On July 25, 2025, the Eleventh Circuit issued an opinion in United States ex rel. Sedona Partners LLC v. Able Moving & Storage Inc. (No. 22-13340) addressing an important procedural question under the False Claims Act (FCA) and other fraud-based statutes: may a plaintiff rely on information learned during discovery to meet Rule 9(b)’s heightened pleading standard in an amended complaint? The court concluded that the answer is yes.
Rule 9(b) requires that allegations of fraud be plead “with particularity.” Defendants frequently rely on this standard at the motion-to-dismiss stage, aiming to defeat weak FCA complaints before discovery begins. In 2019, an unpublished Eleventh Circuit decision, Bingham v. HCA, Inc., 783 F. App'x 868 (11th Cir. 2019), suggested that plaintiffs could not use discovery to cure a deficient complaint. The concern was that such an approach could incentivize speculative suits filed without adequate factual grounding.
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