Robert M. Thomas Jr.

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."