Robert M. Thomas

Biography

Bob Thomas has been teaching at BU Law as an adjunct since 2011. He has created and taught three different courses during that time: Health Care Fraud and Abuse, Whistleblower Law and Practice, and Contemporary Issues of Constitutional Law. He has also taught Criminal Law to BU’s LLM students. He has consistently received outstanding evaluations from his students, who appreciate the ways in which he blends the practical and the doctrinal and uses his many professional contacts and resources to enliven class discussions. In May 2022 he received the Part-Time Faculty Teaching Award.

Bob is the Co-Founder and Managing Member of the Boston-based Whistleblower Law Collaborative LLC, a law firm of six attorneys representing whistleblowers nationwide in cases involving the False Claims Act, as well as the SEC, IRS, and CFTC whistleblower programs. Bob and his partner Suzanne Durrell have been representing whistleblowers since 2003 and have been involved in some of the largest FCA settlements in history, including AmerisourceBergen ($885 million recovered), Amgen ($762 million recovered), Serono ($704 million recovered), Mylan, Inc. ($465 million recovered) and Mallincrodt ($234 million recovered). Bob and Suzanne were named Whistleblower Lawyers of the Year in 2017 by Taxpayers Against Fraud, in recognition of their cumulative body of work in this field. And their firm, the Whistleblower Law Collaborative LLC, was named a Law360 Health Care Practice Group of the Year for 2022, in recognition of the firm’s having “successfully steered a host of high-stakes whistleblower suits in the health care field.”

Bob is a graduate of Princeton University (1980) and Harvard Law School (1985). After a clerkship with federal district judge in Maryland, Bob started his career at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. Three years later he was hired to be an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland, a position he held for eight years (1989-97). As an Assistant U.S. Attorney, Bob worked primarily on white collar criminal matters and was lead trial counsel in dozens of criminal trials. After leaving government service for private practice, he was engaged by the Laborers’ International Union of North America (“LIUNA”) as part of a team of lawyers hired pursuant to a DOJ consent decree that was imposed to eradicate mob influence over the union. Over the next ten years, Bob tried dozens of racketeering cases and labor law arbitrations before the union’s Hearing Officer as part of the union’s internal code of conduct procedures.

In addition to his teaching and law practice, since 2015 Bob has served on the Boards of the ACLU of Massachusetts and the ACLU of Massachusetts Foundation. He is married and has two adult daughters.