Commercial Litigation Update

Artificial intelligence is moving beyond standalone large language model wrappers toward collections of specialized AI agents that reason, act, and collaborate to achieve complex outcomes. This multi-agent vision, articulated in Google’s Introduction to Agents whitepaper,[1] marks a subtle, but seismic, shift in how businesses will deploy AI; and spotlights nuanced legal challenges that litigators and in-house counsel should start addressing now.

[1] https://www.kaggle.com/whitepaper-introduction-to-agents (last visited January 21, 2026).

On September 11, 2025, General Dynamics Corporation (“General Dynamics”), along with other naval manufacturers and defense contractors, petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States to consider whether an unwritten “no-poach” agreement was sufficient to invoke the doctrine of fraudulent concealment and toll the Sherman Anti-Trust Act’s (the “Sherman Act”) four-year statute of limitations.

In May, the Fourth Circuit, in permitting an over-decade-old claim to proceed, held that an unwritten secret agreement was sufficient to toll the Sherman Act’s limitations period, noting that “neither logic nor our precedent supports distinguishing between defendants who destroy evidence . . . and defendants who carefully avoid creating evidence in the first place.” However, that decision conflicts with those of the Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth Circuits—all of which previously found that mere secrecy was not adequate to invoke a fraudulent concealment tolling theory.

Our colleagues Janene Marasciullo and David J. Clark of Epstein Becker Green have a new post on the Trade Secrets and Employee Mobility blog that will be of interest to our readers: "Less Than a Month After DOJ Brings Its First Wage-Fixing Indictment, DOJ Brings Its First "No-Poach" Indictment."

The following is an excerpt:

In the past month, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has made good on its 2016 threat, contained in its Antitrust Guidance for Human Resource Professionals (“Antitrust Guidance”) to bring criminal charges against people or corporations who enter into ...

On September 30, 2020, the Third Circuit reversed a decision by the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ordering AbbieVie, Inc. (“AbbieVie”) and Besins Healthcare Inc. (“Besins”) to pay $448 million in disgorgement of ill-gotten profits for allegedly filing sham patent lawsuits to stifle competition. AbbieVie and Besins had filed patent infringement lawsuits against two developers of generic alternatives to its brand-name testosterone gel product AndroGel. The FTC sued AbbieVie and Besins in 2014 alleging that the patent suits were baseless and brought for no other ...