Overview:
This case, Born v. AbbVie, Inc., arises from Plaintiff Kathryn Born’s employment in AbbVie’s R&D organization, where she worked directly on training and communicating the capabilities of the company’s ARCH data platform. Through that role, Plaintiff alleges she developed firsthand knowledge that the ARCH platform did not perform as publicly described. Specifically, she observed a gap between AbbVie’s external statements—describing ARCH as an integrated, AI-enabled, enterprise-wide knowledge platform—and the platform’s actual functionality, which depended on fragmented tools and could not support the workflows being claimed.
Plaintiff reported these concerns internally, including to Human Resources and the Office of Ethics and Compliance, stating that AbbVie’s public representations could mislead investors and the public. Importantly, Plaintiff also repeatedly reported—before she was terminated—that she believed the discipline being imposed on her, including the Performance Improvement Plan, was retaliatory. She raised this concern multiple times during her employment and reiterated it again during her termination meeting. Despite those warnings, Defendant proceeded with termination. Plaintiff alleges this sequence of events constitutes retaliatory discharge under Illinois law, grounded in the public policy interest in truthful corporate representations and the protection of employees who report potential misconduct.
The submitted document -Plaintiff’s Response in Opposition to Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss -seeks to clarify the legal framing of the case and prevent dismissal at the pleading stage. It argues that AbbVie has mischaracterized the claim as a Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) action, when Plaintiff instead brings a state-law retaliatory discharge claim. The response emphasizes that the allegations concern a material mismatch between public statements and observed reality, supported by specific examples of alleged overstatements regarding productivity, adoption, and AI capabilities.
The filing’s objective is procedural: to show that Plaintiff has plausibly alleged protected activity, employer knowledge, causation, and pretext, including clear notice to the employer that she believed retaliation was occurring in real time. It asks the Court to allow the case to proceed to discovery rather than resolving factual disputes at the motion-to-dismiss stage
Submitted document 4/8/26
PLAINTIFF’S RESPONSE IN OPPOSITION TO DEFENDANT’S MOTION TO DISMISS
Plaintiff Kathryn Born respectfully submits this Response in Opposition to Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss her Second Amended Complaint.
- INTRODUCTION
Defendant’s motion mischaracterizes this case. Plaintiff does not plead a Sarbanes-Oxley claim. She pleads an Illinois retaliatory-discharge claim based on allegations that she reported that AbbVie’s public statements about the ARCH platform overstated its actual capabilities, adoption, and AI functionality and could mislead investors and the public.
Defendant tries to reduce those reports to complaints about internal “functional deficiencies.” That is not what Plaintiff alleges. Plaintiff alleges a mismatch between what AbbVie publicly said ARCH could do and what Plaintiff observed through her work training users, collecting feedback, and attempting to translate the platform’s claimed capabilities into repeatable, real-world workflows.
After Plaintiff escalated those concerns to Human Resources and the Office of Ethics and Compliance, she was placed on a Performance Improvement Plan, again reported that she believed the discipline was retaliatory, and was then terminated. At the pleading stage, those allegations plausibly support protected activity, employer knowledge, causation, and pretext.
The motion should therefore be denied. It attacks a narrower claim than the one Plaintiff pleads, attempts to recast this Illinois common-law claim as a SOX claim, and asks the Court to draw inferences against Plaintiff rather than in her favor. If the Court concludes that any allegation requires more detail, Plaintiff requests leave to amend.
- FACTUAL CONTEXT
Plaintiff’s role involved training ARCH users and working with subject-matter experts to translate the platform’s claimed capabilities into repeatable workflows. Through this work, Plaintiff obtained firsthand knowledge that ARCH itself could not perform the functions publicly attributed to it. Instead, those capabilities were housed in a disparate ecosystem of tools and workflows from entirely separate, unconnected functional departments. This mismatch was further obscured by naming a separate tool with the “ARCH” label – “Ask ARCH” – which misleadingly attributed the performance of independent systems to the original platform.
Plaintiff raised those concerns internally and later escalated them to Human Resources and the Office of Ethics and Compliance. She reported that AbbVie’s public descriptions of ARCH overstated the platform’s actual capabilities, adoption, and AI functionality and could mislead investors and the public. After Plaintiff escalated those concerns, she was placed on a Performance Improvement Plan. Shortly before her termination, Plaintiff again reported that she believed the discipline was retaliatory, and she repeated that concern during the termination meeting. Defendant proceeded with termination anyway. At the pleading stage, those allegations plausibly support knowledge, causation, and pretext
- ARGUMENT
A. Plaintiff Plausibly Alleges Reporting of Conduct Implicating Public Policy
Defendant mischaracterizes Plaintiff’s reports as complaints about software defects. That is not what Plaintiff alleges. Plaintiff alleges that AbbVie publicly attributed to ARCH capabilities, adoption, and AI functionality that she did not observe in practice, and that she reported that mismatch internally. The issue is not whether related capabilities existed somewhere in AbbVie’s broader enterprise data environment. The issue is whether AbbVie accurately described ARCH itself.
Plaintiff further alleges that she reasonably believed those public-facing descriptions could mislead investors and the public. That is enough at the pleading stage.
B. Plaintiff Identified Specific Misleading Public Statements
Plaintiff identifies specific misleading statements, specific speakers or channels, and specific reasons she believed the statements were inaccurate based on her direct work with the platform. The examples below are not generalized complaints about usability. They are examples of alleged overstatements about productivity, pipeline impact, enterprise-wide adoption, and AI functionality.
• Statement 1 (Corporate and investor-facing materials, 2022–2024): ARCH was described as capable of “double[ing] the productivity of AbbVie R&D.”
This is a concrete, measurable performance claim. Plaintiff’s role included communicating ARCH’s impact through newsletters and training materials, which required identifying supporting metrics or documented changes. Plaintiff could not identify one single measurable improvement in research productivity, pipeline advancement, or comparable metric attributable to ARCH’s use.
• Statement 2 (Brian Martin, corporate communication, 2022–2023): ARCH is a “knowledge platform versus a data platform” that affects “the way we bring assets into our pipeline.”
Plaintiff alleges this statement conveyed integrated, decision-support functionality tied to pipeline advancement. In practice, ARCH functioned as a partial data access layer within a broader ecosystem and did not independently perform the integrated analytical or decision-support functions implied.
• Statement 3 (Corporate and investor-facing materials, 2022–2024): ARCH is for “every person in R&D” and would materially accelerate research timelines.
This statement implies enterprise-wide adoption and scale. Plaintiff observed limited adoption, fragmented workflows, and the inability to operationalize core tasks in a repeatable, trainable manner, conditions inconsistent with enterprise-wide use or scaled impact.
• Statement 4 (Jon Stevens, AbbVie presentation title, 2024): “Ask ARCH: LLM Question Answering over Large-Scale Knowledge Graphs.”
This title refers to a separate LLM-based interface (“Ask ARCH”), not the actual ARCH platform. The use of the “ARCH” label creates the impression that the platform itself performs natural-language question answering over a unified knowledge graph. Plaintiff observed that these capabilities were not present within ARCH as a standalone system, and that the labeling blurred the distinction between a separate interface and the actual platform.
These representative examples demonstrate that Plaintiff’s allegations are grounded in specific statements, identifiable speakers or channels, and concrete discrepancies observed through her role.
Plaintiff’s belief that Defendant’s public representations were inaccurate was grounded in her direct, operational experience with the ARCH platform. Plaintiff’s role required her to develop training materials and teach users how to perform specific tasks using the system. In doing so, Plaintiff worked closely with subject matter experts and attempted to translate the platform’s purported capabilities into step-by-step workflows.
These efforts revealed that core functions described in Defendant’s public statements could not be consistently operationalized in a repeatable, user-trainable manner within ARCH itself. Repeated attempts to construct such workflows were unsuccessful, and subject matter experts were unable to demonstrate the claimed functionality within the platform. These observations formed the factual basis for Plaintiff’s reasonable, good-faith belief that Defendant’s public representations regarding the platform’s capabilities were inaccurate and potentially misleading.
At this stage, Plaintiff need only plausibly allege that these statements were misleading in light of known internal conditions. The specific examples above, tied to Plaintiff’s role and direct observations, satisfy that standard. Plaintiff will provide additional examples in discovery.
C. Plaintiff’s Claim Is Not Barred by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act
Defendant misreads Plaintiff’s claim. Plaintiff does not assert a claim under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and her claim does not depend on satisfying SOX’s statutory elements. Plaintiff alleges that she reported that AbbVie’s public statements about the ARCH platform overstated its capabilities, adoption, and AI functionality and could mislead investors and the public, and that she was terminated after making those reports.
Any references to Sarbanes-Oxley came only after Plaintiff had already reported the underlying conduct and arose while Plaintiff was attempting to understand whether those concerns had legal significance. Plaintiff does not assert a SOX claim, and those later references do not convert this Illinois common-law retaliatory-discharge claim into a federal statutory cause of action.
Defendant’s effort to recast this case as a SOX claim does not provide a basis for dismissal at the pleading stage.
D. Defendant’s Alternative Explanations Do Not Defeat the Claim at This Stage
Defendant’s reliance on alleged performance deficiencies does not defeat Plaintiff’s claim at the pleading stage. Plaintiff has alleged protected activity, temporal proximity, employer knowledge, and adverse action.
At this stage, the Court must accept Plaintiff’s factual allegations as true and draw reasonable inferences in her favor.
- CONCLUSION
Plaintiff has plausibly alleged retaliatory discharge in violation of clearly mandated public policy. Defendant’s Motion should be denied.
Respectfully submitted,
Date: April 8, 2026
/s/ Kathryn Born Plaintiff, pro se