Abell Eskew Landau

Our Mission:

AEL is proudly a boutique law firm and a small business with a highly specialized and focused practice. It is our mission to provide the highest quality legal counsel and advocacy without any of the bureaucracy and bloat that sometimes accompanies a larger business. In every engagement, we provide expert, partner-driven, responsive representation with a practical, no-nonsense approach. AEL’s clients benefit from our years’ of experience in government, in-house and on the defense-side, and come to us for our collaborative, straight-forward, honest approach, and creative solutions.

Who We Are:

In AEL, Kenneth Abell, David Eskew, and Scott Landau have created a unique law firm that offers a blend of civil, criminal, and regulatory and compliance expertise, with a focus on representing individuals as well as institutions — from small businesses on up through large, publicly-traded companies and nationally-recognized healthcare systems and hospitals — in high-stakes white-collar government investigations, enforcement matters, and prosecutions. Though many law firms claim expertise in government investigations and health law, none can match AEL’s combination of criminal, civil and regulatory experience.

AEL’s founding partners are all former federal prosecutors who served in both the Criminal and Civil Divisions of two of the most prestigious U.S. Attorneys’ Offices in the country – the Eastern District of New York (EDNY) and the District of New Jersey (DNJ). In their roles as federal prosecutors, AEL’s partners distinguished themselves as healthcare and white-collar experts. Prior to founding AEL, David Eskew and Kenneth Abell served as the Chiefs of their Offices’ respective healthcare practices – David as the Chief of the Health Care and Government Fraud Unit in the Criminal Division of the DNJ, and Ken as the Chief of Healthcare Fraud in the Civil Division of EDNY. Scott Landau also served as an AUSA in the EDNY focusing on affirmative civil healthcare fraud matters. As prosecutors, all three AEL partners led large, sophisticated federal investigations and prosecutions across a broad cross-section of subject matter areas, including “big pharma,” hospital and medical provider cases, mortgage fraud, securities fraud, bank and wire fraud, tax fraud, and cybercrime.

Having been on both the criminal and civil sides, there is simply no boutique better equipped to navigate clients through increasingly-common parallel criminal/civil investigations and high stakes qui tam / whistleblower litigation being conducted by U.S. Attorney’s Offices, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), and state Attorneys’ General. Currently, AEL is representing clients in parallel civil / criminal investigations being led by the U.S. Attorney’s Offices in the Eastern District of New York, Southern District of New York, District of New Jersey, and District of Massachusetts, and by the SEC. And, as AUSAs, AEL’s partners investigated, prosecuted or supervised some of the most significant parallel investigations handled in the EDNY and DNJ, including important cases that started as qui tam / whistleblower actions. Their case credits include:

• the criminal and civil portions of one of the largest-ever international bribery and corruption cases brought under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) against a healthcare company;
• the civil portion of the investigation that resulted in the historic $16.6 billion-dollar resolution against a financial institution following the “subprime mortgage crisis,” which was at the time the largest settlement with a single corporate entity in U.S. history;
• the criminal portion of the “Newswire” case, a cutting edge parallel investigation with the SEC in which cybercriminals infiltrated major newswire agencies and then sold stolen material nonpublic information to securities traders who traded on the information before press releases were made public; and
• the investigation and eventual settlement with one of the largest pharmaceutical distribution companies in the United States related to a portion of its injectable biologics business.

But, AEL goes beyond leveraging its prior government service and expertise. AEL partner Scott Landau also served for many years as in-house counsel with a nationally-recognized hospital system in New York City. In that role, Scott not only represented the hospital in complex civil litigation and pending government investigations, but also advised the hospital in myriad general counsel issues. Among other things, Scott crafted compliant transactions, advised the hospital on physician pay arrangements and healthcare delivery models, and has an “insider’s” understanding of the difficult issues impacting healthcare providers. With this background and experience, AEL is truly a triple threat with expertise in criminal, civil and in-house regulatory matters, and has become known for its wholistic and creative strategies.