Brandon Mark is a member of the firm’s litigation practice and has litigated in state and federal courts throughout the country in cases involving mass torts, government contracts, the False Claims Act and other whistleblower protections.
Brandon Mark is a member of the litigation department and works on the firm’s litigation, healthcare and real estate practice teams. He has represented clients in state and federal trial courts around the country, including the Utah Supreme Court and the Utah Court of Appeals, the Nevada Supreme Court and the United States Courts of Appeals for the Eighth, Ninth, Tenth and Federal Circuits. He has represented parties in expedited arbitration and helped clients submit disclosures to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s whistleblower program.
Mr. Mark focuses his practice on the many legal issues involving government contracts, including representing whistleblowers who have information about fraud committed on government programs.
Mr. Mark has represented numerous whistleblowers under the False Claims Act and represented parties in actions under the Act in almost every covered industry—health care, defense contracting and higher education. For example, Mr. Mark currently represents a physician and two nurses who uncovered alleged billing improprieties by a major hospital chain involving babies in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs) covered by Medicaid in Utah and other states. These actions allegedly resulted in the hospital chain receiving tens of millions of dollars in excessive “outlier payments” than the hospital chain should have received.
Mr. Mark also represents a former student recruiter for a for-profit, online college based in Colorado, who alleges that the college violated both the ban on incentive compensation to recruiters and the ban on misrepresentations when it received hundreds of millions of dollars in Title IV funds for Pell Grants and student loans.
Similarly, in spring 2014, the Department of Justice announced that the government had intervened in a whistleblower lawsuit brought by Mr. Mark’s clients against several for-profit colleges in Idaho, Utah, California, Colorado, Arizona and Wyoming under the federal False Claims Act. The government typically intervenes in only about 20 percent of suits brought under the False Claims Act.
Mr. Mark is also an experienced first chair trial attorney involving whistleblower-related actions. In 2019, Mr. Mark and his team persuaded a jury in Colorado to only award the former employer of his pro bono client a single dollar after a five-year lawsuit filed in retaliation for Mr. Mark’s client blowing the whistle on her former employer to the Colorado Attorney General. In 2020, her former employer was hit with a judgment of more than $3 million in penalties in a suit filed by the Colorado Attorney General.
Representing a client in a lawsuit filed in federal court against Southwestern Oregon Community College on breach of contract and Title IX claims, Mr. Mark and a team of Parsons’ attorneys secured a jury verdict on the breach of contract charge, resulting in an award of $1.7M in damages. The client was subject to harassment and discrimination, resulting in her discontinuing the pursuit of a nursing degree, after she had disclosed previous employment experience in the adult entertainment industry.
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Successfully defended against a retaliatory lawsuit against a whistleblower by her former employer, resulting in a jury verdict to her employer for only $1 after 5-plus years of litigation.
Mr. Mark and his co-counsel successfully persuaded a jury in federal court to award their clients nearly all damages sought against a Utah county and its contractor for the damage they caused to the client’s serene mountain property. The jury returned a verdict in Mr. Mark’s client’s favor on all three claims—trespass, negligence and 5th Amendment Taking—and awarded punitive damages against the contractor. Mr. Mark and Parsons Behle & Latimer also convinced the court to award their clients’ attorneys’ fees for the county’s unconstitutional taking.