We were quoted in a Law360 article summarizing a September 2025 decision by a Utah federal court to dismiss False Claims Act (FCA) allegations against our clients.
The decision followed more than four years of litigation stemming from whistleblower claims that a physician practice, Mountain West Anesthesia, improperly billed Medicare and Medicaid for anesthesia services.
The case is a rare example of the government exercising its sparingly used authority under Section 3730(c)(2)(A) of the FCA to seek dismissal of claims asserted by a qui tam relator.
Speaking about the dismissal on September 30, we said “More than two years ago, the defendants obtained testimony from CMS [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] in this very case showing that the relator’s allegations were meritless.” We added that the latest ruling “only served to confirm our view that this case should not continue.”
After first building a strong evidentiary record over several years of discovery, our team uncovered AI-generated hallucinations in a report submitted by one of the relator’s experts—including fabricated government testimony, fake citations, and made-up industry publications. Our team also obtained testimony from the expert acknowledging his use of ChatGPT.
After our team brought these issues to the court’s attention, the relator withdrew the expert. Our team then moved for sanctions, seeking disqualification of both the relator and his counsel.
Commenting on the AI revelations, we told Law360 “From our perspective, there was simply no credible explanation offered as to how something like that could have happened. Even as courts are increasingly dealing with AI-generated hallucinations, we have never seen anything like that.”
While the motion for sanctions was pending, the Department of Justice moved to intervene in the case to seek dismissal, explaining to the court that continued litigation was “not in the government’s interests.” The court granted the government’s motion, resulting in a complete victory for our clients.
The full article, “FCA Suit Tainted By Expert’s AI ‘Hallucination’ Gets Dismissed,” was published by Law360 on September 30 and is available online (subscription required).
The Bass, Berry & Sims team also included Nathan Brown, John Eason, Emily Farmer and Reagan Schmidt. Read more about our work on the case here.
This case was featured in the October 3 installment of Law360’s Legal Lions Of The Week.