Adam Feinberg commented on a False Claims Act whistleblower suit against pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences. The suit was revived by the Ninth Circuit in July 2017 after being dismissed in 2015 for lack of materiality under Universal Health Services v. United States ex rel. Escobar. The basic question in the litigation is "whether an alleged falsehood is important enough that it makes a difference as to whether [the] government would have paid the bill," Feinberg said, adding that several cases have been dismissed by federal appeals courts under Escobar. The case involving Gilead, which has a cert. petition pending in the U.S. Supreme Court, presents an opportunity to fine-tune the standards used for determining when an alleged representation is material, he said.