IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS
EASTERN DIVISION
SECOND AMENDED COMPLAINT
Plaintiff Kathryn Born, f/k/a Kathryn Greene (“Born”), proceeding pro se, for her Second Amended Complaint against Defendant AbbVie, Inc. (“AbbVie”), states as follows:
NATURE OF THE ACTION
1. This is a civil action under the Illinois Whistleblower Act, 740 ILCS 174/1 et seq. For years, AbbVie publicly represented that an internal software platform, ARCH, was generating scientific discoveries and had achieved broad adoption across its research organization; beginning in late 2023, AbbVie further represented that ARCH incorporated generative artificial intelligence. Born, whose job for years was to drive and measure that adoption, knew from direct and repeated firsthand experience that these representations were materially false: the platform’s flagship “discovery” had in fact been produced by a scientist using ordinary online research, not by ARCH; its reported user figures were cumulative totals that overstated real use many times over; scientists across the company could not obtain their data from it at all; and the generative-AI capability AbbVie publicly claimed for ARCH had not been implemented. Born disclosed, in good faith and through AbbVie’s own reporting channels, her belief that AbbVie’s knowing dissemination of these false representations constituted fraud. AbbVie responded by placing her on a pretextual performance improvement plan and terminating her before that plan’s own deadline. Born brings a single count under the Illinois Whistleblower Act.
FACTUAL BACKGROUND
A. Born’s Employment and Her Firsthand Knowledge of ARCH
6. In June 2018, AbbVie hired Born as a contractor on the instructional design team in its Clinical Development Department. In February 2019, AbbVie hired her as an employee as an Instructional Designer in that department, where she received good performance reviews.
7. In November 2021, AbbVie promoted Born to Training and Communication Manager for ARCH, reporting to CRANE.
8. In that role, Born’s responsibilities centered on driving user adoption of the ARCH Platform. Adoption was so central that Born and CRANE together comprised a dedicated two-person unit known internally as the “ARCH Adoption Team.” Born created the platform’s learning and communications materials and worked directly to increase the number of scientists using the platform.
9. From November 2021, Born and CRANE reviewed the ARCH Platform’s usage analytics on a monthly basis as part of the team’s adoption work. Through this sustained, direct review, Born knew the actual usage data underlying ARCH’s reported adoption figures.
10. In May 2024, AbbVie transitioned Born and CRANE together to AbbVie’s Convergence team, the parent initiative under which ARCH operated. Born retained her title, performed training and communication work for Convergence, and continued to report to CRANE. Approximately six weeks later, CRANE left the team and her position was not backfilled. Born then reported to CRANE’s manager, for approximately three weeks until he left the company; then to his successor, SNAKE, for approximately ten to eleven months, until SNAKE left the department in approximately June 2025; and then, when SNAKE left, to SNAKE’s manager, DODO BIRD, who reported to Vice President MEERKAT.
B. ARCH’s Intended Role and AbbVie’s Investment
11. AbbVie’s Research and Convergence Hub (“ARCH”) was created to accelerate and improve scientific discovery for the scientists in AbbVie’s research and development (“R&D”) organization. AbbVie internally described ARCH as unifying infrastructure “[f]or everyone in R&D,” and invested tens of millions of dollars in it. Because ARCH’s purpose was to serve AbbVie’s R&D scientists broadly, adoption and demonstrated capability were the central measures of whether the platform was succeeding and whether AbbVie’s continued investment was justified.
C. AbbVie’s Public and Internal Representations About ARCH
12. AbbVie represented, both publicly and to its senior leadership, that ARCH was a successful, discovery-generating platform. Beginning in late 2023, after AbbVie installed a generative artificial-intelligence large language model in the summer of 2023, AbbVie further represented that ARCH incorporated generative artificial intelligence; AbbVie had made no such claim about ARCH before then.
13. AbbVie made these representations publicly and attributed a specific scientific discovery to ARCH. In a Bio-IT World news article published August 7, 2024, titled “MEERKAT on How AbbVie’s ARCH is Unlocking Major Opportunities,” AbbVie’s Vice President of Genomics Research, MEERKAT, Ph.D., publicly represented that ARCH had produced a rare-disease drug-repurposing insight. The article stated, based on MEERKAT’s account: “By using ARCH, MEERKAT and his colleague FERRET, vice president of R&D information research at AbbVie, were able to pull up two drugs in the market that could potentially treat this individual’s condition in only four hours.” The article characterized this as “[o]ne major accomplishment that ARCH has achieved.”
14. AbbVie amplified the same representation through additional public and internal channels: it publicized ARCH as the “winner of a 2023 Bio-IT World Innovative Practices Award”; MEERKAT discussed “the strategy behind disseminating info that was generated by ARCH” on the Bio-IT World “Trends from the Trenches” podcast published July 30, 2024; and, in or about 2023, TIGER, an AI and Machine Learning executive, created a video, used internally, presenting the same rare-disease repurposing story and attributing the insight to ARCH. That video remains on Born’s AbbVie-issued laptop, which AbbVie retained upon terminating her, and is subject to AbbVie’s preservation obligations.
15. Beginning in late 2023, AbbVie further publicly represented that ARCH incorporated generative artificial-intelligence capabilities. In an article published on AbbVie’s own public website on November 27, 2023, AbbVie stated that “the company’s generative AI platform is being embedded into the ARCH, creating an even more powerful tool,” and that hosting algorithms on the central platform allowed learning and relearning on an organizational scale, “potentially even reaching the company’s 14,500 employees in R&D.” Separately, AbbVie’s public “AI & Data Convergence” materials described ARCH as using cutting-edge artificial-intelligence and machine-learning technologies to centralize and connect data from more than 200 sources.
16. Internally, each year FERRET, AbbVie’s Vice-President of R&D Information Research, presented ARCH adoption figures to senior R&D leadership, first to POLAR BEAR and, most recently, to his successor HONEY BADGER, M.D., AbbVie’s Executive Vice President, Research & Development and Chief Scientific Officer, the company’s most senior scientific officer, above whom AbbVie’s leadership consists of business executives. In the 2022 presentations the represented figure was approximately 2,000 users; in 2023, approximately 4,000; and in the 2024 year-end presentation, approximately 6,000. Presented year after year, the figures depicted large and steadily growing adoption. Born personally heard FERRET state, at a recorded, in-person Quarterly meeting, “Thousands of people use the ARCH every month.”
D. Born’s Firsthand Knowledge That the Representations Were False
17. Born knew, from her direct and repeated experience, that these representations were materially false.
18. The publicly claimed “discovery” was not ARCH’s. When AbbVie could not produce a simple video showing the steps by which ARCH had generated the rare-disease repurposing insight, Born asked FERRET — the very colleague MEERKAT named in AbbVie’s August 7, 2024 public account — to walk through those steps. FERRET told Born that the ARCH Platform “isn’t there yet” and that he had performed the analysis himself using conventional online scientific research, not through ARCH. AbbVie’s public statement that this insight was achieved “[b]y using ARCH” was therefore false, and FERRET (publicly named as having used ARCH to achieve it) knew it was false. AbbVie nonetheless continued to publicize the insight as a product of ARCH, and no corrected account was ever published. No one had to instruct Born not to publish one: FERRET was a Vice President with approximately 700 employees reporting to him, and Born, stunned, left his office and told a colleague, “We need to drop it and never bring it up again.” Despite AbbVie’s touted safe-to-speak-up culture, Born understood that the subject was closed.
19. The adoption figures were cumulative, not current. The represented figures reflected cumulative activity since the platform’s 2019 launch. It was a running total of everyone who had ever accessed the platform, not the number of scientists using it. In early 2022, the number of regular users was approximately twenty. Activity by developers and vendors engaged to build and test the platform — at times numbering in the hundreds — was initially excluded because it did not reflect scientific adoption, but after CRANE left in mid-2024 that developer and vendor activity was counted toward the reported user figures. The figures were never verified by any data scientist or independent reviewer; Born specifically looked into why, and confirmed no one did.
20. Scientists could not obtain their data. ARCH was represented as providing self-service access to approximately 200 costly datasets. In practice, scientists directed to ARCH to retrieve their data received a runaround and a series of unresolved Jira support tickets, and after weeks of delay routinely gave up. Thousands of scientists were told to use ARCH to obtain data and were unable to do so, generating a large volume of documented tech support tickets reflecting this failure.
21. ARCH itself did not incorporate generative AI; a separately built tool did. AbbVie’s public statement that “the company’s generative AI platform is being embedded into the ARCH” was false. The ARCH software platform did not itself perform generative-AI or natural-language question answering. Its search relied on old-fashioned keyword queries, and results were delivered as large downloadable tables, with no natural-language explanation. This was a gap Born identified in 2023. By 2024, PubMed, the National Institutes of Health’s freely available journal repository, had launched natural-language search of the scientific literature, rendering a core ARCH feature obsolete by a public tool. The only such capability was a separate tool, “Ask ARCH”: A retrieval-augmented-generation (“RAG”) interface built by a different AbbVie enterprise-AI team, operating over a limited subset of material, which AbbVie presented, including at the 2024 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, under the title “Ask ARCH: LLM Question Answering over Large-Scale Knowledge Graphs” (GECKO, 2024). By attaching the “ARCH” name to this separate, later-built interface, AbbVie blurred the line between a narrow query tool and the ARCH platform itself, creating the false impression that ARCH was a fully generative-AI-enabled system. As of Born’s termination in September 2025, no generative-AI capability had been embedded into the ARCH platform as AbbVie’s public materials claimed. Born knew this from years of attending ARCH developer meetings, in which users repeatedly asked for natural-language capabilities and the ARCH team repeatedly stated it had no plans to build a feature that would explain results in natural language. Separately, the internal general-purpose generative-AI tool that AbbVie scientists actually used in volume (called Go/AI) — receiving approximately two million prompts in its first ten months through word-of-mouth adoption, with no dedicated adoption team — was not ARCH, further demonstrating that AbbVie’s leadership knew what genuine AI adoption looked like and that it was not occurring on the ARCH platform.
22. Born knew each of these facts firsthand, over a period of years, from her role on the ARCH Adoption Team, her direct review of usage analytics, her work attempting to create data-access training, and her direct communications with FERRET and other AbbVie personnel.
E. Born’s Protected Disclosures
23. Beginning in early 2025, after returning from a 12-week medical leave in February 2025, Born disclosed her concerns through AbbVie’s internal reporting channels.
24. In or about March 2025, Born met with SNAIL, an AbbVie Human Resources Manager, US Employee Relations. Born reported that misleading statements had been made concerning ARCH’s adoption and capabilities; that reported figures depicted thousands of current users when they in fact reflected cumulative activity over approximately five years, and that no one had independently verified them. In substance, Born and SNAIL distinguished conduct that was a personnel matter from conduct that was an ethics matter; Born summarized the distinction as, in words or substance, “if it is bullying, that is HR, and if it is cooking the books, that is ethics,” and SNAIL responded, “that is correct.” Born told SNAIL she could not consider her concern resolved until she knew the true figures had been clarified to HONEY BADGER.
25. On July 7, 2025, Born reported to SNAIL in writing, among other things, that a group within the organization had been artificially inflating its usage analytics by rewarding employees for using its tools. SNAIL responded in writing: “I am sending this information to our OEC partners as it appears that you are mentioning concerns that are not in compliance. As employees of AbbVie, we have a responsibility to report such concerns.” Born stated that she had “further ethical concerns that go beyond the scope of this email.”
26. THE of AbbVie’s Office of Ethics and Compliance (“OEC”) opened an official investigation of Born’s reports (Case No. abb-68a3-3a1b-8820). In her disclosures to SNAIL and to THE DOE, Born reported not only the false adoption figures but also that AbbVie had publicly and internally credited ARCH with a scientific discovery that had not in fact been produced by ARCH, that AbbVie had publicly claimed, beginning in late 2023, that ARCH incorporated generative-AI capabilities it did not have, and that scientists could not obtain data from the platform as represented.
27. On or about August 19, 2025 — eleven days after being placed on the PIP described below — Born submitted a further report through AbbVie’s OEC hotline (the “Speakfully” system), reiterating her concern that AbbVie’s reported ARCH metrics and public representations materially overstated the platform’s use and capabilities, and reporting that the PIP was retaliation for her disclosures.
28. In making each of these disclosures, Born believed in good faith that AbbVie’s knowing dissemination of materially false representations about ARCH, including its false public claims that ARCH had generated a scientific discovery it had not. Beginning in late 2023 – claims that ARCH incorporated generative artificial-intelligence capabilities it did not have, made to secure continued investment of tens of millions of dollars, favorable public recognition including an industry award, and market and reputational advantage constituted fraud and other unlawful conduct. The Illinois Whistleblower Act requires only a good-faith belief that conduct violates law, not legal certainty; a plaintiff need not always identify the precise statute or regulation where the facts clearly implicate unlawful conduct.
F. AbbVie’s Decision-Makers Knew of Born’s Reports Before Disciplining Her
29. Within approximately one week of SNAIL’s July 7, 2025 referral of Born’s concerns to OEC, and before any performance improvement plan issued, Born personally told Dmitriy DODO BIRD — her direct supervisor and the manager who thereafter placed her on the PIP — that she had opened an ethics complaint.
30. AbbVie’s leadership remained aware of Born’s reports throughout the relevant period. On August 18, 2025, Born identified herself in writing to AbbVie leadership and Human Resources as an “internal whistleblower” who had consulted legal counsel regarding her “responsibilities and protections”; MEERKAT was copied on that writing. On August 20, 2025, MEERKAT, Vice President — the same executive who had publicly represented ARCH as a discovery-generating platform, and who was copied on Born’s PIP — responded in writing to Born’s inquiry about her ethics reporting, asserting that “[t]he performance process is separate and apart from any concerns that you have reported.”
G. Retaliation and Termination
31. On August 8, 2025, DODO BIRD placed Born on a performance improvement plan (“PIP”) of up to 45 days. The PIP was copied to MEERKAT, Vice President, and CLAM, Associate Director, Business Human Resources.
32. The PIP disciplined Born for the very subject matter of her protected disclosures. Among the conduct it cited: “You have repeatedly and incorrectly mentioned in meetings and in your email (April 30th) that we are not willing to dedicate resources to make ARCH usable and that sometimes there are only 20 people who use ARCH, per month.” The PIP directed Born to “[r]efrain from spreading misinformation,” and asserted that the cited behaviors “lead to distrust with our stakeholders.” In the same document, DODO BIRD represented that ARCH had “>400 unique user/month” – a figure far below the thousands AbbVie had represented in its annual presentations and public statements.
33. The PIP also rested on a demonstrably false accusation. The PIP faulted Born for posting outdated training materials, asserting that “[m]aterials uploaded to the Convergence Training landing page were not reviewed with and approved by the Catalysts and many of them were outdated.” That accusation was false: SPARROW, a subordinate of the ARCH-team manager responsible for the materials, had instructed Born in a Microsoft Teams message to post those very materials because the updated materials were not yet ready. Born preserved that message in a screenshot saved to her AbbVie-issued laptop. Because Microsoft Teams messages are automatically deleted, because AbbVie policy prohibited forwarding such materials to personal email, and because AbbVie retained the laptop upon terminating Born, that evidence remains exclusively in AbbVie’s possession and is subject to its preservation obligations.
34. During the same period, Born’s work drew recognition from senior AbbVie leaders outside her chain of command. CAT, who led AbbVie’s Enterprise AI Learning Program, appointed Born to AbbVie’s enterprise-wide AI Training Committee, on which Born was among the most junior members; and M of AbbVie’s commercial training organization sought to have Born form a committee based on cost-saving methods she had identified, that he would lead. The PIP expressly barred Born from applying for other positions without Business Human Resources approval – the same HR function copied on the PIP. After AbbVie terminated Born, CAT circulated a list of AI “champions” that included Born to AbbVie’s training organization of more than 2,000 people. These facts are inconsistent with the deficient performance AbbVie asserted.
35. On August 19, 2025, CLAM confirmed the PIP deadline in writing: Born “must show progress on the expectations outlined in the PIP by September 22, 2025.” The OEC investigation of Born’s reports remained open and active; Born met with OEC on August 20, 2025, and corresponded with THE DOE on September 3, 2025.
36. On September 12, 2025, ten days before the September 22 deadline AbbVie itself had set in writing, while the OEC investigation remained open, approximately three weeks after Born’s August 19 report, and less than two months after she told DODO BIRD of her ethics complaint, DODO BIRD and CLAM informed Born that she was terminated.
COUNT I: Violation of the Illinois Whistleblower Act, 740 ILCS 174/1 et seq.
37. Born re-alleges and incorporates paragraphs 1 through 36 above.
38. The Illinois Whistleblower Act prohibits an employer from taking retaliatory action against an employee for disclosing information about the employer’s activities that the employee in good faith believes violate a State or federal law, rule, or regulation. 740 ILCS 174/15. As amended by Public Act 103-867, effective January 1, 2025, the Act protects disclosures made internally, including “to any supervisor, principal officer, board member, or supervisor in an organization that has a contractual relationship with the employer.” 740 ILCS 174/15(c).
39. To state a claim under Section 15(c), Born must allege that she disclosed or threatened to disclose, to a covered internal recipient, information related to an activity, policy, or practice of AbbVie; that she had a good-faith belief that the activity, policy, or practice violated a State or federal law, rule, or regulation; and that AbbVie took retaliatory action against her because of that disclosure. 740 ILCS 174/5, 174/15(c).
40. AbbVie is an “employer,” and Born was its “employee,” within the meaning of 740 ILCS 174/5.
41. Born made protected disclosures within the meaning of 740 ILCS 174/15(c). She disclosed to persons who were her “supervisors” as the Act defines that term — persons with “authority to direct and control [her] work performance” and persons with “managerial authority to take corrective action regarding a violation,” 740 ILCS 174/5 — including SNAIL of Human Resources and AbbVie’s Office of Ethics and Compliance, which opened a formal investigation (Case No. abb-68a3-3a1b-8820) in response. By its plain text, the Act protects these internal disclosures. 740 ILCS 174/15(c).
42. Born made these disclosures with a good-faith belief that AbbVie’s conduct violated State or federal law. She reasonably believed that AbbVie’s knowing dissemination of materially false representations about ARCH’s capabilities and adoption — publicly and to leadership, over a period of years, to secure continued funding, public recognition, and market and reputational advantage — constituted fraud. The Act requires only a good-faith belief, not legal certainty, 740 ILCS 174/15, and a plaintiff need not always identify the precise statute or regulation violated where the pleaded facts clearly implicate unlawful conduct. Daniel v. Advocate Health Care Network, 278 F. Supp. 3d 1056, 1065 (N.D. Ill. 2017). Born’s belief was objectively reasonable and rested on two independent bases within her firsthand knowledge: first, that AbbVie publicly attributed to ARCH a scientific discovery that a scientist had in fact produced by hand, as the named scientist himself confirmed to her; and second, that AbbVie, beginning in late 2023, publicly claimed ARCH incorporated generative artificial-intelligence capabilities that had not been implemented as of her termination. She also knew that ARCH’s reported user figures were cumulative totals overstating real use many times over, and that scientists could not obtain their data from it – all while AbbVie continued to represent the opposite to the public and to its leadership.
43. AbbVie took “retaliatory action” and “adverse employment action” against Born within the meaning of 740 ILCS 174/5. On August 8, 2025, it placed her on a 45-day PIP, and on September 12, 2025, it terminated her employment. Each action would dissuade a reasonable worker from making the disclosures Born made, and termination is a paradigmatic adverse action.
44. AbbVie took these actions because of Born’s protected disclosures. DODO BIRD, who placed Born on the PIP, knew of her ethics complaint before he did so, because Born told him within approximately a week of the July 7 OEC referral. The PIP disciplined Born for the very subject of her disclosures – faulting her for stating that “there are only 20 people who use ARCH, per month” and directing her to “refrain from spreading misinformation.” AbbVie’s leadership acknowledged her reports while the PIP was pending. And AbbVie terminated Born ten days before its own stated deadline, while the OEC investigation remained open. At the pleading stage, causation need only be alleged plausibly. See Logan v. City of Chicago, No. 17 C 8312, 2018 WL 5279304, at *6 (N.D. Ill. Oct. 24, 2018).
45. AbbVie’s assertion that Born’s discipline rested on performance grounds is pretextual. The PIP rested in part on a demonstrably false accusation — that Born posted outdated training — which is refuted by a contemporaneous Teams message directing her to post those very materials. Two senior AbbVie leaders sought to bring Born onto their teams during the same period, and the PIP barred her from pursuing those opportunities. AbbVie terminated Born before its own deadline. AbbVie cannot establish, as 740 ILCS 174/32 requires, that its actions were “predicated solely upon grounds other than” Born’s protected disclosures.
46. As a direct and proximate result of AbbVie’s retaliatory action, Born has suffered damages, including lost wages and benefits and other harm for which the Act provides relief. 740 ILCS 174/30.