Luke Bierman is of counsel to Cohen Milstein, and adviser to the Ethics and Fiduciary Counseling and Securities Litigation & Investor Protection practices. He counsels pension funds and public entities on fiduciary, ethics, governance, and compliance issues.
Luke joined Cohen Milstein in 2011, bringing with him a singular perspective and substantive experience as in-house general counsel to one of the largest public pension funds in the country, appointments to state task forces to review the state code of judicial ethics and professionalism, and a scholarly and academic background as the Dean and Professor of Law at a law school twice recognized as among the most innovative in the world. His experience provides him with a unique context for assisting public pension funds at critical and challenging times for those funds, and to offer collaborative and creative solutions.
Luke served from 2007 to 2010 as General Counsel for the Office of the New York State Comptroller, the sole trustee of the state’s then $160 billion pension fund and the state’s chief fiscal officer for the state of New York’s then $160 billion budget. This was when the Office of the Comptroller faced unprecedented challenges including an international placement agent scandal and the Great Recession. Luke was the third ranking official in an agency of 2,500 employees managing a legal staff that included 100 staff with 55 attorneys and was responsible for legal advice and counsel on all matters relating to the comptroller’s constitutional and statutory responsibilities, including fiduciary, governance, ethics, litigation, investment, pension benefits, state and municipal finance and legislative matters. He also managed the 35 outside law firms that represented the Comptroller in litigation and transactional matters.
Luke is a noted expert on legal ethics and professionalism, who has spoken and written widely about state courts and judicial conduct. He has served as a member of the North Carolina Commission on Administration of Law and Justice and on the North Carolina Chief Justice’s Commission on Professionalism. He was a member of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s Task Force on the Code of Judicial Conduct, which was assigned to review and suggest updates to the Court. He served on the ABA Presidential Task Force on Financing Legal Education and the ABA Presidential Task Force on Legal Access JobCorps. While working at the American Bar Association, Luke initiated the project that resulted in revisions to the Model Code of Judicial Conduct (2007), which many states have since adopted. He is Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus at Elon University School of Law in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he, as Dean, spearheaded the creation of a unique law curriculum that blends the most important traditional elements of legal education with highly experiential learning in the nation’s first 2½ year JD program.
Previously, Luke was the Associate Dean for Experiential Education and Distinguished Professor of Practice of Law at Northeastern University School of Law, where he was responsible for the Cooperative Legal Education Program. Earlier in his career, he served as a Fellow in Government Law and Policy at Albany Law School, Director of the Institute for Emerging Issues at North Carolina State University, where he held the rank of Associate Professor of Political Science; as founding director of the Justice Center and Special Assistant to the President of the American Bar Association; and as Visiting Specialist in Constitutional Law with the rank of Associate Professor at The Richard Stockton College (now University) of New Jersey. Luke also taught at Northwestern University School of Law, the University at Albany – State University of New York and Trinity College in Hartford. He also clerked for appellate judges in New York state shortly after law school.
Luke is widely published for his legal analysis and is a frequent lecturer and commentator about corporate governance reform, fiduciary responsibility and ethics and justice reform. He was a member of the board of directors of the Council of Institutional Investors, where he co-chaired the policies committee. He has been an elected member of the American Law Institute since 2002.
Jeanne A. Markey is of counsel at Cohen Milstein and a member of the Whistleblower practice. She has successfully represented whistleblowers in federal and state cases across the country in some of highest-profile qui tam litigation in the healthcare, defense, financial services, and education industries. She has also represented whistleblower clients in the public housing sector, in S.E.C. related matters, and in matters involving complex financial instruments.
Representative settled cases include:
- United States of America et al., ex rel. Lauren Kieff, v. Wyeth: Jeanne was co-lead counsel in this False Claims Act whistleblower case against pharmaceutical giant Wyeth (subsequently acquired by Pfizer), in which the whistleblowers alleged that Wyeth defrauded Medicaid, the joint federal/state healthcare program for the poor, when it reported falsely inflated prices for its acid suppression drug Protonix from 2001 through 2006 for Medicaid rebate purposes. Weeks before trial, in February 2016, in one of the largest qui tam settlements in U.S. history, Wyeth agreed to pay $784.6 million to the U.S. government and the over 35 intervening states.
- United States et al. ex relators v. Southern SNF Management, Inc. and Rehab Services in Motion, LLC: Jeanne was lead counsel in this False Claims Act case in which three whistleblowers employed by a chain of skilled nursing facilities located in Florida and Alabama alleged that the chain was engaged in a multi-year scheme of inflating the facilities’ Medicare collections by assigning Medicare patients to levels of therapy, (often referred to as “RUG” levels), higher than what was medically reasonable and necessary for that patient. In July 2018 this case settled for $10 million.
- Ven-A-Care Whistleblower Litigation: Jeanne was involved in a series of Ven-A-Care whistleblower cases which pertained to the inflated reimbursement amounts drug companies were causing Medicare and Medicaid to pay for prescription drugs by reporting inflated wholesale prices to the government. These large, highly-successful groundbreaking cases helped to pave the way for a wide range of subsequent False Claims Act cases in the realm of healthcare and directed at drug companies in particular.
In 2016, Jeanne was recognized as one of the top 25 women lawyers in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania by The Legal Intelligencer. In 2018, she, an alumna of Cornell University Law School, was invited to become a member of The President’s Council of Cornell Women.
She is also an active member of Taxpayers Against Fraud, a nonprofit, public interest organization dedicated to combating fraud against the Federal Government through the promotion and use of the Federal False Claims Act and its Qui Tam provisions, and the Association of qui tam attorneys.
Jeanne frequently speaks about developments in the qui tam field and has co-authored several articles about topics including statistical sampling and representing whistleblowers in cases involving issues of medical necessity.
Daniel A. Small became of counsel at Cohen Milstein, after being a partner for many years, when he largely retired from the practice of law in 2022. He continues to work on periodic pro bono cases with the firm and on a couple of matters nearing completion. Dan was the co-chair of the Antitrust practice group for ten years. He also had the honor of serving on the firm’s executive committee for over a decade.
Dan is one of the most respected litigators in antitrust class actions. In 2020, Law360 named him a Titan of the Plaintiffs Bar for his decades of success in antitrust and other cases, including his extensive involvement in a class action against Sutter Health that settled on the eve of trial in October 2019 for $575 million and detailed injunctive relief. He is also named on the Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America list (2018 – 2022) and the Super Lawyers’ list of Top Antitrust Litigation Attorneys in Washington, DC (2013 – 2022). Since 2009, Legal 500 has annually recognized Dan and Cohen Milstein as a Leading Plaintiffs Antitrust Class Action Lawyer/Firm; Benchmark Plaintiff has repeatedly awarded him with its National Litigation Star – Antitrust recognition; and Global Competition Review and Who’s Who Legal: Competition has named him a Leading Thought Leader – Competition since 2014.
Dan is widely regarded for his intellectual energy, deep study of the economic issues underpinning antitrust disputes and sophisticated understanding of how conspiracies and monopolies operate in a range of complex markets – from animation and visual effects workers and computer software and hardware to wild blueberries and hospital nurses – and achieving just compensation for victims and promoting more open markets nationwide.
He has represented plaintiff classes, and defended unions, as lead or co-lead counsel in numerous antitrust cases and obtained settlements and judgments totaling over one billion dollars. He has tried cases to verdict and argued in numerous appellate courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 2018, Dan, Cohen Milstein, and the co-lead counsel team in Animation Workers Antitrust Litigation were nominated for Public Justice Foundation’s Trial Lawyer of the Year, recognizing the legal teams that made the most outstanding contributions to the public interest through precedent-setting or otherwise extraordinary litigation concluded within the last year.