Manatt Health Partners Ileana Hernandez and Barry Landsberg were named to Daily Journal’s 2022 list of Top Health Care Lawyers, which recognizes California’s leading attorneys representing hospitals, patients, insurers, care facilities and others in the gamut of health care services.
Hernandez was recognized for battling out-of-network substance-abuse treatment providers seeking improper reimbursement from health insurance plans, including recently winning an eight-figure jury award for fraud and racketeering in one of the cases. Discussing this issue, Ileana highlighted that "Most substance-abuse [treatment] providers have provided very valuable services to ... a very vulnerable population that desperately needed help, [but] these cases have involved some of the bad apples in the industry who try to take advantage ... for their own personal gain."
His fourth year on the list, Landsberg was recognized for defending Dignity Health against a lawsuit brought by Dr. Gary Wisner alleging the health system falsely reported to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) that Wisner surrendered his clinical privileges while under investigation. The trial court granted a special motion to strike Wisner's complaint as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) after concluding that Wisner's claims arose from protected activity, the filing of the report with the NPDB, and that Wisner failed to establish a probability of prevailing on the merits because the hospital enjoyed immunity from suit under federal law. Discussing the case, Landsberg noted, "We argued that this case needs to be thrown out not just because it's a protected communication, but on the merits too. You could never prevail because the hospital enjoys immunity, but Dr. Wisner appealed, and the Court of Appeal in the decision this week agreed again at the hospital enjoyed an immunity under the federal peer review reporting statute."
Daily Journal subscribers can read Hernandez’s full profile here and Landsberg’s here.