Three KKC Partners Named ‘Lawyer of the Year’ in 2026 Best Lawyers Awards
Stephen Kohn, David Colapinto, and Mary Jane Wilmoth were named by Best Lawyers as for Qui Tam Law. All three are partners at the leading whistleblower law firm, Kohn, Kohn and Colapinto, LLP (KKC). This marks David Colapinto’s second year of being nominated. Kohn was also recognized under Labor and Employment Law.
Best Lawyers® annual list of honorees “provides trusted, peer-reviewed recognition of top legal professionals” based on the “consensus opinion of leading lawyers about the professional abilities of their colleagues”. The nomination process is entirely based on highly selective peer review, with only 5% of U.S. lawyers and 3% of lawyers globally earning this honor. Kohn, Colapinto, and Wilmoth were recognized as “individual lawyers who received the highest overall peer-feedback for a specific practice area and geographic region.”
With 38 years of experience, Stephen M. Kohn, a founding partner of KKC and Chairman of the Board of the National Whistleblower Center, works to advance whistleblower protections worldwide. Mr. Kohn currently represents the Danske Bank whistleblower who reported (and stopped) the largest known money-laundering scandal ($230 billion). Kohn helped draft key transnational whistleblower laws, including Dodd-Frank, Sarbanes-Oxley, and the AML law, and authored the first legal treatise on whistleblowing and is the world’s most published author on whistleblower protection. His eighth book on whistleblowing is “Rules for Whistleblowers: A Handbook for Doing What’s Right” (Lyons Press, 2023).
David Colapinto is a founding partner of KKC and a co-founder of the National Whistleblower Center, where he has represented whistleblowers for almost four decades. Among his accomplishments, Mr. Colapinto served as lead counsel for one of the whistleblowers in the major Bristol-Myers Squibb False Claims Act case, which resulted in the recovery of more than $500 million for U.S. taxpayers. Together, Kohn and Colapinto obtained the largest tax whistleblower award in history ($104 million) for UBS Swiss Banker Bradley Birkenfeld in 2012, setting numerous precedents that expanded the scope of whistleblower protections.
Mary Jane Wilmoth is a partner at KKC with over three decades of experience representing whistleblowers. Wilmoth serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the National Whistleblower Center, and is a Trustee at the National Whistleblower Center Legal Defense & Education Fund. She has litigated cases involving whistleblower protection for industry whistleblowers and Qui Tam/False Claims whistleblowers that involved complex nuclear and environmental regulations. Wilmoth has endeavored to uphold safeguards in the American workplace, strengthening whistleblower rights in licensing and enforcement proceedings with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and defending whistleblowers at the Environmental Protection Agency in actions before the Department of Labor. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of Whistleblower Network News.
