Stephen L. Meagher
(San Francisco)

Stephen, a partner with Phillips & Cohen, has worked extensively on health care fraud cases as well as other types of whistleblower lawsuits.

He has worked on qui tam lawsuits involving a variety of healthcare fraud, from upcoding to filing false claims in cost reports to billing Medicare for unnecessary medical devices. Among his more recent successes are a qui tam lawsuit against a large healthcare provider, which settled for $85.7 million, and a whistleblower case against a Big Five accounting firm, which paid $9 million to settle charges that it helped a client prepare and conceal fraudulent Medicare claims.

Stephen also has played a leading role in two major whistleblower lawsuits against HCA - the Healthcare Co., which resulted in the largest government investigation ever into Medicare fraud.

Stephen graduated from the University of Virginia Law School in 1983, where he served on the managing and editorial boards of the Virginia Law Review.

From 1983 to 1984, he served as a law clerk to the Honorable Harrison L. Winter, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The following three years Stephen was an associate with the San Francisco firm of Brobeck, Phleger and Harrison, where he specialized in commercial litigation.

He then became an Assistant United States Attorney in San Francisco, serving first in the Civil Division (from 1987 to 1989) and then in the Criminal Division (from 1989 through 1994). Specializing in health care fraud, Stephen founded and was chairman of the Justice Department's Health Care Fraud Task Force in Northern California. He prosecuted a wide variety of complex health care fraud schemes against the federal government and private insurers.

Stephen has taught trial and appellate advocacy at the Department of Justice, the F.B.I., the University of California School of Law (Boalt Hall) and Stanford Law School. He has been a speaker at many conferences on health care fraud and whistleblower lawsuits.

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