Mary Louise Cohen

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."