Julie Keeton Bracker

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.