Marlene Koury

Marlene Koury is a partner in the San Francisco office of Constantine Cannon. Ms. Koury began her career in New York with a focus on antitrust litigation in the healthcare sector, and went on to co-found the firm’s whistleblower practice, which has grown over the last decade into the preeminent whistleblower practice in the country.

Ms. Koury is a seasoned litigator and a nationally recognized expert in healthcare fraud. She was named one of the 500 leading plaintiff financial lawyers by Lawdragon five years in a row, from 2019 to 2023.  Over the past decade, Ms. Koury has represented whistleblowers in variety of matters alleging fraud against the government, including in areas of home health care, risk adjustment, for-profit education fraud, Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, coverage and coding, the marketing and promotion of pharmaceuticals and medical devices, clinical research, and kickbacks.

Ms. Koury served as co-lead counsel on U.S. ex. rel. Lacey v. Visiting Nurse Service of New York, a qui tam action in which she recently secured a $57 million settlement for her whistleblower client, New York, and the United States. The case alleged the defendant home health agency failed to provide patients all the critical visits and services their doctors prescribed in patient Plans of Care. Lacey is the first reported False Claims Act settlement involving allegations of a home health agency failing to follow patient Plans of Care, and it is the largest non-kickback FCA settlement ever against a home health care company. Read more about the case and record settlement here.

Ms. Koury is currently representing whistleblowers in several unsealed and sealed matters alleging multimillion-dollar frauds against the government. As to unsealed whistleblower matters, Ms. Koury represents two virologists in U.S. ex. rel. Krahling v. Merck, in which Relators allege, among other things, that Merck defrauded the government by concealing the significantly diminished efficacy of its mumps vaccine, which the CDC has purchased for hundreds of millions of dollars. Ms. Koury also represents a whistleblower in an intervened Medicare Advantage qui tam suit against UnitedHealth Group alleging billions of dollars in damages. Ms. Koury also represented the plaintiff in a Medicare fraud case, U.S. ex. rel. Beeson v. Rose Cancer Center, that was resolved through a $5.7 million forfeiture and a criminal conviction against the defendant.

In addition to her extensive litigation skills, Ms. Koury has a decade of experience working alongside attorneys in the U.S. Department of Justice and at various state attorney general offices, providing critical support to investigations undertaken by those offices. Additionally, Ms. Koury’s fluency in antitrust enables her to lead matters that straddle whistleblower and antitrust law.

Featured posts

• The Dawn of Antitrust Whistleblowing (with Kristian Soltes) (June 9, 2021)