Hamsa Mahendranathan

Hamsa Mahendranathan is a partner in the New York office of Constantine Cannon. Ms. Mahendranathan joined the firm in March 2015. She predominantly represents whistleblowers litigating state and federal False Claims Act (FCA) claims or navigating the SEC, CFTC, and IRS whistleblower programs. She also represents plaintiffs in antitrust and general commercial litigations. Her practice spans various industries—from health care and pharmaceuticals to data security and government contracting—and she has represented clients in state and federal courts across the country. Ms. Mahendranathan also maintains an active pro bono practice and co-founded the firm’s pro bono Compassionate Release Project.

Representative Matters:

• Represented a class of third-party drug payors that settled antitrust claims concerning the delayed entry of generic versions of an Alzheimer’s drug for $56.6 million in November 2022.
• Represented a health care coding and compliance expert who brought FCA claims alleging Medicare Advantage fraud by a large hospital network that settled for $90 million in August 2021.
• Represented an anonymous whistleblower who received a multi-million-dollar award from the SEC in May 2021 for submitting information regarding securities law violations by a brokerage firm.
• Represented an executive who settled his FCA claims alleging widespread failures by a home health agency to provide adequate home health care for $57 million in June 2020.
• Represented a group of whistleblowers that brought FCA claims alleging Iran sanctions violations by a military food vendor which led to a $45 million criminal and civil settlement in December 2019.

Prior to joining Constantine Cannon, Ms. Mahendranathan worked for two years in the litigation group of Mayer Brown. At Mayer Brown, she defended large financial institutions in complex commercial litigations and represented asylum applicants and human trafficking victims pro bono. Ms. Mahendranathan earned her J.D. from Columbia Law School where she was a Wien National Scholar, a Harlan Fiske Stone Moot Court Semifinalist, and a Moot Court Editor. In her second year, she interned for United States Magistrate Judge Theodore H. Katz (Ret.) in the Southern District of New York. She also spent the summer after her first year of law school representing defendants sentenced to death in Louisiana. Ms. Mahendranathan received a B.A. in Economics and International Studies from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Ms. Mahendranathan is a member of the Federal Bar Council’s Inn of Court, the New York State Bar Association’s Civil Prosecution Committee, and the President’s Council of the TAF Coalition, a non-profit organization that supports whistleblowers who expose fraud impacting government funds or the financial markets. She is also a volunteer mentor for America Needs You, a non-profit organization that supports economic mobility for first-generation college students. Ms. Mahendranathan is admitted to practice in New York and the United States District Courts for the Southern and Western Districts of New York, the District of Colorado, and the Western District of Texas.

Featured Press

• The FinCEN Files Prove We Need an Anti-Money-Laundering Whistleblower Program, PCCE Compliance & Enforcement (October 12, 2020)
• Home Health Care Nonprofit to Pay $57M in Record FCA Deal, Law360 (June 26, 2020)
• Government Contracts Group of the Year: Constantine Cannon, Law360 (February 14, 2020)
• Cisco to Pay $8.6 Million Fine for Selling Government Hackable Surveillance Technology, Washington Post (July 31, 2019)