Mary Inman
False Claims Act, Whistleblower & Medicare Advantage Litigation
I've been incredibly fortunate to have chosen a field that has grown exponentially.
The Whistleblower Who Didn't Live to See It
Dr. Darren Sewell knew the Medicare Advantage program from the inside. He had worked as a physician and a medical executive, and later in Medicare revenue management at Freedom Health and Optimum HealthCare in Florida — close enough to the machinery to see how diagnosis codes became dollars.
In 2009, he filed a False Claims Act case under seal. He alleged that the plans submitted diagnosis data for conditions that members did not have or had not been treated for, inflating the risk scores that determine what Medicare pays each month. He alleged something else, too: that when the plans sought to expand into new counties, they represented that qualifying provider networks existed when the necessary physicians and contracts were not in place.
Sewell died before the case resolved.
His brother David stepped in, and the estate became the relator. Mary Inman preserved the case's legal position and carried forward everything Sewell had built — the interviews, the diagnosis submissions, the network materials, the documents, the government data. The record did not depend on a single form of proof, and it did not depend on a single life. In 2017, the case Sewell started produced $32,445,593 and a five-year corporate integrity agreement.
Houlton, Maine
Inman grew up in rural Maine, in Houlton, near the Canadian border, where she developed an early and durable interest in women's rights. She went to Bowdoin, then to the University of Pennsylvania Law School, graduating cum laude in 1994. She entered the profession the way many public-minded graduates do — with a strong conviction that the law should do good in the world and no clear picture yet of what kind of lawyer she would become.
She clerked for Judge D. Brock Hornby in the District of Maine and Judge Norman H. Stahl on the First Circuit, then spent a year as an associate at O'Melveny & Myers in San Francisco. Then came the phone call that settled the question: a novel opportunity at the new San Francisco office of a boutique firm that did one thing — represent whistleblowers.
She went from a passing familiarity with the subject to seventeen years honing the craft at Phillips & Cohen. When she started, only a handful of whistleblower reward laws existed anywhere. She chose the field before it was a field, and then the field grew up around her.
Two Theories, One Case
The Sewell matter shows what that craft looks like under pressure. Medicare Advantage adjusts plan payments according to the expected cost of caring for enrolled members; diagnosis data supported by medical records can raise a member's risk score and the monthly amount paid to the plan. Every disputed diagnosis therefore required the record to answer separate questions: how the code entered the submission stream, whether the medical record supported it, what the plan knew, and whether the information affected a government payment. That discipline also let the team distinguish an alleged knowing falsehood from medical judgment or routine coding error.
The expansion theory ran on different rails. County approval allowed a plan to enroll members and receive federal payments in a new service area, and plans seeking new territory had to demonstrate adequate networks of physicians, clinics, and hospitals. Inman — working with Timothy McCormack and co-counsel Ned Arens and Stephen Hasegawa — kept the two theories in separate lanes: provider agreements, network submissions, and service-area applications for the expansion claims; medical records, coding evidence, and payment analysis for the risk-adjustment claims.
While the action remained under seal, she kept the whole architecture organized for government review, separating what Sewell had observed from the agency and expert analysis used to corroborate it. Investigators could test the diagnosis sequence against medical and payment records, and the expansion sequence against provider agreements and applications, without either theory leaning on the other.
The $32,445,593 Resolution
In 2017, Freedom Health and related entities agreed to pay $31,695,593. Former chief operating officer Siddhartha Pagidipati agreed to pay $750,000 for his alleged role in the expansion matter. Approximately $16.7 million of the corporate payment concerned the risk-adjustment allegations and $15 million concerned the provider-network representations.
Freedom Health and Optimum HealthCare also entered a corporate integrity agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, imposing compliance obligations from May 11, 2017, through December 5, 2022. The financial resolution came paired with continuing oversight — the case's documentary record carried into a defined period of monitoring.
London
In July 2017, after two decades representing American whistleblowers, Inman moved to London to build an international whistleblower practice from the ground up. The premise was simple and, at the time, novel: fraud crosses borders, the American reward programs reach conduct with a United States connection, and insiders abroad needed lawyers who understood both sides of the Atlantic.
Three years in London made her one of the recognized authorities on the international application of the American whistleblower laws. Cross-border matters demand an early choice of forum, careful control of confidential material, and coordination among regulators that define protected disclosures differently — and her practice now regularly includes claims brought to the Ontario Securities Commission, the Canada Revenue Agency, His Majesty's Revenue and Customs, and Korea's National Tax Service, alongside the U.S. programs.
The Courage Business
Over three decades, Inman has represented some of the most consequential whistleblowers of the era — Tyler Shultz, who spoke up from inside Theranos; Frances Haugen, who brought Facebook's internal research into public view; Mark MacGann, who came forward about Uber's global lobbying operation. Her Medicare Advantage whistleblower work reached a national audience and helped put risk-adjustment fraud on the public map.
What holds the practice together is not a statute but a human pattern that fascinates her: what causes a corporation to commit fraud, and what causes one person inside it to speak against it. Every case begins the same way — identifying what the insider knows, which records can corroborate it, and which regulator can act on the information — and every case runs on the temerity of a client taking incredible personal and professional risk to tell the truth about a powerful adversary.
Whistleblower Partners
Inman is a founding partner of Whistleblower Partners in San Francisco, a boutique built exclusively for this work. She has represented whistleblowers for thirty years under the False Claims Act and the SEC, CFTC, IRS, FinCEN, and NHTSA whistleblower programs, and she remains a frequent author, commentator, and teacher on the laws she helped carry around the world.
The field she chose when it was a handful of statutes is now a global system of accountability. Her clients — named and unnamed, celebrated and confidential — are a large part of the reason why.