The POWER 30: Clayton Halunen

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Employees who blow the whistle, whether it be under state law or under the federal False Claims Act, face the threat of severe retaliation. “It takes a really courageous person to be a whistleblower,” Halunen said.

The Minnesota Whistleblower Protection Act, Minn. Stat. sec. 181.932 protects workers who report in good faith a violation or suspected violation of law, or refuse to engage in what they believe is illegal conduct. The act is applicable to any employer doing business in Minnesota with more than one employee. It also provides specific protections for employees working in health care when they report situations in which public health is at risk.

Halunen, whose firm is Halunen Law, has a national False Claims Act practice and reports that the Department of Justice recently outlined six of its most significant FCA priorities. They are pandemic fraud, opioids, fraud targeting seniors, electronic health records, telehealth and cyber security. The DOJ acknowledged that qui tam cases have brought a lot of money back to the taxpayers, and Halunen points out that those cases are more successful if the government gets involved.

The Whistleblower Act requires that the plaintiff must report an illegality in good faith. Halunen was one of the lawyers involved in the important 2017 opinion in Friedlander v. Edwards Lifesciences, in which the Supreme Court said that good faith does not require exposing an illegality. It only requires that the whistleblower is not reckless and does not make a knowingly false report.

Halunen anticipates an increase in individual and possible class actions based on age as the population grows older and corporate reorganizations and other changes provide a cover for eliminating older workers. Individual claims are possible because not all employers have implemented arbitration clauses and/or class action waivers, he noted.

He is optimistic for the next four years as a result of some hopeful trends. One is the Title VII federal protection for employees who are fired for being gay or transgender, as set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, decided in 2020. The case is “hugely important,” Halunen said.

He also sees some movement in the aftermath protests about police conduct. “Corporations are reevaluating their social justice measures and looking at their own policies because people are demanding it,” he said.

Corporate scrutiny may bring consequences, Halunen said. “We are going to hold corporations accountable. We’re going to look at the numbers. We’ll see what happens.”

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