F. Franklin Amanat

Frank has litigated notable civil cases for private plaintiffs and public sector clients in federal and state courts across the country. His practice today focuses on representing relators in False Claims Act (FCA) qui tam matters; whistleblowers submitting confidential tips to the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and other agencies; and plaintiffs in other fraud-related litigation. He also represents defrauded investors in securities litigation, including class actions, derivative, and opt-out proceedings; consumers injured by deceptive trade practices and anticompetitive conduct; victims of terrorist attacks and other mass torts and human rights violations; governmental entities; and persons harmed by corporate and governmental misconduct. A multifaceted litigator, he provides Motley Rice clients with extensive investigatory, arbitration, trial, and appellate experience, coupled with a broad range of legal and policy knowledge.

At Motley Rice, Frank is one of the lead counsel for the Relator in parallel cases pending in New York, California, and New Jersey state courts. These cases, brought on behalf of dozens of state, county, and local governments, accuse several large banks of having defrauded the states of hundreds of millions of dollars by colluding to inflate interest rates on municipal bonds called variable rate demand obligations. Frank played an instrumental role in achieving a historic $70 million* settlement in an earlier, previous case on behalf of the State of Illinois, and continues to press for justice for taxpayers in other States.

Frank also represents a whistleblower who exposed an alleged scheme by major defense contractors to defraud the U.S. Army of billions of dollars by failing to disclose that it was trafficking tens of thousands of laborers from South Asia to work on Army bases in Afghanistan in deplorable conditions of debt bondage and involuntary servitude. He also represents a whistleblower who was instrumental in discovering and reporting a conspiracy by major international financial institutions to manipulate, for their own benefit, a key benchmark for foreign exchange trading; this whistleblower’s efforts led to enforcement actions culminating in $1.5 billion in civil penalty settlements with federal regulators.

Frank is part of the Motley Rice teams seeking justice and compensation for victims of violence committed by Mexican drug cartels and other international terrorist organizations, including the family of Kiki Camarena, the DEA Special Agent who was brutally murdered in 1985, and the victims of the November 2019 massacre of American women and children in rural Mexico. He also contributes to a class action Little Tucker Act suit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement for failing to return hundreds of millions of dollars in immigration bonds posted on behalf of migrants in removal proceedings.

Prior to joining Motley Rice, Frank was a partner at a plaintiff’s firm, where he represented whistleblowers in a range of FCA and agency proceedings involving financial, procurement, and healthcare fraud, including a qui tam suit against a number of CVS entities accused of defrauding Medicare and Medicaid of tens of millions of dollars. He also formerly represented a state’s Attorney General in a consumer protection and deceptive practices suit against the makers of Androgel®, a testosterone replacement therapy drug, which settled for an undisclosed sum. He contributed to that firm’s antitrust class action practice, most notably in connection with foreign exchange antitrust litigation. Additionally, Frank represented dozens of victims of sex and labor trafficking and sexual abuse, including the victims of Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygård. 

For more than 20 years before returning to private practice, Frank served in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York (Civil Division), as well as the Offices of Legal Policy and Immigration Litigation. He managed over 400 cases on behalf of more than 70 federal agencies in a wide variety of litigation areas, including representing the Government in numerous class action, constitutional, and program litigation. Many of those cases were litigated under the FCA, the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act (FIRREA), the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), the Tucker Act, the various civil rights acts, the immigration code, and the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). He also obtained and collected over $15 million* in asset forfeiture judgments. He was a leading member of the group that developed and promulgated regulations implementing the Prison Rape Elimination Act, the largest administrative rulemaking project in DOJ history. In 2018, Frank was recognized with multiple awards for his work as lead counsel in United States v. Barclays Capital, a fraud case involving the sale of residential mortgage-backed securities that resulted in a $2 billion settlement*—the largest ever single civil penalty recovery by the DOJ involving actions filed under FIRREA. 

Outside the courtroom, Frank is a frequent speaker at professional conferences and a regular storyteller at events sponsored by The Moth. A trivia fanatic, he was a 2004 contestant and multigame winner on the game show Jeopardy! He spent two years directing the Government Civil Litigation Clinic at NYU School of Law as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Clinical Law. After completing his legal studies at Harvard Law School where he served as Editor for the Harvard Law Review, he clerked for Judge Frank E. Schwelb of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. He is fluent in English, French and has a working knowledge of Farsi.

Frank splits his time between Motley Rice offices in New York and Connecticut.

*Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

SELECT PUBLICATIONS:

• Practical Aspects of the Anti-Terrorism Act: “Follow the Money” or Else …, Carver 33rd Annual Accredited CLE Update, December 2020
• Civil Rights and the Future of Qualified Immunity, 360 Advocacy, December 2020
• How Congress Can Depoliticize the Supreme Court, Law360, September 2020
• Int’l Human Rights Law Group, In the Public Eye: Parliamentary Transparency in Europe and North America (1995) (contributing author)
• The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (15th 1991) (Executive Editor)
• Recent Development, 12 J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 1081 (1989) (commenting on Fort Wayne Books v. Indiana, 109 S. Ct. 916 (1989) (applicability of civil RICO laws to obscenity violations))