Ethics in Brief: “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” Mark Twain
By Edward J. McIntyre
Guardant Heath v. Natera (2026 WL 1401006), United States District Court, Northern District of California. (May 19, 2026) underscores Mark Twain’s wisdom. The court sanctioned Quinn Emanuel lawyers $2,985,909, including joint and several sanctions against individual lawyers, another $100,000 in punitive damages and State Bar referrals, for misrepresentations resulting, among other things, from their own misrepresentations and their failure to exercise due diligence related to representations of an expert witness and subsequent representations to the court.
What happened is instructive.
Background
Guardant and Natera, competitors for a cancer diagnostic pharmaceutical, filed Lanham Act false advertising actions against each other. In January 2024, with discovery closed and trial about six weeks away, the Quinn Emanuel firm, representing Natera, sought to supplement its expert’s report based on what it represented was newly discovered, relevant evidence—a just published study, the COBRA study. Because the evidence was new, not otherwise available to the expert, and relevant to an issue in the case, the district court postponed trial, allowed the supplemental report and allowed additional discovery related to the report and COBRA study.
The Facts
Stepping back, however, the district court’s order later summarized what, in fact, had happened. In September 2023, the expert witness contacted a mid-level Quinn Emanuel associate with news that a national clinical study of Guardant’s product (COBRA) had closed early because of higher-than-expected false positives. The expert called it a “monumental failure” for Guardant, a potential “game-changer” for the associate and the case. Instructed by a partner, the associate asked the expert to prepare a memo.
The memo turned out to be more than a summary: it included data from the clinical trial before it was terminated. The expert warned that this trial data was “confidential” and “embargoed,” and wrote, “PLEASE DO NOT DISCUSS DETAILS with anyone else.”
The associate’s supervising partner expressed little concern about how their expert, who was not part of the study, obtained access to embargoed, confidential clinical data. He told the associate to “convert” the memo into a supplemental expert report.
In January, the associate circulated a draft expert report based on the memo to the trial team. A different partner reviewed it, questioning the lack of citations for the clinical trial data. The associate explained that the expert had provided the data in confidence and so it could not be cited. She hoped this data would be publicly revealed when the abstract was published at an upcoming conference. If the data was confidential, the reviewing partner asked, how did the expert get it? But, the district court observed, she was not interested in pursuing this potential ethical problem. “Maybe I don’t want to know, ” and the conversation ended.
The associate’s hopes were mostly met. The abstract was published on schedule and the data in it mostly aligned with data the firm’s expert had provided, though some of the data he provided did not make it into the public abstract. At the associate’s next meeting with the expert, she asked him where he got his data from. He told her: “oncologist gossip,” “watercooler type talk,” and “chatters.” It was hardly a real answer, but despite the implausibility the associate accepted it at face value and let the conversation end there. Trial was set for March, and if the associate’s trial team was going to get this supplemental expert report accepted, she needed to work quickly. This was not, the court observed, the time or place to second-guess.
Anyway, the partners knew that the supplemental expert report was informed by embargoed data, and their only concern was that she revise the expert report to match the public abstract. That was easy enough to do. On the last day of January, with less than six weeks to go before trial, Quinn Emanuel served the report on opposing counsel. Opposing counsel responded by moving to strike, arguing that the expert report was untimely because it concerned a study that concluded five months ago.
The associate observed the oral argument on opposing counsel’s motion to strike.
Opposing counsel claimed that the firm’s expert received the “abstract and the data at least a month and a half before” the abstract was published. He argued that this untimely report should not vacate a trial that was less than a month away or reopen expert discovery that closed sixteen months before. A different partner from the associate’s trial team handled this argument, one who had not worked with her on the supplemental expert report. He told the court that their expert had no “early access” or “inside information” on the clinical trial results. He implied the information was new and late breaking.
That was technically true, the associate thought, because their expert did not have early access to the actual abstract. He had just gotten its data early. As the court later observed, that distinction was thin and not apparent to the court or opposing counsel. Yet the associate kept quiet. She did not raise the issue with the court or the Quinn Emanuel trial team, which won the motion. The court ruled 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 vacated the trial date, pushed trial to August, and reopened discovery.
Opposing counsel, however, refused to let the issue go. They subpoenaed the expert, seeking documents and communications related to the clinical study. When the associate asked the expert if he had any documents responsive to the subpoena, he said no. She asked him to run opposing counsel’s search terms, and he told her that no prior correspondence with the sponsors of the study came up in his email. When she asked for additional confirmation, he joked, “asked and answered, counselor.” In fact, the associate remembered the expert’s memo from back in September, with its detailed, embargoed data months before the public release of the study. But she chose to take the expert at his word without any further inquiry. She reported back to her team that there were no responsive documents.
When opposing counsel moved to compel on their request for correspondence between the expert and the study sponsor, the associate was given the opportunity to handle the oral argument in front of the magistrate judge. She reassured 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 represented to the judge that there was no correspondence to compel. Based on that representation, the magistrate judge agreed: there was nothing to compel, end of story.
Truth Revealed
In June, it all came crashing down. Opposing counsel did not stop digging — they subpoenaed a third-party sponsor of the study with access to the expert’s correspondence.
The third-party production included emails that show 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 circulated the memo to the team. She wrote 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 meant that the data he had sent Quinn Emanuel had been directly taken from the abstract.
The team convened and, after discussing, decided not to correct the record. Although the decision was not the associate’s to make, she agreed with it. As for the expert, she accepted 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. Quinn Emanuel resolved to rest on that assertion, as the court observed, implausible as it sounded. Later, and only after the court ordered a forensic examination of the expert’s computer, did the expert come clean. He had lied: he’d had the emails the whole time.
Then, opposing counsel moved for sanctions. In strategy discussions, the team agreed to argue that nobody misled the court: their representations that the expert never shared the draft abstract with them was technically accurate; he hadn’t actually shared the abstract, just the information it contained. In the end, the court found that Quinn Emanuel had deliberately and knowingly misled the court.
The court concluded its summary: “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 Court’s Orders and Findings
The court issued three orders, one of which attached two Special Master’s reports. Those orders and the reports sequentially reflected at length the underlying facts and the court’s imposition of sanctions: Case No. 21-cv-04062-EMC, USDC, ND Cal.; Doc. Nos. 730, 945, and 1041.
In the first order, the court imposed evidentiary sanctions, excluding the COBRA study or any mention of it or evidence from or implicating it. The court further stated that, if the expert continued to testify about his reports, the court would give an adverse instruction about his credibility. Finally, the court referred the issue of monetary sanctions to a special master.
The case proceeded to trial, where the jury found Natera engaged in willful false advertising, awarding Guardant $75,000,000 in damages; $37,000,000 plus in profit disgorgement and $175,500,000 in punitive damages for a total award of $287,500,000.
The court then issued its second order, reiterating its prior finding that Quinn Emanuel’s “deliberate misrepresentations, to this Court and [the magistrate judge] …were unjustified, unacceptable and sanctionable.” The court awarded Guardant $2,985,909.35 in attorney fees and costs, and appointed the Special Master[CB1] to resolve the issue of apportionment of the compensatory fee award among the Quinn Emanuel’s lawyers and the question punitive damages.
In the third order, the court summarized at length the Special Master’s findings and adopted his report apportioning the compensatory sanctions award, jointly and severally, among the lawyers: three lawyers, $58,000; two lawyers, $29,000, and $100,000 punitive damages payable to the court, together with the order that Quinn Emanuel provide eight hours of ethics instruction to the trial team. The court also ordered that a copy of its third order, with the Special Master’s reports, be transmitted to the State Bar.
The court stated that the Special Master’s:
[T]horough 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.
Though each attorney culpable bears individual responsibility for their actions, their
conduct implicates a culture of lawyering that is deeply disturbing. It is a culture that takes refuge in lawyering finesse and prioritizes winning motions over acting ethically. This kind of lawyering multiplies proceedings, balloons costs, and erodes trust in counsel. It is not good for anyone: not for the Court, not for the client, and not for the attorneys involved, on either side. It is particularly damaging to younger associates, who take their cues and learn their practice from partners who fail to model ethical behavior, creating a vicious cycle. The undersigned hopes that these events — and their consequences — will be educational for Quinn Emanuel, and for the legal profession as a whole. (Doc. No. 1041, at 4-5.)
Candor Obligations
Rule of Professional Conduct 3.3(a)(1) prohibits a false statement of fact or law to a tribunal and the failure to correct a material false statement previously made. Rule 3.3(a)(3) mandates, inter alia, that a lawyer take reasonable remedial measures, including informing the tribunal, if a lawyer learns that the lawyer or a witness the lawyer called has offered material false evidence.
Both the court and the Special Master found that Quinn Emanuel not only made material misrepresentations to the court but also failed to exercise due diligence when the expert’s representations could not withstand scrutiny. The court’s orders and the Special Master’s reports, although long, are instructive, not in the abstract, but in tracing the repeated temptations to shade the truth, ignore red flags and ultimately make material misrepresentations to the court. The district court’s sanctions underscore its rejection of such conduct. Moreover, the evidentiary sanction raises the question whether the loss of the expert’s reports—both the one that preceded the COBRA data, as well as the tainted second report—had an impact on the jury’s verdict?
