A qui tam case begins in a posture no other kind of litigation shares: the complaint is filed under seal, served only on the Department of Justice and the relevant U.S. Attorney, and the defendant is not even permitted to know it exists while the government investigates. The relator -- the whistleblower who files -- is asserting the government's own claim under the False Claims Act, alleging that the defendant knowingly presented, or caused to be presented, a false or fraudulent claim for payment to a federal program. Because the claim belongs to the government, the relator's role is closer to that of a private attorney general than a traditional plaintiff, and the case's entire early trajectory depends on a decision the relator does not control: whether DOJ intervenes. Intervention is not a formality. It signals that career prosecutors and agency investigators, with subpoena power the relator never had, found the underlying fraud allegation credible enough to commit government resources, and it is the single fact most predictive of how a qui tam case actually resolves.

The seal period, often extended repeatedly and lasting years, is where the case is effectively decided even though no court has ruled on anything yet. If the government intervenes, the defendant is typically negotiating with DOJ toward a settlement under significant pressure, since FCA damages are trebled and each false claim carries its own per-claim penalty that compounds quickly across a course of dealing. If the government declines, the relator can still proceed alone, but now faces the defendant without the credibility, resources, or discovery leverage the government brought, and win rates drop sharply. Two statutory gates shape whether a relator can proceed at all: the first-to-file bar, which blocks a later relator from piggybacking on facts already alleged in a pending case, and the public disclosure bar, which cuts off suits based on information already public unless the relator qualifies as an original source. A successful relator recovers 15 to 25 percent of the government's recovery if it intervened, or 25 to 30 percent if it did not, plus protection from retaliation under a separate anti-retaliation provision.

The intervention decision is the fulcrum of a qui tam case: government intervention brings subpoena power, prosecutorial credibility, and a settlement posture that pressures most defendants to resolve before trial, while a declined case leaves the relator to litigate alone against a defendant that knows the government passed. The seal period itself functions as a long, one-sided discovery phase where DOJ investigates without the defendant's knowledge or participation, and its length often signals how seriously the allegations are being taken. First-to-file and public-disclosure bars can eliminate a case before the merits are reached regardless of how strong the underlying fraud evidence is, so relators' counsel spend as much energy protecting the case's procedural standing as building the fraud theory itself.