Janet I. Levine 

As someone often described as one of the best white-collar criminal and regulatory trial lawyers around, Janet I. Levine is very happy to be back in the courtroom after lockdowns and Zoom hearings.

“It’s nice to have things normal again,” Levine said. “I don’t know if I understood how much I missed being able to see judges face-to-face.”

Zoom is OK for continuances and the like, she said. “But if you have to really argue something, there’s nothing that makes you focus, makes the judge focus, like being in court.”

“You need to be able to see how your client’s acting, how the other side is acting, what the judge’s clerk is doing,” Levine added. “They’re all part of understanding how your argument is playing [and] how the other argument’s playing out.”

That is how she and several co-counsel got to argue in her very favorite case from last year. Levine was co-counsel for one of six defendants in a Medicare billing fraud case that was set to go to trial in late January. Working very closely together under a joint defense agreement, the attorneys succeeded in winning a complete dismissal of all counts against all their clients. That put an end to a yearslong prosecution in which an orthopedic pain-management medical group at the center of the allegations had agreed to pay $5.1 million in restitution two years before. U.S. v. Meshkin, 8:21-cr-00112 (C.D. Cal., filed June 9, 2021).

“I loved being in it. I loved the issues. I loved my co-counsel. I loved my client. It was just a pleasure,” Levine said, who co-represented the pain group’s chief medical officer.

The government claimed that doctors in the Virginia-based group worked with a genetic testing lab in Irvine. The lab allegedly ran unnecessary tests on the doctors’ patients, overbilled Medicare and paid kickbacks to the doctors.

“Everything came together,” Levine said about the defense team. “The lawyers cooperated and shared duties, and nobody was pushing each other out of the spotlight, and everybody listened to each other, and we learned and became stronger together.”

The teamwork and resulting synergy helped the attorneys present a couple of “extremely novel and creative” motions, she said. One asserted violations of the lab’s attorney-client privilege. Another argued the U.S. attorney’s office had a conflict of interest.

“We’d filed the pleadings and the judge had ordered declarations from the government, and before they were due, the government dismissed while the motions were pending,” Levine said.

The prosecutors dropped the case right before Christmas last year. “I can tell you the clients were very pleased. It was a great Christmas call to make.”

— Don DeBenedictis