Stephen M. Kohn

Founder & Chairman of the Board

Published on May 08, 2025

Stephen M. Kohn

Stephen M. Kohn

Stephen M. Kohn, with 38 years of experience, was peer-reviewed 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 2024 and 2025Forbes named Kohn as one of the top 200 attorneys in the United States.

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 Act, Dodd-Frank, AML, FCPA, Commodity Exchange, and tax whistleblower laws, and currently represents the Danske Bank whistleblower who reported (and helped stop) 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).

Read Stephen M. Kohn’s full biography.

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