Long Do, Appellate Attorney in San Francisco, California

Long Do is a seasoned and respected health care attorney with broad experience advocating for the provider community. His practice focuses on commercial managed care and health insurance, physician and medical group formation and practice, peer review, and trade association advocacy and governance. Long also is a recognized expert on the corporate practice of medicine and medical staff governance. He has more than two decades of practical legal experience in civil and criminal courts.

Prior to joining Athene Law, Long served for over a decade as Legal Counsel and Director of Litigation for the California Medical Association (CMA). He built a renowned statewide and national profile managing CMA’s activities in the courts and regulatory agencies. He also served as the lead attorney for the CMA lobbying and regulatory teams on numerous important pieces of legislation and regulations.

Long has appeared in federal courts and all levels of state courts throughout California, having argued on several cases before the California Supreme Court.

Representative Matters

• Plan and establish a comprehensive peer review system for a national provider organization with offices in more than 23 states, including system conceptualization, federal and state-by-state compliance planning, contracting, and implementation;

• Provide strategic advice to a large trade association on a major legislation package concerning the practice of medicine, including drafting and analyzing bill language;

• Establish an outpatient medical clinic practice for an academic institution, including strategic planning, corporate practice of medicine compliance planning, incorporation, formation of governance structures, contracting, and applying for tax-exemption status;

• Advise a medical group on implications of medical staff policy changes, including any rights they have under hospital procedures and bylaws;

• Represent out-of-network and in-network providers respond to health plan audits and claims reviews;

• Provide legal and strategic advice to a hospital board on clinical practice policies proposed by the medical staff;

• Argued on behalf of the California Medical Association before the California Supreme Court in Fahlen v. Sutter Central Valley Hospitals, 58 Cal. 4th 655 (2014), involving the applicability of Westlake exhaustion requirement to Health & Safety Code §1278.5 whistleblower claims;

• Served as lead counsel for the California Medical Association in Medical Staff v. Tulare Regional Medical Ctr. (Tulare Superior Ct., 2016), involving medical staff self-governance.

Long previously practiced law in both civil and criminal courts. He was a senior litigation and appellate attorney at the San Francisco law firm Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, PC (now Arnold & Porter) and served as a criminal prosecutor in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office under now Vice President Kamala Harris.

Education

Long is a graduate of Northwestern University and UCLA School of Law. He was in the inaugural class of the law school’s David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy and served as an articles editor on the UCLA Law Review. Long served as law clerk to the Hon. Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco and the Hon. Robert Beezer of the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Seattle.

Professional Affiliations

• American Health Lawyers Association

• American Society of Medical Association Counsel

• California Academy of Attorneys for Healthcare Professionals

• California Healthcare Consumers Foundation

• California Lawyers Association, Health Law Standing Committee of the Business Law Section

• California Society for Healthcare Attorneys