocates, Berkeley. Rebecca S. Williford was still relatively new to practice when she helped try the 2013 challenge to New York City's emergency plans. Disability Rights Advocates gave her work on every aspect of the trial, an opportunity she later credited to its commitment to developing young lawyers. In Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled v. Bloomberg, the team represented a class of roughly 900,000 New Yorkers with disabilities whose ability to evacuate, find shelter and obtain essential information depended on the city's preparations. The trial exposed gaps between the services the city described and those residents could use. The city did not know which shelters were accessible or whether it had enough accessible vehicles for people needing evacuation. Its reliance on the 311 telephone system also left people without another way to request help when lines failed or phone batteries ran out. In November 2013, Judge Jesse Furman held that the emergency-preparedness program violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act and the New York City Human Rights Law in evacuation, shelter access and communications, among other respects. The settlement, finally approved in March 2015, addressed high-rise evacuation, shelters, transportation, canvassing, communications and recovery planning. It required a coordinator responsible for disability access and an advisory panel through which disability organizations could review plans. A new door-to-door canvassing operation would identify residents needing food, water, power or medical help after a disaster and send their requests to a central data center. ###### The Lawyer on Your Side Williford had encountered inaccessible buildings after becoming a wheelchair user as a teenager. As she met other disabled people, she saw how legal representation affected their ability to obtain accommodations and pursue education. "I saw what a difference it made when a person had a lawyer on their side," she recalled, recognizing how few disabled people could afford that help. She graduated with highest honors in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned her law degree there as a Jack Kent Cooke Scholar. While in law school, she co-founded the National Association of Law Students with Disabilities and served as its president. She also served on North Carolina's Statewide Independent Living Council through a governor's appointment from 2006 to 2009. Her student-organization work brought her into contact with DRA co-founder Larry Paradis. In a later interview, she described the prospect of his mentorship as a decisive reason to join the organization. She began as a legal fellow, held eight different roles over more than fifteen years and became DRA's president and CEO in April 2023. The national nonprofit, with offices in Berkeley, Chicago and New York, represents clients without charging them. In 2025, she described its cases as lasting an average of four years, sometimes much longer. Its work with incarcerated young people with disabilities has included investigating abuse and neglect and seeking the accommodations those children needed. Williford described teams spending more than a year visiting facilities, speaking with young people and assembling evidence before asking a court to act. ###### Access Behind Walls In Legal Services for Prisoners with Children v. Ahern, Williford litigated a taxpayer action over inaccessible conditions and disability-based segregation at Alameda County's Santa Rita Jail. The 2016 court-enforceable settlement required wheelchair-accessible cells, toilets, showers, dining and recreation areas, visiting areas, entrances and health-care facilities. DRA and the Disability Rights Legal Center represented the prisoner-rights organization and two taxpayers. The agreement also required sign-language interpreters where necessary and videophones for incarcerated people who are Deaf or hard of hearing and use American Sign Language. Updated policies and grievance procedures gave prisoners a way to raise continuing access problems, while an outside expert would evaluate compliance with the physical improvements. ###### Using the Streaming Service Williford and colleagues at DRA and the Disability Law Center represented blind and low-vision users in American Council of the Blind v. Hulu. The October 2018 settlement required the service to bring its website and applications into conformity with recognized accessibility standards so people using screen readers could navigate them. Hulu also agreed to test updates for accessibility before release, address accessibility bugs alongside equivalent losses of other functions, train customer-service staff and publish support information. Audio description required additional work: obtaining narration of important visual information, providing controls to turn it on, and allowing users to search and filter for described titles. Hulu committed to provide description where it controlled the necessary rights and to seek it for licensed content where commercially reasonable. ###### When an Elevator Is Out In July 2026, DRA announced a proposed settlement over the reliability of New York City subway elevators, subject to court approval. The agreement addressed what riders would need when an elevator was unavailable: real-time information, street-level signs, announcements, alternate accessible routes, staff training and responses to complaints. A separate 2022 agreement called for making at least 95 percent of the stations then inaccessible usable without stairs by 2055. The two agreements addressed different problems—getting into a station and navigating the system when an available route was disrupted. ###### Disabled Lawyers and Leaders Williford serves as a lawyer representative to the Ninth Circuit Judicial Council for the Northern District of California and on Disability Lead's board. She previously served on the American Bar Association's Commission on Disability Rights and the Disability Rights Bar Association's board. She co-edited Lawyers, Lead On: Lawyers with Disabilities Share Their Insights, published by ABA Press in 2011, and was named to Diversability's D-30 Disability Impact List. In 2025, Disability Lead appointed her to chair its new Strategic Growth Committee as it expanded from Chicago into Southwest Pennsylvania. Asked about her DRA leadership, she described working with both lawyers and members of the disability community: "I often find myself translating across those communities." For members of the bar, that can mean explaining how to represent disabled clients or make a legal conference accessible; for community members, it means explaining how litigation can address barriers such as inaccessible sidewalks throughout a city. ###### At a Glance - **Current role:** President and CEO, Disability Rights Advocates - **Practice:** Disability Rights · Equal Access - **Education:** University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; University of North Carolina School of Law - **Location:** Berkeley, California ###### Contact Disability Rights Advocates Professional profile --- ## 54. Jameel Jaffer — `900005091` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff - **Voice-flattening concern:** **NONE** — Verification-only in the GPT-5.6 continuation; no new body edit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **NONE** — No GPT-5.6 body change. - **Before hash:** `8a3f6781d9417080bdcdbee617f967dde787baa5a6057942a0341d3133e2ee90` - **After/current hash:** `ad7745e38e2d2bf89641111a49c852ba2334ab00d68a3584786260501dea3c85` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005091/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Disclosure opening and books**: Replace the speculative secret-author premise with the recorded 2003 request decision, retaining the full torture and drone disclosure work and both documentary books in chronological context. - `rewrite` — **Formation and institutional practice**: Preserve every original education, clerkship, ACLU and Knight fact while grouping the distinct cases coherently and explaining his own stated move into civil-liberties work. - `restructure` — **AAUP trial and ending**: Keep the original clients, trial, findings, remedy and stay qualification, add concrete public exhibits and the dated appellate brief, and close with the witness decision Jaffer discussed in his own essay. ### BEFORE #### Jameel Jaffer First Amendment · Government Transparency > “Free speech is impossible to disentangle from democracy. Free speech is why democracy works. ##### Documents Written to Stay Buried First Amendment, government transparency, surveillance, and national-security litigation — Executive Director, Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, New York. Some of the most consequential legal documents of the post-September 11 era were composed on the assumption that no outsider would ever read them: Office of Legal Counsel memoranda blessing brutal interrogation, opinions justifying lethal strikes far from any conventional battlefield, the classified scaffolding of dragnet surveillance. Jameel Jaffer built a career on dragging those documents into daylight. At the American Civil Liberties Union he led and co-led the Freedom of Information Act teams that compelled disclosure of the torture memos and, years later, the drone memos, forcing the government to reveal the legal reasoning behind its most extraordinary claims of power. He co-led the legal campaign against the National Security Agency's bulk collection of Americans' call records, an effort that preceded the program's abandonment. And in 2012 he stood before the Supreme Court in Clapper v. Amnesty International USA, the case that tested whether lawyers, journalists, and human rights workers could challenge secret surveillance they could not prove had swept them up. He also turned the disclosed record into argument. Administration of Torture, written with Amrit Singh and published by Columbia University Press in 2007, assembled thousands of pages of released government documents into a chronicle of how interrogation policy actually traveled from Washington to Abu Ghraib and beyond. The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law, published by The New Press in 2016, did the same for lethal force — an indictment of policymaking by classified memorandum, built almost entirely from the government's own words. ###### Two Courts, Two Constitutions Born and raised in Canada, Jaffer graduated from Williams College in 1994, took a master's degree at the University of Cambridge in 1996, and earned his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1999, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He clerked for Judge Amalya L. Kearse of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for the Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada. ###### Fourteen Years at the ACLU He joined the ACLU in June 2002, months after the September 11 attacks, and stayed until August 2016, rising to deputy legal director and director of its Center for Democracy, the arm devoted to free speech, privacy, technology, national security, and international human rights. He challenged the national-security-letter provisions of the Patriot Act in litigation that ran through the middle of the decade. In 2006, he brought a case for American scholars and writers who contended that the government had excluded their invited colleague, Tariq Ramadan, because of his views. A federal appeals court ruled for the plaintiffs in 2009. He also played a significant part in the organization's decision to represent Edward Snowden. His ACLU docket encompassed surveillance, secrecy, censorship, detention and extrajudicial killing. ###### An Institute Built for the Digital Public Square In 2016, Columbia University and the Knight Foundation created the Knight First Amendment Institute to defend the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age. Jaffer became its inaugural executive director. In Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump, the district court and then a unanimous Second Circuit panel applied public-forum principles to an official social-media account, holding that the president could not block critics because of their views. After Trump's first term ended, the Supreme Court vacated the judgment as moot. In Doc Society v. Blinken, the Institute challenged the State Department's requirement that visa applicants register their social-media identities. In Edgar v. Haines, it challenged the prepublication-review system that lets agencies vet the writings of former employees for life. Its scholarship, symposia and appellate advocacy also address platform regulation, government pressure on intermediaries and surveillance technology. Jaffer teaches at Columbia as an adjunct professor of law and journalism, and he served as an executive editor of Just Security. ###### The Trial Over Ideas On March 25, 2025, the Institute filed American Association of University Professors v. Rubio on behalf of the AAUP, its Harvard, NYU, and Rutgers chapters, and the Middle East Studies Association, challenging the arrest, detention, and deportation of noncitizen students and faculty for pro-Palestinian advocacy. The case went to a two-week bench trial in Boston, where senior officials' conduct was examined on the public record. On September 30, 2025, the district court found that the defendants had pursued a policy of targeting noncitizen students and scholars because of their viewpoints, in violation of the First Amendment, and had acted arbitrarily and capriciously under the Administrative Procedure Act. A remedial order issued on January 22, 2026, declared the policy unconstitutional and set it aside; an appellate court has stayed aspects of that remedy while briefing proceeds in the First Circuit. Williams College awarded Jaffer its Bicentennial Medal in 2025; in 2026 he received the Sidney Hillman Foundation's George Barrett Award for Public Interest Law and Brooklyn Law School's Distinguished Commitment to Public Service Award. He writes for the New York Times, the Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and the London Review of Books. Jaffer has described free speech as essential to democracy. His transparency cases have put the government's own legal reasoning into the hands of people who could then scrutinize and challenge it. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Executive Director, Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University - **Practice:** First Amendment, government transparency, surveillance, and national-security litigation - **Education:** Williams College; University of Cambridge; Harvard Law School - **Location:** New York, New York ##### Contact Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University Professional profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Jameel Jaffer First Amendment · Government Transparency > “Free speech is impossible to disentangle from democracy. Free speech is why democracy works. ##### Requesting the Interrogation Records First Amendment, government transparency, surveillance, and national-security litigation — Executive Director, Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, New York. In 2003, a few news reports about military and CIA detention centers prompted Jameel Jaffer and his colleagues at the American Civil Liberties Union to request government records. They did not yet know what the documents would show. Recalling the decision in a 2014 interview, Jaffer said they had not expected to uncover a system of torture authorized at the highest levels. The Freedom of Information Act requests began an effort to establish how officials had approved interrogation practices and what had happened to people in American custody. Jaffer led and co-led the disclosure teams as thousands of records became public. With Amrit Singh, he assembled documents and analysis in Administration of Torture, published by Columbia University Press in 2007, tracing interrogation policy from Washington to Abu Ghraib and beyond. In April 2009, litigation by the ACLU and New York Civil Liberties Union produced four more Office of Legal Counsel memoranda. They revealed the legal framework used to authorize the CIA's interrogation methods. Jaffer described disclosure as a first step toward accountability. He later led the ACLU team seeking the legal and policy documents underlying the government's targeted-killing program. In The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law, published by The New Press in 2016, he brought together released memoranda, policy guidance and official explanations of lethal force outside conventional battlefields. His introduction examined the legal arguments alongside the violence they permitted, making the government's own reasoning available for scrutiny rather than relying only on its public assurances. ###### Two Courts and a Change of Practice Born and raised in Canada, Jaffer graduated from Williams College in 1994, earned a master's degree at the University of Cambridge in 1996 and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1999, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He clerked for Judge Amalya L. Kearse of the Second Circuit and for the Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada. He later described the government's treatment of noncitizens after September 11 as the reason he began considering civil-liberties work and left a corporate law firm for the ACLU. He joined in June 2002 and stayed until August 2016, becoming deputy legal director and director of its Center for Democracy. The center's work included free speech, privacy, technology, national security and international human rights. His own cases encompassed surveillance, secrecy, censorship, detention and extrajudicial killing, including a challenge to the Patriot Act's national-security-letter provisions in the mid-2000s. In 2006, Jaffer brought a case for American scholars and writers who contended that the government had excluded their invited colleague Tariq Ramadan because of his views, denying them the opportunity to hear him. An appeals court ruled for the plaintiffs in 2009. In 2012, he argued Clapper v. Amnesty International USA before the Supreme Court, seeking a way for lawyers, journalists and human-rights workers to challenge secret surveillance without proof that their own communications had been intercepted. He also played a significant role in the ACLU's decision to represent Edward Snowden and co-led the challenge to the National Security Agency's bulk collection of Americans' call records, which preceded the program's abandonment. ###### The Knight Institute's Cases Columbia University and the Knight Foundation established the Knight First Amendment Institute in 2016 to defend freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age, with Jaffer as its inaugural executive director. In Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump, the district court and a unanimous Second Circuit panel applied public-forum principles in holding that the president could not exclude critics from an official social-media account because of their views. The Supreme Court vacated the judgment as moot after his first term ended. In Doc Society v. Blinken, the Institute challenged the State Department's demand that visa applicants supply their social-media identities. In Edgar v. Haines, it challenged the lifetime prepublication-review obligations imposed on former government employees. Its research, symposia and appellate advocacy also address platform regulation, government pressure on intermediaries and surveillance technology. Jaffer teaches law and journalism as an adjunct at Columbia and has served as an executive editor of Just Security. His writing appears in the New York Times, the Guardian, Foreign Affairs and the London Review of Books. Williams awarded him its Bicentennial Medal in 2025; in 2026, he received the Sidney Hillman Foundation's George Barrett Award for Public Interest Law and Brooklyn Law School's Distinguished Commitment to Public Service Award. ###### Evidence of a Policy On March 25, 2025, the Institute filed American Association of University Professors v. Rubio for the AAUP, its Harvard, NYU and Rutgers chapters, and the Middle East Studies Association. Jaffer and his colleagues challenged the arrest, detention and threatened deportation of noncitizen students and faculty for pro-Palestinian advocacy. A two-week bench trial in Boston brought officials' conduct into the courtroom. On September 30, Judge William Young found a policy of targeting students and scholars because of their viewpoints, violating the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act's prohibition on arbitrary and capricious agency action. The January 22, 2026 remedial order declared the policy unconstitutional and set it aside. The court also made public exhibits from the trial, including agency reports about individual students, referrals from Homeland Security to the State Department and memoranda recommending removal. Readers could follow the speech and associations recorded in the reports through to the recommendations for government action. The First Circuit stayed part of the remedy while the appeal proceeded. In their August 5, 2026 brief, Jaffer and the other plaintiffs' lawyers asked the appeals court to uphold the ruling and permanently block the policy. They argued that the threat of further enforcement continued to silence students and faculty even after the trial judgment. In his own account of the trial, Jaffer described the testimony of Bernhard Nickel, a German citizen who had recently chaired Harvard's philosophy department. Nickel had stopped attending protests and signing public letters because he feared retaliation. Yet he agreed to testify about that fear. His secure academic position and experience as a noncitizen gave him evidence few others could offer, he explained, and he wanted the legal process to work. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Executive Director, Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University - **Practice:** First Amendment, government transparency, surveillance, and national-security litigation - **Education:** Williams College; University of Cambridge; Harvard Law School - **Location:** New York, New York ##### Contact Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University Professional profile --- ## 55. Marlan B. Wilbanks — `900005141` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **LOW** — Recent manifest reads primarily as stylistic/structural editing; expert should compare before/after closely. - **Before hash:** `74e825f478a5f529a80898dd17a0bd0a6fa84ea73a4b8507881df70d482a7682` - **After/current hash:** `e3140955670a51888d3260c670f32ec12e1a6dbb2b819bef28c34fd9fd8205ec` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005141/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **DaVita opening**: Develop the actual payment change, dosing allegation and privately prosecuted case instead of opening with a repeated general description of declination. - `rewrite` — **Hospital cases and practice formation**: Give Baklid-Kunz and the compensation evidence room, retain every other case and public amount, and consolidate the repeated private-case preparation into its professional context. - `restructure` — **Clinic and public service**: Retain the original charitable commitments and educational roles, date the reported India count and develop the clinic's actual history and student representation. ### BEFORE #### Marlan B. Wilbanks Health Care Fraud · Whistleblower Litigation > “Elin followed her conscience and it worked out for her, but she had no guarantees. ##### Where Declination Is a Beginning Health-care qui tam and government-declined False Claims Act litigation — Founding partner, Wilbanks & Gouinlock, Atlanta. When the United States declines to intervene in a False Claims Act case, the whistleblower can continue through private counsel. Marlan B. Wilbanks represents those clients, financing discovery, studying regulations, retaining experts, and building damages models for litigation that can last years. Since filing his first qui tam case in 1997, he has devoted his Atlanta practice exclusively to fraud against the government, including health-care cases pursued without government intervention. ###### The DaVita Fight The case against dialysis provider DaVita alleged that the company deliberately created unnecessary waste when administering Zemplar and Venofer to patients, then billed federal health programs for that avoidable waste. The relators pursued the drug-billing claims without government intervention. Wilbanks helped litigate the case for years before a $450 million settlement in 2015, at the time a record for a declined False Claims Act case. His firm also obtained favorable rulings in contested motion practice that other relators have since cited. ###### Hospitals on the Ledger Wilbanks represented Elin Baklid-Kunz, an employee of Florida’s Halifax Hospital, in a case concerning physician-compensation arrangements that rewarded referrals. It resolved for $85 million. As Wilbanks put it, Baklid-Kunz followed her conscience with no guarantee it would work out. He served as counsel in matters contributing to a $260 million resolution with Health Management Associates involving the hospital chain’s admission practices, and represented relators in litigation associated with Tenet Healthcare’s $368 million resolution of claims involving payments for maternity-patient referrals. His firm’s work also includes a $65 million Prime Healthcare resolution and veterans’-mortgage cases that returned hundreds of millions more over fees charged to military families refinancing their homes. Across hospital, dialysis, laboratory, hospice, and other health-care settings, the cases he and his firm have brought have returned more than $2 billion to the United States Treasury. Wilbanks investigates the corporate decisions behind claims: unlawful compensation formulas, medically unnecessary services, manipulated admission standards, and certifications signed despite contrary internal knowledge. He assembles documents identifying who made those decisions, when, and why, then develops that evidence through motion practice and discovery for trial. Government declination can reflect resources, timing, or enforcement priorities rather than a judgment on the merits; the statute permits his clients to continue pursuing the alleged fraud. ###### A Georgia Lawyer’s Apprenticeship Wilbanks trained at the University of Georgia School of Law and was admitted to the state bar in 1986. At Harmon, Smith, Bridges & Wilbanks in Atlanta, he developed the firm’s False Claims Act practice, then continued through Wilbanks & Bridges to the firm he co-founded, Wilbanks & Gouinlock. The firm finances and staffs cases pursued for years without government intervention. Taxpayers Against Fraud named him a Whistleblower Lawyer of the Year in 2014 and gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022. He has spoken at more than seventy-five conferences nationwide, teaches False Claims Act courses at the University of Georgia and Georgia State law schools, and has pressed Justice Department leadership on enforcement of the statute. He chairs the Board of Visitors of his alma mater’s law school and serves as a trustee of Young Harris College. ###### The Other Docket At the University of Georgia School of Law, Wilbanks founded the Wilbanks Child Endangerment and Sexual Exploitation Clinic, the first law-school clinic in the nation devoted to providing free legal representation to child victims of sexual abuse and exploitation. Students learn through representing those clients. He chairs the board of Hope Thrives, which serves survivors of child sexual abuse, and funds an orphanage and school in India that is home to a hundred children. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner - **Organization:** Wilbanks & Gouinlock - **Practice:** Health Care Fraud, Whistleblower Litigation - **Location:** Atlanta, Georgia ##### Contact Wilbanks & Gouinlock Professional biography and contact ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Marlan B. Wilbanks Health Care Fraud · Whistleblower Litigation > “Elin followed her conscience and it worked out for her, but she had no guarantees. ##### When the Payment Rule Changed Health-care qui tam and government-declined False Claims Act litigation — Founding partner, Wilbanks & Gouinlock, Atlanta. In July 2011, Marlan B. Wilbanks pointed to a change in DaVita's treatment protocols that he believed supported his clients' fraud allegations. Medicare had changed its dialysis-payment system at the start of the year, ending separate reimbursement for discarded drugs, and the company's instructions for administering two medications had changed. Wilbanks argued that the timing showed how reimbursement, rather than medical need, had driven the earlier practices. His clients, physician Alon Vainer and nurse Daniel Barbir, had filed suit in 2007. They alleged that DaVita deliberately created avoidable waste when administering Zemplar and Venofer, then billed federal health programs for the discarded medication. One example in the amended complaint involved filling a six-microgram Zemplar dose from a ten-microgram vial rather than three two-microgram vials, leaving four micrograms to be discarded and billed. Medicare permitted reimbursement for unavoidable waste incurred in good faith; the clients challenged protocols they alleged had been designed to produce unnecessary waste. The government declined to intervene, and Wilbanks and his co-counsel continued the litigation privately. The case resolved for $450 million in 2015, then a record for a government-declined False Claims Act case. The Justice Department monitored the proceedings, while the private team developed the evidence and pursued the claims. Rulings obtained during the litigation were also cited in other whistleblower cases. ###### The Physician-Compensation Records At Florida's Halifax Hospital, Elin Baklid-Kunz had raised concerns internally about physician payments and patient care before hiring Wilbanks to pursue a whistleblower case. She had worked at the hospital for sixteen years and was in its compliance department. Her allegations required examination of the contracts and compensation formulas connecting doctors' referrals to hospital revenue. The government joined part of the case. Six oncologists received bonuses tied to a pool that included the value of drugs and tests they ordered, and three neurosurgeons were alleged to receive more than fair market value for their work. In November 2013, the court ruled that the oncology contracts violated the Stark Law's restrictions on physician self-referrals. The hospital agreed to pay $85 million in March 2014. Wilbanks later described Baklid-Kunz's decision as a matter of conscience, undertaken without any guarantee that it would work out. Wilbanks served as counsel in matters contributing to Health Management Associates' $260 million resolution over admission practices, and represented relators in litigation associated with Tenet Healthcare's $368 million resolution over payments for maternity-patient referrals. His firm's work also includes a $65 million Prime Healthcare resolution. In preparing health-care claims, he examines compensation formulas, medically unnecessary services, admission standards and certifications made despite contrary internal information. His firm has also recovered hundreds of millions of dollars in veterans'-mortgage cases over fees charged to military families refinancing their homes. The cases he and his firm have brought involving hospitals, dialysis, laboratories, hospice and other government-funded services have returned more than $2 billion to the United States Treasury. ###### Building a Private False Claims Act Practice Wilbanks trained at the University of Georgia School of Law and was admitted to the Georgia bar in 1986. He developed a False Claims Act practice at Harmon, Smith, Bridges & Wilbanks in Atlanta, continued through Wilbanks & Bridges and co-founded Wilbanks & Gouinlock. Since his first qui tam filing in 1997, his practice has focused exclusively on fraud against the government. The firm finances and staffs cases that may continue for years after federal investigators decline to take them over. Its lawyers study the governing regulations, retain experts and develop damages models from records identifying who authorized a practice, when and for what purpose. They carry that evidence through motion practice and discovery toward trial. Declination can reflect government resources, timing or enforcement priorities rather than a judgment that a claim lacks merit; the statute allows the whistleblower to proceed. Taxpayers Against Fraud named Wilbanks a Whistleblower Lawyer of the Year in 2014 and gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022. He has spoken at more than seventy-five conferences, teaches False Claims Act courses at the University of Georgia and Georgia State law schools, and has pressed Justice Department leaders on enforcement of the statute. He chairs Georgia Law's Board of Visitors and serves as a trustee of Young Harris College. ###### Clients and Student Lawyers Wilbanks's work for children has included chairing Hope Thrives, which serves survivors of child sexual abuse, and funding an orphanage and school in India reported in 2022 to serve one hundred children. At the University of Georgia School of Law, he established the Wilbanks Child Endangerment and Sexual Exploitation Clinic, the country's first law-school clinic dedicated to free representation of survivors of childhood sexual abuse and exploitation. The clinic opened in January 2016, after Georgia's Hidden Predator Act expanded the opportunity to bring civil claims. His donation funded a place where second- and third-year students could represent clients who needed help using that opportunity. Students work on intake, discovery, drafting and courtroom representation in civil cases and juvenile dependency proceedings. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner - **Organization:** Wilbanks & Gouinlock - **Practice:** Health Care Fraud, Whistleblower Litigation - **Location:** Atlanta, Georgia ##### Contact Wilbanks & Gouinlock Professional biography and contact --- ## 56. Mary Louise Cohen — `900005140` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **LOW** — Recent manifest reads primarily as stylistic/structural editing; expert should compare before/after closely. - **Before hash:** `ffdac0382ad24f9e97ca699321e9401aca2349a2f17c081e1abebe73449437b1` - **After/current hash:** `bf12b7d1f3eff139a20352ff66a10b7c164730d901d64d4639f5c82835211d07` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005140/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 3 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Opening and career chronology**: Replace the promotional creation metaphor with Cohen's documented 2014 refugee-employment work, then move backward to the whistleblower practice and legislative experience that preceded it. - `rewrite` — **False Claims Act and laboratory matters**: Preserve the full statutory case sequence and original recoveries while correcting the dated legislative sequence and clarifying the scope of LabScam, Quest, TAP and HCA evidence and resolutions. - `rewrite` — **Kyphon, GE and later public-interest work**: Separate Kyphon's $75 million payment from the larger company-and-hospital enforcement total, retain GE and the 2013 award/writing, and end with Cohen's own description of preparing a later asylum case. - `restructure` — **Opening and career chronology**: Replace the promotional creation metaphor with Cohen's documented 2014 refugee-employment work, then move backward to the whistleblower practice and legislative experience that preceded it. - `rewrite` — **False Claims Act and laboratory matters**: Preserve the full statutory case sequence and original recoveries while correcting the dated legislative sequence and clarifying the scope of LabScam, Quest, TAP and HCA evidence and resolutions. - `rewrite` — **Kyphon, GE and later public-interest work**: Separate Kyphon's $75 million payment from the larger company-and-hospital enforcement total, retain GE and the 2013 award/writing, and end with Cohen's own description of preparing a later asylum case. - `restructure` — **Opening and career chronology**: Replace the promotional creation metaphor with Cohen's documented 2014 refugee-employment work, then move backward to the whistleblower practice and legislative experience that preceded it. - `rewrite` — **False Claims Act and laboratory matters**: Preserve the full statutory case sequence and original recoveries while correcting the dated legislative sequence and clarifying the scope of LabScam, Quest, TAP and HCA evidence and resolutions. - `rewrite` — **Kyphon, GE and later public-interest work**: Separate Kyphon's $75 million payment from the larger company-and-hospital enforcement total, retain GE and the 2013 award/writing, and end with Cohen's own description of preparing a later asylum case. ### BEFORE #### Mary Louise Cohen Whistleblowers · Health Care · Government Contracts > “The true heroes in our world are our clients. ##### Present at the Creation Health-care and government-contract qui tam litigation — Founding partner, Phillips & Cohen, Washington, D.C. When Congress revised the False Claims Act in 1986, it restored incentives for insiders to expose fraud on the government. As a founding partner of Phillips & Cohen, Mary Louise Cohen built one of the country’s first practices devoted to representing those whistleblowers. Her work followed the qui tam case from the first confidential conversation with an insider through the complaint filed under seal, the government’s investigation and intervention decision, settlement, and the separate proceeding that determines the whistleblower’s share. Her cases produced recoveries in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and colleagues in the field called her the queen of qui tam. ###### From the Hill to the Bar Cohen graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she served in the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau representing people who could not afford counsel. She began her career in private practice in Atlanta and Washington, then spent a decade in legislative work. In the early 1980s she served as counsel and ultimately chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice. She was legislative director of a major Washington public-interest organization and, from 1986 to 1988, counsel to the Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, working on Capitol Hill during the False Claims Act’s revival. For more than twenty-five years afterward, she represented whistleblowers. ###### The Laboratory Cases The “LabScam” cases Cohen and her firm brought against national medical-testing laboratories exposed systematic billing practices — tests bundled, unbundled, and added without medical need — and launched a federal investigation that returned more than $200 million to the Treasury. The cases challenged billing practices across the industry as False Claims Act violations, using evidence of repeated conduct to show how laboratories generated false claims. In the TAP Pharmaceutical Products matter, Cohen represented a whistleblower whose information was key to the government’s $875 million resolution concerning the pricing and marketing of a cancer drug, at the time among the largest health-care fraud recoveries in American history. Her Quest Diagnostics case produced a $302 million settlement, the largest ever involving a medical laboratory, after a subsidiary sold faulty diagnostic test kits that produced unreliable results. The case concerned both the defective tests and the bills submitted to federal programs for them. Her qui tam suit against a Medtronic spine subsidiary and its network of more than one hundred hospitals resolved for $75 million over billing practices surrounding kyphoplasty procedures. ###### The Full Range of the Statute Cohen represented two emergency-room physicians in a Columbia/HCA matter that resolved for $95 million as part of the enforcement effort involving the hospital chain. A General Electric defense-contract case produced a $59.5 million settlement. Her work examined clinical decisions, laboratory codes, product performance, cost accounting, procurement terms, and certifications to identify discrepancies between companies’ practices and what they told the government. To corroborate whistleblowers’ accounts, she assembled contracts, billing data, scientific records, and internal communications that investigators could test. The Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund gave Cohen its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. She also wrote in the New York Times about improving the process for whistleblowers and in professional journals about the risks of unreported billing errors. ###### The Second Act In 2014, Cohen became a fellow in Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative. She co-founded Talent Beyond Boundaries, which opens skilled-migration pathways so that refugees can move to new countries through their professional qualifications. She also co-founded the Batonga Foundation, supporting secondary education for girls in Africa, and the Aslan Project, working to improve survival rates for children with cancer in developing countries. Looking back on four decades of qui tam work, Cohen describes her clients as the true heroes. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner - **Organization:** Phillips & Cohen - **Practice:** Whistleblowers, Health Care, Government Contracts - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact Phillips & Cohen Professional biography and contact ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Mary Louise Cohen Whistleblowers · Health Care · Government Contracts > “The true heroes in our world are our clients. ##### Opening a Route for Skilled Refugees Health-care and government-contract qui tam litigation — Founding partner, Phillips & Cohen, Washington, D.C. In 2014, Mary Louise Cohen and her husband, Bruce, joined Harvard's Advanced Leadership Initiative. That year, they heard UNICEF goodwill ambassador Téa Leoni describe the professional skills of Syrian refugees. Cohen began developing a way for displaced people to move through employment-based immigration routes. She co-founded Talent Beyond Boundaries, which connects refugees with employers and works with governments on the visa processes needed for those jobs. By then, she had spent more than twenty-five years representing whistleblowers. She and John Phillips founded Phillips & Cohen in 1988, soon after Congress strengthened the False Claims Act's incentives for reporting fraud. The firm was among the first devoted to those clients. Cohen's work followed the case from a confidential conversation with an insider to a complaint filed under seal, the government's investigation and intervention decision, a settlement, and the separate determination of the whistleblower's share. ###### From Capitol Hill to Private Enforcement Cohen graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she represented people who could not afford counsel through the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. She worked in private practice in Atlanta and Washington from 1977 to 1981, then became counsel and ultimately chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice. She held those positions from 1981 to 1984, followed by two years as legislative director of a Washington public-interest organization. From 1986 to 1988, she was counsel to the Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust, Monopolies and Business Rights. Congress enacted the False Claims Act amendments in 1986. Her subsequent cases required her to turn an employee's information into a record that investigators could test: contracts, billing data, scientific findings and internal communications showing the difference between a company's practices and its representations to the government. ###### Laboratory Records and Patients Cohen's cases helped launch the federal “LabScam” investigation into medical laboratories' billing practices. The allegations concerned tests bundled or billed separately, and tests added without medical need. The related Medicare billing cases against hospital and independent laboratories returned more than $200 million to the Treasury. Repeated transactions and billing instructions allowed investigators to examine an organized practice rather than a series of unrelated coding errors. In the Quest Diagnostics matter, Cohen and her colleagues represented Thomas Cantor, a biochemist whose company also made diagnostic tests. His lawsuit alleged that Quest subsidiary Nichols Institute Diagnostics sold faulty test kits used to guide the care of dialysis patients. Comparative testing and reports from physicians raised concerns about unreliable results, while health programs continued paying for tests performed with the kits. The 2009 resolution totaled $302 million in civil and criminal payments. Cohen also represented a whistleblower whose information was central to the government's $875 million resolution with TAP Pharmaceutical Products over the pricing and marketing of a cancer drug. In a separate Columbia/HCA matter, she represented two emergency-room physicians whose allegations led to a $95 million resolution as part of the broader hospital-chain enforcement effort. ###### Hospital Bills and Government Contracts The kyphoplasty case, concerning treatment for spinal fractures, began with information from Craig Patrick, a reimbursement manager, and Chuck Bates, a regional sales manager. Their 2005 lawsuit alleged that Kyphon encouraged hospitals to keep patients overnight for a procedure that could be performed in a few hours as outpatient care. Inpatient admission brought a larger Medicare payment. Cohen explained that this reimbursement allowed the company to maintain a higher price for its medical devices. Kyphon, by then a Medtronic subsidiary, agreed to pay $75 million in 2008. The related enforcement effort against the company and more than one hundred hospitals ultimately recovered nearly $180 million. A General Electric defense-contract case brought another setting for Cohen's work and a $59.5 million settlement. Her cases required examination of procurement terms, cost accounting and certifications as well as clinical decisions, laboratory codes and product performance. In 2013, the Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund gave her its Lifetime Achievement Award. She has also written in the New York Times about improving the whistleblower process and in professional journals about the risks of failing to report billing errors. ###### Representation Beyond the Fraud Case Cohen co-founded the Batonga Foundation to support secondary education for girls in Africa and the Aslan Project to improve survival for children with cancer in developing countries. In a 2024 interview, she and Bruce described preparing an asylum case through the International Rescue Committee in Denver. They had accepted it the previous year after finding the opportunity through We the Action, which connects lawyers with pro bono work. Cohen described the main task as "developing and applying gathered facts to the legal framework." ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner - **Organization:** Phillips & Cohen - **Practice:** Whistleblowers, Health Care, Government Contracts - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact Phillips & Cohen Professional biography and contact --- ## 57. Thomas M. Greene — `900005139` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW/NOT FLAGGED** — No specific flattening concern identified in the current GPT-5.6 audit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `bd03d7d7f488f42b201f25203e0ae71111f4fd5f5c9d488db8809c08570e2da3` - **After/current hash:** `e8eed776f6aceb97dbf1d6af05e4b99ec27acbbc46fb8b7c4da0dcf891023a19` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005139/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Franklin opening**: Replace the broad claim about creating modern pharmaceutical enforcement with the manufacturer's indirect-claim argument, Franklin's pleaded causal chain and Greene's work connecting promotion to reimbursed claims. - `correct` — **Kaiser trial and remedy**: Develop the jury proof and correct the UCL amount and overlap using the First Circuit's account of the judgment. - `rewrite` — **Biogen and career sections**: Replace record-setting rhetoric with the specific alleged physician-payment mechanisms, settlement allocation, lead-counsel role, education, teaching and recurring evidentiary method. ### BEFORE #### Thomas M. Greene False Claims Act · Pharmaceutical Fraud > “This is a triumph for evidence-based medicine over marketing-based medicine. ##### From Drug Promotion to a False Claim False Claims Act and pharmaceutical-fraud whistleblower litigation — Founding partner, Greene LLP, Boston. A drug company’s marketing department never bills the government directly. The company promotes a drug; a physician prescribes it; a pharmacy submits a claim; a public program reimburses. In United States ex rel. Franklin v. Parke-Davis, Thomas M. Greene connected those stages in a False Claims Act theory: a manufacturer’s unlawful promotion could cause the submission of false reimbursement claims even though the manufacturer did not submit the bills. His work helped establish off-label promotion as a basis for pharmaceutical whistleblower litigation, followed by enforcement actions that returned billions of dollars to public health programs. ###### Franklin’s File In 1996, Greene filed suit on behalf of David Franklin, a young scientist who had worked as a medical liaison for Parke-Davis and had watched the company promote its epilepsy drug Neurontin for unapproved uses. The theory was untested, and the government initially declined to intervene. Greene continued the case, tracing how sales scripts and other marketing practices influenced prescribing and generated Medicaid reimbursement claims. In 2004, Pfizer — which had acquired Parke-Davis’s parent — resolved the matter for $430 million in combined civil and criminal payments. Pharmaceutical enforcement actions over the next two decades used the connection between unlawful promotion and government-paid claims. ###### Taking the Theory to Trial Appointed to chair the Neurontin multidistrict litigation, Greene carried the off-label evidence into a private bellwether trial for Kaiser Foundation Health Plan. In 2010, he won a $142 million verdict under the civil RICO statute together with a $102 million judgment under California’s Unfair Competition Law. The evidence presented to twelve jurors included internal documents, marketing plans, and data tracing promotion into prescriptions. At the 2010 Massachusetts Battle of the Lawyers, he took the prize for most compelling argument. He also served on the plaintiffs’ steering committee in the multidistrict litigation over the crash of American Eagle Flight 3379, and a Detrol off-label case in his portfolio resolved for $14.5 million. ###### Proof of Stamina In United States ex rel. Bawduniak v. Biogen, Biogen employee Michael Bawduniak alleged that the company paid kickbacks, presented as consulting fees and speaker honoraria, to physicians prescribing its multiple sclerosis drugs. The government declined to intervene. As lead relator’s counsel, Greene litigated the case for roughly a decade, financing it privately and pursuing discovery, neurology-market analysis, and expert evidence connecting payments to prescriptions. In 2022, on the eve of trial, Biogen agreed to pay $900 million. The federal relator share was $250 million, the largest award ever conferred on a False Claims Act whistleblower. In the statute’s 160-year history, no case pursued without government intervention had produced a larger recovery. ###### The Teacher of the Theory Greene graduated cum laude from Boston College in 1974 and earned his law degree from Suffolk University Law School in 1977. He has concentrated on complex civil litigation ever since and has represented False Claims Act whistleblowers since 1992. He founded Greene LLP in Boston’s financial district, building a small trial firm that finances and staffs cases pursued for years without government intervention. Greene has been invited to lecture on off-label promotion at Harvard Law School, Johns Hopkins, Boston College, and Northwestern. He has spoken before congressional audiences and national conferences on qui tam practice, and his article on RICO in pharmaceutical cases appeared in Trial magazine. Melody Petersen’s book Our Daily Meds features his work, and his cases have been examined on NPR and NBC’s Dateline. When the Neurontin fight concluded, he described the result as a triumph for evidence-based medicine over marketing-based medicine. Across three decades of pharmaceutical cases, Greene has used evidence of promotion, payments to physicians, prescribing, dispensing, and reimbursement to trace how drug-company sales practices affect public spending. Speaker programs, consulting agreements, marketing plans, and prescription data form part of the proof he develops under statutes protecting public money and public health. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner - **Organization:** Greene LLP - **Practice:** False Claims Act, Pharmaceutical Fraud - **Location:** Boston, Massachusetts ##### Contact Greene LLP Professional biography and contact ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Thomas M. Greene False Claims Act · Pharmaceutical Fraud > “This is a triumph for evidence-based medicine over marketing-based medicine. ##### Tracing the Claim Back to the Promotion False Claims Act and pharmaceutical-fraud whistleblower litigation — Founding partner, Greene LLP, Boston. Parke-Davis argued that it had not submitted the Medicaid prescriptions at issue in David Franklin's whistleblower case. The prescriptions came from doctors and the reimbursement claims from pharmacies. Franklin alleged that the company had promoted Neurontin for uses outside its FDA approval, using false statements and financial incentives to increase those prescriptions. Thomas M. Greene's task was to connect that upstream marketing to the claims eventually presented to government health programs. Greene filed the case for Franklin in 1996. Franklin, a scientist who had worked for several months as a Parke-Davis medical liaison, alleged that the company instructed liaisons to promote unapproved uses and dosages, misstate their scientific role and encourage physicians to prescribe the drug. In 2001, the district court rejected the argument that the False Claims Act stopped with the doctors and pharmacists. Taking Franklin's allegations as true at the motion-to-dismiss stage, Judge Patti Saris concluded that their participation in submitting claims was an intended consequence of the alleged promotional scheme. The federal government had declined to intervene, and Greene and his colleagues continued the litigation. In 2004, Pfizer, which had acquired Parke-Davis's parent, resolved the Neurontin matter for $430 million in combined civil and criminal payments. The case provided a route for treating a manufacturer's promotion as conduct that could cause false reimbursement claims even when the manufacturer did not submit those claims itself. ###### Putting the Marketing Evidence Before a Jury Greene later chaired the Neurontin multidistrict litigation and represented Kaiser Foundation Health Plan at a five-week jury trial in 2010. Kaiser alleged that Pfizer's promotion had caused it to pay for Neurontin prescriptions for uses that were ineffective. The trial record included company documents, marketing plans and evidence connecting promotional activity to prescribing. The jury found RICO violations for several promoted uses and awarded Kaiser $47.36 million in damages, which the court trebled to about $142.1 million. The district court separately found for Kaiser under California's Unfair Competition Law and calculated about $95.3 million in restitution, but did not add that amount to the RICO award because it reflected the same underlying injury. The First Circuit later affirmed the judgment. His pharmaceutical docket also included a Detrol off-label matter that resolved for $14.5 million. Outside pharmaceutical litigation, he served on the plaintiffs' steering committee in the multidistrict litigation arising from the crash of American Eagle Flight 3379. ###### Payments to Prescribers at Biogen Michael Bawduniak, a former Biogen employee, alleged a different route from a drug manufacturer's conduct to reimbursed prescriptions. His complaint said that Biogen paid physicians through speaker honoraria, speaker-training fees, consulting fees and meals to induce prescriptions of the multiple-sclerosis drugs Avonex, Tysabri and Tecfidera. Greene served as lead counsel for Bawduniak after the government declined to intervene. The private litigation continued for years as the team developed evidence about the physician programs and prescribing. In September 2022, days before trial, Biogen agreed to pay $900 million to resolve the allegations: about $843.8 million to the United States and $56.2 million to fifteen states. The federal government assigned Bawduniak approximately 29.6 percent of the federal proceeds. The settlement expressly resolved allegations without a determination of liability. ###### A Boston False Claims Act Practice Greene graduated cum laude from Boston College in 1974 and earned his law degree from Suffolk University Law School in 1977. He has practiced complex civil litigation for decades and has represented False Claims Act whistleblowers since 1992. He founded Greene LLP in Boston, where the firm takes on cases that may require private financing and years of discovery when the government does not intervene. He has lectured on off-label promotion and False Claims Act practice at Harvard Law School, Johns Hopkins, Boston College and Northwestern, and has spoken to congressional and professional audiences. His writing has addressed the use of civil RICO in pharmaceutical cases. Melody Petersen's Our Daily Meds discusses his work, and his cases have been covered by NPR and Dateline. Across the pharmaceutical matters, the proof differs with the alleged scheme. In Franklin, it included promotional instructions and the path from physicians' prescriptions to Medicaid claims. In Kaiser, marketing records were paired with evidence about prescribing and payment. In Biogen, the allegations centered on speaker and consulting arrangements with physicians. Greene's work has required connecting those records to the claims paid by public or private health plans. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner - **Organization:** Greene LLP - **Practice:** False Claims Act, Pharmaceutical Fraud - **Location:** Boston, Massachusetts ##### Contact Greene LLP Professional biography and contact --- ## 58. Pamela M. Pressley — `900005138` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `5d41d5be097e172cde03e7a8e6dbc0902e6b83d69b50eba4112e671224ce24f6` - **After/current hash:** `904772d1b3aae3ace2f7ce580b78e0cbba475f1f96711f65f3f1d761465edbfa` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005138/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **State Farm rate opening**: Replace the generic pre-claim thesis with Pressley's documented role in the February 2025 emergency-rate dispute and the actual actuarial proof demanded before approval. - `rewrite` — **Proposition 103 and appellate practice**: Preserve the prior-approval mechanics, actuarial subjects, career history and Garamendi/Poizner/Mercury work while removing ranking-derived praise and an unnecessary largest-penalty characterization. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **State Farm rate hearing**: Carry the original 2025 dispute through the March 2026 three-party settlement and July final order, stating the approved rates and refunds reached after the public hearing and discovery process. - `restructure` — **Wildfire claims-handling enforcement ending**: Separate the claims-handling enforcement case from the rate proceeding and end with the survivors' requested procedural rights and Pressley's exact source-verified statements. - `restructure` — **State Farm rate opening**: Replace the generic pre-claim thesis with Pressley's documented role in the February 2025 emergency-rate dispute and the actual actuarial proof demanded before approval. - `rewrite` — **Proposition 103 and appellate practice**: Preserve the prior-approval mechanics, actuarial subjects, career history and Garamendi/Poizner/Mercury work while removing ranking-derived praise and an unnecessary largest-penalty characterization. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **State Farm rate hearing**: Carry the original 2025 dispute through the March 2026 three-party settlement and July final order, stating the approved rates and refunds reached after the public hearing and discovery process. - `restructure` — **Wildfire claims-handling enforcement ending**: Separate the claims-handling enforcement case from the rate proceeding and end with the survivors' requested procedural rights and Pressley's exact source-verified statements. ### BEFORE #### Pamela M. Pressley Insurance Rates · Policyholder Protection > “The system is designed to prevent unjustified, panic-driven rate increases. ##### Before the Claim Exists Insurance-rate enforcement and policyholder policy — Senior Staff Attorney, Consumer Watchdog, Los Angeles. Pamela M. Pressley defends policyholders before any claim exists — before the fire, before the crash, before the letter of denial. She works in administrative hearings, regulatory appeals, and public-interest cases concerning insurance prices and underwriting rules. Under California’s Proposition 103, the voter initiative that subjected insurance rates to prior approval and opened the process to public participation, she tests whether proposed rates and market practices satisfy the law before insurers apply them to millions of household budgets. A UCLA sociology graduate with a law degree from Pepperdine, Pressley was admitted to the California bar in 1995. She worked as a consumer attorney with CALPIRG and as a staff attorney at the Center for Law in the Public Interest before joining Consumer Watchdog, the Los Angeles advocacy organization founded by Proposition 103’s author. She served as the group’s litigation director for fifteen years and remains its senior staff attorney. Her enforcement practice has spanned insurance commissioners of both parties and periods when Californians faced rising prices and reduced availability of coverage. ###### The Numbers and What They Govern Proposition 103 subjects many property, casualty, and automobile insurance rates to prior approval and permits consumer intervenors to examine the evidence insurers present. Pressley has spent decades working through actuarial assumptions, premium classifications, underwriting practices, and the materials on which regulators rely. A rate case may turn on projected losses, expense loads, investment income, catastrophe models, or whether a classification produces a charge the statute allows. The approved rates determine what policyholders must pay for coverage. In Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights v. Garamendi, Pressley helped establish the contours of the Insurance Commissioner's obligations under the initiative. In Association of California Insurance Companies v. Poizner, she helped preserve the rules against industry challenge. In Mercury Casualty Company v. Jones, the courts upheld the Commissioner's authority. Her appellate work helped hold Mercury Insurance to answer for premium practices that routed customers through supposedly independent brokers into higher effective prices, an enforcement history that culminated in a $27.5 million regulatory penalty against the insurer, among the largest in the Department of Insurance's history. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear Mercury’s challenge to the rate-regulation rules. ###### The Hard Market As wildfire risk and insurer withdrawals put California’s homeowners market under strain, Pressley scrutinizes requests for higher rates. She tests whether the requested price is supported, whether the catastrophe model is transparent enough to evaluate, whether classifications are lawful, and whether the promised availability of coverage will follow the premium increase. She represents the ratepaying public in proceedings involving insurers, regulators, and technical experts. After the January 2025 Los Angeles firestorms, State Farm sought an emergency rate increase. Pressley and Consumer Watchdog intervened, pressing the company to open its finances and justify the request under Proposition 103’s standards. When the Department of Insurance brought a formal enforcement action against State Farm in 2026 over its handling of Eaton and Palisades fire claims, seeking penalties and suspension of the company’s certificate of authority, Pressley sought a role for survivors in the proceeding. In June 2026 she petitioned for full party status on behalf of a network of fire survivors, seeking discovery rights, the power to present evidence and cross-examine witnesses, participation in settlement discussions, and hearings in Los Angeles County. “CDI’s enforcement case should not be resolved only between the regulator and State Farm,” she argued. “Survivors should be able to test the evidence.” ###### Keeping the Door Open Nearly four decades after voters passed Proposition 103, Pressley continues to examine actuarial filings, raise specific objections to proposed rates, and brief appeals over the Commissioner’s authority. Her work on the State Farm enforcement proceeding seeks to give fire survivors access to the evidence and a role in decisions about their claims. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Senior Staff Attorney - **Organization:** Consumer Watchdog - **Practice:** Insurance Rates, Policyholder Protection - **Location:** Los Angeles, California ##### Contact Consumer Watchdog Professional biography and contact ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Pamela M. Pressley Insurance Rates · Policyholder Protection > “The system is designed to prevent unjustified, panic-driven rate increases. ##### What State Farm Had to Prove Insurance-rate enforcement and policyholder policy — Senior Staff Attorney, Consumer Watchdog, Los Angeles. In February 2025, State Farm General asked California regulators for immediate interim increases of 22 percent on homeowners policies, 15 percent on renters and condominium coverage, and 38 percent on rental dwellings. Pamela M. Pressley joined Consumer Watchdog's challenge to the request. In a memorandum to the Insurance Commissioner and the parties, she, litigation director William Pletcher and staff actuary Ben Armstrong argued that the company had not supplied the data required to justify emergency approval. Pressley said State Farm was entitled to an increase only if actuarial data subject to public review demonstrated that one was necessary. Proposition 103 required the insurer to justify the rate before approval, even on an expedited timetable. Consumer Watchdog was willing to move quickly, she said, but the evidence had to be reviewed first. The matter moved into a formal public rate hearing. Consumer Watchdog participated as an intervenor, conducting discovery, presenting expert analysis and litigating evidentiary issues. Pressley appeared as counsel in the proceeding as State Farm, the Department of Insurance and Consumer Watchdog tested the company's financial condition and proposed rates. ###### Prior Approval and Public Participation California voters enacted Proposition 103 in 1988. The initiative subjects many property, casualty and automobile insurance rates to prior approval and gives consumers a route to intervene in rate proceedings. Pressley's work requires examining the actuarial assumptions behind proposed premiums: projected losses, expense loads, investment income, classifications and, increasingly, catastrophe models. She graduated from UCLA with a degree in sociology, earned her law degree at Pepperdine and was admitted to the California bar in 1995. Before Consumer Watchdog, she worked as a consumer attorney at CALPIRG and as a staff attorney at the Center for Law in the Public Interest. She later served for fifteen years as Consumer Watchdog's litigation director and now works there as senior staff attorney. Her appellate work has included Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights v. Garamendi, Association of California Insurance Companies v. Poizner and the Mercury Insurance litigation. Those cases addressed the Commissioner's obligations and authority under the voter-approved system. The Mercury enforcement history also included a $27.5 million regulatory penalty arising from premium practices involving supposedly independent brokers. The United States Supreme Court declined review of Mercury's challenge to the rate-regulation rules. ###### The State Farm Rate Hearing The 2025 interim-rate fight continued into the company's underlying rate applications. After public hearings, discovery disputes and settlement conferences, State Farm, the Department of Insurance and Consumer Watchdog reached an agreement in March 2026. The Commissioner gave final approval in July. The final order limited the homeowners increase to 17 percent and the renters increase to 15.65 percent. Condominium coverage was set at 5.8 percent and rental-dwelling coverage at 32.8 percent. Because interim rates for condominium and rental-dwelling policyholders had been higher, the agreement required refunds with 10 percent interest. It also included additional review and nonrenewal provisions. The final order followed the public hearing and discovery process in which Pressley had appeared as counsel. ###### Fire Survivors in the Enforcement Case A separate State Farm proceeding concerned the handling of claims from the January 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires. In 2026, the Department of Insurance brought an enforcement action after a market-conduct examination. Every Fire Survivor's Network asked to intervene, represented by Consumer Watchdog and Michelle Meyers of Singleton Schreiber. The survivors sought full party status: access to filings, discovery, the ability to present evidence and cross-examine witnesses, briefing and participation in settlement discussions. “CDI’s enforcement case should not be resolved only between the regulator and State Farm,” Pressley said. “Survivors should be able to test the evidence.” She also said they should be able to present their own evidence and be heard before any monetary penalty or other remedies were approved. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Senior Staff Attorney - **Organization:** Consumer Watchdog - **Practice:** Insurance Rates, Policyholder Protection - **Location:** Los Angeles, California ##### Contact Consumer Watchdog Professional biography and contact --- ## 59. John W. Houghtaling II — `900005137` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `f1c9b62fb4100f99473e50733e301bf4e3ba69f1e486fbf1df28efb1fb2e77ed` - **After/current hash:** `53307b41d01f5108df05467cd46d9b2c803ff010f9abeff2f1f056d061733026` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005137/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Sandy opening**: Move the altered engineering reports and document chain to the opening because they show Houghtaling’s policyholder method more concretely than the file-room origin. - `rewrite` — **Katrina and early career**: Preserve the file-room chronology, early plaintiff recoveries, Katrina docket and attorney-general role while connecting them to the wind/flood evidence Houghtaling later taught Sandy homeowners to preserve. - `rewrite` — **COVID coverage and ventures**: State the March 2020 filing and virus-exclusion drafting evidence precisely, preserve the existing hero quotation and retain the separate energy/corporate-fraud biographical facts without making a later court result the thesis. - `restructure` — **Current practice ending**: Replace the paper-infrastructure metaphor with the actual claim-management team and the records used before and during disputes. - `restructure` — **Sandy opening**: Move the altered engineering reports and document chain to the opening because they show Houghtaling’s policyholder method more concretely than the file-room origin. - `rewrite` — **Katrina and early career**: Preserve the file-room chronology, early plaintiff recoveries, Katrina docket and attorney-general role while connecting them to the wind/flood evidence Houghtaling later taught Sandy homeowners to preserve. - `rewrite` — **COVID coverage and ventures**: State the March 2020 filing and virus-exclusion drafting evidence precisely, preserve the existing hero quotation and retain the separate energy/corporate-fraud biographical facts without making a later court result the thesis. - `restructure` — **Current practice ending**: Replace the paper-infrastructure metaphor with the actual claim-management team and the records used before and during disputes. ### BEFORE #### John W. Houghtaling II Hurricane Insurance · Commercial Policyholders > “I didn’t make that up. That was out of the mouths of the insurance industry. ##### The File Room Hurricane property insurance and commercial policyholder recovery — Managing Partner, Gauthier, Murphy & Houghtaling, Metairie. John W. Houghtaling II’s legal career began in 1996 in the file room of Gauthier & Murphy, moving boxes for eight dollars an hour. Wendell Gauthier was a leading figure in the coalition of trial lawyers whose litigation helped produce the national tobacco settlement. Houghtaling became a law clerk in 1997, a lawyer in 1998, and the firm’s top-earning associate within his first year of practice. His early results included a $4.3 million marine wrongful-death settlement, a $6.25 million business-contract recovery, and multi-death fatality and drunk-driving cases resolved in the millions. He became the firm’s managing partner and majority owner. The practice has been associated with approximately $4.8 billion in verdicts and settlements since the tobacco era. After Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, Houghtaling handled roughly eight hundred property matters and helped obtain more than $75 million for policyholders. He also served as special counsel to Louisiana’s attorney general on the policyholder litigation that followed the flood. Each case required a building-by-building reconstruction of wind and flood damage, structural failure, emergency repair, business interruption, and claim decisions made while New Orleans struggled to reopen. For owners in Gentilly, Lakeview, and other neighborhoods, insurance payments helped finance rebuilding. ###### The Lineage of a Document After Superstorm Sandy in 2012, Houghtaling investigated engineering reports used to decide flood claims in New York and New Jersey. Reports that originally found structural storm damage were being altered by reviewers who had never seen the houses, then sent to homeowners as grounds for denial or reduced payment. Appointed plaintiffs’ liaison counsel by the federal court in the Eastern District of New York in 2014, he traced the reports from original inspection through revision to the final claim decision: who saw the damage, what the first report concluded, who changed it, and how the change affected payment. A 60 Minutes investigation covered the practice, and FEMA reopened review of well over one hundred thousand flood claims, leading to hundreds of millions of dollars in additional payments. His work on fraud in the flood program also contributed to enforcement actions, including a contractor’s arrest and a seven-figure federal penalty. Houghtaling was profiled on CNN’s Inside Man with Morgan Spurlock, appeared in PBS Frontline’s examination of disaster economics, and received business-press coverage of his policyholder work. In 2020 he endowed the American Policyholders Association to support insurance oversight beyond individual cases and storms. ###### The Pandemic Test On March 16, 2020, after COVID-19 closures interrupted restaurant operations, Houghtaling filed the nation’s first COVID-19 business-interruption lawsuit. He co-founded the Business Interruption Group with a client roster that included Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, Wolfgang Puck, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. The group pressed insurers publicly while the coverage question proceeded through the courts. Houghtaling argued that the industry’s own policy language had contemplated the interruption at issue. The campaign received coverage in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and network broadcasts. During the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, Houghtaling ran Ocean Therapy Solutions, the venture with actor Kevin Costner that supplied oil-separating centrifuge technology to BP under a $167 million contract. He later co-founded an ethane-export company whose multibillion-dollar supply agreements with China were signed in the presence of two heads of state. A corporate-fraud case he brought against a billionaire defendant inspired a Hollywood thriller. ###### Infrastructure Made of Paper Houghtaling now leads a practice managing billions of dollars in property and loss claims for major owners in the United States and abroad. The firm’s trial results include a $49 million personal-injury verdict in 2015. Its lawyers handle catastrophe, commercial-property, and bad-faith matters and coordinate engineers, accountants, and adjusters who document losses across clients’ properties before coverage disputes begin. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Managing Partner - **Organization:** Gauthier, Murphy & Houghtaling - **Practice:** Hurricane Insurance, Commercial Policyholders - **Location:** Metairie, Louisiana ##### Contact Gauthier, Murphy & Houghtaling Professional biography and contact ### AFTER / CURRENT #### John W. Houghtaling II Hurricane Insurance · Commercial Policyholders > “I didn’t make that up. That was out of the mouths of the insurance industry. ##### The Report That Changed Before Payment Hurricane property insurance and commercial policyholder recovery — Managing Partner, Gauthier, Murphy & Houghtaling, Metairie. After Superstorm Sandy, John W. Houghtaling II and other policyholder lawyers began comparing engineering reports used to decide flood claims with the field engineers' earlier work. In some cases, an initial report attributed structural damage to the storm; a later version changed the conclusion before the homeowner received it. Reviewers who had not inspected the property sometimes made those changes. Appointed plaintiffs' liaison counsel in the Eastern District of New York in 2014, Houghtaling worked through that chain of documents: the inspection, the first report, the peer review, the version sent to the carrier and the resulting payment decision. FEMA later told Congress that Sandy litigation had produced evidence of engineering companies pressuring field engineers, changing reports without their knowledge and sending altered reports under the original engineer's name. The agency reopened review of more than 100,000 flood claims; by 2017 the review process had resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in additional payments to policyholders. The engineering-report dispute reached 60 Minutes and Frontline, and Houghtaling’s career was profiled on CNN’s Inside Man. In 2020 he endowed the American Policyholders Association to support insurance oversight beyond individual lawsuits and storms. ###### From Katrina to the Flood Program Houghtaling had entered Gauthier & Murphy in 1996 by moving file boxes for eight dollars an hour. He became a law clerk in 1997, a lawyer in 1998 and, within his first year of practice, the firm's top-earning associate. His early matters included a $4.3 million marine wrongful-death settlement and a $6.25 million business-contract recovery. He later became managing partner and majority owner. Hurricane Katrina changed the concentration of his practice. He litigated roughly eight hundred storm-related matters, helped obtain more than $75 million for policyholders and served as special counsel to Louisiana's attorney general on post-Katrina policyholder litigation. The claims required separating wind from flood damage, documenting emergency repairs and business interruption, and reconstructing how a carrier had valued a damaged building while New Orleans was trying to reopen. That experience also shaped the advice he later gave Sandy homeowners: document the chronology of the damage, preserve the physical and engineering evidence, and make the carrier identify the basis for attributing a loss to an excluded cause. The claim file became the record through which the parties disputed what happened to the property and what the policy required. ###### The Virus Exclusion and the Policy Language On March 16, 2020, Houghtaling filed a declaratory-judgment action for New Orleans's Oceana Grill over business-interruption coverage during the COVID-19 shutdown. He later worked with restaurateurs including Thomas Keller and helped organize the Business Interruption Group. The litigation asked whether shutdown losses fell within all-risk property policies when a form did not contain a virus exclusion. At trial, Houghtaling relied in part on the history of a standard virus exclusion developed by the Insurance Services Office. He argued that insurance-industry representatives had previously told regulators that viral contamination could cause physical damage and sought approval of an exclusion for that risk. Discussing that evidence in 2022, he gave the statement preserved above: “I didn’t make that up. That was out of the mouths of the insurance industry.” Outside the insurance practice, Houghtaling has also worked on large energy and infrastructure ventures. During the Deepwater Horizon spill he ran Ocean Therapy Solutions with Kevin Costner, which supplied BP with oil-separating centrifuge technology under a $167 million contract. He later co-founded an ethane-export company involved in multibillion-dollar supply agreements with China that were signed in the presence of two heads of state, and a corporate-fraud case he brought against a billionaire defendant later inspired a feature film. ###### Building the Claim Before the Dispute Houghtaling now leads a property-insurance practice representing individual homeowners, commercial owners, real-estate investment trusts and property-management groups in the United States and abroad. The firm handles catastrophe, commercial-property and bad-faith matters; one of its trial results was a $49 million personal-injury verdict in 2015. Its claim-management work begins before litigation. Engineers document physical damage, accountants develop business-interruption figures, adjusters prepare proofs of loss and lawyers track policy conditions and payment deadlines. Houghtaling's current practice uses that assembled record to press for payment or, when the claim becomes disputed, to show how the insurer's decision departed from the evidence already in the file. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Managing Partner - **Organization:** Gauthier, Murphy & Houghtaling - **Practice:** Hurricane Insurance, Commercial Policyholders - **Location:** Metairie, Louisiana ##### Contact Gauthier, Murphy & Houghtaling Professional biography and contact --- ## 60. Amanda L. Riddle — `900005136` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `4845d5c91206d613f1e56227a25ad0f6e8ead4725c31e3257c64f2ef7bc152b3` - **After/current hash:** `2cbdb10498649773376fcc72fa6d481a6097e0b7658d0b118050c356ec5e260c` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005136/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Eaton opening**: Open with the March 17, 2025 court appointment and the actual coordination responsibilities among more than one hundred firms, then place the client-scale discussion behind the live procedural role. - `rewrite` — **Individual loss proof**: Consolidate repeated scale/exactness explanations into one account of claimant records, loss categories, experts, mediation and communication. - `restructure` — **San Bruno, Butte and Fire Victim Trust**: Use the earlier liaison appointments and PG&E bankruptcy work as the documented professional history behind the Eaton assignment, preserving education, oversight and firm leadership facts. - `correct` — **August 2026 Eaton cause finding**: Replace the broad electrical-event description with the official conclusion that electrical arcing events occurred on an out-of-service SCE tower, and distinguish cause from the civil-liability questions still before the court. - `restructure` — **Eaton opening**: Open with the March 17, 2025 court appointment and the actual coordination responsibilities among more than one hundred firms, then place the client-scale discussion behind the live procedural role. - `rewrite` — **Individual loss proof**: Consolidate repeated scale/exactness explanations into one account of claimant records, loss categories, experts, mediation and communication. - `restructure` — **San Bruno, Butte and Fire Victim Trust**: Use the earlier liaison appointments and PG&E bankruptcy work as the documented professional history behind the Eaton assignment, preserving education, oversight and firm leadership facts. - `correct` — **August 2026 Eaton cause finding**: Replace the broad electrical-event description with the official conclusion that electrical arcing events occurred on an out-of-service SCE tower, and distinguish cause from the civil-liability questions still before the court. ### BEFORE #### Amanda L. Riddle Wildfire · Explosion · Disaster Recovery > “The devastation is terrible, and it didn’t have to be this way. ##### Six Thousand Different Losses Wildfire, explosion, and disaster-recovery plaintiffs — Managing Partner, Corey, Luzaich, de Ghetaldi & Riddle, Millbrae. Amanda L. Riddle has represented more than six thousand people harmed by wildfires, explosions, and utility failures. A single disaster may leave one family without a home, another without a business, another without a loved one, another facing years of medical injury or a property that will never regain its value. For two decades, her work has combined common proof of utility liability with an individual accounting of each family’s losses. Riddle attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, and then the University of San Francisco School of Law, where she won the Edward J. McFetridge Award for trial advocacy a year before her 2001 graduation. She joined a Millbrae firm with deep Peninsula roots and rose to managing partner, running the business of the firm while handling its litigation. In 2010, a PG&E gas transmission pipeline exploded beneath San Bruno, a few miles from her office, killing residents and leveling a neighborhood. Riddle served as plaintiffs’ co-liaison counsel, coordinating communication among injured families, dozens of law firms, and the court. ###### The Machinery Behind the Numbers The Butte Fire came in 2015, and again she served as co-liaison counsel. The 2017 North Bay fires and the 2018 Camp Fire together drove PG&E into bankruptcy. Riddle was part of the plaintiffs’ team that negotiated the $13.5 billion settlement establishing the Fire Victim Trust, and she has since served on the nine-member oversight committee supervising the years-long distribution of that fund to tens of thousands of survivors. Her disaster-litigation teams have secured more than $1.5 billion for their own clients. Riddle coordinates claimant records assembled family by family, loss categories that distinguish rebuilding costs from lost income and temporary displacement from permanent injury, and expert evidence on ignition and spread. She also organizes mediation and maintains reliable communication with clients scattered by evacuation. ###### Altadena In January 2025, the Eaton Fire tore out of the San Gabriel foothills and devastated Altadena. In the first case management order, issued that March, the Los Angeles Superior Court appointed Riddle one of three liaison counsel for the individual plaintiffs — the coordinating link between the court and the more than one hundred law firms representing fire survivors in the litigation against Southern California Edison. For the work she joined forces with Gibbs Mura in a consortium, Corey Gibbs Fire Lawyers, pairing her disaster-litigation experience with a firm long practiced in complex consumer cases; together they represent thousands of Altadena households and businesses. In August 2026, CAL FIRE and the Los Angeles County Fire Department concluded that the Eaton Fire was sparked by an electrical event at Edison’s transmission towers. “Edison prioritized profits over safety,” she said, “and we are committed to helping survivors pursue their legal rights and hold Edison accountable.” Her stated aim is to resolve all cases swiftly and favorably so that Altadena can move forward. Preserving physical evidence and collecting ignition and utility data early create the record for later claimants. Liaison counsel must also coordinate cases and establish how residents can participate across multiple proceedings. ###### Scale and Exactness Riddle received her firm’s George R. Corey Trial Lawyer of the Year Award in 2022 and serves on the board of the Consumer Attorneys of California, where she also sat a decade earlier. She also manages the firm and handles business and employment litigation. Her work in San Bruno, the Butte Fire, Wine Country, Paradise, and Altadena has required coordinating thousands of claims while documenting the losses of each client. Rebuilding costs, lost income, temporary displacement, permanent injury, property damage, and wrongful death require different evidence and measures of compensation. Some expenses arise immediately; other losses continue for years. Each claim needs an individual valuation, and the review has to move quickly enough to deliver compensation to displaced families. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Managing Partner - **Organization:** Corey, Luzaich, de Ghetaldi & Riddle - **Practice:** Wildfire, Explosion, Disaster Recovery - **Location:** Millbrae, California ##### Contact Corey, Luzaich, de Ghetaldi & Riddle Professional biography and contact ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Amanda L. Riddle Wildfire · Explosion · Disaster Recovery > “The devastation is terrible, and it didn’t have to be this way. ##### Coordinating the Eaton Fire Cases Wildfire, explosion, and disaster-recovery plaintiffs — Managing Partner, Corey, Luzaich, de Ghetaldi & Riddle, Millbrae. In the first case-management order on March 17, 2025, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Laura Seigle appointed Amanda L. Riddle one of three liaison counsel for the individual plaintiffs in the Eaton Fire litigation. More than one hundred law firms were representing fire survivors. The liaison lawyers became the point of coordination between those firms, the court and the other parties while the cases moved on a common schedule. Riddle had held similar positions before. In Eaton, the early work included organizing how individual plaintiffs would participate, preserving physical evidence and collecting ignition and utility records for the common case. Her role did not replace each family's lawyer or damages claim. The court's liaison procedures gave the separate cases a shared calendar and channel for communication. She joined Gibbs Mura in the Corey Gibbs Fire Lawyers consortium, representing households and businesses in Altadena. Riddle said the aim was to resolve the cases swiftly enough for the community to move forward while pursuing Southern California Edison for the losses the plaintiffs attributed to its equipment. ###### The Loss Behind Each Claim Riddle has represented more than six thousand people harmed by utility-caused wildfires and explosions. Recoveries for those clients have exceeded $1.5 billion. Those recoveries still required different records for different losses: rebuilding a home, replacing a business, lost income, temporary displacement, permanent injury, damaged property or a wrongful death. Her teams assemble those records family by family while experts address the common questions of ignition, spread and utility conduct. Mediation must account for the differences among claims, and client communication has to continue even after evacuation has scattered people across different cities and states. The same litigation therefore requires a shared liability record and separate proof of what each client lost. ###### From San Bruno to the Fire Victim Trust Riddle attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, and graduated from the University of San Francisco School of Law in 2001. She received the Edward J. McFetridge Award for trial advocacy the year before graduation and later became managing partner of her Millbrae firm. In 2010, when a PG&E gas transmission pipeline exploded beneath San Bruno a few miles from her office, killing residents and leveling a neighborhood, Riddle served as plaintiffs' co-liaison counsel. She again served as co-liaison counsel after the 2015 Butte Fire. The 2017 North Bay fires and the 2018 Camp Fire led into PG&E's bankruptcy, where Riddle was part of the plaintiffs' team that negotiated the $13.5 billion settlement establishing the Fire Victim Trust. She remains one of nine members of the Trust Oversight Committee, which represents fire claimants' interests as the fund is administered. That work extends past settlement into claim evaluation and distribution for tens of thousands of survivors. Riddle also serves on the board of the Consumer Attorneys of California, where she had served a decade earlier, received her firm's George R. Corey Trial Lawyer of the Year Award in 2022, manages the firm and handles business and employment litigation. ###### The August 2026 Cause Finding On August 4, 2026, the Los Angeles County Fire Department released the results of its investigation conducted jointly with CAL FIRE. After eighteen months of review, investigators concluded that the Eaton Fire was caused by electrical arcing events on an out-of-service Southern California Edison transmission tower. The official cause finding established what ignited the fire; the civil litigation still had to address the legal responsibility and individual losses asserted by the plaintiffs. “Edison prioritized profits over safety,” Riddle said, “and we are committed to helping survivors pursue their legal rights and hold Edison accountable.” The statement reflected the plaintiffs' position, not a completed liability judgment. Her liaison work continued to require coordination of the common case while each household or business developed the evidence supporting its own claim. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Managing Partner - **Organization:** Corey, Luzaich, de Ghetaldi & Riddle - **Practice:** Wildfire, Explosion, Disaster Recovery - **Location:** Millbrae, California ##### Contact Corey, Luzaich, de Ghetaldi & Riddle Professional biography and contact --- ## 61. Frank M. Pitre — `900005135` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `59e9b59ca786ff64d73a793be6fad5d0294b8e87eb5aa2940f7c8567e84912f5` - **After/current hash:** `3f64160bb0705e0d0294df14379dbb9621485701d4b84e7e3db7a020a1c44c57` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005135/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **San Bruno opening**: Replace the generalized single-ignition thesis with Pitre’s documented forty-deposition San Bruno investigation and his own explanation of trial-driven discovery. - `correct` — **PG&E bankruptcy and D&O settlement**: Preserve the $13.5 billion trust, TOC role and $117 million D&O result while correcting how the latter proceeds were used under the bankruptcy plan. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Maui settlement process**: Update the existing Maui steering-committee matter through class/individual settlement approval, lien-resolution procedures and remaining insurer-subrogation appeals. - `correct` — **Toyota economic-loss result**: Preserve Pitre’s co-lead role and major Toyota settlement while replacing a disputed aggregate value with court-described cash and noncash benefits. - `restructure` — **Trial practice and ending**: Preserve the aviation, pharmaceutical, automotive, individual-verdict, teaching and professional-service record and end on Pitre’s documented discovery judgment as applied to settlement administration. ### BEFORE #### Frank M. Pitre Wildfire · Utility Disasters · Community Recovery > “Because your clients are people who need prompt resolution. They are hurting … they may have lost everything they owned. ##### One Ignition, Thousands of Endings Wildfire, utility-disaster, and community-recovery litigation — Partner, Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, Burlingame. A wildfire has one ignition and thousands of endings. Frank M. Pitre represents people facing death, bodily injury, displacement, destroyed homes, interrupted businesses, contaminated land, and the unraveling of an entire community. He reconstructs how the disaster occurred while documenting what each family lost, combining common proof of utility liability with an individual accounting of the harm. Pitre earned his business degree cum laude from the University of San Francisco and stayed for its law school, then served a legal externship at the California Supreme Court before beginning a trial career that has now produced more than a hundred jury and bench trials and arbitrations taken to verdict. As early as 1987 he was on the plaintiffs’ steering committee and co-lead trial counsel in the litigation over the crash of PSA Flight 1771, coordinating common proof of the crash’s cause and compensation for individual losses. The individual verdicts came alongside the mass cases: a $17.4 million wrongful-death verdict in Mazurek v. American Medical Response, then the largest in San Diego County’s history, and a $45 million verdict for a frozen-out minority shareholder in a family timber business. ###### San Bruno to Paradise In 2010, a Pacific Gas & Electric gas transmission pipeline exploded beneath a San Bruno neighborhood. Pitre served as co-lead counsel for the victims, investigating failures of pipeline integrity and corporate safety. The related shareholder derivative litigation he co-led produced a $90 million settlement. His work included reconstructing the event minute by minute, tracing what the company knew about its own equipment, and identifying the maintenance and risk decisions made before the failure. After the 2017 North Bay fires and the 2018 Camp Fire, which erased the town of Paradise, Pitre served as co-lead counsel for the victims in litigation that collided with the largest utility bankruptcy in American history. When PG&E entered Chapter 11, counsel had to address liability and loss valuation within a claims process that also required corporate reorganization and long-term trust administration. Pitre sat on the Tort Claimants’ Committee as the case produced a $13.5 billion settlement structure for fire victims, then served on the Fire Victim Trust’s oversight body during the distribution of the fund. He also helped obtain a $117 million settlement from PG&E’s former directors and officers for the benefit of fire victims, adding a corporate-governance recovery to the principal fund. He is an active member of the plaintiffs’ steering committee in the litigation arising from the 2023 Maui fires, representing hundreds of individuals and businesses against Hawaiian Electric and other defendants. His committee work also spans the Thomas and Woolsey fire cases and the Porter Ranch gas-leak litigation, where his firm represented more than a thousand residents driven from their homes by a single failed well. ###### The Range Behind the Fires Pitre served on the plaintiffs’ executive committee prosecuting cases for the families of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 against Boeing after the 737 MAX crashes, and was liaison counsel for the plaintiffs after the crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 in San Francisco. He co-led the economic-loss class in the Toyota unintended-acceleration litigation, which resolved for $1.5 billion, was co-lead trial counsel in the Pfizer Bextra and Celebrex litigation, which settled for $894 million, and held committee appointments in the Volkswagen diesel-emissions and General Motors ignition-switch cases. In community-disaster cases, his work brings together business-loss calculations, medical evidence of burns and smoke exposure, the valuation of destroyed homes, and corporate records documenting risk decisions. He is a past president of the Consumer Attorneys of California and of Cal-ABOTA, a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and the International Academy of Trial Lawyers, and the author of California Personal Injury Proof, a practice guide he has updated annually for the state’s bar since 1998. He teaches trial advocacy at his alma mater and through ABOTA’s Masters in Trial programs. In 2026, he was inducted into the California Lawyers Association’s Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame. ###### The Speed of Recovery Clients who have lost their homes are living in trailers and spare bedrooms; businesses that survived the flames face continuing losses during the interruption. Families must decide whether to rebuild or move away while the litigation runs. Pitre’s work over forty years includes assembling evidence for trial, developing settlement structures that can process thousands of claims, and overseeing the distribution of compensation. In disaster cases, those tasks must proceed quickly enough for displaced families to use the recovery to rebuild their homes, businesses, and communities. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner - **Organization:** Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy - **Practice:** Wildfire, Utility Disasters, Community Recovery - **Location:** Burlingame, California ##### Contact Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy Professional biography and contact ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Frank M. Pitre Wildfire · Utility Disasters · Community Recovery > “Because your clients are people who need prompt resolution. They are hurting … they may have lost everything they owned. ##### Forty Depositions in San Bruno Wildfire, utility-disaster, and community-recovery litigation — Partner, Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, Burlingame. Frank M. Pitre grew up near San Bruno, and after a PG&E gas transmission line exploded beneath the city in 2010 he became co-lead counsel for victims. Over the next three years, he took roughly forty depositions, from the company's chief executive down to workers familiar with the pipe and its maintenance history. He later described that work as an education in how the utility evaluated risk and made safety decisions. The exercise also reflected a lesson Pitre says he learned from trying cases: discovery should be built around the evidence that will actually matter at trial. Rather than treating every deposition as an end in itself, he worked backward from the disputed issues—what happened, what the company knew, what decisions followed and which witnesses or records could establish each point. The San Bruno litigation paired personal-injury and wrongful-death claims with scrutiny of corporate governance. A related shareholder derivative case Pitre co-led resolved for $90 million. The same inquiry into risk decisions later became important in wildfire cases involving PG&E. ###### PG&E's Bankruptcy and the Fire Victim Trust After the 2017 North Bay fires and the 2018 Camp Fire, Pitre served as co-lead counsel for fire victims as PG&E entered Chapter 11. Once the utility was in bankruptcy, liability and loss valuation had to be addressed within a reorganization that would determine how tort claims were funded alongside the company's other obligations. Pitre served on the Tort Claimants' Committee as the bankruptcy produced a $13.5 billion settlement structure for wildfire victims. He later served on the Fire Victim Trust's oversight body during administration of the fund. As lead counsel for the Trust in a related directors-and-officers case, he also helped obtain a $117 million insurance-funded settlement. Under the bankruptcy plan, those proceeds were used largely to satisfy outstanding federal-agency fire claims, clearing obligations of the Trust rather than becoming direct individual payments to fire victims. Pitre has explained that disaster clients may be living elsewhere, rebuilding businesses or deciding whether they can return home at all. The statement preserved above reflects that concern: they need prompt resolution because many have lost the property and routines on which ordinary life depended. For those clients, the timing of a recovery affects what the recovery can still accomplish. ###### Maui's Settlement Process Pitre is also a member of the plaintiffs' steering committee in the litigation arising from the 2023 Maui fires, where his firm represents individuals and businesses. He and lawyers from other firms helped negotiate a global settlement announced in 2024 at approximately $4.037 billion for individual and class claims arising from the fires. By 2026, the Maui Circuit Court had granted final approval to the class settlement and approved the individual settlement framework. A court-approved lien-resolution process was also in place for insurance liens against individual recoveries. Appeals involving insurers' separate subrogation claims remained relevant to full implementation, so the settlement process had moved from negotiation into administration without ending every related dispute. Pitre's utility-disaster docket also includes the Thomas and Woolsey fires and the Porter Ranch gas-leak litigation, where his firm represented more than a thousand residents. Those matters required proof of property loss, business interruption, medical injury and the corporate decisions preceding the event. ###### The Trial Practice Behind the Disaster Cases Pitre earned his business degree cum laude from the University of San Francisco, stayed for law school and served a legal externship at the California Supreme Court. He has taken more than one hundred jury and bench trials and arbitrations to verdict or decision. In 1987, he was on the plaintiffs' steering committee and served as co-lead trial counsel in the litigation over the crash of PSA Flight 1771. His individual results have included a $17.4 million wrongful-death verdict in Mazurek v. American Medical Response and a $45 million verdict for a minority shareholder in a family timber business. In mass litigation, he has served on the plaintiffs' executive committee in the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 cases, acted as liaison counsel after the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash, co-led the Toyota unintended-acceleration economic-loss class whose settlement included $500 million in cash plus vehicle-safety and customer-support benefits, and served as co-lead trial counsel in the Pfizer Bextra and Celebrex litigation that resolved for $894 million. He has also held committee appointments in the Volkswagen diesel-emissions and General Motors ignition-switch cases. Pitre is a past president of the Consumer Attorneys of California and Cal-ABOTA, a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and the International Academy of Trial Lawyers, and the author of California Personal Injury Proof, which he has updated annually since 1998. He teaches trial advocacy at the University of San Francisco and through ABOTA's Masters in Trial programs, and in 2026 was inducted into the California Lawyers Association's Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame. Pitre has said courtroom experience helps him identify the real disputed issues and collect the evidence needed to prove them without wasting time. In a disaster case, the same judgment extends beyond discovery: common proof has to be translated into a settlement and claims process capable of delivering individual recoveries while displaced clients can still use them to rebuild. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner - **Organization:** Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy - **Practice:** Wildfire, Utility Disasters, Community Recovery - **Location:** Burlingame, California ##### Contact Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy Professional biography and contact --- ## 62. William F. “Chip” Merlin Jr. — `900005134` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **LOW** — Recent manifest reads primarily as stylistic/structural editing; expert should compare before/after closely. - **Before hash:** `e6c59b34c1553c3762863a4fbbe5ec6d5c17a988854f182091ddada431cf420a` - **After/current hash:** `eaf7c4d4555d0bf08ac522ad0679489ea4d6c351f3d0dcf0778e9cefb1034e56` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005134/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Career-turning-point opening**: Replace the generalized catastrophe-evidence opening with Merlin’s documented decision to leave property-insurance defense and build a policyholder practice. - `rewrite` — **Andrew, Katrina and Sandy**: Preserve the storm chronology, coordinated State Farm cases, Mississippi admission/offices, Port claim and Sandy representation while removing press nicknames. - `rewrite` — **Evidence and coverage practice**: Consolidate physical-evidence preservation, core policy provisions and bad-faith trial work into the actual claim-development sequence. - `restructure` — **Public education and ending**: Preserve blog, Pay Up!, United Policyholders, AAJ, FAPIA, media, seminars and adjuster training; retain the marathon record as biography without using it as a career metaphor. - `restructure` — **Career-turning-point opening**: Replace the generalized catastrophe-evidence opening with Merlin’s documented decision to leave property-insurance defense and build a policyholder practice. - `rewrite` — **Andrew, Katrina and Sandy**: Preserve the storm chronology, coordinated State Farm cases, Mississippi admission/offices, Port claim and Sandy representation while removing press nicknames. - `rewrite` — **Evidence and coverage practice**: Consolidate physical-evidence preservation, core policy provisions and bad-faith trial work into the actual claim-development sequence. - `restructure` — **Public education and ending**: Preserve blog, Pay Up!, United Policyholders, AAJ, FAPIA, media, seminars and adjuster training; retain the marathon record as biography without using it as a career metaphor. ### BEFORE #### William F. “Chip” Merlin Jr. Property Insurance · Policyholder Recovery > “There was no one on the policyholder side doing this on a regular basis. ##### The First Unstable Interval Catastrophe property insurance and policyholder recovery — Founder and President, Merlin Law Group, Tampa. Catastrophe destroys evidence almost as quickly as it destroys property. Wind, fire, and flood are followed within days by emergency demolition, tarping, gutting, cleanup crews, and a procession of adjusters and engineers, each pass altering the loss site before the coverage dispute has even begun. Chip Merlin’s firm works to reach the property early, preserving photographs, materials, contents inventories, and engineering observations. His lawyers also help policyholders meet their obligations under the insurance contract so that they can pursue the coverage needed to rebuild a home or business. Merlin graduated from the University of Florida’s law school in 1982 and founded his Tampa firm in 1985. He concentrated on representing homeowners and business owners who believed their property-insurance claims had been underpaid, developing policy expertise on the policyholder side. His national firm now handles first-party property coverage exclusively, with lawyers collectively licensed in twenty-five states and offices in regions prone to catastrophes. ###### From Andrew to Katrina Merlin represented victims of Hurricane Andrew for years after its 1992 landfall; the last of those settlements was resolved in 2000. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, his firm resolved 103 State Farm claims in one coordinated effort and joined a separate group settlement covering twenty-two more cases. The lawyers developed evidence of common engineering disputes, catastrophe conditions, policy language, and claim-handling patterns across the group, while documenting each owner’s structure, contents, business interruption, and policy limits individually. After Katrina, Merlin sat for the Mississippi bar examination at mid-career, decades out of law school — the oldest applicant in the room, by his own account. He opened offices in Bay St. Louis and Gulfport to work near his clients. He represented the Port of New Orleans in a $150 million claim against its insurer over coverage for the region’s commercial infrastructure. When Superstorm Sandy struck the Northeast in 2012, Merlin represented twenty-three municipalities along with hundreds of individual policyholders. The New Jersey press called him the “Babe Ruth of hurricane lawyers”; the Tampa Bay Times called him “the master of disaster.” ###### The Grammar of a Property Claim Merlin’s coverage disputes involve causation, anti-concurrent-cause language, replacement-cost conditions, code-upgrade coverage, matching of undamaged materials, appraisal clauses, proof-of-loss deadlines, and the contested line between wind and flood. Those provisions determine what an insurer must pay and what the owner must do to recover. Through four decades of litigation, he has pressed courts to enforce the coverage policyholders purchased. His firm also brings bad-faith claims over delay, low offers, and repeated document requests that cause further loss. Its lawyers won a $1.4 million bad-faith jury verdict in 2023. With offices in catastrophe-prone regions, Merlin Law Group can move lawyers, experts, and claim operations into a disaster zone while the evidence is still changing. Photographs and engineering observations collected before a building is gutted preserve details that may be unavailable by the time the parties dispute coverage. ###### Writing the Field into Existence Merlin’s long-running Property Insurance Coverage Law Blog provides policyholders, public adjusters, and lawyers on both sides of the industry with nearly daily accounts of coverage decisions, claim-handling practices, and catastrophe response. In 2020 he published “Pay Up!,” a guide for laypeople to protecting their insurance claims. He serves on the board of directors of United Policyholders, the national nonprofit that guides disaster survivors through recovery, and is a past chair of the American Association for Justice’s Insurance Bad Faith Litigation Group. The Florida Association of Public Adjusters gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award. In cable-news appearances after major storms, he explains what a policyholder is owed and how the policy’s terms work. Merlin also gives seminars and trains public adjusters. His teaching addresses the difference in experience between insurers that handle claims repeatedly and homeowners confronting a property loss for the first time, explaining the policy requirements and claim practices those owners must navigate. ###### The Long Run Merlin is a marathoner, with twenty-six races over the years, including eight runnings of Boston. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founder and President - **Organization:** Merlin Law Group - **Practice:** Property Insurance, Policyholder Recovery - **Location:** Tampa, Florida ##### Contact Merlin Law Group Professional biography and contact ### AFTER / CURRENT #### William F. “Chip” Merlin Jr. Property Insurance · Policyholder Recovery > “There was no one on the policyholder side doing this on a regular basis. ##### Leaving the Insurer Side Catastrophe property insurance and policyholder recovery — Founder and President, Merlin Law Group, Tampa. Chip Merlin began his career at a law firm that did only property-insurance defense. The work gave him repeated exposure to claims, policies and carrier strategy, but he later said it also showed him an imbalance: insurance companies had lawyers doing this work every day, while he saw no comparable specialist regularly representing policyholders. “Switching over made sense to me,” he recalled. In 1985 he opened his own Tampa practice on the policyholder side. His reason was the asymmetry he had seen firsthand: carriers had specialists with daily claim experience, while homeowners and business owners often encountered policy conditions, proof requirements and engineering disputes only after a loss. Merlin Law Group has represented policyholders since, and its current practice is devoted to first-party property claims and bad-faith disputes for homeowners, businesses and public entities. ###### Andrew, Katrina and Sandy Merlin represented Hurricane Andrew policyholders after the 1992 storm, and his last Andrew settlement did not resolve until 2000. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, his firm resolved 103 State Farm claims in a coordinated settlement and later settled twenty-two more. Documents and testimony developed in the earlier cases informed later negotiations, while each policyholder still had a separate property, contents and coverage record. Katrina also took Merlin physically closer to the claims. In 2006, decades after law school, he sat for the Mississippi bar examination and later recalled being the oldest applicant in the room. His firm opened offices in Bay St. Louis and Gulfport. He also represented the Port of New Orleans in a $150 million insurance claim over Katrina damage to commercial infrastructure. When Superstorm Sandy struck in 2012, Merlin represented twenty-three municipalities and hundreds of individual policyholders. The work again joined common questions—storm conditions, engineering, policy language and carrier practices—with the proof unique to each building or owner. ###### What Has to Be Preserved Merlin's firm often enters a catastrophe zone before a coverage lawsuit exists. Emergency demolition, tarping, gutting and cleanup can change the physical evidence quickly. Photographs, damaged materials, contents records and engineering observations taken early may later help establish what caused the loss and what repairs were necessary. The policy creates a second record. Property disputes can turn on causation, anti-concurrent-cause clauses, replacement-cost conditions, code-upgrade coverage, matching, appraisal provisions, proof-of-loss deadlines and the line between wind and flood. Policyholders also have duties after a loss, and meeting those requirements can determine whether an otherwise covered claim is paid. When the dispute concerns claim handling rather than only the amount of covered damage, the firm also brings bad-faith cases. In 2023, a Merlin Law Group trial team obtained a verdict of about $1.4 million in a case centered on delay and the withholding of an engineering report. Merlin wrote afterward that taking such cases to trial develops the experience needed to challenge wrongful claim practices. ###### Teaching the Claims Process Merlin has turned much of that specialist knowledge outward. His Property Insurance Coverage Law Blog tracks coverage decisions, claim practices and catastrophe response for policyholders, public adjusters and lawyers. In 2020, he published “Pay Up!,” subtitled Preventing A Disaster With Your Own Insurance Company, a 192-page guide for policyholders dealing with claims. He serves on the board of United Policyholders and is a past chair of the American Association for Justice's Insurance Bad Faith Litigation Group. The Florida Association of Public Adjusters gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award, and he has explained policyholder rights in cable-news appearances after major storms. He also teaches at seminars and trains public adjusters, explaining policy requirements and the claim practices that owners encounter after a loss. The work addresses the same imbalance that led him to change sides early in his career: the repeat player already knows the process, while the policyholder usually has to learn it in the middle of a disaster. Merlin graduated from the University of Florida College of Law in 1982. Outside the practice, he has run twenty-six marathons, including eight Boston Marathons. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founder and President - **Organization:** Merlin Law Group - **Practice:** Property Insurance, Policyholder Recovery - **Location:** Tampa, Florida ##### Contact Merlin Law Group Professional biography and contact --- ## 63. Andrew N. Friedman — `900005133` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `6b65d6377ab53e5f8711910fabf213ad3cc9f7211af1d9973586f58b35024d81` - **After/current hash:** `0e50a1fea753e41ad253d166bcccf4b1d1ced137cb200dcf1f519b5cd7229036` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005272 (2026-09-09 02:26:49 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Opening and career foundation**: Replace generalized remedy language with Friedman's consumer-side evidence method while preserving his four-decade practice, education, USPTO origin, 1985 class-action entry and Cohen Milstein leadership history. - `correct` — **Anthem, Equifax and MGM breach matters**: Preserve the existing breach results while making the relief descriptions more precise and updating MGM through the June 18, 2025 final approval of the $45 million global settlement. - `correct` — **Marriott data-breach litigation**: Replace the stale statement that Marriott simply remained a pending certified class case with the Fourth Circuit's June 3, 2025 reversal of recertification and the MDL's continued pending status in August 2026. - `correct` — **DZ Reserve v. Meta Platforms**: Replace the vague January 2025 certiorari reference with the Ninth Circuit certification ruling, certiorari denial, vacated trial, December 2025 arbitration-waiver decision, stay and April 2026 appellate briefing status. - `rewrite` — **Product cases and evidentiary method**: Preserve Symantec, Facebook, Apple and Caterpillar results while replacing generalized summary language with the concrete comparison between representations, product performance and common proof. - `restructure` — **Final section and conclusion**: Replace the repetitive Compass Setting recap with a section about expert coordination, common proof, appellate defense and continuity through procedural changes, then close on Friedman's consumer-side role since 1985. - `restructure` — **Anthem opening and career formation**: Replace the abstract technology thesis with the actual discovery record, damage theories and remedy structure Friedman developed as co-lead counsel, while preserving his education and class-action career chronology. - `rewrite` — **Equifax and MGM**: Preserve the original consumer-benefit figures and leadership roles while making the distinction between monetary relief and security changes concrete. - `correct` — **DZ Reserve v. Meta Platforms**: Update the certified advertiser case through the December 2025 arbitration denial, resulting stay and 2026 Ninth Circuit appeal while preserving the earlier certification and Supreme Court history. - `correct` — **Marriott-Starwood litigation**: Replace the stale generic pending-case description with the June 2025 Fourth Circuit class-waiver ruling and its precise procedural scope. - `restructure` — **Product and advertising cases and ending**: Preserve Khoday, LLE One, Apple and Caterpillar with their separate roles and results, ending on the common evidentiary comparison between representation and actual performance. ### BEFORE #### Andrew N. Friedman Privacy · Data Breach · Consumer Protection > “Our mission and focus has always been first and foremost to help consumers. ##### Closing the Distance Privacy, data breach, digital advertising, and consumer class actions — Of Counsel and immediate past co-chair of Consumer Protection, Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, Washington, D.C. Andrew N. Friedman has spent four decades pursuing consumer remedies for harm caused by technology, from distorted advertising metrics to catastrophic breaches of identity data. He investigates the company practices that harmed a group of consumers, develops evidence that can prove their claims together, and seeks both compensation for past losses and changes to prevent further injury. Friedman graduated magna cum laude from Tufts before earning his J.D. at George Washington University Law School in 1983. He began his legal career as an attorney at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. By 1985 he had entered class action practice, and at Cohen Milstein he rose to co-chair the firm’s Consumer Protection practice. Now Of Counsel and the practice’s immediate past co-chair, he continues to handle the firm’s technology cases. ###### The Anatomy of a Breach Settlement When hackers penetrated Anthem, the nation’s second-largest health insurer, they took personal information belonging to 78.8 million people — names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, the raw material of identity theft. Friedman was court-appointed co-lead plaintiffs’ counsel, and the $115 million settlement he helped obtain was, at the time, the largest data-breach settlement in American history. The settlement also provided identity-protection benefits, out-of-pocket reimbursement, and mandatory cybersecurity commitments requiring the company to change how it guarded the data. The 2017 Equifax breach affected nearly half the country. Friedman served on the plaintiffs’ steering committee and co-chaired the expert committee in the consolidated case against the credit bureau. The resolution provided up to $425 million in monetary and injunctive consumer benefits and required approximately $1 billion in security and technology upgrades. He also served as co-lead class counsel in the MGM Resorts data-breach litigation, resolved in 2025 with a $45 million settlement. He serves as co-lead plaintiffs’ counsel in the pending Marriott litigation, arising from one of the largest hospitality breaches ever disclosed: an intrusion that sat inside the Starwood guest-reservation database for four years and touched hundreds of millions of guest records. The litigation is now in its eighth year. ###### Did the Product Do What They Said? In Khoday v. Symantec and Digital River, Friedman was lead counsel for consumers who paid for a service to re-download their Norton software. He litigated the case to the brink of trial before resolving it, one month out, for $60 million in an all-cash settlement. In LLE One v. Facebook, Cohen Milstein served as co-lead counsel for advertisers who alleged that the platform’s video-viewing metrics were inflated; the court granted final approval to a $40 million settlement. He continues as class counsel in DZ Reserve v. Meta Platforms, the certified advertisers’ case over the platform’s “potential reach” figures. The Supreme Court declined the company’s petition for review in January 2025, and the case continues. Friedman also worked on the Apple device-performance litigation, where consumers who alleged that software updates slowed their iPhones obtained a settlement fund of up to $500 million. As co-lead counsel in the Caterpillar engine litigation, he helped obtain a $60 million resolution on behalf of purchasers of vehicles with defective emissions systems. These cases required comparing the companies’ representations with the performance of their products and developing common proof for the affected purchasers. ###### The Compass Setting In his class-action practice, Friedman examines how companies count views, sell services, store identity data, and determine their spending on security. His work has combined reimbursement funds with cybersecurity commitments and injunctive terms governing how a metric is calculated or a database is guarded. He has pursued those remedies against insurers, credit bureaus, hotel chains, casinos, social networks, and device makers. In Anthem and Equifax, Friedman helped organize co-lead counsel and expert committees to pursue compensation and mandated security measures together. He continues that work in the Marriott litigation, examining the company’s data-security practices and its promises to the people whose information it held. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Of Counsel; immediate past co-chair, Consumer Protection - **Organization:** Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll - **Practice:** Privacy, Data Breach, Consumer Protection - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll Professional biography and contact ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Andrew N. Friedman Privacy · Data Breach · Consumer Protection > “Our mission and focus has always been first and foremost to help consumers. ##### Closing the Distance Privacy, data breach, digital advertising, and consumer class actions — Of Counsel and immediate past co-chair of Consumer Protection, Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, Washington, D.C. Andrew N. Friedman has spent four decades representing consumers in class actions against companies whose products, services, or data practices allegedly failed in a common way. His docket has ranged from advertising metrics and software services to defective engines and some of the country’s largest data breaches. That work requires matching a company’s representations to its own records, then determining whether the same proof can answer the claims of a class rather than one claimant at a time. Friedman graduated magna cum laude from Tufts University in 1980 and earned his J.D. from George Washington University Law School in 1983. He began his legal career at the United States Patent and Trademark Office and entered class-action practice in 1985. At Cohen Milstein he later became co-chair of the Consumer Protection practice. He is now Of Counsel and the practice’s immediate past co-chair, continuing to work on the firm’s consumer and technology litigation. ###### The Anatomy of a Breach Case Data-breach litigation shows both sides of Friedman’s approach to relief: compensation for what has already happened and changes aimed at reducing the chance that it happens again. When hackers penetrated Anthem, they obtained personal information belonging to 78.8 million people, including names, birth dates and Social Security numbers. Friedman was court-appointed co-lead plaintiffs’ counsel. The resulting $115 million settlement was, at the time, the largest data-breach settlement in American history and combined monetary relief and identity-protection benefits with cybersecurity commitments governing how Anthem would protect customer information. Friedman later served on the plaintiffs’ steering committee and co-chaired the expert committee in the Equifax litigation arising from the credit bureau’s 2017 breach. That resolution provided up to $425 million in consumer benefits and required Equifax to spend $1 billion on security and technology upgrades. His practice also included the MGM Resorts data-breach litigation, where a federal court granted final approval on June 18, 2025 to a $45 million global settlement covering breaches disclosed in 2019 and 2023. The Marriott litigation has taken a less linear course. Friedman was appointed consumer plaintiffs’ co-lead counsel in the multidistrict litigation over the long-running intrusion into Starwood’s guest-reservation database. The district court initially certified multiple damages and issue classes, and after a 2023 appellate remand it recertified them. On June 3, 2025, however, the Fourth Circuit reversed that recertification, holding that the Starwood Preferred Guest Program’s class-action waiver was valid and enforceable and also reversing the related issue classes against Accenture. That ruling changed the class posture; it did not erase the underlying MDL, which the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation continued to list as pending in August 2026. ###### What Did the Product Promise? Friedman’s consumer cases outside the breach field ask a closely related question: did the product or service perform as purchasers were led to expect? In Khoday v. Symantec and Digital River, he was lead counsel for consumers who paid for a service that allowed them to re-download Norton software. The case settled one month before trial for $60 million in cash. In LLE One v. Facebook, Cohen Milstein served as co-lead counsel for advertisers who alleged that Facebook inflated metrics associated with video advertising; the court approved a $40 million settlement in 2020. The continuing DZ Reserve v. Meta Platforms litigation has required a different kind of persistence. Friedman is class counsel for advertisers challenging Meta’s “Potential Reach” metric. On March 21, 2024, the Ninth Circuit affirmed certification of the damages class, while vacating an injunction class for further consideration of standing. The Supreme Court denied Meta’s petition for review on January 13, 2025. A jury trial was then set for October 14, 2025, but weeks before trial Meta moved to compel arbitration of many class members’ claims. U.S. District Judge James Donato denied that motion on December 2, 2025, finding that Meta had waived arbitration after years of litigation. Meta appealed, and the district court stayed the case pending that interlocutory appeal. The Ninth Circuit appeal was fully briefed in April 2026. Friedman has also worked on the Apple device-performance litigation, where consumers who alleged that software updates slowed certain iPhones obtained a settlement fund of up to $500 million, and served as co-lead counsel in litigation over Caterpillar diesel engines with allegedly defective emissions systems, resolved for $60 million. The object being tested changes — a download service, an advertising metric, a phone, an engine — but the evidentiary question remains concrete. Friedman compares what was sold with what purchasers actually received. ###### The Work Between the Milestones Settlement figures and certification orders are the visible moments in a class action. Much of Friedman’s work happens between them: coordinating experts and co-counsel, testing a company’s internal records against its public representations, defending common proof through appellate review, and preserving viable consumer claims when the procedural posture changes. His technology cases require enough technical fluency to question how a platform counts users or how a company secures a database. The technical work serves a straightforward legal task: establish what the company did, whom it affected, and whether the proof can be tested for a class. Since entering class-action practice in 1985, Friedman has remained on the consumer side. His roles have ranged from co-leading breach cases and organizing expert work to negotiating settlements and defending class certification on appeal. The technology changes from case to case; the job is to build a record sturdy enough to survive those procedural turns and useful enough to produce relief for the people affected. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Of Counsel; immediate past co-chair, Consumer Protection - **Organization:** Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll - **Practice:** Privacy, Data Breach, Consumer Protection - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll Professional biography and contact --- ## 64. Brian Wolfman — `900005132` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `626df55c7c73b8aea3bffa5fb7538910bf5736b5f43db69a4deff09b3dde1d72` - **After/current hash:** `d65c857cff3c28eb97069bec56a78417bbd9b94027866207592e823fbd014a33` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005192 (2026-09-08 06:15:53 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Muldrow, Chambers, Amchem, Devlin, Green, Endrew and other named authorities**: Preserve the existing legal substance while italicizing case names for consistent long-form presentation; no holding, result, chronology or favorable detail is removed. - `rewrite` — **Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic methods paragraph**: Add appellate brief writing to the existing list of student responsibilities because the official Georgetown docket repeatedly identifies clinic-written opening, answering and reply briefs. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **2025-26 current clinic docket**: Update a profile whose clinic examples otherwise stopped with older matters by adding representative, officially documented recent public-interest appeals: Driscoll, Qashu and Perez-Funez, plus the broader recent issue range. - `rewrite` — **Final paragraph**: Preserve the seven Supreme Court arguments, six wins, Blume role and advocacy scholarship while replacing a potentially interpretive closing with concrete clinic tasks performed under Wolfman's supervision. ### BEFORE #### Brian Wolfman Supreme Court · Public Interest Appeals > “The idea was not to just take a case, but change the law. ##### Some Harm Is Harm Enough Public-interest Supreme Court and appellate litigation — Professor from Practice and Director, Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic, Georgetown Law, Washington, D.C. Sergeant Jatonya Clayborn Muldrow had spent years in plainclothes with the St. Louis Police Department's Intelligence Division, working public corruption and human trafficking cases and serving on an FBI task force, when a new commander transferred her out. The transfer changed her assignment, credentials, schedule, and work, but neither her rank nor her pay. Her Title VII case challenged the lower courts’ requirement that she show a "materially significant" disadvantage. The statute prohibits discrimination in the terms and conditions of employment without specifying that the harm must be significant. Brian Wolfman argued the case before the Supreme Court in December 2023. On April 17, 2024, the Court unanimously ruled in Muldrow’s favor, holding in Muldrow v. City of St. Louis that a transferred employee need show some harm, rather than significant harm, from a discriminatory transfer. Two years earlier, he had argued Chambers v. District of Columbia before the en banc D.C. Circuit and persuaded the full court to discard its twenty-three-year-old precedent imposing an "objectively tangible harm" requirement on transfer claims. Georgetown clinic students worked on the briefs in both cases. ###### An Apprenticeship in Other People's Stakes After a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and a 1984 law degree from Harvard, Wolfman clerked for Judge R. Lanier Anderson III of the Eleventh Circuit. He then spent five years as a staff lawyer with Legal Services of Arkansas, handling trial and appellate cases for low-income clients in a rural poverty law practice. Those cases affected clients’ homes, benefits, and livelihoods. In 1990 he joined the Public Citizen Litigation Group in Washington and stayed nearly twenty years, serving as its director and general counsel from 2004 to 2009. He also directed the group's Supreme Court Assistance Project, which pairs experienced high-court advocates with public-interest lawyers whose cases reach the Justices. ###### The Objector's Chair At Public Citizen, Wolfman represented class members bound by settlements they had not negotiated. He was counsel for the objectors in Amchem Products, Inc. v. Windsor, the 1997 Supreme Court decision rejecting an asbestos settlement that would have bound future victims whose illnesses were not yet known. As principal co-counsel in Devlin v. Scardelletti, he helped establish that unnamed class members who object to a settlement may appeal its approval without formally intervening. His article "Representing the Unrepresented in Class Action Settlements" appeared in the NYU Law Review in 1996. He later advised the American Law Institute on its Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation. Wolfman also represented injured consumers against federal preemption defenses, through which companies argued that federal regulatory approval displaced state tort remedies. He served as counsel in Medtronic, Inc. v. Lohr and Wyeth v. Levine and wrote a practical monograph on opposing preemption defenses in vehicle-defect cases. He served on an Institute of Medicine committee reviewing the FDA's device-clearance process and spent years as trustee and twice chair of the D.C. Bar's Clients' Security Fund, which compensates clients wronged by their own lawyers. ###### A Classroom with a Docket Wolfman has taught a January-term appellate courts workshop at Harvard Law School since 2004. From 2009 to 2014 he taught at Georgetown and directed civil rights work at its Institute for Public Representation; from 2014 to 2016 he was Professor of the Practice at Stanford Law School and co-directed its Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. He argued and won Green v. Brennan, establishing that the limitations period for a constructive-discharge claim begins when the employee gives notice of resignation. He was principal co-counsel in Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District, the unanimous 2017 decision requiring that a disabled child's educational program be "appropriately ambitious" in light of the child's circumstances, rejecting the minimal-benefit standard some circuits had applied. In 2016, Wolfman returned to Georgetown to establish the Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic, a full-time, semester-long program devoted to public-interest appeals in the federal circuits, the D.C. Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court. Clinic students drafted the briefing in Muldrow. A clinic team, working in just over a month, produced the Sixth Circuit brief that secured habeas relief for Stephen Mitchell, a Memphis man who had served seventeen years for an ammunition offense, more than seven years beyond the lawful statutory maximum. In Balbed v. Eden Park Guest House, the clinic won Fourth Circuit precedent protecting live-in workers under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Students investigate records, shape strategy, and sit at counsel table. Wolfman has argued seven cases in the Supreme Court and won six. He also serves as faculty director of Georgetown's Blume Public Interest Law Scholars Program. His recent scholarship includes essays on writing the conclusion of a brief and preparing a reply. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Professor from Practice; Director, Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic - **Organization:** Georgetown Law - **Practice:** Supreme Court, Public Interest Appeals - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact Georgetown Law Professional biography and contact ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Brian Wolfman Supreme Court · Public Interest Appeals > “The idea was not to just take a case, but change the law. ##### Some Harm Is Harm Enough Public-interest Supreme Court and appellate litigation — Professor from Practice and Director, Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic, Georgetown Law, Washington, D.C. Sergeant Jatonya Clayborn Muldrow had spent years in plainclothes with the St. Louis Police Department's Intelligence Division, working public corruption and human trafficking cases and serving on an FBI task force, when a new commander transferred her out. The transfer changed her assignment, credentials, schedule, and work, but neither her rank nor her pay. Her Title VII case challenged the lower courts’ requirement that she show a "materially significant" disadvantage. The statute prohibits discrimination in the terms and conditions of employment without specifying that the harm must be significant. Brian Wolfman argued the case before the Supreme Court in December 2023. On April 17, 2024, the Court unanimously ruled in Muldrow’s favor, holding in Muldrow v. City of St. Louis that a transferred employee need show some harm, rather than significant harm, from a discriminatory transfer. Two years earlier, he had argued Chambers v. District of Columbia before the en banc D.C. Circuit and persuaded the full court to discard its twenty-three-year-old precedent imposing an "objectively tangible harm" requirement on transfer claims. Georgetown clinic students worked on the briefs in both cases. ###### An Apprenticeship in Other People's Stakes After a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and a 1984 law degree from Harvard, Wolfman clerked for Judge R. Lanier Anderson III of the Eleventh Circuit. He then spent five years as a staff lawyer with Legal Services of Arkansas, handling trial and appellate cases for low-income clients in a rural poverty law practice. Those cases affected clients’ homes, benefits, and livelihoods. In 1990 he joined the Public Citizen Litigation Group in Washington and stayed nearly twenty years, serving as its director and general counsel from 2004 to 2009. He also directed the group's Supreme Court Assistance Project, which pairs experienced high-court advocates with public-interest lawyers whose cases reach the Justices. ###### The Objector's Chair At Public Citizen, Wolfman represented class members bound by settlements they had not negotiated. He was counsel for the objectors in Amchem Products, Inc. v. Windsor, the 1997 Supreme Court decision rejecting an asbestos settlement that would have bound future victims whose illnesses were not yet known. As principal co-counsel in Devlin v. Scardelletti, he helped establish that unnamed class members who object to a settlement may appeal its approval without formally intervening. His article "Representing the Unrepresented in Class Action Settlements" appeared in the NYU Law Review in 1996. He later advised the American Law Institute on its Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation. Wolfman also represented injured consumers against federal preemption defenses, through which companies argued that federal regulatory approval displaced state tort remedies. He served as counsel in Medtronic, Inc. v. Lohr and Wyeth v. Levine and wrote a practical monograph on opposing preemption defenses in vehicle-defect cases. He served on an Institute of Medicine committee reviewing the FDA's device-clearance process and spent years as trustee and twice chair of the D.C. Bar's Clients' Security Fund, which compensates clients wronged by their own lawyers. ###### A Classroom with a Docket Wolfman has taught a January-term appellate courts workshop at Harvard Law School since 2004. From 2009 to 2014 he taught at Georgetown and directed civil rights work at its Institute for Public Representation; from 2014 to 2016 he was Professor of the Practice at Stanford Law School and co-directed its Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. He argued and won Green v. Brennan, establishing that the limitations period for a constructive-discharge claim begins when the employee gives notice of resignation. He was principal co-counsel in Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District, the unanimous 2017 decision requiring that a disabled child's educational program be "appropriately ambitious" in light of the child's circumstances, rejecting the minimal-benefit standard some circuits had applied. In 2016, Wolfman returned to Georgetown to establish the Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic, a full-time, semester-long program devoted to public-interest appeals in the federal circuits, the D.C. Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court. Clinic students drafted the briefing in Muldrow. A clinic team, working in just over a month, produced the Sixth Circuit brief that secured habeas relief for Stephen Mitchell, a Memphis man who had served seventeen years for an ammunition offense, more than seven years beyond the lawful statutory maximum. In Balbed v. Eden Park Guest House, the clinic won Fourth Circuit precedent protecting live-in workers under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Students investigate records, shape strategy, write appellate briefs, and sit at counsel table. That model remained active through the clinic’s 2025 and 2026 docket. Students briefed Driscoll v. Montgomery County, concerning qualified immunity after a police officer shot an unarmed person experiencing a mental-health crisis, and Qashu v. Rubio, involving disability-discrimination, accommodation, and retaliation claims against the State Department. In Perez-Funez v. Department of Homeland Security, a spring 2026 team defended a classwide injunction requiring notice of legal rights for unaccompanied non-citizen minors before a departure from the United States is treated as voluntary. Other recent teams have handled employment discrimination and retaliation, prison disability accommodations, religious-exercise claims, and First Step Act sentencing-credit disputes. Wolfman has argued seven cases in the Supreme Court and won six. He also serves as faculty director of Georgetown's Blume Public Interest Law Scholars Program, and his scholarship on appellate advocacy includes work on how to conclude a brief and how to prepare a reply. In the immersion clinic, students represent actual parties while mastering records, developing legal theories, drafting and revising briefs, and preparing cases for appellate decision under Wolfman’s supervision. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Professor from Practice; Director, Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic - **Organization:** Georgetown Law - **Practice:** Supreme Court, Public Interest Appeals - **Location:** Washington, D.C. ##### Contact Georgetown Law Professional biography and contact --- ## 65. Noreen Farrell — `900005083` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff - **Voice-flattening concern:** **MEDIUM** — Coalition material was moved and the ending was restructured; compare original cadence before merging current facts. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — AB 1928 and current Stronger California legislative results. - **Before hash:** `40f07b2b3909e91675f9a0002205488df2ada49239f6387bc2a91b25d9e4ab8b` - **After/current hash:** `e8e4d8365c91418697be50445a43e233a8fe0549eacd4b17f333340dd029feb7` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005193 (2026-09-08 06:25:03 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Equal Pay Today / Stronger California / Closing the Women's Wealth Gap coalition paragraph**: Move the existing coalition material from the Fair Pay Act section to a new current closing section, update Stronger California's documented 2026 size, and preserve Farrell's argument that state protections can provide a defense when federal safeguards weaken. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Rules Written for the People Who Use Them — AB 1928 paragraph**: Add ERA's August 2026 co-sponsorship of the Campus Counsel and Care Act as a current continuation of the profile's procedural Title IX work. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **The State-Law Backstop — 2026 Stronger California legislative results**: Add the January 2026 convening's nine enacted 2025 priorities, AB 250 example and Farrell's documented description of California measures as a model for replication elsewhere. ### BEFORE #### Noreen Farrell Gender Equity · Workplace Civil Rights > “Our rights shouldn't depend on our zip code. ##### The Roster and the Rulebook Gender equity, Title IX, pay discrimination, and workplace civil rights — Executive Director, Equal Rights Advocates, San Francisco. Noreen Farrell helped lead Mansourian v. Regents of the University of California, in which women wrestlers challenged UC Davis under Title IX after being denied equal athletic opportunity. The case produced a trial victory, a $1.35 million settlement, and changes to the university’s athletics program. Farrell sought enforcement of the university’s duty to provide equal participation in athletics when setting rosters and access to competition. In Brust v. Regents of the University of California, another Title IX athletics matter, Farrell helped obtain terms adding a women's field hockey team and improving equal athletic opportunity. ###### The Price of Speaking Up Farrell secured a $2.46 million jury verdict in Maher v. County of Fresno, a sex-discrimination case arising out of a fire academy, and an approximately $812,000 jury verdict in Bojorquez v. ABM Industries, a workplace sexual-harassment case. In Medina v. Station Casinos, a sexual-harassment matter, her work contributed to a multimillion-dollar settlement. Her employment practice addresses compensation, workplace treatment, and retaliation against employees who report discrimination. Her advocacy for women and girls facing discrimination at work and at school has reached every level of the federal system, including the United States Supreme Court. She has also written for practitioners on class certification after Wal-Mart v. Dukes in a Thomson Reuters publication. Farrell graduated from Yale University and earned her law degree at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where she was editor-in-chief of the Hastings Women's Law Journal. At Equal Rights Advocates, the San Francisco gender-justice organization, she rose to legal director and then executive director. Under her leadership, the organization has represented thousands of women and girls and pursued changes in discrimination law and enforcement. ###### One Statute, Fifty Statehouses In 2015, Equal Rights Advocates co-sponsored the California Fair Pay Act, which Farrell helped develop. By 2025, California's wage gap had narrowed to roughly 13 percent, compared with a national figure closer to 18 percent. Settlements with major employers had returned more than $500 million to workers; twenty-five states had strengthened their own equal pay laws, and more than a dozen had adopted pay transparency requirements modeled on California’s approach. "Ten years later, we've proven that this is a blueprint that works," Farrell said in 2025, "and states across the country agree." Farrell chairs Equal Pay Today, a coalition of more than two dozen organizational partners coordinating state-by-state efforts to close gender and race wage gaps. She founded and chairs the Stronger California Women's Agenda Campaign, a collaboration of more than fifty organizations advancing women's economic security through legislation on pay, child care, leave, and workplace protections. As a founding partner of the Closing the Women's Wealth Gap Initiative, she also addresses disparities in assets, savings, and long-term financial security. When federal protections came under pressure, she argued that the state laws developed over the preceding decade provided a defense. ###### Rules Written for the People Who Use Them Equal Rights Advocates joined the Victim Rights Law Center, the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, Legal Voice, and survivors as plaintiffs challenging federal Title IX regulations governing campus sexual-harassment proceedings. The plaintiffs were represented by Morrison & Foerster, the National Women's Law Center, and Diane Rosenfeld. In July 2021, a federal court in Massachusetts directed the Department of Education to reconsider a provision barring key evidence, including police reports, medical records, and admissions, from consideration at hearings. The court said the provision made proceedings a "remarkably hollow gesture" for survivors. ###### Enforcement as Education Farrell has written about accommodating pregnant workers in Expecting a Baby, Not a Lay-Off and about family-responsibilities discrimination under Title VII, the Family and Medical Leave Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Her publications include Ending Harassment Now: Keeping Our Kids Safe at School, a three-part assessment of women's progress marking Title VII’s fiftieth anniversary, and an argument in the Hastings Law Journal for legislation addressing discrimination against employees with caregiving responsibilities. She testifies before legislative bodies. Her commentary appears in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Fortune, and on NPR, PBS NewsHour, and MSNBC. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Executive Director, Equal Rights Advocates - **Practice:** Gender equity, Title IX, equal pay, and workplace civil rights - **Selected matters:** Mansourian v. Regents of the University of California; Brust v. Regents of the University of California; Maher v. County of Fresno - **Education:** Yale University; UC Hastings College of the Law - **Location:** San Francisco, California ##### Contact Equal Rights Advocates Professional biography and organization contact ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Noreen Farrell Gender Equity · Workplace Civil Rights > “Our rights shouldn't depend on our zip code. ##### The Roster and the Rulebook Gender equity, Title IX, pay discrimination, and workplace civil rights — Executive Director, Equal Rights Advocates, San Francisco. Noreen Farrell helped lead Mansourian v. Regents of the University of California, in which women wrestlers challenged UC Davis under Title IX after being denied equal athletic opportunity. The case produced a trial victory, a $1.35 million settlement, and changes to the university’s athletics program. Farrell sought enforcement of the university’s duty to provide equal participation in athletics when setting rosters and access to competition. In Brust v. Regents of the University of California, another Title IX athletics matter, Farrell helped obtain terms adding a women's field hockey team and improving equal athletic opportunity. ###### The Price of Speaking Up Farrell secured a $2.46 million jury verdict in Maher v. County of Fresno, a sex-discrimination case arising out of a fire academy, and an approximately $812,000 jury verdict in Bojorquez v. ABM Industries, a workplace sexual-harassment case. In Medina v. Station Casinos, a sexual-harassment matter, her work contributed to a multimillion-dollar settlement. Her employment practice addresses compensation, workplace treatment, and retaliation against employees who report discrimination. Her advocacy for women and girls facing discrimination at work and at school has reached every level of the federal system, including the United States Supreme Court. She has also written for practitioners on class certification after Wal-Mart v. Dukes in a Thomson Reuters publication. Farrell graduated from Yale University and earned her law degree at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where she was editor-in-chief of the Hastings Women's Law Journal. At Equal Rights Advocates, the San Francisco gender-justice organization, she rose to legal director and then executive director. Under her leadership, the organization has represented thousands of women and girls and pursued changes in discrimination law and enforcement. ###### One Statute, Fifty Statehouses In 2015, Equal Rights Advocates co-sponsored the California Fair Pay Act, which Farrell helped develop. By 2025, California's wage gap had narrowed to roughly 13 percent, compared with a national figure closer to 18 percent. Settlements with major employers had returned more than $500 million to workers; twenty-five states had strengthened their own equal pay laws, and more than a dozen had adopted pay transparency requirements modeled on California’s approach. "Ten years later, we've proven that this is a blueprint that works," Farrell said in 2025, "and states across the country agree." ###### Rules Written for the People Who Use Them Equal Rights Advocates joined the Victim Rights Law Center, the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, Legal Voice, and survivors as plaintiffs challenging federal Title IX regulations governing campus sexual-harassment proceedings. The plaintiffs were represented by Morrison & Foerster, the National Women's Law Center, and Diane Rosenfeld. In July 2021, a federal court in Massachusetts directed the Department of Education to reconsider a provision barring key evidence, including police reports, medical records, and admissions, from consideration at hearings. The court said the provision made proceedings a "remarkably hollow gesture" for survivors. Under Farrell's leadership, ERA also co-sponsored California's AB 1928, the Campus Counsel and Care Act, signed in August 2026. The law requires colleges and universities to permit each party in a campus sexual-misconduct grievance process to be accompanied by both an advisor and a support person, rather than making someone choose between technical guidance and emotional support during the proceeding. ###### Enforcement as Education Farrell has written about accommodating pregnant workers in Expecting a Baby, Not a Lay-Off and about family-responsibilities discrimination under Title VII, the Family and Medical Leave Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Her publications include Ending Harassment Now: Keeping Our Kids Safe at School, a three-part assessment of women's progress marking Title VII’s fiftieth anniversary, and an argument in the Hastings Law Journal for legislation addressing discrimination against employees with caregiving responsibilities. She testifies before legislative bodies. Her commentary appears in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Fortune, and on NPR, PBS NewsHour, and MSNBC. ###### The State-Law Backstop Farrell chairs Equal Pay Today, a coalition of more than two dozen organizational partners coordinating state-by-state efforts to close gender and race wage gaps. She founded and chairs the Stronger California Women's Agenda Campaign, which by January 2026 brought together more than sixty-five nonprofit and advocacy organizations working on pay, child care, leave, workplace protections, and women's economic security. As a founding partner of the Closing the Women's Wealth Gap Initiative, she also works on disparities in assets, savings, and long-term financial security. At Stronger California's January 2026 convening in Sacramento, the network marked nine 2025 priority bills that had been signed into law. One, AB 250, extended filing deadlines for sexual-assault claims to account for delays associated with trauma and fear of retaliation. Farrell has described state protections as a defense when federal safeguards weaken; at the convening, she said California measures had already provided a model for other states and that the network had supported their replication elsewhere. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Executive Director, Equal Rights Advocates - **Practice:** Gender equity, Title IX, equal pay, and workplace civil rights - **Selected matters:** Mansourian v. Regents of the University of California; Brust v. Regents of the University of California; Maher v. County of Fresno - **Education:** Yale University; UC Hastings College of the Law - **Location:** San Francisco, California ##### Contact Equal Rights Advocates Professional biography and organization contact --- ## 66. Riyaz Kanji — `900005082` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff - **Voice-flattening concern:** **MEDIUM** — Jurisdiction material was reorganized and the closing/firm paragraph rewritten; useful structure but voice deserves comparison. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Dollar General plus 2025-26 Great Lakes Fishing Decree currentness. - **Before hash:** `30223767f9125ef907fad5abc538688a2638442ce1f923ccde6cef8063d72cef` - **After/current hash:** `94dfa2002de7d139f09f25980b3b453803c43de6560befa5d662f0f576fe5354` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005524 (2026-09-11 21:30:54 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure` — **Kelsey and Seneca jurisdiction matters**: Move the existing Kelsey and Seneca paragraph out of the salmon-culverts section and give those jurisdiction and tribal-land decisions their own section so unrelated legal subjects no longer share one heading. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Jurisdiction in Tribal Courts and on Tribal Land — Dollar General**: Add Kanji's documented representation of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians in the Supreme Court tribal-court jurisdiction dispute because it is a major sovereignty matter distinct from Kelsey and Seneca and was absent from the current profile. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **New section: Great Lakes Co-Management**: Add the 2025-26 Great Lakes Fishing Decree litigation because Kanji was counsel of record for four respondent tribes and the January 12, 2026 denial of Supreme Court review is a material current treaty-rights development. - `rewrite` — **A Firm Built for Nations**: Retain the Tribal Supreme Court Project and Michigan teaching while adding the documented formation and pro bono contribution and correcting the teaching description to avoid implying an unverified current semester appointment. ### BEFORE #### Riyaz Kanji Tribal Sovereignty · Treaty Rights > “All we did was tell the truth about what the Nation was already doing. ##### Treaty Rights and Tribal Sovereignty Tribal sovereignty, treaty rights, and federal Indian-law litigation — Founding Partner, Kanji & Katzen, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Riyaz Kanji represents tribal nations in disputes over land, natural resources, gaming, and the authority of tribal, state, and federal governments. He examines treaty text, historical relationships, and congressional action to enforce the United States’ commitments to Native nations and the sovereignty those nations retain. Kanji graduated from Harvard College in 1986 and Yale Law School in 1991, where he won the Potter Stewart Prize in moot court. He clerked for Judge Betty Fletcher on the Ninth Circuit and Justice David Souter at the Supreme Court, then spent two years as a Skadden Fellow at Evergreen Legal Services in Seattle, working on treaty shellfishing litigation for Northwest tribes under the nineteenth-century Stevens Treaties. After several years at Williams & Connolly in Washington, he co-founded Kanji & Katzen to represent tribal nations. The firm has offices in Ann Arbor and Seattle. ###### McGirt and the Muscogee Reservation As lead counsel for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in litigation from Carpenter v. Murphy to McGirt v. Oklahoma, Kanji addressed whether Congress had disestablished the Nation’s reservation, whose boundaries were set in 1866. Oklahoma had treated it as disestablished for a century. Kanji argued from statute and history that allotment had divided the land without an act of Congress dissolving the reservation. In May 2020, during the Supreme Court’s first season of telephonic arguments, he argued the Nation’s position. That July, the Court held that the Muscogee reservation in eastern Oklahoma remained Indian country for purposes of the Major Crimes Act. The Court required congressional action to disestablish the reservation; demographic change and the passage of time could not substitute for it. Kanji described counsel’s work as telling the truth about the Nation’s existing governance of land it had never lawfully lost. ###### Salmon, Culverts, and a Treaty’s Plumbing As co-counsel for western Washington tribes in the culverts phase of United States v. Washington, Kanji helped enforce the Stevens Treaties’ guarantee of the right to take fish. State-maintained culverts, the channels carrying streams beneath roads, blocked salmon from hundreds of miles of habitat and diminished the runs on which the treaty right depends. The tribes won a ruling protecting the fish runs needed to exercise that right, along with access to fishing grounds. The Ninth Circuit’s judgment stood after the Supreme Court divided evenly in 2018. The remedy requires Washington to correct hundreds of barrier culverts through a multiyear construction program. As lead counsel in Kelsey v. Pope, Kanji won the first federal appellate decision upholding a tribe’s criminal jurisdiction over its own members outside Indian country, grounded in the inherent sovereignty that predates the United States. For the Seneca Nation, he served as lead counsel in Citizens Against Casino Gambling in Erie County v. Chaudhuri, in which the Second Circuit affirmed the Indian-country status of Nation lands in Buffalo and the legality of its gaming facility. ###### A Firm Built for Nations As a principal advisor to the Tribal Supreme Court Project, Kanji helps coordinate strategy across tribal litigation, including which cases reach the Court and how the issues are presented. He also teaches Native American law at the University of Michigan. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner, Kanji & Katzen - **Practice:** Tribal sovereignty, treaty rights, and federal Indian law - **Selected matters:** McGirt v. Oklahoma; United States v. Washington; Kelsey v. Pope - **Education:** Harvard College; Yale Law School - **Location:** Ann Arbor, Michigan ##### Contact Kanji & Katzen Professional biography and firm contact ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Riyaz Kanji Tribal Sovereignty · Treaty Rights > “All we did was tell the truth about what the Nation was already doing. ##### Treaty Rights and Tribal Sovereignty Tribal sovereignty, treaty rights, and federal Indian-law litigation — Founding Partner, Kanji & Katzen, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Riyaz Kanji represents tribal nations in disputes over land, natural resources, gaming, and the authority of tribal, state, and federal governments. He examines treaty text, historical relationships, and congressional action to enforce the United States’ commitments to Native nations and the sovereignty those nations retain. Kanji graduated from Harvard College in 1986 and Yale Law School in 1991, where he won the Potter Stewart Prize in moot court. He clerked for Judge Betty Fletcher on the Ninth Circuit and Justice David Souter at the Supreme Court, then spent two years as a Skadden Fellow at Evergreen Legal Services in Seattle, working on treaty shellfishing litigation for Northwest tribes under the nineteenth-century Stevens Treaties. After several years at Williams & Connolly in Washington, he co-founded Kanji & Katzen to represent tribal nations. The firm has offices in Ann Arbor and Seattle. ###### McGirt and the Muscogee Reservation As lead counsel for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in litigation from Carpenter v. Murphy to McGirt v. Oklahoma, Kanji addressed whether Congress had disestablished the Nation’s reservation, whose boundaries were set in 1866. Oklahoma had treated it as disestablished for a century. Kanji argued from statute and history that allotment had divided the land without an act of Congress dissolving the reservation. In May 2020, during the Supreme Court’s first season of telephonic arguments, he argued the Nation’s position. That July, the Court held that the Muscogee reservation in eastern Oklahoma remained Indian country for purposes of the Major Crimes Act. The Court required congressional action to disestablish the reservation; demographic change and the passage of time could not substitute for it. Kanji described counsel’s work as telling the truth about the Nation’s existing governance of land it had never lawfully lost. ###### Salmon, Culverts, and a Treaty’s Plumbing As co-counsel for western Washington tribes in the culverts phase of United States v. Washington, Kanji helped enforce the Stevens Treaties’ guarantee of the right to take fish. State-maintained culverts, the channels carrying streams beneath roads, blocked salmon from hundreds of miles of habitat and diminished the runs on which the treaty right depends. The tribes won a ruling protecting the fish runs needed to exercise that right, along with access to fishing grounds. The Ninth Circuit’s judgment stood after the Supreme Court divided evenly in 2018. The remedy requires Washington to correct hundreds of barrier culverts through a multiyear construction program. ###### Jurisdiction in Tribal Courts and on Tribal Land As lead counsel in Kelsey v. Pope, Kanji won the first federal appellate decision upholding a tribe’s criminal jurisdiction over its own members outside Indian country, grounded in the inherent sovereignty that predates the United States. For the Seneca Nation, he served as lead counsel in Citizens Against Casino Gambling in Erie County v. Chaudhuri, in which the Second Circuit affirmed the Indian-country status of Nation lands in Buffalo and the legality of its gaming facility. Kanji was also co-counsel for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians in Dollar General Corp. v. Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, where the federal courts allowed a civil tort claim against a non-Indian business operating on tribal trust land to proceed in tribal court. The Supreme Court divided evenly in 2016, leaving the Fifth Circuit judgment in favor of tribal-court jurisdiction in place. ###### Great Lakes Co-Management Kanji returned to Great Lakes treaty litigation as counsel of record for four respondent tribes defending the 2023 Great Lakes Fishing Decree. The decree governs commercial, subsistence, and sport fishing in treaty waters of Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior and emerged from negotiations among tribal, federal, and state sovereigns over how to protect treaty-reserved fishing rights while conserving a stressed fishery. In March 2025, the Sixth Circuit upheld the district court’s authority to enter the decree over the objection of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe. When the Sault Tribe sought Supreme Court review, Kanji and his colleagues filed the joint tribal brief in opposition for the Bay Mills Indian Community, Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, and Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. On January 12, 2026, the Supreme Court denied review, leaving the Sixth Circuit judgment and the 2023 decree in place. ###### A Firm Built for Nations As a principal advisor to the Tribal Supreme Court Project, Kanji helps coordinate strategy across tribal litigation, including which cases reach the Court and how the issues are presented. He played an active role in the Project’s formation and has devoted hundreds of hours of pro bono time to its work. He has also taught Native American law at the University of Michigan. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner, Kanji & Katzen - **Practice:** Tribal sovereignty, treaty rights, and federal Indian law - **Selected matters:** McGirt v. Oklahoma; United States v. Washington; Kelsey v. Pope - **Education:** Harvard College; Yale Law School - **Location:** Ann Arbor, Michigan ##### Contact Kanji & Katzen Professional biography and firm contact --- ## 67. Mary Kathryn Nagle — `900005079` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff - **Voice-flattening concern:** **HIGH** — The prior ending was treated as circular and replaced. That may have removed an intentional thematic return and literary voice. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Current MMIP-family representation and dated 2026 productions are useful even if original voice is restored. - **Before hash:** `6164a4e3ed211b2a7a467258fa48ab0c4b0617c1d0091c4b6ffe5a7a6a91a620` - **After/current hash:** `14a5fa3cd7197bf0caeea0a1549eb1813b5e140e16a0d48c3c8fb3c03111bfda` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005195 (2026-09-08 06:42:25 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Final section: Sovereignty as Survival / Families, Sovereignty, and the Stage**: Replace the circular closing that repeated the full hero quotation with a current, fact-led ending while retaining the protected opening clause and preserving Nagle's independent national federal Indian-law practice and sovereignty-and-safety focus. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Families, Sovereignty, and the Stage — current family representation**: Add Nagle's current representation of families of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls, including Kaysera Stops Pretty Places' family, because it concretely extends the Native-women's-safety practice already central to the profile. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Families, Sovereignty, and the Stage — 2026 productions**: Add the January 2026 On the Far End reading and August-September 2026 Sovereignty productions because they provide a dated current continuation of Nagle's documented playwriting without repeating the existing plot summary. - `rewrite` — **Final section: Sovereignty as Survival / Families, Sovereignty, and the Stage**: Replace the circular closing that repeated the full hero quotation with a current, fact-led ending while retaining the protected opening clause and preserving Nagle's independent national federal Indian-law practice and sovereignty-and-safety focus. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Families, Sovereignty, and the Stage — current family representation**: Add Nagle's current representation of families of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls, including Kaysera Stops Pretty Places' family, because it concretely extends the Native-women's-safety practice already central to the profile. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Families, Sovereignty, and the Stage — 2026 productions**: Add the January 2026 On the Far End reading and August-September 2026 Sovereignty productions because they provide a dated current continuation of Nagle's documented playwriting without repeating the existing plot summary. ### BEFORE #### Mary Kathryn Nagle Tribal Sovereignty · Native Women’s Safety > “Protecting sovereignty is not a hobby. For Native women and Native Nations, it is a matter of survival. ##### Who May Answer Tribal sovereignty, Native women’s safety, and federal Indian law — Independent attorney and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, McLean, Virginia. Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Supreme Court briefs defend tribal authority to protect Native children, address violence, and govern conduct on tribal lands. Her advocacy draws on treaties, the Constitution, and federal Indian-law decisions to enforce the United States’ commitments to tribal nations. She also writes plays about Native families and the legal disputes that affect their lives. Born in Oklahoma City and an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Nagle descends from John Ridge and Major Ridge, Cherokee leaders who carried their nation’s cause to Washington during the removal era and lost their lives in its aftermath. Her great-great-great-grandfather brought the Cherokee Nation’s legal arguments to the federal government before the forced removal known as the Trail of Tears. Nagle studied at Georgetown University, then earned her law degree summa cum laude from Tulane, where she received the Judge John Minor Wisdom Award. She went on to clerk for federal judges. ###### Briefs at the Threshold of the Court Nagle has drafted and filed numerous Supreme Court amicus briefs for the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center defending tribal sovereignty and Native women’s safety. In Dollar General Corp. v. Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, she co-authored a tribal-side amicus brief defending a tribal court’s authority to hear a civil claim arising from the alleged abuse of a Native child in a business operating on tribal land. An equally divided Supreme Court left standing the Fifth Circuit’s ruling recognizing the tribal court’s jurisdiction. In Haaland v. Brackeen, she served as counsel of record for the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center as amicus in defense of the Indian Child Welfare Act. In 2023, by a seven-to-two vote, the Supreme Court sustained Congress’s authority to enact ICWA and rejected the challenges under the Tenth Amendment. It dismissed the equal-protection and nondelegation challenges for lack of standing. A decade earlier, Nagle had authored an amicus brief for members of Congress defending the statute in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl. In the intervening years, she publicly warned that challenges to tribal classifications could unsettle laws governing Native children, land, health care, and the relationship between the United States and tribal governments. Alongside survivors and tribal leaders, Nagle has advocated for the Violence Against Women Act provisions recognizing and expanding tribal criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians who commit violence against Native women. The provisions restored tribal authority to prosecute offenses that had fallen outside tribal courts’ jurisdiction. ###### The Law Behind the Curtain Nagle’s play Sovereignty made her the first Native playwright featured at Washington’s Arena Stage. It interlaces the Ridge family’s removal-era story with a present-day Cherokee lawyer’s fight over jurisdiction and violence against Native women; its premiere run took place blocks from the Supreme Court. Sliver of a Full Moon, her documentary play about survivors whose testimony drove VAWA’s tribal-jurisdiction provisions, has been performed at law schools and the United Nations. Manahatta follows a Lenape woman between Wall Street and her nation’s dispossessed homeland. It has been staged across the country and published alongside her other work. From 2015 to 2019, Nagle ran the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program. In 2025, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected her a member. ###### Sovereignty as Survival After years with a firm devoted to tribal representation, Nagle now works as an independent attorney with a national federal Indian law practice, continuing to advise and write on tribal sovereignty and Native women’s safety. “Protecting sovereignty is not a hobby,” she says. “For Native women and Native Nations, it is a matter of survival.” ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Independent attorney and citizen of the Cherokee Nation - **Practice:** Tribal sovereignty, Native women’s safety, and federal Indian law - **Selected matters:** Dollar General v. Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians; Haaland v. Brackeen; Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl - **Education:** Georgetown University; Tulane Law School - **Location:** McLean, Virginia ##### Contact Mary Kathryn Nagle, Esq. mkn@mknaglelaw.onmicrosoft.com 202-407-0591 ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Mary Kathryn Nagle Tribal Sovereignty · Native Women’s Safety > “Protecting sovereignty is not a hobby. For Native women and Native Nations, it is a matter of survival. ##### Who May Answer Tribal sovereignty, Native women’s safety, and federal Indian law — Independent attorney and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, McLean, Virginia. Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Supreme Court briefs defend tribal authority to protect Native children, address violence, and govern conduct on tribal lands. Her advocacy draws on treaties, the Constitution, and federal Indian-law decisions to enforce the United States’ commitments to tribal nations. She also writes plays about Native families and the legal disputes that affect their lives. Born in Oklahoma City and an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Nagle descends from John Ridge and Major Ridge, Cherokee leaders who carried their nation’s cause to Washington during the removal era and lost their lives in its aftermath. Her great-great-great-grandfather brought the Cherokee Nation’s legal arguments to the federal government before the forced removal known as the Trail of Tears. Nagle studied at Georgetown University, then earned her law degree summa cum laude from Tulane, where she received the Judge John Minor Wisdom Award. She went on to clerk for federal judges. ###### Briefs at the Threshold of the Court Nagle has drafted and filed numerous Supreme Court amicus briefs for the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center defending tribal sovereignty and Native women’s safety. In Dollar General Corp. v. Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, she co-authored a tribal-side amicus brief defending a tribal court’s authority to hear a civil claim arising from the alleged abuse of a Native child in a business operating on tribal land. An equally divided Supreme Court left standing the Fifth Circuit’s ruling recognizing the tribal court’s jurisdiction. In Haaland v. Brackeen, she served as counsel of record for the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center as amicus in defense of the Indian Child Welfare Act. In 2023, by a seven-to-two vote, the Supreme Court sustained Congress’s authority to enact ICWA and rejected the challenges under the Tenth Amendment. It dismissed the equal-protection and nondelegation challenges for lack of standing. A decade earlier, Nagle had authored an amicus brief for members of Congress defending the statute in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl. In the intervening years, she publicly warned that challenges to tribal classifications could unsettle laws governing Native children, land, health care, and the relationship between the United States and tribal governments. Alongside survivors and tribal leaders, Nagle has advocated for the Violence Against Women Act provisions recognizing and expanding tribal criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians who commit violence against Native women. The provisions restored tribal authority to prosecute offenses that had fallen outside tribal courts’ jurisdiction. ###### The Law Behind the Curtain Nagle’s play Sovereignty made her the first Native playwright featured at Washington’s Arena Stage. It interlaces the Ridge family’s removal-era story with a present-day Cherokee lawyer’s fight over jurisdiction and violence against Native women; its premiere run took place blocks from the Supreme Court. Sliver of a Full Moon, her documentary play about survivors whose testimony drove VAWA’s tribal-jurisdiction provisions, has been performed at law schools and the United Nations. Manahatta follows a Lenape woman between Wall Street and her nation’s dispossessed homeland. It has been staged across the country and published alongside her other work. From 2015 to 2019, Nagle ran the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program. In 2025, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected her a member. ###### Families, Sovereignty, and the Stage After years with a firm devoted to tribal representation, Nagle works as an independent attorney with a national federal Indian law practice focused on tribal sovereignty and Native women’s safety. “Protecting sovereignty is not a hobby,” Nagle has said; her current work includes counsel for the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center and representation of families of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls. Among them is the family of Kaysera Stops Pretty Places, which has pursued a public campaign seeking an investigation into her death. Her playwriting remained active in 2026. In January, The Old Globe presented a reading of On the Far End, Nagle’s one-woman play about Muscogee leader Jean Hill Chaudhuri and the history of promises made to tribal nations. Three Bone Theatre later staged Sovereignty in Charlotte from August 21 through September 6 and in Cherokee, North Carolina, on September 11 and 12. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Independent attorney and citizen of the Cherokee Nation - **Practice:** Tribal sovereignty, Native women’s safety, and federal Indian law - **Selected matters:** Dollar General v. Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians; Haaland v. Brackeen; Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl - **Education:** Georgetown University; Tulane Law School - **Location:** McLean, Virginia ##### Contact Mary Kathryn Nagle, Esq. mkn@mknaglelaw.onmicrosoft.com 202-407-0591 --- ## 68. Rachel Geman — `900004882` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW** — Mostly additive current matters plus a light closing integration edit. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — September SPS class-certification/co-lead appointment and Fareportal settlement. - **Before hash:** `13203812d2f8c9e34d25ea38c1cc822b2ffbc54cb5bcc8f6e7358c4266a1aac6` - **After/current hash:** `627d703f7497eea08dc86c74f668cd6edb63ac572e792bd8bc808c039a31b802` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005528 (2026-09-11 22:48:11 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `add_source_supported_fact` — **New section: Charges in the Servicing Record**: Add the September 3, 2026 Evans v. Select Portfolio Servicing class-certification and co-lead-counsel appointment because it is a material current consumer-rights matter that fits the profile's record-centered architecture. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Certification to the Government — Fareportal tax matter**: Add the May 2026 New York False Claims Act tax settlement because it is a current whistleblower matter directly within the practice group Geman chairs and distinct from the cybersecurity example already present. - `rewrite` — **One Process, Many Claimants — closing synthesis**: Update the existing record-centered closing sentence to account for the newly added mortgage-servicing and tax matters while preserving its original organizing function and non-promotional tone. ### BEFORE #### Rachel Geman AI Copyright · Financial Privacy · Worker Equality · False Claims Act > “ Our clients call it like it is and want it fixed. We fix it. ##### Where the Record Changes Hands Rachel Geman follows information through the institutional systems that acquire, classify, and rely on it, then builds class and whistleblower cases around the record of what happened. ###### Acquisition Before Training An artificial-intelligence company can possess the same book through legally different routes: one copy bought and scanned, another downloaded from a pirate library. That distinction became decisive in Bartz v. Anthropic. In June 2025, the court held that using books to train large language models was fair use and that digitizing purchased print books as internal library replacements was also fair use. It refused, however, to excuse the acquisition and retention of pirated library copies on that basis. Rachel Geman served as court-appointed co-lead class counsel for the authors. The remaining acquisition claims led to a $1.5 billion settlement, which received final approval on July 20, 2026. The fund established a classwide process for covered works. Geman’s assignment required attention to the history of each copy, the ownership of each covered work, and a claims process capable of reaching authors and other rightsholders across decades of publishing. ###### Consent at the Interface Plaid occupied a different handoff. Its technology connected consumer bank accounts to financial applications. The complaint alleged that versions of the Plaid Link interface appeared to consumers like their banks’ login screens even though users were providing credentials to Plaid, and that Plaid obtained more financial data than an application needed or a user authorized. Geman served as one of the lawyers appointed to represent the class. The court granted final approval to the Plaid settlement on July 20, 2022. Plaid funded a $58 million settlement and agreed to nonmonetary terms addressing data deletion, minimization, disclosures, retention, and tools for managing account connections. Those provisions followed the path of the alleged conduct. Alongside compensation, the remedy addressed what the interface told users, which information Plaid kept, and how a person could later disconnect an application or delete stored data. ###### Evaluation Inside the Workplace Information becomes consequential again when an employer turns evaluations into pay and promotion decisions. In the Goldman Sachs gender litigation, Geman represented a certified class of women in professional roles who challenged the firm’s evaluation and promotion systems. The litigation resolved in 2023 through a $215 million settlement and agreed changes to employment practices. Other matters place the same question in different systems. Geman represented employee-benefit plans in litigation over a concealed coding error in AXA Rosenberg’s quantitative investment model; a $65 million class settlement received approval in 2012. As co-lead counsel for the City of Philadelphia, she worked on Fair Housing Act claims against Wells Fargo that ended in 2019 with $10 million for city housing programs and other relief. In 2024, she was appointed co-lead class counsel in a settled forced-labor case for approximately 200 Colombian workers and workers of Colombian origin. ###### Certification to the Government False Claims Act work changes the recipient of the representation but not the need to test it against an underlying record. In a cybersecurity matter involving Raytheon and businesses later acquired by Nightwing, Geman represented the whistleblower whose suit preceded an $8.4 million federal settlement in 2025. The government alleged that required cybersecurity controls and a system security plan were missing from an internal system used in work on twenty-nine Defense Department contracts and subcontracts. The case concerned what contractors had promised the government about protecting covered information and their compliance with those requirements. Geman now chairs Lieff Cabraser’s Whistleblower Law/False Claims Act practice group, where an insider’s account must be connected to contracts, invoices, technical requirements, and the government’s payment decision. ###### One Process, Many Claimants Geman earned an A.B., cum laude, from Harvard University in 1993 and a J.D. from Columbia Law School in 1997. At Columbia, she was a Stone Scholar, Equal Justice America Fellow, Human Rights Fellow, and an editor of the Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems. She is a partner in Lieff Cabraser’s New York office. Her professional service has included the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York Rules Committee, the Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund, and employee-side labor and employment committees. A book still has an author and an acquisition history; a bank connection still belongs to a consumer; an evaluation still affects one worker; a security certification still rests on particular systems and contracts. Geman’s practice links those individual records to the repeated institutional process behind them. That is how a dispute involving many claimants can remain exact about the right, representation, or promise each one brings to the case. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner; Chair, Whistleblower Law/False Claims Act, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP - **Practice:** AI and copyright, financial privacy, employment and civil rights, and False Claims Act litigation - **Selected matters:** Bartz v. Anthropic; In re Plaid, Inc. Privacy Litigation; Goldman Sachs gender litigation; Raytheon/Nightwing cybersecurity False Claims Act matter - **Education:** Columbia Law School, J.D.; Harvard University, A.B., cum laude ##### Contact Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP 250 Hudson Street, 8th FloorNew York, New York 10013 Office: 212-355-9500 rgeman@lchb.com Official profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Rachel Geman AI Copyright · Financial Privacy · Worker Equality · False Claims Act > “ Our clients call it like it is and want it fixed. We fix it. ##### Where the Record Changes Hands Rachel Geman follows information through the institutional systems that acquire, classify, and rely on it, then builds class and whistleblower cases around the record of what happened. ###### Acquisition Before Training An artificial-intelligence company can possess the same book through legally different routes: one copy bought and scanned, another downloaded from a pirate library. That distinction became decisive in Bartz v. Anthropic. In June 2025, the court held that using books to train large language models was fair use and that digitizing purchased print books as internal library replacements was also fair use. It refused, however, to excuse the acquisition and retention of pirated library copies on that basis. Rachel Geman served as court-appointed co-lead class counsel for the authors. The remaining acquisition claims led to a $1.5 billion settlement, which received final approval on July 20, 2026. The fund established a classwide process for covered works. Geman’s assignment required attention to the history of each copy, the ownership of each covered work, and a claims process capable of reaching authors and other rightsholders across decades of publishing. ###### Consent at the Interface Plaid occupied a different handoff. Its technology connected consumer bank accounts to financial applications. The complaint alleged that versions of the Plaid Link interface appeared to consumers like their banks’ login screens even though users were providing credentials to Plaid, and that Plaid obtained more financial data than an application needed or a user authorized. Geman served as one of the lawyers appointed to represent the class. The court granted final approval to the Plaid settlement on July 20, 2022. Plaid funded a $58 million settlement and agreed to nonmonetary terms addressing data deletion, minimization, disclosures, retention, and tools for managing account connections. Those provisions followed the path of the alleged conduct. Alongside compensation, the remedy addressed what the interface told users, which information Plaid kept, and how a person could later disconnect an application or delete stored data. ###### Charges in the Servicing Record Mortgage servicing presents another record problem: which events justify a fee, what the underlying vendor charged, and what a borrower’s account history shows. In Evans v. Select Portfolio Servicing, Inc., borrowers allege that SPS imposed unlawful pay-to-pay, property-inspection, and late fees, including inspection charges exceeding the amounts billed by vendors. On September 3, 2026, the federal court certified a nationwide Fair Debt Collection Practices Act class, a nationwide breach-of-contract class, and an alternative multistate good-faith-and-fair-dealing class. The court appointed Geman co-lead class counsel. ###### Evaluation Inside the Workplace Information becomes consequential again when an employer turns evaluations into pay and promotion decisions. In the Goldman Sachs gender litigation, Geman represented a certified class of women in professional roles who challenged the firm’s evaluation and promotion systems. The litigation resolved in 2023 through a $215 million settlement and agreed changes to employment practices. Other matters place the same question in different systems. Geman represented employee-benefit plans in litigation over a concealed coding error in AXA Rosenberg’s quantitative investment model; a $65 million class settlement received approval in 2012. As co-lead counsel for the City of Philadelphia, she worked on Fair Housing Act claims against Wells Fargo that ended in 2019 with $10 million for city housing programs and other relief. In 2024, she was appointed co-lead class counsel in a settled forced-labor case for approximately 200 Colombian workers and workers of Colombian origin. ###### Certification to the Government False Claims Act work changes the recipient of the representation but not the need to test it against an underlying record. In a cybersecurity matter involving Raytheon and businesses later acquired by Nightwing, Geman represented the whistleblower whose suit preceded an $8.4 million federal settlement in 2025. The government alleged that required cybersecurity controls and a system security plan were missing from an internal system used in work on twenty-nine Defense Department contracts and subcontracts. The case concerned what contractors had promised the government about protecting covered information and their compliance with those requirements. Geman now chairs Lieff Cabraser’s Whistleblower Law/False Claims Act practice group, where an insider’s account must be connected to contracts, invoices, technical requirements, and the government’s payment decision. In another False Claims Act matter, Geman and co-counsel represented a whistleblower whose allegations concerned New York tax deductions taken by Fareportal and affiliated online-travel businesses. A May 2026 settlement required the defendants to pay $4.5 million to resolve the state’s claims. ###### One Process, Many Claimants Geman earned an A.B., cum laude, from Harvard University in 1993 and a J.D. from Columbia Law School in 1997. At Columbia, she was a Stone Scholar, Equal Justice America Fellow, Human Rights Fellow, and an editor of the Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems. She is a partner in Lieff Cabraser’s New York office. Her professional service has included the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York Rules Committee, the Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund, and employee-side labor and employment committees. A book still has an author and an acquisition history; a bank connection still belongs to a consumer; a servicing fee still has a borrower and a charge history; an evaluation still affects one worker; a government claim still rests on particular systems, contracts, or tax records. Geman’s practice links those individual records to the repeated institutional process behind them. That is how a dispute involving many claimants can remain exact about the right, representation, or promise each one brings to the case. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner; Chair, Whistleblower Law/False Claims Act, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP - **Practice:** AI and copyright, financial privacy, employment and civil rights, and False Claims Act litigation - **Selected matters:** Bartz v. Anthropic; In re Plaid, Inc. Privacy Litigation; Goldman Sachs gender litigation; Raytheon/Nightwing cybersecurity False Claims Act matter - **Education:** Columbia Law School, J.D.; Harvard University, A.B., cum laude ##### Contact Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP 250 Hudson Street, 8th FloorNew York, New York 10013 Office: 212-355-9500 rgeman@lchb.com Official profile --- ## 69. James J. Pizzirusso — `900004881` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW** — Append-only PowerSchool currentness section. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — PowerSchool leadership and April 2026 dismissal ruling. - **Before hash:** `b13cc86df839c2ff7f27a6afd82392e4db1465032f6abee6a0acf6fcab8f457f` - **After/current hash:** `fe2329cd0ee355ea06103e75c3685d2a83360eaac74e59354f6b9b76e40454b3` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900004903 (2026-08-31 02:44:59 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `add_source_supported_fact` — **New section: PowerSchool Before the Remedy**: Add the current PowerSchool multidistrict litigation because Pizzirusso is co-lead counsel for individual-action plaintiffs and the April 1, 2026 dismissal ruling is a material development in his ongoing data-breach practice. ### BEFORE #### James J. Pizzirusso Data Breach · Privacy · Consumer Protection · Class Actions > “ It’s about getting money in the hands of consumers and deterring this kind of conduct in the future. ##### The Parts of a Breach Remedy James J. Pizzirusso approaches data-breach settlements as linked problems of reimbursement, identity protection, claims administration, and security changes that continue after the case ends. ###### The Costs Arrive in Different Places A data breach can leave one person disputing a fraudulent account, another replacing identification, and a bank issuing new cards. James J. Pizzirusso’s docket follows those losses to the people and institutions that bear them. The remedies in his T-Mobile, Equifax, Premera, and Target matters have included cash funds, identity-protection services, claims for documented losses, and commitments to change data-security practices. Each component addresses a different part of the same event. Pizzirusso is a partner and co-founder of Hausfeld in Washington, D.C., and a member of the firm’s Management Committee. He has led its Data Breach/Privacy and Consumer Protection practice groups since the firm’s inception. He earned his J.D., with honors, from George Washington University Law School in 2001 and his B.A., summa cum laude, from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1998. ###### T-Mobile: Cash, Services, Security The federal court overseeing the T-Mobile customer data-security litigation appointed Pizzirusso as one of three co-lead interim class counsel. The litigation followed a 2021 breach in which hackers obtained personal information belonging to an estimated 76.6 million people. The settlement created a $350 million fund. Class members could seek as much as $25,000 for documented losses, including time spent addressing problems tied to the breach; people who did not document a loss could claim a smaller cash payment. The settlement also offered two years of identity-defense and monitoring services and two years of restoration services. Separately, T-Mobile committed to spend an additional $150 million over two years on data-security improvements. The court granted final approval in June 2023. Keeping the $350 million fund distinct from the $150 million security commitment shows how the resolution divided compensation, individual support, and system changes into separate forms of relief. ###### Equifax and the Life of a Claim Pizzirusso served on the plaintiffs’ steering and settlement committees in the Equifax data-breach litigation. Equifax reported that the 2017 breach exposed personal information belonging to 147 million people. The global settlement included up to $425 million to help those affected, with benefits addressing out-of-pocket losses, time spent responding to the breach, credit monitoring, and identity restoration. Some consequences do not surface during the original claims period. Under the settlement, an affected person who later discovers misuse of personal information can receive identity-restoration assistance through January 2029, even without having filed an earlier claim for other benefits. That continuing service treats exposure as a risk that can mature after litigation ends and the first payments go out. ###### Patients, Banks, and the Same Breach In the Premera Blue Cross litigation, Pizzirusso served on the plaintiffs’ Executive Leadership Committee. The settlement combined a $32 million fund with $42 million that Premera agreed to spend on improved data security from 2019 through 2022. The fund supported credit monitoring, claims for documented losses, and cash benefits; the separate security spending addressed systems that retained sensitive information after the breach. The Target litigation placed Pizzirusso on a steering committee representing financial institutions rather than individual shoppers. Banks and credit unions claimed the breach forced them to replace cards and absorb fraud losses. The court recorded nearly $60 million in total class benefit, and the settlement required data-security changes at Target. The matter put the downstream cost of a retail breach into the same remedial frame as consumer identity loss. ###### A Consumer Practice Built for Systems Pizzirusso’s consumer work predates the modern data-breach docket. In 2010, while discussing a proposed consumer settlement over Tyson Foods’ “Raised Without Antibiotics” advertising, he described the purpose in direct terms: “It’s about getting money in the hands of consumers and deterring this kind of conduct in the future.” The same two objectives—compensation and changed conduct—appear in the breach resolutions that followed. His work outside individual cases includes co-authoring the LexisNexis treatise Data Breach Litigation. He has taught environmental and toxic torts as an adjunct professor and clinical law as a visiting associate professor at George Washington University Law School, and he served on the steering committee of The Sedona Conference’s Data Security and Privacy Liability Working Group from 2020 through 2023. Across those roles, the recurring question is practical: how to convert a technical failure spread across many people and institutions into relief they can use. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner, co-founder, and Management Committee member, Hausfeld - **Practice:** Data-breach, privacy, consumer-protection, and class-action litigation - **Selected matters:** In re T-Mobile Customer Data Security Breach Litigation; In re Equifax, Inc. Customer Data Security Breach Litigation; In re Premera Blue Cross Customer Data Security Breach Litigation; In re Target Corporation Customer Data Security Breach Litigation - **Education:** George Washington University Law School, J.D., with honors; University of Tennessee, Knoxville, B.A., summa cum laude ##### Contact Hausfeld 1200 17th Street N.W., Suite 600Washington, D.C. 20036 +1 202 540 7154 jpizzirusso@hausfeld.com Official profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### James J. Pizzirusso Data Breach · Privacy · Consumer Protection · Class Actions > “ It’s about getting money in the hands of consumers and deterring this kind of conduct in the future. ##### The Parts of a Breach Remedy James J. Pizzirusso approaches data-breach settlements as linked problems of reimbursement, identity protection, claims administration, and security changes that continue after the case ends. ###### The Costs Arrive in Different Places A data breach can leave one person disputing a fraudulent account, another replacing identification, and a bank issuing new cards. James J. Pizzirusso’s docket follows those losses to the people and institutions that bear them. The remedies in his T-Mobile, Equifax, Premera, and Target matters have included cash funds, identity-protection services, claims for documented losses, and commitments to change data-security practices. Each component addresses a different part of the same event. Pizzirusso is a partner and co-founder of Hausfeld in Washington, D.C., and a member of the firm’s Management Committee. He has led its Data Breach/Privacy and Consumer Protection practice groups since the firm’s inception. He earned his J.D., with honors, from George Washington University Law School in 2001 and his B.A., summa cum laude, from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1998. ###### T-Mobile: Cash, Services, Security The federal court overseeing the T-Mobile customer data-security litigation appointed Pizzirusso as one of three co-lead interim class counsel. The litigation followed a 2021 breach in which hackers obtained personal information belonging to an estimated 76.6 million people. The settlement created a $350 million fund. Class members could seek as much as $25,000 for documented losses, including time spent addressing problems tied to the breach; people who did not document a loss could claim a smaller cash payment. The settlement also offered two years of identity-defense and monitoring services and two years of restoration services. Separately, T-Mobile committed to spend an additional $150 million over two years on data-security improvements. The court granted final approval in June 2023. Keeping the $350 million fund distinct from the $150 million security commitment shows how the resolution divided compensation, individual support, and system changes into separate forms of relief. ###### PowerSchool Before the Remedy The PowerSchool litigation is at an earlier stage. The breach of the company’s Student Information System exposed data associated with roughly 62 million students and nearly 10 million educators and staff in the United States and Canada, including names, contact information, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, grades, and medical details. In June 2025, the court appointed Pizzirusso co-lead counsel for individual-action plaintiffs in the centralized multidistrict litigation. On April 1, 2026, the court denied defendants’ motions to dismiss, including a motion by private-equity firm Bain Capital. The ruling allowed negligence, unjust-enrichment, and California unfair-competition claims to proceed on allegations that Bain exercised operational control over PowerSchool and made decisions affecting cybersecurity operations. No settlement has yet fixed the form of any remedy; the case remains in litigation. ###### Equifax and the Life of a Claim Pizzirusso served on the plaintiffs’ steering and settlement committees in the Equifax data-breach litigation. Equifax reported that the 2017 breach exposed personal information belonging to 147 million people. The global settlement included up to $425 million to help those affected, with benefits addressing out-of-pocket losses, time spent responding to the breach, credit monitoring, and identity restoration. Some consequences do not surface during the original claims period. Under the settlement, an affected person who later discovers misuse of personal information can receive identity-restoration assistance through January 2029, even without having filed an earlier claim for other benefits. That continuing service treats exposure as a risk that can mature after litigation ends and the first payments go out. ###### Patients, Banks, and the Same Breach In the Premera Blue Cross litigation, Pizzirusso served on the plaintiffs’ Executive Leadership Committee. The settlement combined a $32 million fund with $42 million that Premera agreed to spend on improved data security from 2019 through 2022. The fund supported credit monitoring, claims for documented losses, and cash benefits; the separate security spending addressed systems that retained sensitive information after the breach. The Target litigation placed Pizzirusso on a steering committee representing financial institutions rather than individual shoppers. Banks and credit unions claimed the breach forced them to replace cards and absorb fraud losses. The court recorded nearly $60 million in total class benefit, and the settlement required data-security changes at Target. The matter put the downstream cost of a retail breach into the same remedial frame as consumer identity loss. ###### A Consumer Practice Built for Systems Pizzirusso’s consumer work predates the modern data-breach docket. In 2010, while discussing a proposed consumer settlement over Tyson Foods’ “Raised Without Antibiotics” advertising, he described the purpose in direct terms: “It’s about getting money in the hands of consumers and deterring this kind of conduct in the future.” The same two objectives—compensation and changed conduct—appear in the breach resolutions that followed. His work outside individual cases includes co-authoring the LexisNexis treatise Data Breach Litigation. He has taught environmental and toxic torts as an adjunct professor and clinical law as a visiting associate professor at George Washington University Law School, and he served on the steering committee of The Sedona Conference’s Data Security and Privacy Liability Working Group from 2020 through 2023. Across those roles, the recurring question is practical: how to convert a technical failure spread across many people and institutions into relief they can use. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner, co-founder, and Management Committee member, Hausfeld - **Practice:** Data-breach, privacy, consumer-protection, and class-action litigation - **Selected matters:** In re T-Mobile Customer Data Security Breach Litigation; In re Equifax, Inc. Customer Data Security Breach Litigation; In re Premera Blue Cross Customer Data Security Breach Litigation; In re Target Corporation Customer Data Security Breach Litigation - **Education:** George Washington University Law School, J.D., with honors; University of Tennessee, Knoxville, B.A., summa cum laude ##### Contact Hausfeld 1200 17th Street N.W., Suite 600Washington, D.C. 20036 +1 202 540 7154 jpizzirusso@hausfeld.com Official profile --- ## 70. E. Michelle Drake — `900004880` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW** — Append-only current-work paragraph. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Change Healthcare and TransUnion current assignments. - **Before hash:** `112f8e4a96067126799bc27c23fe2a55457e6d93e228bd3c5eacbe2d7dbfab34` - **After/current hash:** `d7bf2efbb0de30394f405016f7200a3c6a8564bfc668c0d384a87fb2a239f938` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900004902 (2026-08-31 02:44:56 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `add_source_supported_fact` — **From Proof to Remedy — current Change Healthcare and TransUnion matters**: Add two material current assignments that Berger Montague's present biography identifies as central to Drake's ongoing practice: co-lead representation of health care providers in the Change Healthcare data-breach MDL and lead class representation of consumers allegedly reported as deceased by TransUnion. ### BEFORE #### E. Michelle Drake Data Breach · Credit Reporting · Privacy · Consumer Class Actions > “ By leading this important MDL to a successful conclusion, I hope to ensure that large corporations begin taking data security seriously, and stop putting peoples’ sensitive personal information in web-facing locations that are not properly secured. ##### Who Gets to Correct the File E. Michelle Drake represents people harmed when institutions expose, misclassify, or act on personal information, then builds remedies around the systems that produced the error. ###### The Envelope Was the Breach A data breach does not always begin with code. In Beckett v. Aetna, customers alleged that the words “HIV Medications” could be seen through the window of envelopes mailed to them. Berger Montague served as co-lead counsel in the consolidated privacy litigation. The court approved a settlement requiring Aetna to pay $17,162,000, with automatic payments for class members and a process for claims involving additional financial or non-financial harm. The alleged disclosure did not depend on someone taking data from a server and selling it. The information had been placed inside ordinary correspondence, positioned so that someone outside the envelope could read it. That mechanism connects privacy law to Drake’s credit-reporting work: information can injure a person when it is exposed to the wrong audience, when a database attaches it to the wrong identity, or when an institution acts on a conclusion the underlying facts do not support. ###### When the Database Names the Wrong Person Drake began her career as an Atlanta public defender, trying serious felony matters and representing people facing the death penalty. She earned a B.A. in government from Harvard College, an M.Sc. in sociology from Oxford University, and a J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School. After moving to Minnesota, she built a consumer department at a class-action firm before joining Berger Montague in 2016 to open its Minneapolis office. Her Fair Credit Reporting Act cases examine how a matching rule becomes a decision about a person. Drake led Rodriguez v. National Credit Center, which alleged that consumers seeking vehicle financing were inaccurately identified as possible matches to a federal sanctions list and ended in a $30 million settlement. She also led Fernandez v. CoreLogic Credco, another sanctions-list matching case that produced a $58.5 million gross settlement. In Hill-Green v. Experian, Berger Montague served as co-lead class counsel in litigation over fraud-alert reporting; the resolution combined injunctive relief with approximately $23 million in monetary relief. ###### A Hundred Million Records After the 2013 Target payment-card breach, Drake was appointed liaison counsel for the consumer track. The class encompassed approximately 100 million people, and the settlement created a $10 million fund for consumer claims. Following an appellate remand and renewed district-court review, the Eighth Circuit affirmed the settlement, class certification, and fee award. Her role required coordination across a nationwide class before data-breach litigation had developed its present scale. That scale now includes In re MOVEit Customer Data Security Breach Litigation, where the court appointed Drake as one of five Lead Counsel after the exploitation of a vulnerability in widely used file-transfer software. The consolidated proceeding remains active, not a completed recovery. Drake has stated her objective in the case directly: bring the litigation to a successful conclusion and change how companies secure sensitive information placed on internet-facing systems. ###### From Proof to Remedy Drake’s other leadership assignments show how the remedy changes with the system. In the JUUL multidistrict litigation, she served on the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee and chaired the consumer class-action committee; the consumer class settlement accounted for $255 million within an overall multidistrict resolution of approximately $1.2 billion. In consolidated force-placed-insurance litigation against Citibank, she obtained a settlement valued at $110 million for nationwide borrower classes. Drake is an Executive Shareholder at Berger Montague, where she founded and manages the firm’s second-largest office. She chairs its Credit Reporting and Background Checks Department and co-chairs its Consumer Protection and Technology, Privacy and Data Breach departments. She has served as lead or co-lead counsel in more than fifty class actions. Across those matters, the legal theory depends on understanding the machinery beneath the result: a matching protocol, a mailing workflow, an insurance-placement process, or the security architecture of a file-transfer product. ###### The Person Inside the Record Her work beyond individual cases retains the same focus. Drake chairs the board of the Southern Center for Human Rights and serves on the board of Public Justice and the Partners’ Council of the National Consumer Law Center. She is a former board member of the National Association of Consumer Advocates and has taught consumer lawyers about credit reporting, class certification, evidence, and the use of data in litigation. A capital case and a credit report place different stakes on a record, but both require a lawyer to ask who assembled it, what it says, and whether the person it describes can contest it. Drake’s privacy and consumer cases return to that practical demand. When an envelope, database, or networked product exposes or misstates personal information, the remedy must reach the person harmed and the system that produced the harm. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Executive Shareholder; founder and manager, Minneapolis Office; Chair, Credit Reporting and Background Checks; Co-Chair, Consumer Protection and Technology, Privacy and Data Breach, Berger Montague PC - **Practice:** Data-breach, privacy, credit-reporting, background-check, consumer-protection, and class-action litigation - **Selected matters:** Beckett v. Aetna; Rodriguez v. National Credit Center; In re Target Corp. Customer Data Security Breach Litigation; In re MOVEit Customer Data Security Breach Litigation - **Education:** Harvard Law School, J.D.; Oxford University, M.Sc.; Harvard College, B.A. ##### Contact Berger Montague PC 1229 Tyler Street NE, Suite 205Minneapolis, Minnesota 55413 Direct: 612-594-5933 emdrake@bergermontague.com Official profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### E. Michelle Drake Data Breach · Credit Reporting · Privacy · Consumer Class Actions > “ By leading this important MDL to a successful conclusion, I hope to ensure that large corporations begin taking data security seriously, and stop putting peoples’ sensitive personal information in web-facing locations that are not properly secured. ##### Who Gets to Correct the File E. Michelle Drake represents people harmed when institutions expose, misclassify, or act on personal information, then builds remedies around the systems that produced the error. ###### The Envelope Was the Breach A data breach does not always begin with code. In Beckett v. Aetna, customers alleged that the words “HIV Medications” could be seen through the window of envelopes mailed to them. Berger Montague served as co-lead counsel in the consolidated privacy litigation. The court approved a settlement requiring Aetna to pay $17,162,000, with automatic payments for class members and a process for claims involving additional financial or non-financial harm. The alleged disclosure did not depend on someone taking data from a server and selling it. The information had been placed inside ordinary correspondence, positioned so that someone outside the envelope could read it. That mechanism connects privacy law to Drake’s credit-reporting work: information can injure a person when it is exposed to the wrong audience, when a database attaches it to the wrong identity, or when an institution acts on a conclusion the underlying facts do not support. ###### When the Database Names the Wrong Person Drake began her career as an Atlanta public defender, trying serious felony matters and representing people facing the death penalty. She earned a B.A. in government from Harvard College, an M.Sc. in sociology from Oxford University, and a J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School. After moving to Minnesota, she built a consumer department at a class-action firm before joining Berger Montague in 2016 to open its Minneapolis office. Her Fair Credit Reporting Act cases examine how a matching rule becomes a decision about a person. Drake led Rodriguez v. National Credit Center, which alleged that consumers seeking vehicle financing were inaccurately identified as possible matches to a federal sanctions list and ended in a $30 million settlement. She also led Fernandez v. CoreLogic Credco, another sanctions-list matching case that produced a $58.5 million gross settlement. In Hill-Green v. Experian, Berger Montague served as co-lead class counsel in litigation over fraud-alert reporting; the resolution combined injunctive relief with approximately $23 million in monetary relief. ###### A Hundred Million Records After the 2013 Target payment-card breach, Drake was appointed liaison counsel for the consumer track. The class encompassed approximately 100 million people, and the settlement created a $10 million fund for consumer claims. Following an appellate remand and renewed district-court review, the Eighth Circuit affirmed the settlement, class certification, and fee award. Her role required coordination across a nationwide class before data-breach litigation had developed its present scale. That scale now includes In re MOVEit Customer Data Security Breach Litigation, where the court appointed Drake as one of five Lead Counsel after the exploitation of a vulnerability in widely used file-transfer software. The consolidated proceeding remains active, not a completed recovery. Drake has stated her objective in the case directly: bring the litigation to a successful conclusion and change how companies secure sensitive information placed on internet-facing systems. ###### From Proof to Remedy Drake’s other leadership assignments show how the remedy changes with the system. In the JUUL multidistrict litigation, she served on the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee and chaired the consumer class-action committee; the consumer class settlement accounted for $255 million within an overall multidistrict resolution of approximately $1.2 billion. In consolidated force-placed-insurance litigation against Citibank, she obtained a settlement valued at $110 million for nationwide borrower classes. Two current matters remain in litigation. In In re Change Healthcare, Inc. Customer Data Security Breach Litigation, the court appointed Drake co-lead counsel for health care providers, including doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies, after the 2024 cyberattack and shutdown disrupted access to insurance payments. In Christian v. Trans Union LLC, she serves as lead class counsel for consumers who allege that TransUnion reported them as deceased when they were alive, impairing their ability to obtain credit. Drake is an Executive Shareholder at Berger Montague, where she founded and manages the firm’s second-largest office. She chairs its Credit Reporting and Background Checks Department and co-chairs its Consumer Protection and Technology, Privacy and Data Breach departments. She has served as lead or co-lead counsel in more than fifty class actions. Across those matters, the legal theory depends on understanding the machinery beneath the result: a matching protocol, a mailing workflow, an insurance-placement process, or the security architecture of a file-transfer product. ###### The Person Inside the Record Her work beyond individual cases retains the same focus. Drake chairs the board of the Southern Center for Human Rights and serves on the board of Public Justice and the Partners’ Council of the National Consumer Law Center. She is a former board member of the National Association of Consumer Advocates and has taught consumer lawyers about credit reporting, class certification, evidence, and the use of data in litigation. A capital case and a credit report place different stakes on a record, but both require a lawyer to ask who assembled it, what it says, and whether the person it describes can contest it. Drake’s privacy and consumer cases return to that practical demand. When an envelope, database, or networked product exposes or misstates personal information, the remedy must reach the person harmed and the system that produced the harm. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Executive Shareholder; founder and manager, Minneapolis Office; Chair, Credit Reporting and Background Checks; Co-Chair, Consumer Protection and Technology, Privacy and Data Breach, Berger Montague PC - **Practice:** Data-breach, privacy, credit-reporting, background-check, consumer-protection, and class-action litigation - **Selected matters:** Beckett v. Aetna; Rodriguez v. National Credit Center; In re Target Corp. Customer Data Security Breach Litigation; In re MOVEit Customer Data Security Breach Litigation - **Education:** Harvard Law School, J.D.; Oxford University, M.Sc.; Harvard College, B.A. ##### Contact Berger Montague PC 1229 Tyler Street NE, Suite 205Minneapolis, Minnesota 55413 Direct: 612-594-5933 emdrake@bergermontague.com Official profile --- ## 71. Norman E. Siegel — `900004877` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW** — Two additive current-result paragraphs; old narrative untouched. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Change Healthcare leadership and Niewinski settlement. - **Before hash:** `13e7eceb074c5791cf10b71a34cad311c5b156120bca9735f28211f5eb010734` - **After/current hash:** `285fd4a23babaa947f67f87c9f6070a09c1b3db0a29813875af950d03f50e663` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005504 (2026-09-11 20:38:15 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Relief after a breach — Change Healthcare**: Add Siegel's current court-appointed lead-counsel role for medical providers and hospitals in the ongoing Change Healthcare business-interruption MDL because it materially updates the profile's data-breach practice while preserving the unresolved posture. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **One calculation, thousands of accounts — Niewinski**: Add the $65 million Niewinski State Farm settlement as the documented later continuation of the same cost-of-insurance litigation already illustrated by Vogt and Rogowski. ### BEFORE #### Norman E. Siegel Data Privacy · Consumer Class Actions · Insurance Litigation > “ The court's decision affirms that, simply put – if you want to charge for it, you need to put it in the contract. ##### What the Agreement Actually Says From life-insurance charges to data-breach settlements, Norman E. Siegel tests what institutions promised and builds relief around terms people can enforce. ###### What the policy listed A clause in a State Farm life-insurance policy listed the factors that could determine a monthly cost-of-insurance charge: age, sex, and rate class. State Farm used additional factors. In Vogt v. State Farm, Norman E. Siegel served as co-lead counsel for Missouri policyholders who challenged those deductions. A jury returned a $34.3 million award; the Eighth Circuit upheld the judgment on State Farm’s appeal while sending the policyholders’ request for prejudgment interest back for reconsideration. Siegel summarized the holding after the appeal: “The court's decision affirms that, simply put – if you want to charge for it, you need to put it in the contract.” Siegel begins with the obligation the institution chose for itself. The files may contain actuarial tables or security logs, but the legal work is to connect a shared system to a concrete loss and then define relief that can be administered across a class. Siegel’s matters differ in technology and scale. Their common question is whether the company’s conduct matched the terms governing the transaction or the protection of personal information. ###### Relief after a breach The Equifax breach put that task at national scale. In 2017, attackers reached names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, addresses, and other identifying information belonging to approximately 147 million people. Siegel served in the plaintiffs’ leadership and chaired the settlement committee. The global settlement required Equifax to pay at least $575 million and potentially as much as $700 million. It funded credit monitoring and compensation for qualifying losses, and it required a comprehensive information-security program with regular risk assessments, testing, board-level certifications, service-provider safeguards, and independent reviews. After the 2021 T-Mobile breach exposed personal information belonging to an estimated 76.6 million people, Siegel was one of the court-appointed lawyers leading the consumer settlement. Its $350 million fund provided routes to recover documented losses, baseline cash payments, identity monitoring, and restoration assistance. T-Mobile also committed another $150 million to data security. Those terms treated claims administration and security work as parts of the same resolution: help for people dealing with the breach and defined spending inside the systems that would continue to hold customer information. ###### One calculation, thousands of accounts Siegel’s insurance docket applies the same discipline to recurring charges rather than exposed data. In Rogowski v. State Farm, he served as class counsel in a $325 million settlement approved and implemented in 2023. The case concerned allegations that non-mortality factors entered cost-of-insurance calculations under another State Farm policy form. The policy language and the calculation method supplied a common issue that could be tested across thousands of accounts without losing sight of what had been deducted from each one. ###### Built in Kansas City Siegel earned his undergraduate degree at Tufts University and his J.D. at Washington University School of Law. He began as an assistant attorney general for Missouri, later practiced as a partner at Dentons, and co-founded Stueve Siegel Hanson in Kansas City. His current docket spans class actions, data privacy, antitrust, insurance, and other complex litigation. From that Kansas City base, he has taken leadership roles in national proceedings while continuing to try contract disputes before Missouri juries. His work outside the courtroom keeps that national practice connected to the city where he built it. Siegel serves on the board of the Public Justice Foundation and previously served on the boards of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and the Health Forward Foundation, including a term as Health Forward’s chair. In court, his measure remains exact: identify the promise, test the system against it, and secure terms that people can use. For Siegel, a class action earns its breadth by staying specific about the obligation owed to each person within it. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding partner, Stueve Siegel Hanson LLP - **Practice:** Data privacy, consumer, insurance, antitrust, and complex class-action litigation - **Selected matters:** Vogt v. State Farm; Rogowski v. State Farm; In re Equifax Data Breach Litigation; In re T-Mobile Customer Data Security Breach Litigation - **Education:** Washington University School of Law, J.D.; Tufts University, B.A. ##### Contact Stueve Siegel Hanson LLP 460 Nichols Road, Suite 200Kansas City, MO 64112 Direct: 816-714-7112Email: siegel@stuevesiegel.com Official profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Norman E. Siegel Data Privacy · Consumer Class Actions · Insurance Litigation > “ The court's decision affirms that, simply put – if you want to charge for it, you need to put it in the contract. ##### What the Agreement Actually Says From life-insurance charges to data-breach settlements, Norman E. Siegel tests what institutions promised and builds relief around terms people can enforce. ###### What the policy listed A clause in a State Farm life-insurance policy listed the factors that could determine a monthly cost-of-insurance charge: age, sex, and rate class. State Farm used additional factors. In Vogt v. State Farm, Norman E. Siegel served as co-lead counsel for Missouri policyholders who challenged those deductions. A jury returned a $34.3 million award; the Eighth Circuit upheld the judgment on State Farm’s appeal while sending the policyholders’ request for prejudgment interest back for reconsideration. Siegel summarized the holding after the appeal: “The court's decision affirms that, simply put – if you want to charge for it, you need to put it in the contract.” Siegel begins with the obligation the institution chose for itself. The files may contain actuarial tables or security logs, but the legal work is to connect a shared system to a concrete loss and then define relief that can be administered across a class. Siegel’s matters differ in technology and scale. Their common question is whether the company’s conduct matched the terms governing the transaction or the protection of personal information. ###### Relief after a breach The Equifax breach put that task at national scale. In 2017, attackers reached names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, addresses, and other identifying information belonging to approximately 147 million people. Siegel served in the plaintiffs’ leadership and chaired the settlement committee. The global settlement required Equifax to pay at least $575 million and potentially as much as $700 million. It funded credit monitoring and compensation for qualifying losses, and it required a comprehensive information-security program with regular risk assessments, testing, board-level certifications, service-provider safeguards, and independent reviews. After the 2021 T-Mobile breach exposed personal information belonging to an estimated 76.6 million people, Siegel was one of the court-appointed lawyers leading the consumer settlement. Its $350 million fund provided routes to recover documented losses, baseline cash payments, identity monitoring, and restoration assistance. T-Mobile also committed another $150 million to data security. Those terms treated claims administration and security work as parts of the same resolution: help for people dealing with the breach and defined spending inside the systems that would continue to hold customer information. A current proceeding presents the consequences of a cyberattack before any remedy has been fixed. In In re Change Healthcare Customer Data Security Breach Litigation, the court appointed Siegel lead counsel for medical providers and hospitals seeking business-interruption damages after the 2024 ransomware attack. The providers allege that the shutdown prevented them from processing insurance claims and obtaining payment for medical services. The multidistrict litigation remains ongoing. ###### One calculation, thousands of accounts Siegel’s insurance docket applies the same discipline to recurring charges rather than exposed data. In Rogowski v. State Farm, he served as class counsel in a $325 million settlement approved and implemented in 2023. The case concerned allegations that non-mortality factors entered cost-of-insurance calculations under another State Farm policy form. The policy language and the calculation method supplied a common issue that could be tested across thousands of accounts without losing sight of what had been deducted from each one. That State Farm work continued in Niewinski v. State Farm, where Siegel served as class counsel on claims that non-mortality factors had also been included in cost-of-insurance charges under the company’s 86040 policy form. He negotiated a $65 million settlement reached in 2024. ###### Built in Kansas City Siegel earned his undergraduate degree at Tufts University and his J.D. at Washington University School of Law. He began as an assistant attorney general for Missouri, later practiced as a partner at Dentons, and co-founded Stueve Siegel Hanson in Kansas City. His current docket spans class actions, data privacy, antitrust, insurance, and other complex litigation. From that Kansas City base, he has taken leadership roles in national proceedings while continuing to try contract disputes before Missouri juries. His work outside the courtroom keeps that national practice connected to the city where he built it. Siegel serves on the board of the Public Justice Foundation and previously served on the boards of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and the Health Forward Foundation, including a term as Health Forward’s chair. In court, his measure remains exact: identify the promise, test the system against it, and secure terms that people can use. For Siegel, a class action earns its breadth by staying specific about the obligation owed to each person within it. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding partner, Stueve Siegel Hanson LLP - **Practice:** Data privacy, consumer, insurance, antitrust, and complex class-action litigation - **Selected matters:** Vogt v. State Farm; Rogowski v. State Farm; In re Equifax Data Breach Litigation; In re T-Mobile Customer Data Security Breach Litigation - **Education:** Washington University School of Law, J.D.; Tufts University, B.A. ##### Contact Stueve Siegel Hanson LLP 460 Nichols Road, Suite 200Kansas City, MO 64112 Direct: 816-714-7112Email: siegel@stuevesiegel.com Official profile --- ## 72. Tina Wolfson — `900004876` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW** — Append-only Meta AI Glasses section. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Meta AI Glasses privacy litigation. - **Before hash:** `9e3c1de68dbb474f701ede3287583a40dca4ca65b0dd1337550e61e9b012e1ae` - **After/current hash:** `066840697aa353ce0fbc4f18f3ce694908c4972d3334cb7ca32464f22cad7bef` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900004907 (2026-08-31 03:11:09 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `add_source_supported_fact` — **New section: What the Glasses Send**: Add the current Meta AI Glasses privacy litigation because Wolfson is court-appointed interim co-lead counsel and the September 2026 bystander-claim expansion materially extends the profile's existing product-data privacy theme. ### BEFORE #### Tina Wolfson Biometric Privacy · Digital Tracking · Consumer Class Actions > “ In the age of corporate surveillance, this historic settlement recognizes that data is the new oil. ##### What the Product Keeps Tina Wolfson’s privacy cases trace what happens after a photograph, meeting, or location setting becomes data—and turn hidden product behavior into payments, disclosures, deletion rules, and user controls. ###### A Snapshot Becomes a Dataset Most digital privacy cases begin with an action that feels ordinary: saving a photograph, opening a video meeting, turning off a location setting. In Tina Wolfson’s cases, the legal problem starts with what the product does next. Plaintiffs alleged that Google Photos generated face templates from images, that Zoom’s third-party software and security representations exposed information in ways users had not expected, and that Google stored location data even while Location History was disabled. The sequence—an ordinary choice followed by an unseen technical process—organizes a practice built around making the system legible enough for a court, a class, and ultimately the product designer to act on it. Wolfson is a principal and founding member of Ahdoot & Wolfson, a national class-action firm focused on antitrust and consumer protection. She graduated cum laude from Columbia University in 1991 and cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1994. She is admitted in California, New York, and the District of Columbia and in federal courts across the country. Her matters move between privacy statutes, platform-security claims, and antitrust cases, but the recurring question is concrete: what information did the system create, retain, or disclose after the user made a choice? ###### The Face in the Photograph Rivera v. Google concerned Google Photos’ Face Grouping feature. Illinois residents alleged that the service created and stored face templates from photographs without the disclosures and written consent required by the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act. The settlement agreement identified Wolfson among court-appointed class counsel and established a $100 million non-reversionary fund for the class. It also required notices explaining that Face Grouping was enabled and that Google created face templates or models, affirmative consent when Google Photos was activated, instructions for disabling the feature and deleting templates, and a published retention policy tied to user deletion choices. The settlement translated the technical conversion at the center of the case into specific product rules. Plaintiffs connected faces in ordinary photographs to templates stored by Google and then to BIPA’s notice, consent, and retention requirements. The resulting terms addressed where notice would appear, what a user had to affirm, which actions would trigger deletion, how face data would be protected, and a prohibition on selling, leasing, or trading face templates outside Google. ###### When the Meeting Became Infrastructure The Zoom privacy litigation arose as work, school, medicine, and family life moved onto video calls. Plaintiffs alleged that Zoom shared user data through third-party software, represented that meetings had end-to-end encryption when they did not, and failed to prevent unauthorized disruptions known as “Zoombombing.” The federal court appointed Wolfson and Mark Molumphy interim co-lead counsel. They led the case through discovery, expert analysis, and repeated mediation before the court granted final approval on April 21, 2022. The final settlement created an $85 million non-reversionary fund, made individual payments available to paid subscribers and other users who filed valid claims, and required more than a dozen practice changes aimed at meeting security, privacy disclosures, and consumer-data protection. Those changes remained in force for periods of one to three years. The result joined cash relief for eligible users to changes in the platform that had become a daily communications system for roughly 150 million settlement-class members. ###### The Map a Life Leaves Behind In Google Location History Litigation, the plaintiffs alleged that Google tracked and stored mobile-device location information even when users had disabled the Location History setting. The court appointed Wolfson and Michael Sobol lead class counsel for a settlement class estimated at 247.7 million people. The final settlement established a $62 million non-reversionary fund and required Google to explain how Location History and Web & App Activity collect location information, show users how to disable those settings, and maintain an automatic-deletion policy of no more than eighteen months for users who opted into them. No settlement money was paid directly to class members. After approved deductions, the balance went to twenty-one court-approved nonprofit organizations for work addressing internet and data privacy, with periodic reports required on how the funds were used. The district court approved that structure in May 2024 after finding direct distribution infeasible for a class of that size. On August 26, 2026, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the final-approval order. Wolfson’s antitrust work follows the data question into the advertising markets built around it: a 2022 federal order appointed her and Dena Sharp interim co-lead counsel for an advertiser class in Google Digital Advertising Antitrust Litigation, and her docket also includes Klein v. Meta Platforms. ###### Judgment in Service of the Courts Wolfson has served as a lawyer representative to the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference and as an elected member of its executive committee. She has also served on the Merit Selection Panel for the United States District Court for the Central District of California, which evaluates candidates for appointment as magistrate judges. These roles place the same questions of judgment and institutional administration that shape her litigation work into service of the federal courts. Across Rivera, Zoom, and Location History, the form of monetary relief changed with the record: direct class payments in the first two matters and court-approved nonprofit distributions in the third. Each resolution also imposed product changes. Face Grouping received new notice, consent, retention, deletion, and security terms; Zoom adopted meeting-security and privacy measures; Google agreed to clearer location-setting notices and automatic deletion. Wolfson’s work repeatedly turns hidden system behavior into terms that a court can approve and a company must implement. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Principal and founding member, Ahdoot & Wolfson, PC - **Practice:** Privacy, cybersecurity, biometrics, antitrust, consumer protection, and class actions - **Selected matters:** Rivera v. Google; In re Zoom Video Communications Privacy Litigation; In re Google Location History Litigation; In re Google Digital Advertising Antitrust Litigation; Klein v. Meta Platforms - **Education:** Harvard Law School, J.D., cum laude; Columbia University, B.A., cum laude - **California Bar:** #174806 · Active ##### Contact Ahdoot & Wolfson, PC 2600 W Olive Avenue, Suite 500Burbank, CA 91505 Main: 310-474-9111 Email: twolfson@ahdootwolfson.com Official profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Tina Wolfson Biometric Privacy · Digital Tracking · Consumer Class Actions > “ In the age of corporate surveillance, this historic settlement recognizes that data is the new oil. ##### What the Product Keeps Tina Wolfson’s privacy cases trace what happens after a photograph, meeting, or location setting becomes data—and turn hidden product behavior into payments, disclosures, deletion rules, and user controls. ###### A Snapshot Becomes a Dataset Most digital privacy cases begin with an action that feels ordinary: saving a photograph, opening a video meeting, turning off a location setting. In Tina Wolfson’s cases, the legal problem starts with what the product does next. Plaintiffs alleged that Google Photos generated face templates from images, that Zoom’s third-party software and security representations exposed information in ways users had not expected, and that Google stored location data even while Location History was disabled. The sequence—an ordinary choice followed by an unseen technical process—organizes a practice built around making the system legible enough for a court, a class, and ultimately the product designer to act on it. Wolfson is a principal and founding member of Ahdoot & Wolfson, a national class-action firm focused on antitrust and consumer protection. She graduated cum laude from Columbia University in 1991 and cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1994. She is admitted in California, New York, and the District of Columbia and in federal courts across the country. Her matters move between privacy statutes, platform-security claims, and antitrust cases, but the recurring question is concrete: what information did the system create, retain, or disclose after the user made a choice? ###### The Face in the Photograph Rivera v. Google concerned Google Photos’ Face Grouping feature. Illinois residents alleged that the service created and stored face templates from photographs without the disclosures and written consent required by the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act. The settlement agreement identified Wolfson among court-appointed class counsel and established a $100 million non-reversionary fund for the class. It also required notices explaining that Face Grouping was enabled and that Google created face templates or models, affirmative consent when Google Photos was activated, instructions for disabling the feature and deleting templates, and a published retention policy tied to user deletion choices. The settlement translated the technical conversion at the center of the case into specific product rules. Plaintiffs connected faces in ordinary photographs to templates stored by Google and then to BIPA’s notice, consent, and retention requirements. The resulting terms addressed where notice would appear, what a user had to affirm, which actions would trigger deletion, how face data would be protected, and a prohibition on selling, leasing, or trading face templates outside Google. ###### When the Meeting Became Infrastructure The Zoom privacy litigation arose as work, school, medicine, and family life moved onto video calls. Plaintiffs alleged that Zoom shared user data through third-party software, represented that meetings had end-to-end encryption when they did not, and failed to prevent unauthorized disruptions known as “Zoombombing.” The federal court appointed Wolfson and Mark Molumphy interim co-lead counsel. They led the case through discovery, expert analysis, and repeated mediation before the court granted final approval on April 21, 2022. The final settlement created an $85 million non-reversionary fund, made individual payments available to paid subscribers and other users who filed valid claims, and required more than a dozen practice changes aimed at meeting security, privacy disclosures, and consumer-data protection. Those changes remained in force for periods of one to three years. The result joined cash relief for eligible users to changes in the platform that had become a daily communications system for roughly 150 million settlement-class members. ###### What the Glasses Send In In re Meta AI Glasses Litigation, consumers allege that Meta’s AI-enabled glasses transmitted audio, video, and other data to Meta’s servers despite representations that captured media remained under the user’s control. They further allege that some footage was made available to human reviewers or used in connection with training Meta’s artificial-intelligence systems. Wolfson represents plaintiffs in the consolidated Northern District of California proceeding. On July 19, 2026, Judge Edward Chen appointed Wolfson, Thomas Loeser, and Ryan Clarkson interim co-lead counsel. The litigation expanded in September to include proposed claims for bystanders who allege they were recorded without consenting to the capture or downstream use of their images. The case remains pending. ###### The Map a Life Leaves Behind In Google Location History Litigation, the plaintiffs alleged that Google tracked and stored mobile-device location information even when users had disabled the Location History setting. The court appointed Wolfson and Michael Sobol lead class counsel for a settlement class estimated at 247.7 million people. The final settlement established a $62 million non-reversionary fund and required Google to explain how Location History and Web & App Activity collect location information, show users how to disable those settings, and maintain an automatic-deletion policy of no more than eighteen months for users who opted into them. No settlement money was paid directly to class members. After approved deductions, the balance went to twenty-one court-approved nonprofit organizations for work addressing internet and data privacy, with periodic reports required on how the funds were used. The district court approved that structure in May 2024 after finding direct distribution infeasible for a class of that size. On August 26, 2026, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the final-approval order. Wolfson’s antitrust work follows the data question into the advertising markets built around it: a 2022 federal order appointed her and Dena Sharp interim co-lead counsel for an advertiser class in Google Digital Advertising Antitrust Litigation, and her docket also includes Klein v. Meta Platforms. ###### Judgment in Service of the Courts Wolfson has served as a lawyer representative to the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference and as an elected member of its executive committee. She has also served on the Merit Selection Panel for the United States District Court for the Central District of California, which evaluates candidates for appointment as magistrate judges. These roles place the same questions of judgment and institutional administration that shape her litigation work into service of the federal courts. Across Rivera, Zoom, and Location History, the form of monetary relief changed with the record: direct class payments in the first two matters and court-approved nonprofit distributions in the third. Each resolution also imposed product changes. Face Grouping received new notice, consent, retention, deletion, and security terms; Zoom adopted meeting-security and privacy measures; Google agreed to clearer location-setting notices and automatic deletion. Wolfson’s work repeatedly turns hidden system behavior into terms that a court can approve and a company must implement. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Principal and founding member, Ahdoot & Wolfson, PC - **Practice:** Privacy, cybersecurity, biometrics, antitrust, consumer protection, and class actions - **Selected matters:** Rivera v. Google; In re Zoom Video Communications Privacy Litigation; In re Google Location History Litigation; In re Google Digital Advertising Antitrust Litigation; Klein v. Meta Platforms - **Education:** Harvard Law School, J.D., cum laude; Columbia University, B.A., cum laude - **California Bar:** #174806 · Active ##### Contact Ahdoot & Wolfson, PC 2600 W Olive Avenue, Suite 500Burbank, CA 91505 Main: 310-474-9111 Email: twolfson@ahdootwolfson.com Official profile --- ## 73. Amy E. Keller — `900004875` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff - **Voice-flattening concern:** **LOW** — One new Equifax paragraph and one currentness expansion to an existing OnStar paragraph. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Separate Equifax FCRA settlement and April OnStar ruling. - **Before hash:** `5e073834d89c3f0ba26b7f5fa447bc1c90f7360c2036c285cd24573462dfdbc9` - **After/current hash:** `f81f0266b3272e14fd1571f6fecf75d53574fa3b0c7d4d32a9c787a78d0d6f71` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900004898 (2026-08-31 02:44:48 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `add_source_supported_fact` — **A Settlement Built for Long Risk — separate Equifax FCRA paragraph**: Add the separate 2022 Equifax credit-score litigation because Keller is co-lead counsel and the August 17, 2026 preliminary approval of a $100 million settlement is a material current consumer-protection development distinct from the 2017 data-breach case. - `rewrite` — **The Right to Reach the Merits — other appointments paragraph**: Preserve the existing T-Mobile arbitration assignment, OnStar co-lead appointment, Electrolux settlement and section synthesis while adding the April 2026 OnStar ruling and the surviving federal and state claims. ### BEFORE #### Amy E. Keller Privacy · Cybersecurity · Consumer Technology · Class Actions > “ Consumers are sick and tired of data breaches. ##### What Identity Exposure Requires Amy E. Keller builds consumer cases around the long life of compromised data, the technical choices hidden inside products, and relief that can still matter years later. ###### The Number That Cannot Be Reset A password can be replaced within minutes. A Social Security number may follow its owner for life. Amy E. Keller’s privacy practice starts with that difference. In breach litigation, the useful questions begin with what was taken and continue into how long the exposure can be exploited, which services can limit the damage, and what security obligations will reduce the chance of a repeat. Those questions also guide her work when a device behaves in ways its owner cannot readily inspect. Keller is a partner at DiCello Levitt, managing partner of its Chicago office, and chair of the firm’s Privacy, Technology, and Cybersecurity practice. She earned her B.A. at the University of Michigan and her J.D. at the John Marshall Law School, now the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law. Her appointment as co-lead counsel in the Equifax data-breach litigation made her the youngest woman to serve as co-lead class counsel in a nationwide class action. ###### A Settlement Built for Long Risk The 2017 Equifax breach exposed personal information belonging to approximately 147 million people. Keller served as co-lead counsel in the consolidated consumer litigation. The class settlement established a $380.5 million fund and allowed up to another $125 million if needed. The broader resolution with the Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and states was announced at a minimum of $575 million and a potential total of $700 million. The settlement paired monetary claims with credit monitoring, identity-restoration services, and security requirements. That combination recognized the unusual duration of identity theft risk: misuse may surface well after a conventional claims period ends. The FTC’s continuing administration of the settlement includes free identity-restoration assistance through January 2029, keeping a practical form of relief available years after the breach. ###### Pricing a Hidden Software Change In In re Apple Inc. Device Performance Litigation, Keller was named Co-Chair of Law and Briefing on the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee. The case concerned software that managed the performance of certain iPhones as their batteries aged. Its settlement required Apple to pay at least $310 million and permitted a total of up to $500 million, depending on the number of valid claims. The record joined operating-system behavior, battery condition, consumer disclosures, and purchase decisions in a single class case. Keller’s briefing role placed her at the point where those technical facts had to support a legal theory common to millions of devices. The eventual payment range translated an unseen software decision into defined compensation for eligible owners. ###### The Right to Reach the Merits Keller also serves as co-lead counsel in In re Blackbaud, Inc. Customer Data Security Breach Litigation. At the pleading stage, the district court rejected Blackbaud’s challenge to subject-matter jurisdiction, finding that the plaintiffs had sufficiently alleged traceability for Article III standing. The ruling allowed claims arising from the breach to proceed and addressed a threshold question that often decides whether people whose data was exposed can reach the merits of their case. Her other appointments carry the same concern into different settings. On the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee in the T-Mobile data-breach litigation, she was assigned to oppose efforts to compel customers into individual arbitration. She is also OnStar Track Co-Lead Counsel in multidistrict litigation over the allegedly unauthorized collection and sharing of consumer driving data. In litigation involving allegedly defective Electrolux dryers, she served as co-lead settlement class counsel in a $35 million resolution. These matters move from access to court, to behavioral data gathered by a connected car, to a physical product with a visible defect. Each requires a workable remedy for a dispersed consumer class. ###### Rules With Consequences Keller’s work outside individual cases centers on the institutions that shape privacy and class-action law. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, secretary of Public Justice, chair of the American Association for Justice’s Data Breach and Cybersecurity Practice Group Committee, and a member of the steering committee for The Sedona Conference’s Working Group 11 on data security and privacy liability. She also served on Law360’s 2025 Cybersecurity & Privacy Editorial Board and, in May 2026, published an argument against federal privacy legislation that failed to provide genuine consumer protection. Each role deals with the rules that determine whether consumer rights can be used in practice. Her summary of the public mood is direct: “Consumers are sick and tired of data breaches.” The cases supply a legal response to that frustration. They identify the injury, preserve access to a forum, connect technical conduct to common proof, and set out relief that matches the life of the risk. For data that cannot simply be reissued, the remedy has to remain useful after the headlines are gone. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner; Managing Partner, Chicago Office; Chair, Privacy, Technology, and Cybersecurity, DiCello Levitt LLP - **Practice:** Privacy, cybersecurity, data-breach, defective-technology, consumer-protection, and class-action litigation - **Selected matters:** In re Equifax Customer Data Security Breach Litigation; In re Apple Inc. Device Performance Litigation; In re Blackbaud, Inc. Customer Data Security Breach Litigation; In re T-Mobile Customer Data Security Breach Litigation - **Education:** The John Marshall Law School, J.D.; University of Michigan, B.A. ##### Contact DiCello Levitt LLP 10 North Dearborn Street, 6th FloorChicago, Illinois 60602 Direct: 312-214-7900 akeller@dicellolevitt.com Official profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Amy E. Keller Privacy · Cybersecurity · Consumer Technology · Class Actions > “ Consumers are sick and tired of data breaches. ##### What Identity Exposure Requires Amy E. Keller builds consumer cases around the long life of compromised data, the technical choices hidden inside products, and relief that can still matter years later. ###### The Number That Cannot Be Reset A password can be replaced within minutes. A Social Security number may follow its owner for life. Amy E. Keller’s privacy practice starts with that difference. In breach litigation, the useful questions begin with what was taken and continue into how long the exposure can be exploited, which services can limit the damage, and what security obligations will reduce the chance of a repeat. Those questions also guide her work when a device behaves in ways its owner cannot readily inspect. Keller is a partner at DiCello Levitt, managing partner of its Chicago office, and chair of the firm’s Privacy, Technology, and Cybersecurity practice. She earned her B.A. at the University of Michigan and her J.D. at the John Marshall Law School, now the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law. Her appointment as co-lead counsel in the Equifax data-breach litigation made her the youngest woman to serve as co-lead class counsel in a nationwide class action. ###### A Settlement Built for Long Risk The 2017 Equifax breach exposed personal information belonging to approximately 147 million people. Keller served as co-lead counsel in the consolidated consumer litigation. The class settlement established a $380.5 million fund and allowed up to another $125 million if needed. The broader resolution with the Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and states was announced at a minimum of $575 million and a potential total of $700 million. The settlement paired monetary claims with credit monitoring, identity-restoration services, and security requirements. That combination recognized the unusual duration of identity theft risk: misuse may surface well after a conventional claims period ends. The FTC’s continuing administration of the settlement includes free identity-restoration assistance through January 2029, keeping a practical form of relief available years after the breach. A separate Equifax case reached a new stage in August 2026. Keller serves as co-lead counsel in In re Equifax Fair Credit Reporting Act Litigation, brought for consumers who allege that Equifax miscalculated credit scores for approximately four million people applying for mortgages, auto loans, or credit cards during part of 2022. On August 17, the court preliminarily approved a $100 million non-reversionary settlement providing direct cash payments to class members. A final fairness hearing is scheduled for January 22, 2027. ###### Pricing a Hidden Software Change In In re Apple Inc. Device Performance Litigation, Keller was named Co-Chair of Law and Briefing on the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee. The case concerned software that managed the performance of certain iPhones as their batteries aged. Its settlement required Apple to pay at least $310 million and permitted a total of up to $500 million, depending on the number of valid claims. The record joined operating-system behavior, battery condition, consumer disclosures, and purchase decisions in a single class case. Keller’s briefing role placed her at the point where those technical facts had to support a legal theory common to millions of devices. The eventual payment range translated an unseen software decision into defined compensation for eligible owners. ###### The Right to Reach the Merits Keller also serves as co-lead counsel in In re Blackbaud, Inc. Customer Data Security Breach Litigation. At the pleading stage, the district court rejected Blackbaud’s challenge to subject-matter jurisdiction, finding that the plaintiffs had sufficiently alleged traceability for Article III standing. The ruling allowed claims arising from the breach to proceed and addressed a threshold question that often decides whether people whose data was exposed can reach the merits of their case. Her other appointments carry the same concern into different settings. On the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee in the T-Mobile data-breach litigation, she was assigned to oppose efforts to compel customers into individual arbitration. Keller also serves as OnStar Track Co-Lead Counsel in multidistrict litigation alleging that General Motors, OnStar, LexisNexis, and Verisk collected, shared, and monetized consumers’ driving data without proper consent. In April 2026, the court allowed claims under the Federal Wiretap Act and Stored Communications Act to proceed, along with unjust-enrichment claims and portions of the plaintiffs’ invasion-of-privacy, civil-conspiracy, and Fair Credit Reporting Act claims. In litigation involving allegedly defective Electrolux dryers, she served as co-lead settlement class counsel in a $35 million resolution. These matters move from access to court, to behavioral data gathered by a connected car, to a physical product with a visible defect. Each requires a workable remedy for a dispersed consumer class. ###### Rules With Consequences Keller’s work outside individual cases centers on the institutions that shape privacy and class-action law. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, secretary of Public Justice, chair of the American Association for Justice’s Data Breach and Cybersecurity Practice Group Committee, and a member of the steering committee for The Sedona Conference’s Working Group 11 on data security and privacy liability. She also served on Law360’s 2025 Cybersecurity & Privacy Editorial Board and, in May 2026, published an argument against federal privacy legislation that failed to provide genuine consumer protection. Each role deals with the rules that determine whether consumer rights can be used in practice. Her summary of the public mood is direct: “Consumers are sick and tired of data breaches.” The cases supply a legal response to that frustration. They identify the injury, preserve access to a forum, connect technical conduct to common proof, and set out relief that matches the life of the risk. For data that cannot simply be reissued, the remedy has to remain useful after the headlines are gone. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner; Managing Partner, Chicago Office; Chair, Privacy, Technology, and Cybersecurity, DiCello Levitt LLP - **Practice:** Privacy, cybersecurity, data-breach, defective-technology, consumer-protection, and class-action litigation - **Selected matters:** In re Equifax Customer Data Security Breach Litigation; In re Apple Inc. Device Performance Litigation; In re Blackbaud, Inc. Customer Data Security Breach Litigation; In re T-Mobile Customer Data Security Breach Litigation - **Education:** The John Marshall Law School, J.D.; University of Michigan, B.A. ##### Contact DiCello Levitt LLP 10 North Dearborn Street, 6th FloorChicago, Illinois 60602 Direct: 312-214-7900 akeller@dicellolevitt.com Official profile --- ## 74. R. Joseph Barton — `900004826` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff - **Voice-flattening concern:** **HIGH** — Major rewrite explicitly removed stature, touchstone, definitive-treatise, and profession-chose-him language. Strong restoration candidate. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Ritchie Trucking and United Bank 2026 ESOP endpoints are useful even if prose is restored. - **Before hash:** `a3c34a4228d31eb225cdd570da4e2e34d321f7c91ffdf899a9b79ea6b3e47147` - **After/current hash:** `e3909122eb37aba17cd6cd97c77d1ab8d3fe724c9fed1dfa1126bdec3cb1dbdb` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900004862 (2026-08-30 18:04:44 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Opening section: heading, stewardship paragraph, and biography paragraph**: Replace duplicate heading and promotional/performative narration with concrete valuation, plan-document, benefit-calculation, education and employee-benefits-practice facts while preserving the worker-retirement stewardship frame. - `rewrite` — **Trying the ESOP Case — Chesemore paragraph**: Preserve Barton's lead-trial role, $17.2 million-plus-interest result and Seventh Circuit affirmance while removing unsupported stature and 'touchstone' narration and foregrounding valuation and transaction proof. - `rewrite` — **Trying the ESOP Case — broader record paragraph**: Preserve Wawa, KPC and Rainbow settlements while adding source-supported Ritchie Trucking and United Bank settlement/final-judgment developments through March 2026. - `rewrite` — **Writing section: heading and both paragraphs**: Preserve Barton's Employee Benefits Law editorial chair, ABA committee service, Fellow status, AAJ roles and writing while removing 'definitive,' 'most senior,' and 'profession chose him' narrator praise and replacing the close with a direct description of his method. - `rewrite` — **At a Glance — selected matters**: Add Ritchie Trucking ESOP and United Bank ESOP to the existing selected-matters rail so the public exterior reflects the current narrative. ### BEFORE #### R. Joseph Barton ESOPs · Pensions · ERISA · Fiduciary Litigation > “ My practice involves representing employees in disputes concerning calculation of their pensions. ##### The Stewardship Question R. Joseph Barton brings trial discipline to ESOP and pension cases where workers’ earned security turns on valuation, calculation, and fiduciary stewardship. ###### The Stewardship Question Stewardship is R. Joseph Barton's abiding subject. Pension administrators, 401(k) fiduciaries, ESOP trustees, employers, and the advisers who surround them hold authority over assets a worker may spend an entire career earning — and almost never sees until the day a benefit fails to arrive. For a quarter century, Barton's litigation has tested whether that authority was used for the participants' benefit: whether stock was bought at a fair value, whether a pension was calculated as the plan promised, and whether fiduciaries treated retirement assets as workers' property rather than a pool to be managed for someone else's benefit. It is a practice conducted largely out of public view, in the dense country of plan documents and valuation reports, yet its results are as concrete as law gets — tens of millions of dollars restored to employees and plan participants. Barton's path into the field ran through Williamsburg twice. He took his undergraduate degree in history from the College of William & Mary, then returned to its Marshall-Wythe School of Law, where he graduated Order of the Coif in 2000, served on the editorial board of the law review, and collected a shelf of the school's top advocacy and service awards. History turned out to be apt training: benefits cases are archaeology, reconstructed from decades of amendments, transactions, and administrative decisions. After beginning practice in 2001 and building his reputation over more than a decade of benefits class actions at national plaintiffs' firms, he founded his own Washington firm — a lean operation designed for the kind of trial-intensive fiduciary litigation most class practices settle their way around. ###### Trying the ESOP Case Employee stock ownership plans occupy a strange corner of American capitalism: vehicles designed to make workers owners, funded with their own retirement assets, and dependent entirely on the integrity of the trustees and sellers who set the price of the stock. When that integrity fails, employees can pay retirement money for shares worth a fraction of the price — and Barton has become one of the country's foremost lawyers at proving it. His landmark is the Chesemore litigation over the ESOP of Trachte Building Systems, a Wisconsin manufacturer whose employees' plan was loaded with company stock in a leveraged transaction that soon collapsed in value. Rather than settling, Barton's team tried the case — a rarity in ERISA practice — and won approximately $17.2 million plus prejudgment interest, a judgment the Seventh Circuit affirmed. The decision became a touchstone for fiduciary liability in ESOP transactions, cited ever since by lawyers and courts working through what trustees owe the employee-owners whose money is on the table. The trial win anchored a broader record. Barton was counsel in the $25 million settlement for participants in the Wawa ESOP, whose employee-shareholders challenged the forced liquidation of their stock; in the KPC litigation, which resolved for more than $9 million; and in the Rainbow ESOP matter, settled for $7.9 million. Each turned on the same cluster of questions — whether employees paid a fair price for employer stock, whether the trustees and advisers honored the duties that govern transactions financed with retirement assets, and whether an ownership stake sold to workers as a benefit had been structured, in truth, for someone else's benefit. ###### The Arithmetic of a Promise Pension litigation turns abstract promises into arithmetic. Barton's pension work includes a judgment of more than $15 million, affirmed by the Second Circuit, in litigation over the management of the Severstal Wheeling retirement plans, and a $14 million settlement in Mehling v. New York Life on behalf of plan participants. Those results make the governing principle tangible: a retirement promise in a plan booklet is an obligation whose value can be calculated, tested, and restored. The same insistence on calculation over abstraction defines Barton's approach to pension mismanagement. A benefit formula is a promise expressed in variables — years of service, final average pay, interest assumptions — and each variable is a place where value can quietly leak away. Barton follows valuation decisions, plan calculations, and administrative records back to the person responsible for them, giving employees a practical way to enforce obligations that stay invisible until the moment a promised benefit fails to arrive. ###### Writing the Field's Common Law Barton's influence now extends into the professional literature that trains both sides of the bar. On the first day of 2025 he became Plaintiffs' Chair of the Board of Editors for the third edition of Employee Benefits Law, the American Bar Association's definitive treatise on the field — the most senior plaintiff-side editorial position the publication has — after more than a decade co-chairing the civil-procedure work of the ABA's Employee Benefits Committee. He is a Fellow of the American College of Employee Benefits Counsel, has chaired the American Association for Justice's Employment Rights Section and co-chaired its Class Action Litigation Group, and writes steadily for practitioner journals on ERISA, arbitration, and the procedural doctrines that decide whether benefits claims survive. The treatise chair may say the most: the lawyer the profession chose to state what plan participants' law is. There is a consistency to all of it that goes back to the stewardship question. Whether the client is a warehouse worker whose retirement account bought overpriced stock or a plan participant whose pension was reduced by a flawed calculation, the wrong is the same shape: someone with power over another person's earned security used it carelessly or for themselves. Barton's career has been the patient, technically exacting business of proving that shape in court — and of making sure the people entrusted with workers' futures understand that the trust is enforceable. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner, The Barton Firm - **Practice:** ESOP, pension, ERISA, and fiduciary litigation - **Selected matters:** Chesemore / Trachte ESOP; Wawa ESOP; KPC ESOP; Rainbow ESOP; Severstal Wheeling; Mehling v. New York Life - **Education:** William & Mary Law School, J.D., Order of the Coif; College of William & Mary, B.A. ##### Contact The Barton Firm LLP 1633 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 200Washington, DC 20009 Main: 202-734-7046Direct: 202-734-5458 Official profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### R. Joseph Barton ESOPs · Pensions · ERISA · Fiduciary Litigation > “ My practice involves representing employees in disputes concerning calculation of their pensions. ##### The Stewardship Question R. Joseph Barton brings trial discipline to ESOP and pension cases where workers’ earned security turns on valuation, calculation, and fiduciary stewardship. ###### Assets Under Fiduciary Control Retirement-plan disputes often begin with decisions participants cannot see: how employer stock is valued, how plan assets are invested, or how a pension formula is applied. Barton’s litigation follows those decisions through plan documents, valuation reports, transaction records, and benefit calculations. In ESOP cases, he tests whether workers paid or received fair value for employer stock; in pension cases, whether administrators calculated benefits under the plan’s terms. The common issue is fiduciary control over assets workers earned and whether that control was exercised for the participants’ benefit. Barton studied history at the College of William & Mary and earned his J.D. from its Marshall-Wythe School of Law in 2000, graduating Order of the Coif and serving on the editorial board of the law review. His law-school record also included the Lawrence W. I’Anson Award, William B. Sprong Award, Robert R. Kaplan Award, and service on the National Trial Team. After beginning practice in 2001, he spent more than a decade litigating employee-benefits cases at national plaintiffs’ firms before founding The Barton Firm in Washington, D.C. Its employee-benefits docket focuses on ESOP transactions, pensions, 401(k) plans, and other ERISA disputes for workers and plan participants. ###### Trying the ESOP Case ESOP cases can turn on a price set through a transaction the participants did not negotiate. In the Chesemore litigation over the Trachte Building Systems ESOP, Barton served as lead trial counsel for employees challenging a leveraged stock transaction. His team tried the fiduciary-breach case and obtained remedies of approximately $17.2 million plus prejudgment interest; the Seventh Circuit affirmed. The record required proof about valuation, transaction structure, trustee conduct, financing, and the effect of those decisions on the employee-owned shares. Other ESOP matters have produced a $25 million settlement for Wawa participants challenging forced liquidation of their stock, more than $9 million in the KPC litigation, and $7.9 million in the Rainbow matter. More recent cases carry the same valuation questions forward. In the Ritchie Trucking ESOP litigation, participants alleged that the plan paid more than fair market value for company stock in a 2018 transaction; a settlement providing $485,000 in cash, a $1.4 million reduction in transaction debt, and release of 115,000 shares from the suspense account received final approval in December 2025 and final judgment on January 23, 2026. In the United Bank ESOP case, former employees alleged that their shares were forcibly liquidated below fair value, cutting them out of a later company dividend. A $2 million class settlement received final approval on March 27, 2026, followed by final judgment on March 30. ###### The Arithmetic of a Promise Pension litigation turns abstract promises into arithmetic. Barton's pension work includes a judgment of more than $15 million, affirmed by the Second Circuit, in litigation over the management of the Severstal Wheeling retirement plans, and a $14 million settlement in Mehling v. New York Life on behalf of plan participants. Those results make the governing principle tangible: a retirement promise in a plan booklet is an obligation whose value can be calculated, tested, and restored. The same insistence on calculation over abstraction defines Barton's approach to pension mismanagement. A benefit formula is a promise expressed in variables — years of service, final average pay, interest assumptions — and each variable is a place where value can quietly leak away. Barton follows valuation decisions, plan calculations, and administrative records back to the person responsible for them, giving employees a practical way to enforce obligations that stay invisible until the moment a promised benefit fails to arrive. ###### Writing Employee Benefits Law On January 1, 2025, Barton became Plaintiffs’ Chair of the Board of Editors for the third edition of Employee Benefits Law, after more than a decade co-chairing the civil-procedure work of the ABA’s Employee Benefits Committee. He is a Fellow of the American College of Employee Benefits Counsel, has chaired the American Association for Justice’s Employment Rights Section and co-chaired its Class Action Litigation Group, and writes for practitioner publications on ERISA, arbitration, and the procedural rules that determine whether benefits claims can proceed. That work tracks the same questions that recur in his cases. Plan language, valuation methodology, fiduciary process, and procedure determine whether a participant can enforce an earned benefit. Across employer-stock transactions, pension calculations, and other fiduciary disputes, Barton identifies who controlled the decision, tests it against ERISA or the plan, and calculates the value at issue for participants. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Founding Partner, The Barton Firm - **Practice:** ESOP, pension, ERISA, and fiduciary litigation - **Selected matters:** Chesemore / Trachte ESOP; Wawa ESOP; KPC ESOP; Rainbow ESOP; Ritchie Trucking ESOP; United Bank ESOP; Severstal Wheeling; Mehling v. New York Life - **Education:** William & Mary Law School, J.D., Order of the Coif; College of William & Mary, B.A. ##### Contact The Barton Firm LLP 1633 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 200Washington, DC 20009 Main: 202-734-7046Direct: 202-734-5458 Official profile --- ## 75. Claudia Center — `900004823` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff - **Voice-flattening concern:** **HIGH** — Major rewrite removed literary/editorial judgments such as unfashionable frontier, visible defender, authority of a career, and What distinguishes Center. Clearest flattening concern. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Barnett precision plus 2026 Florida parking and Section 504/Olmstead developments should survive restoration. - **Before hash:** `f2b36562bfeded0f303db1fb7848ccb40c270a311aaddf85153f8c32e8d9651f` - **After/current hash:** `f61104769398845018bad788dcecf66355e0da1391d4eb1563df47dc05d6fec5` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005503 (2026-09-11 20:36:16 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 3 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **The Mailroom Question — both paragraphs**: State the Barnett seniority/reassignment framework precisely and replace rhetorical fragments with a direct description of Center's functional-access method. - `rewrite` — **Invisible Barriers — both paragraphs**: Preserve Center's career, Libra Project, FEHA work, Bates relief, teaching and Hearne Award while removing frontier/signal-recognition narration. - `rewrite` — **The Whole Life of the Statute — existing DREDF paragraph**: Preserve ACLU role and all E.E., Mark S., Hecker and Armstrong substance in a more direct current-role paragraph. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **The Whole Life of the Statute — United Spinal paragraph**: Add Center's April 2026 counsel role and requested ADA parking relief in the current Florida case. - `rewrite` — **Defending the Foundation — both paragraphs**: Replace narrator praise with Center's dated 2026 Section 504/Olmstead advocacy and a direct synthesis of her access-focused litigation method. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **At a Glance — selected matters**: Add United Spinal Association v. Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to the selected-matters rail. - `rewrite` — **The Mailroom Question — both paragraphs**: State the Barnett seniority/reassignment framework precisely and replace rhetorical fragments with a direct description of Center's functional-access method. - `rewrite` — **Invisible Barriers — both paragraphs**: Preserve Center's career, Libra Project, FEHA work, Bates relief, teaching and Hearne Award while removing frontier/signal-recognition narration. - `rewrite` — **The Whole Life of the Statute — existing DREDF paragraph**: Preserve ACLU role and all E.E., Mark S., Hecker and Armstrong substance in a more direct current-role paragraph. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **The Whole Life of the Statute — United Spinal paragraph**: Add Center's April 2026 counsel role and requested ADA parking relief in the current Florida case. - `rewrite` — **Defending the Foundation — both paragraphs**: Replace narrator praise with Center's dated 2026 Section 504/Olmstead advocacy and a direct synthesis of her access-focused litigation method. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **At a Glance — selected matters**: Add United Spinal Association v. Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to the selected-matters rail. - `rewrite` — **Article lead heading**: Reduce a four-signal predictable-device stack identified by the structural audit while preserving the exact organizing principle and all substantive content. ### BEFORE #### Claudia Center Disability Rights · Workplace Accommodation · Education ##### The Function of Inclusion Disability discrimination, workplace accommodation, education, and community integration — Legal Director, Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, Berkeley. > This is a set of standards that generations of disabled people and disabled children have relied on. ###### The Mailroom Question The case looked small from the outside: a US Airways cargo handler named Robert Barnett had injured his back, transferred into a mailroom position he could physically perform, and asked to keep it. The airline said its seniority system controlled. From that dispute over one job assignment, Claudia Center — barely a decade out of law school — carried a question to the United States Supreme Court that reached every workplace in the country: when a disabled employee needs reassignment to keep working, what does the law require of the employer? Center argued US Airways, Inc. v. Barnett herself, and the Court's 2002 decision confirmed that reassignment can be a reasonable accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Even where a seniority system ordinarily prevails, the Court preserved the employee's ability to show special circumstances in which reassignment remains reasonable — meaning the accommodation analysis does not end automatically the moment an employer invokes a general rule. Two decades on, that framework still governs how millions of accommodation conversations begin, and it began with a lawyer who understood that the mailroom job was never small at all. Center's method starts from a blunt question: what must this person actually be able to do? Understand the training. Enter the workplace. Perform the job with a reasonable accommodation. Obtain the service. Remain at home in the community. Her cases push past formal policies to test whether an institution's ordinary operation lets disabled people take part with autonomy — because disability discrimination so often hides inside nominal inclusion, a program open in theory and impassable in practice. ###### Invisible Barriers She built the method deliberately. After Wesleyan and a 1991 law degree from Berkeley, Center began as a Women's Law and Public Policy Fellow and staff attorney at NARAL in Washington before returning to San Francisco and the Legal Aid Society–Employment Law Center, now Legal Aid at Work, where she would direct the disability rights program for the better part of two decades. In 1997, Echoing Green awarded her a fellowship to found the Libra Project — Lifting Invisible Barriers through Reasonable Accommodation — an initiative to advance the workplace rights of people with psychiatric disabilities through direct services, education, and litigation. The choice of focus was characteristic: psychiatric disability was then the unfashionable frontier of the field, the place where stigma was strongest and legal protection thinnest, and Center planted her practice exactly there. She later founded the Workers' Rights Disability Law Clinic at the Ed Roberts Campus, the Berkeley building that is itself a monument of universal design, and played a significant role in securing the comprehensive amendments to California's Fair Employment and Housing Act that expanded disability protections in employment and housing — state-law guarantees that proved crucial when federal doctrine narrowed. The employment docket produced structural results. In Bates v. UPS, she was counsel in systemic litigation on behalf of deaf and hard-of-hearing employees seeking what hearing employees received automatically: effective communication, equal access to safety information, meetings they could follow, a fair shot at advancement. The case produced injunctive and workplace relief that changed how a national logistics company communicates with its workforce. Throughout, she taught disability rights law as an adjunct professor at both UC Hastings and Berkeley Law, and in 2009 the American Bar Association's disability commission honored her with the Paul G. Hearne Award for Disability Rights, one of the field's signal recognitions. ###### The Whole Life of the Statute A stint as senior staff attorney in the ACLU's national Disability Rights Program widened the canvas — legislative work, amicus strategy, appellate litigation across the full range of disability civil rights — before Center assumed her current post as legal director of the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, the Berkeley-based organization that has shaped disability law since before the ADA existed. At DREDF she directs a docket that follows disabled people through the whole arc of public life. In E.E. v. State of California, the DREDF team secured a 2022 settlement requiring the governor's office to support legislative amendments designed to remove disability barriers from independent-study programs, so that students whose health or disability keeps them from a conventional classroom are not quietly excluded from schooling itself. In Mark S. v. State of California, 2024 settlements required stronger state monitoring and oversight of school districts and expert-directed reforms to Pittsburg Unified's special-education and student-discipline programs. In Hecker v. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, a settlement changed statewide policies affecting prisoners with serious mental illness and other psychiatric disabilities. In Armstrong v. Davis, litigation enforced ADA access in California's prison and parole systems, including parole hearings — settings in which an inaccessible process or unintelligible requirement can carry grave consequences. Different institutions, same discipline: relief built around communication, mobility, work, education, and community life, designed to change a daily routine rather than survive only as a declaration. ###### Defending the Foundation The current chapter of Center's career has a different valence: the standards themselves are under attack, and she has become one of their most visible defenders. When a coalition of states brought litigation challenging the regulatory foundations of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act — the 1973 statute that first promised disabled people access to federally funded programs, and the legal ancestor of the ADA — Center stepped forward to explain, in courtrooms of public opinion and to national media, precisely what was at stake: accessibility requirements, effective-communication rules, the integration mandate that keeps disabled people in communities rather than institutions. Her warning was simple and carried the authority of a career: this is a set of standards that generations of disabled people and disabled children have relied on. She has spent thirty-five years helping to write, enforce, and now defend those standards, and she knows their weight because she has watched individual lives — a cargo handler, a deaf driver, a student studying from home, a parolee reporting in — turn on whether the standards held. What distinguishes Center in a field of committed advocates is her exacting attention to function. A policy that promises inclusion means nothing to her until she can trace how it operates at the level of a single working day: the training video that has captions or does not, the reassignment list that includes the injured worker or does not, the independent-study packet that arrives in an accessible format or does not. By building remedies around those verifiable particulars, she has helped move disability law from symbolic availability toward the real thing — a working day, a classroom, a neighborhood, actually lived in. The mailroom question, asked again and again, institution by institution, for a generation: what must this person actually be able to do, and what must change so that they can? ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Legal Director, Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund - **Practice:** Disability discrimination, workplace accommodation, education, and community integration - **Selected matters:** US Airways, Inc. v. Barnett; Bates v. UPS; E.E. v. State of California; Mark S. v. State of California; Hecker v. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation; Armstrong v. Davis - **Earlier roles:** ACLU Disability Rights Program; Legal Aid at Work disability rights program - **Recognition:** Paul G. Hearne Award for Disability Rights; Echoing Green Fellowship ##### Contact Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund Official profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Claudia Center Disability Rights · Workplace Accommodation · Education ##### Inclusion in Practice Disability discrimination, workplace accommodation, education, and community integration — Legal Director, Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, Berkeley. > This is a set of standards that generations of disabled people and disabled children have relied on. ###### The Mailroom Question Robert Barnett, a US Airways cargo handler, injured his back, transferred into a mailroom position he could physically perform, and asked to remain there when the job became subject to the airline's seniority system. Center argued US Airways, Inc. v. Barnett in the Supreme Court. The Court's 2002 decision recognized reassignment as a form of reasonable accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act while holding that a seniority system will ordinarily make a conflicting reassignment unreasonable. It also preserved the employee's opportunity to show special circumstances that make reassignment reasonable in a particular case. The framework requires an accommodation analysis rather than an automatic answer from the employer's general rule. That focus on how a rule operates in practice runs through Center's later work. Her cases examine whether a disabled person can understand required training, enter a workplace, perform a job with an accommodation, obtain a public service, or remain at home in the community. Center therefore examines whether ordinary procedures allow disabled people to use a program with meaningful access and autonomy. ###### Invisible Barriers After Wesleyan and a 1991 law degree from Berkeley, Center began as a Women's Law and Public Policy Fellow and staff attorney at NARAL in Washington before returning to San Francisco and the Legal Aid Society–Employment Law Center, now Legal Aid at Work, where she directed the disability rights program for much of the next two decades. In 1997, an Echoing Green Fellowship supported her creation of the Libra Project — Lifting Invisible Barriers through Reasonable Accommodation — which advanced workplace rights for people with psychiatric disabilities through direct services, education, and litigation. She later founded the Workers' Rights Disability Law Clinic at the Ed Roberts Campus and played a significant role in securing amendments to California's Fair Employment and Housing Act that expanded disability protections in employment and housing. In Bates v. UPS, Center was counsel in systemic litigation for deaf and hard-of-hearing employees seeking effective communication, access to safety information, understandable meetings, and equal employment opportunities. The case produced injunctive and workplace relief addressing how UPS communicated with affected employees. Center also taught disability rights law as an adjunct professor at UC Hastings and Berkeley Law, and in 2009 received the American Bar Association Commission on Disability Rights' Paul G. Hearne Award for Disability Rights. ###### The Whole Life of the Statute Center later served as a senior staff attorney in the ACLU's national Disability Rights Program, working on legislation, amicus strategy, and appellate litigation before becoming legal director of the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund. At DREDF, her docket spans education, institutional settings, employment, and community access. In E.E. v. State of California, a 2022 settlement required the governor's office to support legislative amendments addressing disability barriers in independent-study programs. In Mark S. v. State of California, 2024 settlements required stronger state monitoring of school districts and expert-directed reforms to Pittsburg Unified's special-education and student-discipline programs. In Hecker v. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, a settlement changed statewide policies affecting prisoners with serious mental illness and other psychiatric disabilities. In Armstrong v. Davis, litigation enforced ADA access in California's prison and parole systems, including parole hearings. That same attention to physical access is central to United Spinal Association v. Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. In April 2026, Center signed an amended federal complaint for United Spinal Association and individual plaintiffs challenging a Florida law that allows pregnancy permit holders to use disability parking spaces without showing a mobility disability. The plaintiffs allege that the law conflicts with the ADA. They seek to preserve accessible disability spaces while allowing Florida to designate additional parking for pregnancy; among the requested alternatives is an order limiting pregnancy permits to separately designated pregnancy spaces, together with policies and training for ADA compliance. ###### Defending the Foundation Center's current policy work includes the renewed challenge to Section 504's community-integration protections in Texas v. Kennedy. By 2026, her legal career spanned roughly thirty-five years of disability-rights and related civil-rights advocacy. In February, she joined disability-rights leaders in a public briefing on the states' challenge to the 2024 Section 504 regulations, including accessibility requirements, effective-communication obligations, and the integration mandate reflected in Olmstead v. L.C. On August 31, the Department of Justice, on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services, and state plaintiffs filed a proposed resolution asking the court to remove references to community integration from the 2024 regulations. DREDF and allied disability organizations opposed that proposal on September 1. Their statement emphasized that the proposed resolution does not itself alter Section 504, the ADA, or the Supreme Court's Olmstead precedent. Center's work in these matters turns on specific points of access: whether a training video communicates to a deaf employee, whether reassignment rules account for disability, whether an independent-study program can be used by a disabled student, whether an accessible parking space remains available to the person who needs it, and whether public services are delivered in integrated community settings. Across workplace, education, parking, prison, parole, and community-integration cases, she builds disability-rights claims around the procedures and physical conditions that determine whether access exists in practice. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Legal Director, Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund - **Practice:** Disability discrimination, workplace accommodation, education, and community integration - **Selected matters:** US Airways, Inc. v. Barnett; Bates v. UPS; E.E. v. State of California; Mark S. v. State of California; Hecker v. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation; Armstrong v. Davis; United Spinal Association v. Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles - **Earlier roles:** ACLU Disability Rights Program; Legal Aid at Work disability rights program - **Recognition:** Paul G. Hearne Award for Disability Rights; Echoing Green Fellowship ##### Contact Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund Official profile --- ## 76. Mark D. Rosenbaum — `900004824` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `2571b60c8316aabedc1c3d63ec41111d20f104c57024a93696c690d00f3a1abc` - **After/current hash:** `b89531f79b8f27ad4cfe6aad3e4b63cdeb2bd20f9200b51bc84b2228f6c297a2` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900004824/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restructure_and_tighten` — **Williams opening and career paragraph**: Preserve the concrete school-condition evidence and civil-rights chronology while replacing abstract praise and the repeated 'running that play' formulation with a clear description of Rosenbaum's method. - `correct` — **Gary B. settlement and funding sequence**: Distinguish the governor's settlement commitment to seek at least $94.4 million from the state's later appropriation of that amount. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Perez-Funez 2026**: Replace a vague reference to immigrant-child due-process protections with the specific 1985 injunction, Rosenbaum's original role, the 2026 termination effort and the April 7 ruling. - `correct_and_update` — **Powers v. McDonough**: Distinguish the Ninth Circuit's affirmed disability-discrimination and housing holdings from the reversed charitable-trust ruling and narrowed lease relief, then update the matter through the September 11, 2026 denial of rehearing en banc. - `remove_promotional_or_unsupported_framing` — **late-career and closing sections**: Remove age-based emeritus language, prediction about which case he will be remembered for, the doctrinal-flag applause line, the 'veterans are coming inside the fence' flourish and unsupported annual-travel cadence; retain the dated award and current teaching facts. - `restructure` — **Williams opening and career paragraph**: Preserve the concrete school-condition evidence and civil-rights chronology while replacing abstract praise and the repeated 'running that play' formulation with a clear description of Rosenbaum's method. - `correct` — **Gary B. settlement and funding sequence**: Distinguish the governor's settlement commitment to seek at least $94.4 million from the state's later appropriation of that amount. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Perez-Funez 2026**: Replace a vague reference to immigrant-child due-process protections with the specific 1985 injunction, Rosenbaum's original role, the 2026 termination effort and the April 7 ruling. - `correct` — **Powers v. McDonough**: Distinguish the Ninth Circuit's affirmed disability-discrimination and housing holdings from the reversed charitable-trust ruling and narrowed lease relief, then update the matter through the September 11, 2026 denial of rehearing en banc. - `restructure` — **late-career and closing sections**: Remove age-based emeritus language, prediction about which case he will be remembered for, the doctrinal-flag applause line, the 'veterans are coming inside the fence' flourish and unsupported annual-travel cadence; retain the dated award and current teaching facts. ### BEFORE #### Mark D. Rosenbaum Education Equity · Immigrants’ Rights · Public-Interest Litigation ##### The Classroom Record Education equity, immigrants’ rights, voting, and constitutional public-interest litigation — Senior Special Counsel for Strategic Litigation, Public Counsel, Los Angeles. ###### California’s Empty Shelves In some California classrooms the textbooks never arrived, the bathrooms did not work, and the teachers changed with the seasons. The state’s constitution promised every child an education; the buildings told a different story. Mark D. Rosenbaum begins where a formal right exists but the conditions to exercise it do not — and in Williams v. California, he served as principal counsel for students attending schools without adequate textbooks, qualified teachers, or safe facilities, transforming broken plumbing and empty shelves into evidence of unequal educational conditions rather than unfortunate details beyond the reach of law. The settlement produced commitments exceeding $1 billion for instructional materials, qualified teachers, and facility repairs in the state’s lowest-performing schools, along with new accountability machinery to keep the promises visible. It is a signature Rosenbaum result: the constitutional abstraction made material, the material deprivation made actionable, and the remedy aimed at the system that produced the harm. He has been running that play for half a century. Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Michigan, Harvard Law class of 1974, Rosenbaum went almost directly to the ACLU of Southern California and stayed roughly forty years, rising from staff counsel to general counsel and legal director, and finally chief counsel. The docket he built there is a chronicle of late-twentieth-century civil rights in California. He joined the legal effort that finally overturned the conviction of former Black Panther leader Geronimo Pratt, imprisoned for decades for a murder he did not commit. In Garza v. Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, he helped litigate the voting-rights case that redrew the county’s supervisorial districts after findings of unlawful dilution of Latino voting strength — and within a year, Gloria Molina had become the first Latina elected to the board of one of the largest local governments in America. And when California voters passed Proposition 187 in 1994, Rosenbaum was among the lead lawyers in Gregorio T. v. Wilson, the challenge that kept the initiative’s machinery of exclusion — the status checks in schools and clinics, the reporting mandates — from ever taking effect. ###### The Right to Read In 2014, at an age when most litigators of his standing accept the emeritus circuit, Rosenbaum moved to Public Counsel, the nation’s largest pro bono public-interest firm, to direct its Opportunity Under Law project; since 2023 he has served as senior special counsel for strategic litigation. The move produced the case he may be remembered for longest. In Gary B. v. Whitmer, he represented Detroit schoolchildren consigned to classrooms without books, without qualified teachers, sometimes without heat — schools where, the complaint documented, literacy itself was not being taught. His theory was audacious: that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees access to literacy, because every other right the Constitution confers — voting, jury service, petition, speech — presumes a citizen who can read. In 2020 a Sixth Circuit panel agreed, recognizing for the first time in American history a federal constitutional right of access to literacy. The full court later vacated the panel opinion when the case settled — but the settlement itself delivered what the students had sued for: Michigan committed $94.4 million to Detroit’s schools along with a program of literacy reforms. The doctrinal flag was planted, the money and reforms were real, and a generation of Detroit students inherited both. Rosenbaum’s immigration work in the same years reached the Supreme Court. He was counsel in the litigation that became Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, the successful challenge to the attempted rescission of DACA. The Court held the rescission arbitrary and capricious — a ruling that preserved, for hundreds of thousands of young people who had built lives in reliance on the program’s promise, the ability to keep working, studying, and remaining in the only country they know. The case fit the pattern of his career: a government program invites settled reliance, then attempts to vanish without adequate explanation, and the law of reasoned decision-making becomes the shield for the people left standing in the doorway. In 2026 the pattern continued when a federal court upheld due-process protections for unaccompanied immigrant children. ###### The Soldiers’ Home The case that best displays the late-career Rosenbaum began with a broken deed. In 1888, land in West Los Angeles was donated to the federal government as a home for disabled soldiers; a century later, veterans with disabilities were sleeping on sidewalks outside its fences while portions of the campus hosted a private school’s athletic facilities and other non-veteran uses. Rosenbaum had pressed the issue for years — including in Valentini v. Shinseki, which won relief for disabled homeless veterans — and in Powers v. McDonough he helped lead the trial team, alongside co-counsel from Inner City Law Center and Brown, Goldstein & Levy, that took the Department of Veterans Affairs to trial in 2024. The federal court ordered housing and services for disabled veterans on the campus itself, enforcing the land’s original promise as law. In December 2025, the Ninth Circuit upheld the core of the district court’s order, including housing and services for disabled veterans on the campus. The veterans are coming inside the fence. ###### Fifty Years, One Client Rosenbaum has argued four times before the United States Supreme Court, more than twenty-five times in the federal courts of appeals, and three times in the California Supreme Court. He received the Shattuck-Price Outstanding Lawyer Award in 2026. For more than two decades he held the Harvey Gunderson professorship from practice at the University of Michigan; he now teaches at UC Irvine, after years at UCLA, USC, and Loyola, and travels annually to Shenzhen to teach liberty, equality, and free speech to Chinese law students at Peking University’s School of Transnational Law. Enforceability unites it all. A constitutional guarantee means little when an institution withholds the material conditions needed to use it: the child with a right to education and no books, the family invited to rely on a program that vanishes overnight, the veteran with a deed-promised home and a sidewalk. Rosenbaum builds the record out of those conditions — the empty shelf, the shuttered classroom, the fence line — and seeks remedies substantial enough to change the public system that produced the denial. Fifty years in, his client has never really changed. It is the person the system was built to serve and somehow learned to overlook, and he keeps winning them back what they were promised in writing all along. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Senior Special Counsel for Strategic Litigation, Public Counsel - **Practice:** Education equity, immigrants’ rights, voting rights, veterans’ rights, and constitutional public-interest litigation - **Selected matters:** Williams v. California; Gary B. v. Whitmer; DHS v. Regents of the University of California; Powers v. McDonough - **Education:** University of Michigan; Harvard Law School - **Location:** Los Angeles, California ##### Contact Public Counsel Official profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Mark D. Rosenbaum Education Equity · Immigrants’ Rights · Public-Interest Litigation ##### The Classroom Record Education equity, immigrants’ rights, voting, and constitutional public-interest litigation — Senior Special Counsel for Strategic Litigation, Public Counsel, Los Angeles. ###### California’s Empty Shelves In some California classrooms the textbooks never arrived, the bathrooms did not work, and the teachers changed with the seasons. The state’s constitution promised every child an education; the buildings told a different story. In Williams v. California, Mark D. Rosenbaum served as principal counsel for students attending schools without adequate textbooks, qualified teachers, or safe facilities. The case turned those conditions into evidence of unequal educational opportunity and produced commitments exceeding $1 billion for instructional materials, qualified teachers, facility repairs, and new accountability measures in the state’s lowest-performing schools. The method recurs throughout Rosenbaum’s work: document the conditions that keep a formal right from being usable, then seek a remedy aimed at the public system producing them. That method grew out of more than five decades of civil-rights practice. Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Michigan and a 1974 Harvard Law graduate, Rosenbaum went almost directly to the ACLU of Southern California and remained there for more than forty years, ultimately serving as chief counsel. He joined the legal effort that overturned the murder conviction of former Black Panther leader Geronimo Pratt after Pratt had spent more than two decades in prison. In Garza v. Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Rosenbaum helped litigate the voting-rights case that redrew supervisorial districts after findings of unlawful dilution of Latino voting strength; Gloria Molina then became the first Latina elected to the board. When California voters adopted Proposition 187 in 1994, he was among the lead lawyers in Gregorio T. v. Wilson, the challenge that prevented the initiative’s status checks and reporting requirements in schools and health-care settings from taking effect. ###### The Right to Read In 2014, after four decades at the ACLU, Rosenbaum moved to Public Counsel to direct its Opportunity Under Law project; since 2023 he has served as senior special counsel for strategic litigation. In Gary B. v. Whitmer, he represented Detroit schoolchildren attending schools that the complaint described as lacking books, qualified teachers, and at times heat. The plaintiffs argued that the Fourteenth Amendment protects access to literacy because participation in civic life depends on the ability to read. In 2020, a Sixth Circuit panel recognized a fundamental right of access to literacy. The court later vacated the panel opinion after the case settled. Under the settlement, Michigan’s governor agreed to seek at least $94.4 million for literacy-related programs in Detroit public schools, and the state later appropriated that amount. Rosenbaum’s immigration work in the same period reached the Supreme Court. He was counsel in the litigation that became Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, the challenge to the attempted rescission of DACA. The Court held the rescission arbitrary and capricious because the agency had not adequately considered important aspects of the problem, including reliance interests. In 2026 Rosenbaum returned to Perez-Funez v. Department of Homeland Security, a case in which he had helped obtain a 1985 injunction protecting unaccompanied immigrant children from being pressured to waive their rights without meaningful notice or an opportunity to communicate with a parent, relative, friend, or legal-services organization. On April 7, 2026, a federal court rejected the government’s effort to terminate that injunction and found that a replacement advisal being used by DHS was coercive and violated its terms. ###### The Soldiers’ Home Rosenbaum’s veterans’ work has likewise focused on whether an institutional promise can be made usable. In 1888, land in West Los Angeles was donated to the federal government for a soldiers’ home; more than a century later, disabled veterans were living unhoused near a campus that also contained non-veteran uses. Rosenbaum had litigated the issue for years, including in Valentini v. Shinseki. In Powers v. McDonough, he helped lead the trial team, with lawyers from Inner City Law Center and Brown, Goldstein & Levy, that took the Department of Veterans Affairs to trial in 2024. The district court ordered housing and services for disabled veterans on the campus. In December 2025, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the disability-discrimination rulings and the core housing remedy, including orders requiring 1,800 permanent and 750 temporary housing units, while reversing the separate charitable-trust ruling and narrowing parts of the lease-related relief. On September 11, 2026, the court denied the VA’s petition for rehearing en banc, leaving the housing mandate in place. ###### Making Public Guarantees Enforceable Rosenbaum has argued four times before the United States Supreme Court, more than twenty-five times in the federal courts of appeals, and three times in the California Supreme Court. In June 2026, the Los Angeles County Bar Association gave him its Shattuck-Price Outstanding Lawyer Award. For more than two decades he held the Harvey Gunderson professorship from practice at the University of Michigan. He now teaches at UC Irvine, after teaching at UCLA, USC, and Loyola, and also teaches courses in liberty, equality, and free speech to law students at Peking University’s School of Transnational Law in Shenzhen. Rosenbaum’s records ask what conditions are necessary for a public guarantee to be usable: books and qualified teachers in schools, notice and access to counsel or family for immigrant children, and housing near the services disabled veterans need. The remedies he pursues operate at the same level—funding, injunctions, housing, and procedural safeguards—so that a right does not stop at the words announcing it. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Senior Special Counsel for Strategic Litigation, Public Counsel - **Practice:** Education equity, immigrants’ rights, voting rights, veterans’ rights, and constitutional public-interest litigation - **Selected matters:** Williams v. California; Gary B. v. Whitmer; DHS v. Regents of the University of California; Powers v. McDonough - **Education:** University of Michigan; Harvard Law School - **Location:** Los Angeles, California ##### Contact Public Counsel Official profile --- ## 77. Eve Hill — `900004822` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol — current-conversation handoff - **Voice-flattening concern:** **MEDIUM-HIGH** — DOJ/status language and the award/media paragraph were flattened, although later factual/procedural corrections are important and should be preserved. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — 2026 NFB digital-access case, medical-privacy litigation, plus later Doe/Powers/appeal procedural corrections should survive restoration. - **Before hash:** `7bd4eb4c90b0986927823e1fc948cc3ec5b85868f395cee257f7a718a775f86d` - **After/current hash:** `a6fe0c9257ebee957ea68222c8df6c30f9079464b15020cdd571ae81b1c0ef6b` - **Before recovered from:** WordPress revision 900005496 (2026-09-11 19:20:06 GMT) - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `rewrite` — **Enforcing the Nation's Promise — DOJ paragraph**: Preserve Hill's exact DOJ title, tenure, portfolio, treaty negotiation and Senate testimony while removing the unsupported countrywide ranking and tightening the description of federal enforcement work. - `rewrite` — **Everywhere, in Every Role — opening paragraph**: Preserve the 2026 Stanley S. Herr Award while replacing the unsupported media-voice characterization with source-supported current National Federation of the Blind digital-access litigation. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Everywhere, in Every Role — medical privacy paragraph**: Add the January 2026 subpoena-quashing result and May 2026 nationwide class-action filing concerning transgender youths' protected medical records. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **At a Glance — selected matters**: Add the current NFB website-accessibility litigation and In re Administrative Subpoenas to Children's Hospitals to the public matter list without removing existing selected matters. - `correct` — **The Operating Manual of Equality — Doe v. Catholic Relief Services paragraph**: Update the favorable district-court result through the still-pending Fourth Circuit appeal and March 2026 oral argument, avoiding the impression that the matter is procedurally final. - `correct` — **The Operating Manual of Equality — Powers v. McDonough paragraph**: Replace the overbroad statement that the Ninth Circuit simply upheld the judgment with the precise partial affirmance/reversal and add the September 11, 2026 denial of rehearing en banc. - `correct` — **Everywhere, in Every Role — Children's National medical-privacy paragraph**: Carry the 2026 subpoena litigation beyond the May filing through the district court's June ruling and DOJ's August appeal, while preserving Hill's representation and the favorable subpoena-quashing results. ### BEFORE #### Eve Hill Disability Rights · Accessibility · Civil Rights ##### Access Designed Into Public Life Disability rights, LGBTQ+ equality, accessible technology, and civil-rights litigation — Partner, Brown, Goldstein & Levy, Baltimore. > People with disabilities being everywhere, in every role, is the greatest impact of the disability rights movement. ###### A Staircase and a Login Screen A staircase excludes; so does a login screen. Eve Hill has built her career on the insight that the two are the same legal event — a design choice that decides, before any human being makes a decision, who can enter and who is turned away. Her cases reach physical and digital access, effective communication, voting, education, employment, and equal treatment for LGBTQ+ people, and each of them converts a broad promise of inclusion into a specific operational duty: the document must come in Braille, the ballot must be markable in private, the app must speak to a screen reader, the benefit must extend to the spouse who is actually there. Access, in her practice, is a design requirement rather than an accommodation arranged after someone has already been turned away. Hill graduated magna cum laude from Sweet Briar College and took her law degree cum laude from Cornell in 1989. She was executive director of the Disability Rights Legal Center at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, running civil-rights litigation, mediation, and outreach. She became the founding director of the District of Columbia's Office of Disability Rights, charged with bringing an entire city government into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act — a job that meant translating a civil-rights statute into procurement rules, personnel policies, and building plans. She served as senior vice president of the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University, directing its ADA and disability civil-rights work nationally. ###### Enforcing the Nation's Promise From 2011 to January 2017, Hill served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice — one of the highest-ranking disability-rights lawyers in the country. Her portfolio spanned disability rights, education, and Title VI enforcement, along with the division's American Indian Working Group, during years when the federal government pressed the ADA's integration mandate into new territory: community living instead of institutions, real jobs instead of segregated workshops, technology that works for the people who rely on it most. She carried the work beyond the border as well, participating in the negotiation of the Marrakesh Treaty, which opens access to published works for people who are blind or print-disabled, and testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in support of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Hill moved from the department to Brown, Goldstein & Levy, the Baltimore firm long associated with the National Federation of the Blind and disability civil-rights litigation. As a partner, she represents clients seeking access to prison services, voting, digital banking, employment benefits and housing. ###### The Operating Manual of Equality In Brown v. Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, Hill represented blind prisoners who could not read the documents that governed their own confinement — the notices, forms, handbooks, and educational materials that sighted prisoners take for granted. The settlement requires accessible formats, auxiliary aids, and services throughout the system, along with $1.4 million in damages and fees: a recognition that incarceration does not suspend the right to comprehend one's own life. In Powell v. Benson, she secured a consent decree requiring Michigan to provide an accessible absentee-voting system for voters with print disabilities, protecting the right to cast a private and independent ballot rather than accept a lesser vote mediated through another person's hands. Her work for the National Federation of the Blind against Boeing Employees' Credit Union carried the same principle into digital banking, producing an agreement that requires the credit union's website and mobile app to be fully accessible to blind customers. Exclusion no longer requires a staircase or a locked door; a website, a document format, or an authentication step can decide whether a blind customer controls her own financial life, and Hill has made those technical choices answerable to civil-rights standards. The equality docket extends past disability. In Doe v. Catholic Relief Services, she won a federal district-court victory for a married gay employee whose spousal health coverage had been withdrawn, vindicating his claims under federal and Maryland law and restoring the benefits his family had been promised. In pending litigation she has represented transgender women in federal custody, winning early emergency protection while the cases proceed. Hill and her colleagues — alongside Public Counsel and Inner City Law Center — represented unhoused veterans with disabilities in Powers v. McDonough, the suit over the West Los Angeles VA campus, land deeded more than a century ago as a home for old soldiers. The veterans had been sleeping outside the fence of land set aside for their care. After a full trial in 2024, a federal court ordered changes including housing and services on the campus itself; in late 2025 the Ninth Circuit upheld the judgment. ###### Everywhere, in Every Role In 2026, The Arc Baltimore honored Hill with its Stanley S. Herr Advocacy Leadership Award, named for one of disability law's founding scholars. She has become one of the voices national newspapers call when disability rights collide with new technology, new workplaces, and new forms of exclusion. Hill seeks remedies detailed enough to make a service usable: accessible formats, implementation deadlines, testing protocols and reporting obligations. The agreements govern ordinary operations so that people can use those services with privacy and autonomy. Blind prisoners must be able to read prison and library materials; voters with print disabilities must be able to mark an absentee ballot independently; blind credit-union customers must be able to use the website and mobile app. At the West Los Angeles VA campus, the judgment requires housing and services for veterans with disabilities. Each duty puts Hill's stated ambition — people with disabilities everywhere, in every role — into terms the responsible agency or business must carry out. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner, Brown, Goldstein & Levy - **Practice:** Disability rights, accessible technology, effective communication, voting, education, employment, and LGBTQ+ equality - **Federal service:** Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice, 2011–2017 - **Selected matters:** Brown v. Maryland DPSCS; Powell v. Benson; Doe v. Catholic Relief Services; Powers v. McDonough - **Advocacy award:** The Arc Baltimore’s 2026 Stanley S. Herr Advocacy Leadership Award ##### Contact Brown, Goldstein & Levy Official profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Eve Hill Disability Rights · Accessibility · Civil Rights ##### Access Designed Into Public Life Disability rights, LGBTQ+ equality, accessible technology, and civil-rights litigation — Partner, Brown, Goldstein & Levy, Baltimore. > People with disabilities being everywhere, in every role, is the greatest impact of the disability rights movement. ###### A Staircase and a Login Screen A staircase excludes; so does a login screen. Eve Hill has built her career on the insight that the two are the same legal event — a design choice that decides, before any human being makes a decision, who can enter and who is turned away. Her cases reach physical and digital access, effective communication, voting, education, employment, and equal treatment for LGBTQ+ people, and each of them converts a broad promise of inclusion into a specific operational duty: the document must come in Braille, the ballot must be markable in private, the app must speak to a screen reader, the benefit must extend to the spouse who is actually there. Access, in her practice, is a design requirement rather than an accommodation arranged after someone has already been turned away. Hill graduated magna cum laude from Sweet Briar College and took her law degree cum laude from Cornell in 1989. She was executive director of the Disability Rights Legal Center at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, running civil-rights litigation, mediation, and outreach. She became the founding director of the District of Columbia's Office of Disability Rights, charged with bringing an entire city government into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act — a job that meant translating a civil-rights statute into procurement rules, personnel policies, and building plans. She served as senior vice president of the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University, directing its ADA and disability civil-rights work nationally. ###### Enforcing the Nation's Promise From 2011 to January 2017, Hill served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Her portfolio included disability rights, education, Title VI enforcement, and the division's American Indian Working Group. During that period, the department pursued disability-rights work involving community integration, employment, and accessible technology. Hill also participated in negotiation of the Marrakesh Treaty, which expands access to published works for people who are blind or print-disabled, and testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in support of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Hill moved from the department to Brown, Goldstein & Levy, the Baltimore firm long associated with the National Federation of the Blind and disability civil-rights litigation. As a partner, she represents clients seeking access to prison services, voting, digital banking, employment benefits and housing. ###### The Operating Manual of Equality In Brown v. Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, Hill represented blind prisoners who could not read the documents that governed their own confinement — the notices, forms, handbooks, and educational materials that sighted prisoners take for granted. The settlement requires accessible formats, auxiliary aids, and services throughout the system, along with $1.4 million in damages and fees: a recognition that incarceration does not suspend the right to comprehend one's own life. In Powell v. Benson, she secured a consent decree requiring Michigan to provide an accessible absentee-voting system for voters with print disabilities, protecting the right to cast a private and independent ballot rather than accept a lesser vote mediated through another person's hands. Her work for the National Federation of the Blind against Boeing Employees' Credit Union carried the same principle into digital banking, producing an agreement that requires the credit union's website and mobile app to be fully accessible to blind customers. Exclusion no longer requires a staircase or a locked door; a website, a document format, or an authentication step can decide whether a blind customer controls her own financial life, and Hill has made those technical choices answerable to civil-rights standards. The equality docket extends past disability. In Doe v. Catholic Relief Services, she won a federal district-court judgment for a married gay employee whose spousal health coverage had been withdrawn, vindicating his claims under federal and Maryland law. Catholic Relief Services appealed; the Fourth Circuit heard argument in March 2026, and the appeal remains pending. In separate litigation she has represented transgender women in federal custody, winning early emergency protection while those cases proceed. Hill and her colleagues — alongside Public Counsel and Inner City Law Center — represented unhoused veterans with disabilities in Powers v. McDonough, the suit over the West Los Angeles VA campus, land deeded more than a century ago as a home for old soldiers. The veterans had been sleeping outside the fence of land set aside for their care. After a full trial in 2024, the district court ordered housing and services on the campus. In December 2025, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the core disability-discrimination holdings and housing order, including requirements for 1,800 permanent and 750 temporary units, while reversing the separate charitable-trust judgment and narrowing parts of the lease-related relief. On September 11, 2026, the court denied rehearing en banc, leaving the housing mandate in place. ###### Everywhere, in Every Role In May 2026, The Arc Baltimore honored Hill with its Stanley S. Herr Advocacy Leadership Award. That same month, Hill and Michael Abrams, together with Democracy Forward, filed suit for the National Federation of the Blind challenging one-year delays in federal website- and mobile-app-accessibility compliance deadlines. The complaint alleges that the Department of Justice and Department of Health and Human Services adopted the delays without the notice-and-comment process required by the Administrative Procedure Act and asks the court to restore the original deadlines. Hill's LGBTQ+ civil-rights work also moved into medical privacy in 2026. In January, a federal court quashed a Department of Justice subpoena seeking sensitive records of transgender youth treated at Children's National Hospital; Hill represented eight affected families, and the government appealed. In May, Hill and co-counsel sought broader protection for eleven families from substantially similar DOJ demands directed to children's hospitals around the country. In June, the district court quashed the challenged Children's National subpoena requests; DOJ appealed that ruling in August. Hill seeks remedies detailed enough to make a service usable: accessible formats, implementation deadlines, testing protocols and reporting obligations. The agreements govern ordinary operations so that people can use those services with privacy and autonomy. Blind prisoners must be able to read prison and library materials; voters with print disabilities must be able to mark an absentee ballot independently; blind credit-union customers must be able to use the website and mobile app. At the West Los Angeles VA campus, the judgment requires housing and services for veterans with disabilities. Each duty puts Hill's stated ambition — people with disabilities everywhere, in every role — into terms the responsible agency or business must carry out. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner, Brown, Goldstein & Levy - **Practice:** Disability rights, accessible technology, effective communication, voting, education, employment, and LGBTQ+ equality - **Federal service:** Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice, 2011–2017 - **Selected matters:** Brown v. Maryland DPSCS; Powell v. Benson; Doe v. Catholic Relief Services; Powers v. McDonough; National Federation of the Blind website-accessibility litigation; In re Administrative Subpoenas to Children's Hospitals - **Advocacy award:** The Arc Baltimore’s 2026 Stanley S. Herr Advocacy Leadership Award ##### Contact Brown, Goldstein & Levy Official profile --- ## 78. Mary L. Bonauto — `900005048` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855` - **After/current hash:** `8eb23ad94eda56abaa2b76aa2af4db7015bf6c64c1de17027259b95bd9adca37` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005048/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 1 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restore` — **Complete initial canonical profile body**: Restore Mary L. Bonauto's complete manually reviewed owner-authorized narrative presentation into the previously empty protected draft while keeping the post nonpublic. - `rewrite` — **Opening and closing narration from owner master**: Preserve the supported litigation strategy and ordinary-family consequences while replacing performative claims about national stature and a 'monument' with concrete case questions, legal documents and present-day protections. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Keeping the Ground**: Carry the profile forward with current GLAD marriage-defense, parentage, conversion-therapy, juvenile-justice, criminal-justice and child-welfare work and the January 2025 Presidential Citizens Medal presentation. ### BEFORE _(empty)_ ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Mary L. Bonauto Marriage Equality · Family Recognition · LGBTQ+ Civil Rights ##### Building the Sequence LGBTQ+ constitutional and civil-rights litigation — Senior Director of Civil Rights and Legal Strategies, GLAD Law, Boston. > Being able to marry … eliminated that stain that we’re somehow so different that we can’t even engage in this basic liberty. ###### Vermont, Then Massachusetts Mary L. Bonauto’s marriage-equality litigation moved from one concrete legal problem to the next. In Vermont, the question was whether same-sex couples could be denied the protections tied to marriage. In Massachusetts, it was whether equality could stop short of marriage itself. In federal court, it became whether lawfully married couples could be denied national recognition. Each case put the effects on families before the court and established ground the next case could use. After Hamilton College and Northeastern University School of Law, Bonauto began practicing in Maine and joined GLAD in 1990, where her early docket included discrimination and family-law cases across New England. In Baker v. State, Bonauto helped secure the Vermont Supreme Court’s 1999 ruling that same-sex couples were entitled to the same legal benefits and protections as different-sex married couples. Vermont responded with the nation’s first civil-union law. Bonauto and GLAD then pressed the question directly in Massachusetts. As lead counsel in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, she represented couples challenging exclusion from civil marriage itself. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2003 that the state constitution did not permit that exclusion, and same-sex couples began marrying in Massachusetts in May 2004. ###### From DOMA to Obergefell Bonauto continued the state-law work as co-counsel in Kerrigan v. Commissioner of Public Health, where Connecticut’s high court held that denying marriage to same-sex couples violated the state constitution. She then turned to the federal consequences of marriage. In Gill v. Office of Personnel Management and Pedersen v. Office of Personnel Management, GLAD challenged the Defense of Marriage Act’s federal definition of marriage, obtaining rulings that the federal government could not withhold recognition from lawfully married same-sex couples. Bonauto also coordinated amici in the litigation that became United States v. Windsor, in which the Supreme Court invalidated DOMA’s federal marriage restriction. The state and federal strands met in Obergefell v. Hodges. On April 28, 2015, Bonauto argued before the Supreme Court that the Fourteenth Amendment does not permit states to exclude same-sex couples from marriage. Two months later, the Court held that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry and that states must recognize lawful same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. The path to that ruling had tested the same principle at several levels: equal legal protections in Vermont, access to civil marriage in Massachusetts and Connecticut, federal recognition under DOMA, and finally a nationwide constitutional rule. ###### What Marriage Changed The litigation was built around the legal work marriage performs. Civil status determines who may make decisions in a medical crisis, how property and inheritance are treated, how families are recognized for taxes and benefits, and how parent-child relationships are protected. Bonauto’s clients were couples and parents already carrying those responsibilities without the same legal structure available to other families. The records in her cases made those consequences part of the constitutional question rather than treating marriage as a symbolic dispute. That is also why Bonauto has continued to describe marriage equality in terms of both protection and equal civic standing. In 2025, reflecting on the tenth anniversary of Obergefell, she emphasized the importance of preserving marriage as a legal right and basic liberty. The point connects the landmark cases to the work that followed: rights have to remain usable in family law, parentage, benefits, and the institutions that recognize a family’s legal relationships. ###### Keeping the Ground Bonauto remains at GLAD Law as Senior Director of Civil Rights and Legal Strategies. Her current work includes defending marriage equality and advancing parentage protections, along with policy work involving conversion-therapy bans, juvenile justice, criminal justice, and child welfare. She also serves on Maine’s Justice for Children Task Force and teaches as a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. Her public-interest career has remained centered in New England even as the constitutional cases reached nationwide. Her recognition includes a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship and the Presidential Citizens Medal presented in January 2025. Bonauto lives in Maine, where she married her partner in 2008 and raised two children. The legal sequence that defines her career is visible in ordinary documents now used every day: marriage licenses, joint benefits forms, birth and parentage records, tax filings, and school paperwork that recognize the family before them. Her current work is directed at keeping those protections enforceable while extending the same approach — identify the concrete legal injury, establish the governing principle, and translate it into rules that families can use. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Senior Director of Civil Rights and Legal Strategies, GLAD Law - **Practice:** LGBTQ+ constitutional and civil rights, marriage defense, parentage, and family recognition - **Selected matters:** Baker v. State; Goodridge v. Department of Public Health; Gill v. OPM; Pedersen v. OPM; Obergefell v. Hodges - **Education:** Hamilton College; Northeastern University School of Law - **Base:** Portland, Maine; GLAD Law, Boston ##### Contact GLAD Law Official profile --- ## 79. Shannon Price Minter — `900005047` - **Model/phase:** Earlier/parallel recent revision — exact model not encoded - **Voice-flattening concern:** **REVIEW** — Manifest history contains style-bearing removals/rephrasing (e.g., promotional/authorial/meta/synthesis language). This is a heuristic flag, not a finding that the edit was wrong. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **HIGH** — Manifest history contains explicit factual/currentness corrections or additions. - **Before hash:** `e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855` - **After/current hash:** `c66e1d6868dc00092d2acf4dda71b0f4fe68371210c2649ab3afb26b32b53b4b` - **Before recovered from:** quality before.json: /var/lib/auremont-agent/workspace/editorial/quality-enhancement-20260912/post-900005047/before.json - **Recent manifest count:** 2 - **Recorded recent changes:** - `restore` — **Complete initial canonical profile body**: Restore Shannon Price Minter's complete manually reviewed owner-authorized narrative presentation into the previously empty protected draft while keeping the post nonpublic. - `rewrite` — **Owner-master opening and ending**: Preserve the legal-status and everyday-document insight while replacing commemorative/decorative framing with the concrete family, institution, professional-care and military rules Minter has litigated. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Born Perfect and Talbott current-work sections**: Update the profile through the March 2026 Chiles ruling and remaining remedies, the June 2026 D.C. Circuit Talbott result and class certification, and the August 27, 2026 government certiorari petition. - `restore` — **Complete initial canonical profile body**: Restore Shannon Price Minter's complete manually reviewed owner-authorized narrative presentation into the previously empty protected draft while keeping the post nonpublic. - `rewrite` — **Owner-master opening and ending**: Preserve the legal-status and everyday-document insight while replacing commemorative/decorative framing with the concrete family, institution, professional-care and military rules Minter has litigated. - `add_source_supported_fact` — **Born Perfect and Talbott current-work sections**: Update the profile through the March 2026 Chiles ruling and remaining remedies, the June 2026 D.C. Circuit Talbott result and class certification, and the August 27, 2026 government certiorari petition. ### BEFORE _(empty)_ ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Shannon Price Minter LGBTQ+ Civil Rights · Transgender Rights · Family Recognition ##### Rules for Ordinary Life LGBTQ+ civil-rights impact litigation — Vice President of Legal (Legal Director), National Center for LGBTQ Rights, San Francisco. > Transgender people just want to lead their lives, work, go to school, have families, exactly like other people. ###### Family Status Before Marriage Equality Shannon Price Minter has spent more than three decades litigating the points where legal status determines whether a person can use an ordinary rule on equal terms. He grew up in East Texas, graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and Cornell Law School, and found LGBTQ+ public-interest practice through the National Center for LGBTQ Rights. He joined NCLR in the early 1990s and remained there as its docket expanded from family recognition and employment to marriage, transgender rights, education, health care, military service, and federal policy. Some of Minter’s early cases asked courts to recognize family relationships before the law offered those families a settled status. In Smith v. Knoller, NCLR represented Sharon Smith after the death of her partner, Diane Whipple. In 2001, a California court held that Smith could pursue a wrongful-death claim even though the couple could not marry, treating the relationship as legally cognizable rather than dismissing Smith as a stranger. In Florida, Minter represented transgender father Michael Kantaras in litigation over marriage and parental rights. A 2003 trial ruling recognized Kantaras as legally male and awarded him primary custody; after an appellate court later invalidated the marriage, the case ended in a 2005 settlement preserving his parental rights and shared legal custody. The results were different in form, but both matters forced courts to decide whether an existing family would count when the legal categories around it were incomplete. ###### Marriage, Parenthood, and Campus Rules Minter then served as lead counsel in California’s In re Marriage Cases. In 2008, the California Supreme Court held that the state constitution protected the right of same-sex couples to marry and required strict scrutiny for discrimination based on sexual orientation. He later represented Tennessee couples in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court case establishing a nationwide right to marry for same-sex couples. In Pavan v. Smith, he led NCLR’s work on the Supreme Court ruling requiring Arkansas to apply its birth-certificate rules equally to married same-sex parents. The progression carried marriage equality into the administrative rules that identify parents and families after the wedding itself. The same principle appears in rules governing schools and public programs. In Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, NCLR helped defend a public law school’s all-comers policy for recognized student organizations, and the Supreme Court upheld the school’s ability to condition official recognition on accepting all students. Minter has also taught at UCLA, Stanford, Golden Gate University, and Santa Clara University, and in 2015 President Obama appointed him to the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships. The recurring question is whether a general rule actually extends to LGBTQ+ people as parents, students, employees, and participants in the program at issue. ###### Born Perfect After Chiles Minter founded NCLR’s Born Perfect campaign to end conversion therapy and has helped draft and defend state protections for LGBTQ+ youth. By 2026, the campaign had helped secure protections in dozens of jurisdictions. The Supreme Court’s March 2026 decision in Chiles v. Salazar held that Colorado’s restriction on conversion therapy by licensed mental-health professionals likely violated the First Amendment under the regulatory approach then before the Court. Minter and NCLR responded by emphasizing what the decision did not remove: malpractice, consumer-fraud, licensing, and other legal remedies for harmful practices. Colorado then revised its law to address the Court’s guidance while preserving protections for minors. That response reflects a method visible elsewhere in Minter’s career. A court may narrow one doctrinal route without resolving the underlying problem. The next task is to identify which legal duties remain available and make them concrete enough to enforce. Born Perfect has therefore combined legislation with professional standards, civil remedies, and public education rather than depending on a single constitutional theory. ###### Talbott at the Supreme Court’s Door Minter’s current federal docket includes multiple challenges to policies directed at transgender people. In Talbott v. United States, brought with GLAD Law, he represents transgender servicemembers and people seeking to join the military in a challenge to the renewed transgender-service ban. Minter argued the appeal in the D.C. Circuit in January 2026. On June 1, the court affirmed the preliminary injunction as to current servicemembers while vacating it as to prospective enlistees and remanding the case. On June 30, the district court certified a class so that later rulings could extend beyond the named plaintiffs. On August 27, the United States filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to review the D.C. Circuit’s decision; that petition is pending. The case brings Minter back to the ordinary activities named in his own description of transgender life: work, school, family, and public service. His litigation does not ask courts to create a separate set of rules for transgender people. It asks whether the rules governing military fitness, parenthood, schools, professional care, and family recognition can exclude people because they are transgender or LGBTQ+ when they otherwise meet the standards that apply to everyone else. That question has moved across Minter’s docket for more than thirty years, and it remains the center of his current work. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Vice President of Legal (Legal Director), National Center for LGBTQ Rights - **Practice:** LGBTQ+ civil rights, transgender rights, family recognition, conversion therapy, and federal impact litigation - **Selected matters:** In re Marriage Cases; Obergefell v. Hodges; Pavan v. Smith; Christian Legal Society v. Martinez; Talbott v. United States - **Education:** University of Texas at Austin; Cornell Law School - **Public service:** President’s Commission on White House Fellowships, appointed 2015 ##### Contact National Center for LGBTQ Rights Official profile --- ## 80. Eve H. Cervantez — `900004879` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol continuation — verification only - **Voice-flattening concern:** **NONE** — Verification-only; body left unchanged. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **NONE** — No new body facts added. - **Before hash:** `bc93246e58d6a13317a256c53284856fc59817b05ec3b2ae9e253ac61f5f4ef1` - **After/current hash:** `bc93246e58d6a13317a256c53284856fc59817b05ec3b2ae9e253ac61f5f4ef1` - **Before recovered from:** Verification-only profile; before equals current live body - **Recorded recent changes:** none; verification-only completion. ### BEFORE #### Eve H. Cervantez Data Breach · Pay Equity · Civil Rights > “ The jobs do not have to be identical. ##### What an Institution Does With What It Knows Eve H. Cervantez’s cases examine how institutions use the records they keep—from health-plan files and pay systems to a customer’s age—and seek remedies fitted to the way each system produced harm. ###### The Power Inside a Record A record can look administrative until an institution acts through it. A health insurer stores the identifiers that make a person vulnerable after a breach. An employer assigns levels and pay across thousands of workers. A subscription service links age to price. In Eve H. Cervantez’s litigation, those records often reveal where the challenged decision was made, repeated, and distributed across a class. Cervantez is a partner at Altshuler Berzon in San Francisco, where she primarily represents workers and consumers in class actions involving employment discrimination, wages, privacy, and civil rights. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Washington University and her law degree from Harvard Law School, where she served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. After clerking for Judge Charles A. Legge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, she joined the Prison Law Office as a staff attorney. ###### Learning to Read an Institution At the Prison Law Office, Cervantez represented people challenging conditions inside California prisons. She later became a partner at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein before joining Altshuler Berzon. The settings changed, but the work kept returning to the machinery of an institution: who controlled the relevant information, which rule governed the people inside the system, and whether an individual event disclosed a broader practice. That approach connects matters that otherwise sit in different legal categories. A data-breach settlement can require years of identity protection and independent review. A pay-equity resolution can change how an employer assigns job levels and audits compensation. A disability-access decree can specify what employees must have at hand when a customer arrives. Cervantez’s docket crosses privacy, employment, consumer, and civil-rights law because each field can present the same practical question: what remedy reaches the process that produced the harm? ###### After Seventy-Nine Million Records The consolidated Anthem data-breach litigation followed a 2015 cyberattack that plaintiffs alleged exposed personal information associated with roughly 79 million people. The federal court appointed Cervantez and three other lawyers as class counsel. In August 2018, the court granted final approval to a $115 million non-reversionary settlement resolving the class claims. The settlement paired monetary and protective relief. It provided credit monitoring, identity-restoration services, reimbursement for qualifying out-of-pocket losses, and a cash alternative supported by a minimum allocation of $13 million. Anthem also agreed to specific cybersecurity measures, to triple its annual cybersecurity spending for three years, and to permit the plaintiffs’ expert to review annual compliance. Individual assistance addressed losses from the breach, while the security requirements addressed the continuing risk within the system holding the data. ###### When Job Titles Hide the Work Pay systems can conceal unequal treatment behind titles that do not line up perfectly. At a conference on pay gaps, Cervantez put the comparison in plain terms: jobs may still demand substantially similar skill and responsibility even when their labels differ. In Ellis v. Google, women alleged that Google paid them less than men performing substantially similar work and steered women into lower-paid levels and tracks. The court approved a $118 million settlement for more than 15,000 women. The settlement required an industrial-organizational psychologist to review leveling at hire, a labor economist to review annual pay-equity audits, and an external monitor to oversee implementation for three years. In Ries v. McDonald’s, a court certified a class of women who worked at a Mason, Michigan franchise operation in litigation alleging sexual harassment. The court later approved a $1.5 million settlement with the franchisee companies, with Cervantez named among class counsel. The two matters used different tools, but each moved from individual accounts to a workplace structure that could be examined across a group. ###### A Price, a Door, and the Rule Beneath Them Candelore v. Tinder challenged subscription prices that plaintiffs alleged were higher for California users who were at least 30 years old, in violation of the Unruh Civil Rights Act and the state's unfair-competition law. After certifying a class in 2024, the court granted final settlement approval in June 2026. The final order approved a $60.5 million class-payment fund, appointed three firms including Altshuler Berzon as co-lead class counsel, and listed Cervantez among the lawyers representing the plaintiff and the class. In a separate disability-access case, Cervantez helped negotiate an injunctive-only consent decree for deaf and hard-of-hearing customers at Nike stores in California while face-covering requirements were in effect. The decree required transparent masks, clean pens and paper, employee guidance, and entrance notices explaining available communication methods. Anthem demanded protection after a breach; Ellis added expert review to a pay system; Tinder funded payments tied to an age-pricing claim; Nike specified what had to change at the store door. The remedies differ because the institutional rule—and the way people encounter it—differs too. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner, Altshuler Berzon LLP - **Practice:** Worker and consumer class actions, employment discrimination, wage and hour, privacy, and civil rights - **Selected matters:** In re Anthem, Inc. Data Breach Litigation; Ellis v. Google; Ries v. McDonald’s; Candelore v. Tinder; Bunn v. Nike - **Education:** Harvard Law School, J.D.; Washington University, B.A. - **California Bar:** #164709 · Active ##### Contact Altshuler Berzon LLP 177 Post Street, Suite 300San Francisco, CA 94108 Phone: 415-421-7151 ext. 353 Email: ecervantez@altshulerberzon.com Official profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Eve H. Cervantez Data Breach · Pay Equity · Civil Rights > “ The jobs do not have to be identical. ##### What an Institution Does With What It Knows Eve H. Cervantez’s cases examine how institutions use the records they keep—from health-plan files and pay systems to a customer’s age—and seek remedies fitted to the way each system produced harm. ###### The Power Inside a Record A record can look administrative until an institution acts through it. A health insurer stores the identifiers that make a person vulnerable after a breach. An employer assigns levels and pay across thousands of workers. A subscription service links age to price. In Eve H. Cervantez’s litigation, those records often reveal where the challenged decision was made, repeated, and distributed across a class. Cervantez is a partner at Altshuler Berzon in San Francisco, where she primarily represents workers and consumers in class actions involving employment discrimination, wages, privacy, and civil rights. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Washington University and her law degree from Harvard Law School, where she served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. After clerking for Judge Charles A. Legge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, she joined the Prison Law Office as a staff attorney. ###### Learning to Read an Institution At the Prison Law Office, Cervantez represented people challenging conditions inside California prisons. She later became a partner at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein before joining Altshuler Berzon. The settings changed, but the work kept returning to the machinery of an institution: who controlled the relevant information, which rule governed the people inside the system, and whether an individual event disclosed a broader practice. That approach connects matters that otherwise sit in different legal categories. A data-breach settlement can require years of identity protection and independent review. A pay-equity resolution can change how an employer assigns job levels and audits compensation. A disability-access decree can specify what employees must have at hand when a customer arrives. Cervantez’s docket crosses privacy, employment, consumer, and civil-rights law because each field can present the same practical question: what remedy reaches the process that produced the harm? ###### After Seventy-Nine Million Records The consolidated Anthem data-breach litigation followed a 2015 cyberattack that plaintiffs alleged exposed personal information associated with roughly 79 million people. The federal court appointed Cervantez and three other lawyers as class counsel. In August 2018, the court granted final approval to a $115 million non-reversionary settlement resolving the class claims. The settlement paired monetary and protective relief. It provided credit monitoring, identity-restoration services, reimbursement for qualifying out-of-pocket losses, and a cash alternative supported by a minimum allocation of $13 million. Anthem also agreed to specific cybersecurity measures, to triple its annual cybersecurity spending for three years, and to permit the plaintiffs’ expert to review annual compliance. Individual assistance addressed losses from the breach, while the security requirements addressed the continuing risk within the system holding the data. ###### When Job Titles Hide the Work Pay systems can conceal unequal treatment behind titles that do not line up perfectly. At a conference on pay gaps, Cervantez put the comparison in plain terms: jobs may still demand substantially similar skill and responsibility even when their labels differ. In Ellis v. Google, women alleged that Google paid them less than men performing substantially similar work and steered women into lower-paid levels and tracks. The court approved a $118 million settlement for more than 15,000 women. The settlement required an industrial-organizational psychologist to review leveling at hire, a labor economist to review annual pay-equity audits, and an external monitor to oversee implementation for three years. In Ries v. McDonald’s, a court certified a class of women who worked at a Mason, Michigan franchise operation in litigation alleging sexual harassment. The court later approved a $1.5 million settlement with the franchisee companies, with Cervantez named among class counsel. The two matters used different tools, but each moved from individual accounts to a workplace structure that could be examined across a group. ###### A Price, a Door, and the Rule Beneath Them Candelore v. Tinder challenged subscription prices that plaintiffs alleged were higher for California users who were at least 30 years old, in violation of the Unruh Civil Rights Act and the state's unfair-competition law. After certifying a class in 2024, the court granted final settlement approval in June 2026. The final order approved a $60.5 million class-payment fund, appointed three firms including Altshuler Berzon as co-lead class counsel, and listed Cervantez among the lawyers representing the plaintiff and the class. In a separate disability-access case, Cervantez helped negotiate an injunctive-only consent decree for deaf and hard-of-hearing customers at Nike stores in California while face-covering requirements were in effect. The decree required transparent masks, clean pens and paper, employee guidance, and entrance notices explaining available communication methods. Anthem demanded protection after a breach; Ellis added expert review to a pay system; Tinder funded payments tied to an age-pricing claim; Nike specified what had to change at the store door. The remedies differ because the institutional rule—and the way people encounter it—differs too. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner, Altshuler Berzon LLP - **Practice:** Worker and consumer class actions, employment discrimination, wage and hour, privacy, and civil rights - **Selected matters:** In re Anthem, Inc. Data Breach Litigation; Ellis v. Google; Ries v. McDonald’s; Candelore v. Tinder; Bunn v. Nike - **Education:** Harvard Law School, J.D.; Washington University, B.A. - **California Bar:** #164709 · Active ##### Contact Altshuler Berzon LLP 177 Post Street, Suite 300San Francisco, CA 94108 Phone: 415-421-7151 ext. 353 Email: ecervantez@altshulerberzon.com Official profile --- ## 81. Rafey S. Balabanian — `900004871` - **Model/phase:** GPT-5.6 Sol continuation — verification only - **Voice-flattening concern:** **NONE** — Verification-only; body left unchanged because of the hash-bound hero dependency. - **Useful-correction confidence:** **NONE** — No new body facts added. - **Before hash:** `e8e2cb3c2c5af0651542a14203d9fb73d037830c5202cdaee62919751c4819f8` - **After/current hash:** `e8e2cb3c2c5af0651542a14203d9fb73d037830c5202cdaee62919751c4819f8` - **Before recovered from:** Verification-only profile; before equals current live body - **Recorded recent changes:** none; verification-only completion. ### BEFORE #### Rafey S. Balabanian Privacy · Biometrics · TCPA Class Actions > “ I can’t do it all on my own. ##### The App’s Two Lives Rafey S. Balabanian follows the technical path from permission screen to data flow, turning software behavior, call records, and biometric templates into classwide proof. ###### The App’s Two Lives Every app has a face it shows the user and a life it lives underneath. There is the screen — the install button, the permission prompt, the cheerful interface — and there is everything running beneath it: background collection, transmission to servers the user has never heard of, and the conversion of a voice or location into data that outlives the moment it was captured. Rafey S. Balabanian litigates the distance between the two. His cases reconstruct the technical path — installation, permission, transmission, retention, use — and ask whether consent gathered at the surface ever reached the conduct occurring underneath. His practice treats code, call logs, and biometric templates as records of corporate behavior that no individual user could audit alone. Balabanian joined Edelson PC in 2008 and now serves as a partner, chief financial officer, and board member. He has been appointed lead class counsel in more than two dozen state and federal class actions, building a docket at the junction of software, privacy, and consumer law. ###### From Misdemeanor Court to Privacy Litigation Balabanian’s route into that work ran through the trial courtroom. After earning a B.A. in history with distinction from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2002 and a J.D. from DePaul University College of Law in 2005, he began his career as a prosecutor for the City of Chicago and took part in dozens of trials. A stint at a Chicago litigation boutique followed before he joined Edelson. That trial formation shaped how he approached privacy litigation. Terms of service and expert reports can make the field seem abstract; Balabanian builds cases around concrete conduct, provable data flows, and damages a jury can count. He is admitted in California and Illinois, in the Ninth and Seventh Circuits, and in federal district courts around the country. He has also guest lectured at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law on privacy and class actions. ###### Certifying the comScore Class The comScore litigation announced the method. Consumers alleged that analytics software bundled into free downloads collected information from their computers beyond what the installation process disclosed. As co-lead counsel, Balabanian argued that automation supplied the common proof: the software behaved the same way across machines. The federal court in Chicago certified a contested privacy class, and the litigation resolved for $14 million with prospective restrictions on the challenged data-collection program. Computer forensics and the law of assent meet in that sequence. The question in comScore — whether installation disclosures authorized what the software did after entering a device — recurs across Balabanian’s privacy work. The technical record supplies both the alleged conduct and the means of proving it at class scale. ###### The Machinery of 1.85 Million Calls His Telephone Consumer Protection Act work applies the same discipline to automated communication. As lead counsel in Kolinek v. Walgreen Company, he resolved claims over automated prescription-notification calls for $11 million. As lead counsel in Wright v. Nationstar Mortgage, he secured a $12.1 million settlement over automated mortgage-servicing calls. Dialers, consent data, account fields, and vendor relationships became evidence for classwide claims. Wakefield v. ViSalus went to a federal jury in Oregon. The jury found that ViSalus had made 1,850,440 prerecorded calls in violation of the TCPA, and the district court entered roughly $925 million in statutory damages. On appeal, the Ninth Circuit affirmed liability, vacated the damages award, and remanded for constitutional reduction proceedings. The procedural split matters: the liability finding remained in place, while the aggregate damages question returned to the district court. ###### The Voice as an Identifier Balabanian’s biometric work begins at the moment a human trait becomes a data asset. In Hopwood v. Nuance Communications, consumers alleged that their voices had been converted into reusable voiceprints without the notice and consent Illinois law requires. The litigation resolved for $9 million, with individual class members eligible for payments exceeding $10,000. The portfolio holds together through its evidence. Whether the artifact is tracking software, a dialing campaign, or a voiceprint database, Balabanian’s cases insist that a company’s systems can be reconstructed packet by packet and call by call, then tested in court. Technical uniformity becomes the bridge between an experience scattered across millions of devices and a claim that can proceed for a class. Balabanian describes his results as collective work. Lawyers, technologists, and experts reconstruct what the software did; class members provide the scale that no single user could assemble. His own formulation is simpler: he can’t do it all on his own. The cases apply that lesson twice — inside the litigation team and across the class whose shared record makes hidden conduct visible. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner, Chief Financial Officer, and Board Member, Edelson PC - **Practice:** Privacy, tracking technology, biometrics, TCPA, consumer protection, and class actions - **Selected matters:** comScore privacy litigation; Kolinek v. Walgreen Company; Wright v. Nationstar Mortgage; Wakefield v. ViSalus; Hopwood v. Nuance Communications - **Education:** DePaul University College of Law, J.D.; University of Colorado Boulder, B.A. - **Admissions:** California and Illinois; Ninth and Seventh Circuits ##### Contact Edelson PC San Francisco, California Official profile ### AFTER / CURRENT #### Rafey S. Balabanian Privacy · Biometrics · TCPA Class Actions > “ I can’t do it all on my own. ##### The App’s Two Lives Rafey S. Balabanian follows the technical path from permission screen to data flow, turning software behavior, call records, and biometric templates into classwide proof. ###### The App’s Two Lives Every app has a face it shows the user and a life it lives underneath. There is the screen — the install button, the permission prompt, the cheerful interface — and there is everything running beneath it: background collection, transmission to servers the user has never heard of, and the conversion of a voice or location into data that outlives the moment it was captured. Rafey S. Balabanian litigates the distance between the two. His cases reconstruct the technical path — installation, permission, transmission, retention, use — and ask whether consent gathered at the surface ever reached the conduct occurring underneath. His practice treats code, call logs, and biometric templates as records of corporate behavior that no individual user could audit alone. Balabanian joined Edelson PC in 2008 and now serves as a partner, chief financial officer, and board member. He has been appointed lead class counsel in more than two dozen state and federal class actions, building a docket at the junction of software, privacy, and consumer law. ###### From Misdemeanor Court to Privacy Litigation Balabanian’s route into that work ran through the trial courtroom. After earning a B.A. in history with distinction from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2002 and a J.D. from DePaul University College of Law in 2005, he began his career as a prosecutor for the City of Chicago and took part in dozens of trials. A stint at a Chicago litigation boutique followed before he joined Edelson. That trial formation shaped how he approached privacy litigation. Terms of service and expert reports can make the field seem abstract; Balabanian builds cases around concrete conduct, provable data flows, and damages a jury can count. He is admitted in California and Illinois, in the Ninth and Seventh Circuits, and in federal district courts around the country. He has also guest lectured at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law on privacy and class actions. ###### Certifying the comScore Class The comScore litigation announced the method. Consumers alleged that analytics software bundled into free downloads collected information from their computers beyond what the installation process disclosed. As co-lead counsel, Balabanian argued that automation supplied the common proof: the software behaved the same way across machines. The federal court in Chicago certified a contested privacy class, and the litigation resolved for $14 million with prospective restrictions on the challenged data-collection program. Computer forensics and the law of assent meet in that sequence. The question in comScore — whether installation disclosures authorized what the software did after entering a device — recurs across Balabanian’s privacy work. The technical record supplies both the alleged conduct and the means of proving it at class scale. ###### The Machinery of 1.85 Million Calls His Telephone Consumer Protection Act work applies the same discipline to automated communication. As lead counsel in Kolinek v. Walgreen Company, he resolved claims over automated prescription-notification calls for $11 million. As lead counsel in Wright v. Nationstar Mortgage, he secured a $12.1 million settlement over automated mortgage-servicing calls. Dialers, consent data, account fields, and vendor relationships became evidence for classwide claims. Wakefield v. ViSalus went to a federal jury in Oregon. The jury found that ViSalus had made 1,850,440 prerecorded calls in violation of the TCPA, and the district court entered roughly $925 million in statutory damages. On appeal, the Ninth Circuit affirmed liability, vacated the damages award, and remanded for constitutional reduction proceedings. The procedural split matters: the liability finding remained in place, while the aggregate damages question returned to the district court. ###### The Voice as an Identifier Balabanian’s biometric work begins at the moment a human trait becomes a data asset. In Hopwood v. Nuance Communications, consumers alleged that their voices had been converted into reusable voiceprints without the notice and consent Illinois law requires. The litigation resolved for $9 million, with individual class members eligible for payments exceeding $10,000. The portfolio holds together through its evidence. Whether the artifact is tracking software, a dialing campaign, or a voiceprint database, Balabanian’s cases insist that a company’s systems can be reconstructed packet by packet and call by call, then tested in court. Technical uniformity becomes the bridge between an experience scattered across millions of devices and a claim that can proceed for a class. Balabanian describes his results as collective work. Lawyers, technologists, and experts reconstruct what the software did; class members provide the scale that no single user could assemble. His own formulation is simpler: he can’t do it all on his own. The cases apply that lesson twice — inside the litigation team and across the class whose shared record makes hidden conduct visible. ##### At a Glance - **Current role:** Partner, Chief Financial Officer, and Board Member, Edelson PC - **Practice:** Privacy, tracking technology, biometrics, TCPA, consumer protection, and class actions - **Selected matters:** comScore privacy litigation; Kolinek v. Walgreen Company; Wright v. Nationstar Mortgage; Wakefield v. ViSalus; Hopwood v. Nuance Communications - **Education:** DePaul University College of Law, J.D.; University of Colorado Boulder, B.A. - **Admissions:** California and Illinois; Ninth and Seventh Circuits ##### Contact Edelson PC San Francisco, California Official profile ---