Federal prosecutors have accused an Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld partner—and a government lawyer himself until last year—of hawking a copy of a nonpublic whistleblower complaint to a company facing a False Claims Act lawsuit.
The alleged scheme ended with a resounding thud for the defendant, Jeffrey Wertkin, who joined Akin Gump as a partner after serving nearly six years as a trial lawyer in the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Division. A criminal complaint unsealed on Monday in San Francisco federal court says Wertkin was arrested at a hotel in Cupertino, California, on Jan. 31 as he attempted to sell a copy of the sealed complaint for $310,000 to an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation agent.
