Robert J. Stillman is an American lawyer admitted to practice in New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. His legal career centered on healthcare cost containment, fraud, and related litigation, including a long tenure in the law department of the Hartford insurer Aetna.
Education
Stillman earned a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University in 1978, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. Yale traces its origins to the Collegiate School, founded in 1701 in Connecticut, and its undergraduate college has long been one of the country's leading liberal arts institutions.
He then studied at Harvard Law School, receiving a Juris Doctor cum laude in 1981. Founded in 1817, Harvard Law School is the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States, and it helped pioneer the case method of instruction that came to define American legal education.
Stillman was admitted to the bar of New York in 1982, of Massachusetts in 1986, and of Connecticut in 1993, qualifications that prepared him for the corporate and regulatory practice described in his career.
Career
Stillman worked as a partner of S. E. Giorno before moving into corporate legal practice.
In 1992 he joined Aetna, the Hartford insurer. The company had been established in 1853 as Aetna Life Insurance Company, and over the following decades it expanded from life and accident coverage into health insurance, offering its first health plans in 1899 and creating its first health maintenance organization subsidiary in 1973. Stillman rose to vice president in Aetna's law department. In that post he advised senior business leaders and directed more than one hundred lawyers and related professionals who supported the company's commercial insured products. His work covered healthcare cost containment, fraud, False Claims Act cases, government investigations, and national class actions involving ERISA and RICO. He also led the company's effort to settle a national class action brought on behalf of physicians and state medical societies.
Stillman later joined Pierce LLC, a law firm in West Hartford, Connecticut, as an of counsel attorney in early 2018. He said he chose the firm because of its focus on helping clients address health care provider cost containment. Pierce LLC describes itself as a client-centered firm that seeks optimal outcomes at sensible and appropriate costs.
Membership
Stillman has been an active volunteer with the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford, serving on its Audit Committee. Jewish federations are community organizations that coordinate fundraising and social services for local Jewish communities, and the Hartford federation's committee work involves oversight of the organization's financial reporting.
