Stephen M. Kohn

Stephen M. Kohn, with 38 years of experience, was peer-reviewed rated by the National Law Journal as one of the 50 top Plaintiff’s Lawyers in the United States, the only whistleblower rights lawyer to achieve this distinction. In 2025, Forbes named Kohn as one of America’s Top Lawyers, and in 2024, Forbes named Kohn as one of America’s Top 200 Lawyers.

A founding partner of Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto, LLP, Kohn specializes in whistleblower advocacy, helping to change that legal landscape worldwide. He won the first $100 million whistleblower award for a UBS Swiss Banker and set numerous precedents expanding the scope of whistleblower protections. He won landmark cases under the False Claims, Dodd-Frank, AML, FCPA, Commodity Exchange, and tax whistleblower laws, and 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.

In 1988, he helped found the National Whistleblower Center, where he currently serves, pro bono, as Chairman of the Board. He is the author of 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).

Kohn has spearheaded several of the largest whistleblower cases in the U.S. and internationally. He is known for his successful strategies, leveraging whistleblower protection and reward laws, many of which he played a significant role in authoring.

In honoring Kohn as one of the Top 200 Attorneys in the United States, Forbes Magazine noted that he “helped change the legal landscape” by protecting whistleblowers and “drafted key whistleblower legislation and regulation, including those incorporated into the Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank acts.”

He won $104 million for UBS whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld, among the largest-ever individual tax whistleblower reward payments, and currently represents Danske Bank whistleblower Howard Wilkinson in its massive money-laundering scandal.

In addition to being added to the inaugural list of Top 50 White Collar Crime Trailblazers, Kohn has been a major contributor to whistleblower law, including the following:

• The chief attorney in the Dodd-Frank Act whistleblower case found restrictive nondisclosure agreements to be illegal under U.S. securities laws.
• Over $125 million in awards to his SEC whistleblower clients under Dodd-Frank.
• Three whistleblower awards of over $100 million based on IRS and DOJ enforcement actions.
• Represented a whistleblower who successfully exposed and stopped the largest money laundering scheme in history (over $200 billion laundered from Russia to Western banks).
• Successfully represented key Swiss banking whistleblowers who triggered the historic prosecutions of Swiss banks (resulting in over $15 billion in sanctions, fines, and settlements).
• Represented False Claims Act whistleblower who exposed illegal sales of defective body armor to U.S. military and local police departments. All defective vests were pulled from the market; Companies involved were sanctioned over $100 million; the whistleblower was awarded over $6.5 million.
• Argued case establishing nationwide precedent under the First Amendment recognizing the right of federal employees to publicly blow the whistle on their employing agencies.