Jim Schuster

Jim Schuster is a principal at McCarthy, Lebit, Crystal & Liffman Co., L.P.A.  Mr. Schuster focuses the majority of his practice on regulatory health care, technology and intellectual property law.  He has extensive experience working with health care and technology providers, as well as those that do business with, invest in and finance health care and technology providers and initiatives.  In and outside of health care and technology, Mr. Schuster has a substantial background safeguarding and protecting client intellectual property rights.

Substantive areas of Mr. Schuster's health care practice include: fraud and abuse, anti-kickback; physician self-referral; false claims; HHS OIG self-disclosure; CLIA (exempt and high complexity laboratory); credentialing and accreditation; survey, certification and enforcement; EHR and other HITECH; ERISA (health and welfare benefits); HIPAA and other privacy, security and security breach notification; corporate due dilligence and complex business transactions.

Substantive areas of Mr. Schuster's technology practice include: EHR and other HITECH; software licensing and development; software source code commenting; open source licensing; software as a service ("SaaS"); e-commerce; website development; source code escrows; outsourcing; original equipment manufacturer ("OEM")/value-added reseller ("VAR"); hardware acquisition; employment and complex business transactions; copyrights; covenants not to compete; non-solicitation; non-interference; confidentiality and non-disclosure.

Niche areas of Mr. Schuster's intellectual property law practice include: software design documentation; source code and proper commenting and attribution of such source code; brands; branding; logos; scopes of work; trade secrets and confidential information; and graphic and industrial designs.

In addition to the full-time practice of law, Mr. Schuster serves as adjunct health law professor at the Cleveland-Marshall School of Law, Center for Health Law Policy.

Mr. Schuster has served as special outside health care and technology counsel to hundreds of health care and technology providers, including integrated delivery systems, physician practice groups, medical management services entities, long-term care facilities, third party billing companies; and electronic health records ("EHR") and other technology and software companies.  He has served as general and intellectual property counsel of one of the world's largest branding and graphic and industrial design firms.

Mr. Schuster has the unique distinction of serving all three branches of the federal government, including the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs; the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Labor; the Federal Interagency Working Group on Telemedecine; the White House National Health Care Task Force; and as federal judicial law clerk to the late Honorable Carl B. Rubin, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.  Mr. Schuster has been specially appointed by U.S. District and Appeals Courts on four separate occasions to represent death row inmates at the last stages of their appeal and for the writ of habeas corpus, three of which have been granted with the fourth Petition for a writ currently pending.

An authority on the field of legal informatics and artificial intelligence and the law, Mr. Schuster has invented and patented rule-based business methods and systems in health care and other compliance, certification, risk mitigation and intelligent form-filling, completion and transmission.

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