Just read David Freeman Engstrom’s super-interesting empirical paper
Harnessing the Private Attorney General: Evidence from Qui TamLitigation, which has implications for hiring private firms to assist
AGs in consumer protection cases as well. The paper also revealed this tidbit: business competitors are quite
successful in pursuing qui tam cases to a successful outcome but achieve small
impositions (awards) when they do. Engstrom suggests that this may lend
credence to a concern that business competitors bring False Claims Act claims as part of a
broader business dispute, perhaps along with other types of claims (such as antitrust), but with less focus on
maximizing impositions. Perhaps because the US government, for all its size, is rarely a key customer of the parties who tend to use the Lanham Act to sue each other, I haven't seen many Lanham Act-FCA claims (indeed none come to mind at the moment), but it would be interesting to collect a list of the full range of business-on-business claims these days.
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