Reuben A. Guttman

Building the Machine Around the Insider

Even before filing, Guttman's team begins with intensive investigation. Brown supplied the firsthand account. Guttman organized the multidisciplinary effort around it.

The team he helped coordinate — Traci Buschner, Justin Brooks, Dan Guttman, Liz Shofner, Caroline Poplin, Paul Zwier, retired Judge Nancy Gertner, and lawyers from several firms — divided the work the government had declined to do: discovery, regulatory analysis, medicine, reimbursement, trial preparation. Experts took on the specialized clinical and economic questions. Government lawyers stayed engaged with the public interests the claims represented.

The legal architecture mattered. Physicians may lawfully prescribe an approved drug for an unapproved use, so the case could not rest on off-label prescribing alone. It had to show that Celgene's promotional practices caused government programs to pay claims falling outside their coverage rules — that Medicare Part D covered a use only when FDA-approved or supported by designated drug compendia, that Medicaid coverage turned on state discretion, indication, and period, and that the company's promotion had caused government programs to pay claims beyond those coverage boundaries.

Guttman's team assembled promotional records, prescribing evidence, medical context, reimbursement pathways, public-program claims data, coverage standards, and expert analysis into one causal account. A protective order governing Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services information bears his signature — the paper trail of his role in obtaining and managing the sensitive claims data at the center of the proof.

December 28, 2016

Judge George H. King denied Celgene's summary-judgment motion on the core off-label claims and found genuine disputes for trial.

Brown had presented evidence of a systematic promotional campaign, higher prescribing rates among physicians receiving more promotional contacts, large volumes of government claims, and Celgene's involvement in reimbursement activity. The court held that a jury could infer from the circumstantial evidence that promotion was a substantial factor in causing claims — without requiring one identified promotional contact for every prescription. Medicare claims for uses that were not medically accepted indications could be false for False Claims Act purposes. Materiality and knowledge were for the jury.

The litigation by then encompassed millions of documents, roughly forty fact and expert depositions, and seventeen designated experts across the two sides — biostatistics to reimbursement. The parties returned to mediation while preparing expert hearings, pretrial filings, and trial dates.

In July 2017, on the eve of trial, Celgene paid $280 million: $259.3 million to the United States and $20.7 million to twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia. A recovery of that size, achieved by a relator and private counsel after government declination, remains one of the defining results of the modern False Claims Act.

Billions Returned

Celgene was not an outlier in Guttman's practice. It was a method applied again.

He represented one of the six principal whistleblowers in the litigation that produced the government's $2.3 billion settlement with Pfizer in September 2009. He represented whistleblower Meredith McCoyd in the Depakote off-label marketing case against Abbott Laboratories, which returned $1.6 billion to state and federal governments in 2012. That same year he represented one of the main whistleblowers in a case against GlaxoSmithKline that returned over $3 billion, and he represented Lynn Szymoniak, whose qui tam case involving fraudulent mortgage assignments was resolved within the government's $25 billion settlement with some of the world's largest banks.

The International Business Times has called him "one of the world's most prominent whistleblower attorneys." The nickname that followed him out of the pharmaceutical cases was blunter: the lawyer pharma loves to hate.

Beyond the Qui Tam Docket

Guttman began his career as Washington, D.C. counsel to the Service Employees International Union, and the labor grounding never left his practice. For more than a decade he served as chief outside counsel to the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers in litigation that improved safety and environmental conditions at Manhattan Project nuclear-weapons sites — work that helped drive dread-disease compensation legislation for nuclear-weapons workers nationwide.

In 2020, as lead counsel in a federal class action against the South Carolina Department of Corrections, he secured a consent order mandating Hepatitis C testing and treatment for 17,000 incarcerated people.

He also teaches the craft he practices. Guttman has been an adjunct professor at Emory Law School, a senior fellow at Emory's Center for Advocacy and Dispute Resolution, a National Institute for Trial Advocacy faculty member, and a faculty member at American University's School of Public Affairs, where he teaches equal protection and civil rights. With J.C. Lore of Rutgers Law he co-authored the textbook Pretrial Advocacy, and he has trained advocates and fraud prosecutors in the United States, China, and Mexico.

Practice and Background

Guttman is a founding member of Guttman Buschner LLP in Washington, D.C. His practice includes whistleblower, False Claims Act, civil rights, class-action, and complex litigation, and he serves as a mediator.

He earned his B.A. in American history from the University of Rochester and his J.D. from Emory University School of Law, which honored him with its Alumni Service Award in 2015.