Ropes & Gray Honored as a Law360 “Healthcare Practice Group of the Year”

Law360 honored Ropes & Gray’s health care practice as a 2024 “Healthcare Practice Group of the Year,” which recognizes the top attorney teams behind litigation and transformative deals that resonated throughout the legal industry in the past year.

With roughly 100 lawyers serving in Ropes & Gray's health care practice — working across the firm's offices in Boston, New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco — the group is able to serve a broad set of clients.

Ropes & Gray's health care practice advises health care providers, biopharmaceutical companies, medical device makers and other clients on transactions, litigation, enforcement and regulatory matters, and it benefits from the hundreds of attorneys working in related practices across the firm.

Looking ahead, health care partners and practice co-chairs Tim McCrystal and Deborah Gersh anticipate continued expansion of the Medicare Advantage program, increased migration to outpatient care, continued Medicare drug price negotiations, and expansion of artificial intelligence and other technologies aimed at supporting efficiency in health care.

Deborah said she is watching to see whether investigative priorities at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights will shift on reproductive health issues, including pregnancy terminations and hospitals' liability, responsibility and reporting requirements.

In the health care transactions sector, state laws are a key area to track as states continue to enact new transaction review processes aimed at market concentration, as well as cost, accessibility and quality of care.

In 2024 Ropes & Gray’s health care practice launched an interactive website called HealthTrax that tracks proposed, failed and enacted health care transaction laws and regulations in individual states and offers ways to mitigate their impact.

"We invest a lot of time in HealthTrax because we want to be efficient for our clients when they are working on transactions, but also to think ahead with respect to transaction structuring, and other issues that can be impacted when you need to go through additional regulatory processes," said Tim.