[EDRM Editor’s Note: The opinions and positions are those of the author.]
“This is not a Professional Ethics issue spotter. These are the facts of Quinn Emanuel’s conduct in the instant litigation, as investigated by the appointed Special Master. The Special Master reviewed internal firm communications and took testimony from the involved attorneys under oath. His thorough investigation revealed not the misstatement or inadvertence of a single attorney but a pattern of conduct that infected an entire litigation team, from mid-level associate to managing partner. No less than four partners were involved in propagating misleading statements to the Court. At virtually every juncture in this misadventure, these attorneys turned a blind eye to the truth, deliberately failed to exercise diligence, violated their duties of candor to the Court, and then attempted to justify it — without basis.” Guardant Health, Inc. v. Natera, Inc., 2026 WL 1401006 (N.D. Cal. May 19, 2026).
At virtually every juncture in this misadventure, these attorneys turned a blind eye to the truth, deliberately failed to exercise diligence, violated their duties of candor to the Court, and then attempted to justify it — without basis.
Guardant Health, Inc. v. Natera, Inc., 2026 WL 1401006 (N.D. Cal. May 19, 2026).
The District Judge’s decision “has taken some liberty in ascribing to the attorneys states of mind,” id. at n. 1, however, it summarizes the facts as follows:
Picture a mid-level litigation associate at a well-recognized law firm. It is the summer of 2023, and the firm’s client, a maker of cancer tests, has been sued by a competitor for false and misleading advertising. The client’s defense hinges on showing that the science backs up its statements.
In early September, an expert witness retained by the firm contacts the associate with intriguing news — a national clinical study of the plaintiff’s product closed early due to higher-than-expected false positives. The expert calls it a “monumental failure” for the opposition, which means it could be a litigation game-changer for the associate and her case team. At the team’s request, their expert prepares a memo about the shuttered study. The memo turns out to be more than a summary: it includes data from the clinical trial before it was terminated. Their expert warns that this trial data is “confidential” and “embargoed,” and writes, “PLEASE DO NOT DISCUSS DETAILS with anyone else.”
The associate’s supervising partner does not seem concerned with how their expert, who was not part of the study, obtained access to embargoed, confidential clinical data. He tells the associate to “convert” the memo into a supplemental expert report. In January, the associate circulates a draft expert report based on the memo to her case team. A different partner reviews it, questioning the lack of citations for the clinical trial data. The associate explains that the data was provided by their expert in confidence and so cannot be cited. She is hoping that this data will be revealed to the public when the abstract is published at an upcoming conference. If the data is confidential, the reviewing partner asks, how did the expert get it? But she is not interested in pursuing this potential ethical problem further. “Maybe I don’t want to know,” she says, and the conversation ends there.
The associate’s hopes are mostly met. The abstract is published on schedule and the data in it mostly aligns with the data the firm’s expert provided, though some of the data he provided didn’t make it into the public abstract. At the associate’s next meeting with the expert, she asks him where he got his data from. He tells her: “oncologist gossip,” “watercooler type talk,” and “chatters.” Watercooler talk, for specific clinical trial data? It’s not a real answer, but despite the implausibility she accepts it at face value and lets the conversation end there. Trial is set for March, and if her team is going to get this supplemental expert report in, she needs to work quickly. It’s not the time or place to second-guess.
Anyway, she reassures herself, the partners know that the supplemental expert report was informed by embargoed data, and their only concern is that she revise the expert report to match the public abstract. That’s easy enough to do. On the last day of January, with less than six weeks to go before trial, the team serves the report on opposing counsel. Opposing counsel responds by moving to strike, arguing that the expert report is untimely because it concerns a study that concluded five months ago.
The associate observes the oral argument on opposing counsel’s motion to strike. Opposing counsel claims that the firm’s expert received the “abstract and the data at least a month and a half before” the abstract was published. He argues that this untimely report should not vacate a trial that is less than a month away or reopen expert discovery that closed sixteen months ago. A different partner from the associate’s team is handling this argument, one who did not work with her on the supplemental expert report. He tells the Court that their expert had no “early access” or “inside information” on the clinical trial results. He implies the information is new and late breaking.
Is that true? Technically, the associate thinks, their expert did not have early access to the actual abstract. He’d just gotten its data early.
The distinction is thin and evidently not apparent to the Court or opposing counsel. Yet the associate keeps quiet. She does not raise the issue with the Court or her legal team. Instead, perhaps, she takes the oral argument as a lesson: this is what vigorous advocacy looks like.
Her team wins the motion. The Court rules that their delay in serving the expert report was justified, since the study results were not available to the firm or their expert until mid-January, when they were made public. Given the late-breaking evidence, the Court vacates the trial date, pushes trial to August, and reopens discovery.
Opposing counsel refuses to let the issue go. They subpoena the expert, seeking documents and communications related to the clinical study. When the associate asks the expert if he has any documents responsive to the subpoena, he says no. She asks him to run opposing counsel’s search terms, and he tells her that no prior correspondence with the sponsors of the study came up in his email. When she asks for additional confirmation, he jokes, “asked and answered, counselor.” The associate remembers the expert’s memo from back in September, with its detailed, embargoed data months before the public release of the study. But she chooses to take the expert at his word without any further inquiry. She reports back to her team that there are no responsive documents.
When opposing counsel moves to compel on their request for correspondence between the expert and the study sponsor, the associate is given the opportunity to handle the oral argument in front of the magistrate judge. It’s a show of trust by her team, and she is determined to do it right. She reassures the judge that their expert’s involvement with the clinical study was “very limited” and that his expert report was based on “looking at the published data.” She represents to the judge that there is no correspondence to compel.
The magistrate judge agrees with her position: there is nothing to compel, end of story. Another win for her team.
In June, it all comes crashing down. Opposing counsel didn’t stop digging — they went and subpoenaed a third-party sponsor of the study with access to the expert’s correspondence. The third-party production includes emails that show in black and white that the firm’s expert received a draft of the abstract on September 13, days before he sent the associate his initial memo. The associate finally circulates the memo to the team. She writes in bold and all caps that their expert did not just learn about the trial data in January with everyone else. He’d had “the actual abstract” the whole time, which means that the data he’d sent the team had been directly taken from the abstract.
The team convenes and, after discussing, decides not to correct the record. The decision is not the associate’s to make, but she agrees with it. As for the expert, she accepts his explanation for why he failed to turn over that correspondence in response to the discovery request: he’d deleted the emails as a matter of course and “forgotten” that he’d had them. The team resolves to rest on that assertion, as implausible as it sounds. Later, and only after the Court orders a forensic examination of the expert’s computer, does the expert come clean. He lied: he’d had the emails the whole time.
Opposing counsel moves for sanctions. In strategy discussions, the team agrees on the party line: nobody misled the Court. Saying that their expert never shared the draft abstract with them was technically accurate; he hadn’t actually shared the abstract, just the information it contained. More thin distinctions. The associate tells herself that thin distinctions are what lawyering is all about.
In the end, the Court finds that the associate and her firm deliberately and knowingly misled the Court. When asked about it later, the associate doesn’t believe that she did anything wrong.
Id. at *1-3.
The Guardant decisions of the District Judge and Special Master1 spill across approximately 50 pages in Westlaw. They include comments by attorneys who, “when faced with the knowledge that [the expert witness] had access to non-public data,” responded: “If that data is confidential, how did [the expert witness] get it? Maybe I don’t want to know.” Id. at *6.
The court wrote that the attorneys “conducted no additional diligence” with the expert, “despite the red flags that he was being untruthful….” Id. at *11. At one point, the expert said to counsel “what if I just didn’t want to give my emails over.” Id. at *38. Counsel stated that, when they heard this “My heart stopped” and further stated that “I don’t trust him at all.”
Essentially, the accurate facts were discovered by service of a subpoena on a non-party. The court called it a “bombshell of a production from Rutgers….” Id. at 23. The expert had denied having certain documents. The court explained: “On June 13, 2024, the landscape shifted when Rutgers University produced scores of documents — including many documents responsive to Guardant’s earlier subpoena to [the expert witness].” Id. at *15.
It then turned out that the expert also had the documents. In the court’s words, “the emails contradicted [the expert’s] statements that he had no communications around COBRA.” Id. at *15. The court wrote:
After the Rutgers production, [the expert’s] statements both to Quinn and at his deposition raised sufficient red flags that it was negligent for the Quinn team not to conduct additional diligence on [the expert’s] searches to verify the accuracy of the representations to Judge Kim. Had they conducted additional diligence, they would have discovered many communications regarding COBRA in his inbox—as they later did when faced with a court-ordered forensic exam.
Id. at *23.
The court wrote: “Despite the Rutgers production revealing that [an attorney’s] statements at the February 21 hearing were not accurate, the team decided not to correct the record.” Id. at 31. One attorney, learning of the Rutgers production, said of the expert: “His explanation better be: I had a head trauma recently.” Id.
The District Judge adopted the Special Master’s Report and Recommendation, which stated:
These recommendations reflect a careful assessment of the responsibility of Natera, individual culpability, mitigating factors, and the severity of the firm’s collective responsibility for the series of failures that unnecessarily protracted litigation and eroded the integrity of the proceedings.
In addition to ordering mandatory ethics training and sending notice to the California State Bar, compensatory sanctions were allocated among the participants and a punitive sanction imposed on the law firm. The court added: “The Court will enter a final sanctions order upon adjudication of Guardant’s outstanding motion for further fees.” Id. at *8.
The decision was issued on May 19, 2026. On May 22nd, the docket reflects an “Amended MOTION for Entry of Judgment under Rule 54(b) Amended Request for Entry of Judgment filed by Guardant Health, Inc.”
The May 28th docket entry is “Receipt from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan Re: Order at Docket no. 1041 Sanctions/ Contempt of Court fines (Fine Paid $100,000.00 Receipt no. 311176776).”
The final entry is dated May 29th: “STIPULATION WITH PROPOSED ORDER Regarding the Court’s Referral of Guardant’s Motion for Further Fees to the Special Master [Joint] filed by Natera, Inc.”
Note
- In this post, both are referred to as the “court.” ↩︎
Assisted by GAI and LLM Technologies per EDRM’s GAI and LLM Policy.
