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make her former employers squirm—that might embarrass them in the eyes of the federal government the way their counterclaim had embarrassed her in the eyes of her former colleagues. I saw something far different. If the bits and pieces of what she had observed were more than mere coincidence, then Beckman Engineering was a participant in an illegal bid-rigging conspiracy in violation of the Federal False Claims Act. That meant that Ruth had an opportunity to become a qui tam relator—in plain English, a bounty hunter.
    Qui tam is derived from the Latin qui tam pro domino rege quam proseippso , which means “he who as much for the king as for himself,” or, for short, “in the king’s name.” It’s legal shorthand for a special type of lawsuit in which an ordinary citizen is allowed to wrap himself in official garb and take action in the name of the government. It dates back to thirteenth-century England, where clever litigants used the qui tam maneuver to avoid corrupt local tribunals, gain access to the royal court, and, by purporting to align themselves with the king’s interest, claim as their reward a percentage of the penalties levied against the wrongdoers. The qui tam action entered this country in a statute enacted at the height of the Civil War in response to allegations of fraud and price gouging by unscrupulous contractors. The goal was to encourage whistle-blowers by giving ordinary citizens the chance to share in the bounty. In more recent years, Congress turbo-charged the statute by adding treble damages and a bigger slice of the pie (up to 30 percent) for the successful qui tam relator.
    To move from an employment discrimination plaintiff to a qui tam relator was the equivalent of moving from church-basement bingo to Monte Carlo. Beckman Engineering had submitted bids on a hundred forty-eight relevant federal water-control projects over the past ten years. If—and it was still a huge if—we could prove an illegal bid-rigging scheme, then each of those bids constituted a separately punishable act of “false negotiation” under the Federal False Claims Act. Given the size of the contracts involved, the potential recovery was staggering. As an age discrimination plaintiff, Ruth’s best-case scenario was an award of roughly $100,000—the difference between her “early retirement severance package” and the regular salary she could have earned through age seventy. As a qui tam relator, Ruth’s share of the bounty could exceed $10 million.
    All of which explained why Ruth and I were now the featured items on a Jurassic Park Blue Plate Special.
    This was the first qui tam claim I’d ever handled.
    It was also the last.
    I’d long since taken that vow.
    ***
    Unfortunately, identifying the universe of one hundred forty-eight bids was just the starting point, and we were still a long way from the finish line. Indeed, there was no way to determine from the bid documents we’d reviewed which of Beckman Engineering’s one hundred forty-eight bids had been successful; nor was there any way to determine who else submitted a bid on that project, who won, and what the winning bid had been. Those were crucial facts, since the other winners could be Beckman’s co-conspirators.
    But the task of identifying the winning bids for those projects seemed even bigger and more tedious than the document review we’d just completed. The crucial information was buried within ten years of back issues of the Commerce Business Daily . I’d taken several issues with me to the restaurant and passed them out to Benny, Jacki, and the law students during lunch. I explained my next project: finding out who won each of the one hundred forty-eight bids. I waited as they leafed through the publication, watching as the enormity of the project began to dawn on them.
    The CBD , as it’s known to its readers, is a daily bulletin listing every U.S.