Earlier this month, following three hours of deliberation, a federal jury in San Francisco, California found that Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. had violated the federal whistleblower provisions by unlawfully firing Sanford Wadler, its former general counsel, and awarded Wadler nearly $11 million in damages.
Wadler had sued his former company under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the Dodd-Frank Act and California state law, asserting that he was wrongfully terminated in retaliation for investigating and reporting to senior management potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA”) in China. The pre-trial proceedings and three-week trial involved several whistleblower-friendly rulings that promise to generate additional litigation. Those legal determinations, as well as the jury’s prompt finding of liability and imposition of a substantial award in the face of an aggressive corporate defense, could have implications for public companies – not the least of which is the precedent of a general counsel in the role of whistleblower.