AbbVie Beats Employee’s Would-Be Whistleblower Suit on Appeal

An AbbVie Inc. employee can’t save his whistleblower retaliation suit after a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that he didn’t put the company on notice of their alleged defrauding of the government.

Jeffrey Lewis only raised his concerns to AbbVie about potential regulatory violations, failing to satisfy the notice requirement needed to state a claim for unlawful retaliation under §31 U.S.C. §3730(h), Judge Joshua P. Kolar said. And the allegedly unlawful scheme implies that AbbVie risked violating US Food and Drug Administration regulations about off-label marketing, rather than submitting false claims to the government.

The unanimous US Court of Appeals ...