Mary Beth Buchanan, former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania and former Bryan Cave partner. |

Former federal prosecutor Mary Beth Buchanan and her most recent law firm, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, face allegations that they covered up a whistleblower client's use of “FBI surveillance software” to hack private patient data stored by LabMD Inc., a beleaguered medical testing company.

A lawsuit filed April 28 in Manhattan federal court accuses Buchanan, a former U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh, of violating the Ethics in Government Act and allegedly hiding that violation by advising a whistleblower client, Richard Wallace, to give incomplete testimony in a Federal Trade Commission enforcement action against LabMD.

Before it began winding down operations in 2014 amid an FTC case related to a 2008 data breach, LabMD, based in Atlanta, was a medical testing laboratory that provided cancer diagnoses for urologists. LabMD and its founder, Michael Daugherty, represented by Alpharetta, Georgia-based lawyer James Hawkins, lodged the late April suit against Buchanan and Bryan Cave.