May 19, 2026

Even as Scientologist OT VIII Bob Duggan watched his company’s stock drop again under $16.00, a federal court development from May 11 was working its way through the institutional flow that has been steadily distributing SMMT shares for nearly three weeks.

For Scientology Money Project readers who have followed Duggan’s career across Pharmacyclics, Computer Motion, and Summit, this kind of pressure on the SMMT tape is not new. What is new is the documentary architecture now visible behind it. On May 11, 2026, the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey entered a Stipulated Confidentiality and Protective Order in a federal trade secrets case that names Summit Therapeutics as the current employer of the defendant.

On May 11, 2026, the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey entered the Stipulated Confidentiality and Protective Order in Janssen Global Services, LLC v. Cynthia Nwachukwu, Case No. 3:26-cv-02563-MAS-TJB.

Scroll down to read the order.

The order, so-ordered by Magistrate Judge Tonianne J. Bongiovanni, governs the conduct of discovery in a federal trade secrets action in which Summit Therapeutics Inc., the Nasdaq-listed clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company controlled by Robert W. Duggan, is pleaded as the entity at which the defendant is currently employed.

Summit is not a defendant in the case. Summit is, however, named in the complaint as the destination employer of the defendant, Cynthia Nwachukwu, who Janssen alleges downloaded the company’s confidential information during the months preceding her resignation from Janssen on November 1, 2025.

The complaint pleads Nwachukwu’s employment at Summit on information and belief, and the prayer for relief asks the court to enjoin Nwachukwu from using Janssen’s confidential information “in connection with” Summit Therapeutics, among other competitive businesses.

The procedural context. Janssen filed its complaint in the District of New Jersey on March 12, 2026. Summit disclosed the existence of the lawsuit in its quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, which the company filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 1, 2026. That same Form 10-Q contained the auditor’s qualified opinion expressing substantial doubt about Summit’s ability to continue as a going concern. The protective order was entered nine days after Summit’s first public disclosure of the case.

The protective order is a stipulated order, meaning that counsel for Janssen and counsel for Nwachukwu negotiated its terms and submitted it jointly to the magistrate judge for entry. Janssen is represented by Harris S. Freier and Latiqua M. Liles of Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, P.C., based in Morristown, New Jersey. Nwachukwu is represented by Jesse S. Weinstein and Samantha Solomotis of Phillips & Associates, PLLC, based in New York. The terms of the order therefore reflect what both parties accepted as the operative discovery framework.

Four provisions of the protective order are worth examining in detail. Each provision tells the reader something specific about how the parties view the case they are litigating, and each is worth understanding before discovery proceeds in earnest.

The Attorney Eyes Only tier. The protective order establishes a two-tier confidentiality regime. The lower tier covers material designated as Confidential Material. The higher tier, designated as “Confidential Material–Attorney Eyes Only,” covers material whose disclosure, in the words of the order, “would cause the Designating Party serious competitive and commercial harm.”

Material designated at the higher tier may not be shown to the defendant herself without an objection-and-meet-and-confer process that runs no less than ten business days and may extend longer if counsel cannot reach agreement.

A two-tier regime with an Attorney Eyes Only designation is not the default discovery architecture for a routine employee-departure dispute. The presence of a negotiated higher tier indicates that Janssen contemplates producing documents in this case that it considers competitively sensitive at the highest level.

The presence of a meet-and-confer process before the defendant herself may see Attorney Eyes Only material indicates that the parties anticipate disputes about what the defendant is permitted to see. Both signals are consistent with a case in which the document universe at issue extends beyond personnel and onboarding records into substantive research, development, and commercial materials.

The same-therapeutic-area Competitor exclusion. The protective order restricts disclosure of confidential material to retained consultants and experts under a defined process. A consultant or expert who is a “Competitor” of the designating party is presumptively excluded from receiving confidential material. The order defines Competitor to include any entity “within the same therapeutic area(s) and/or utilizing similar mechanisms of action” as the products and drug candidates at issue in the case.[6]

The same-therapeutic-area language is the operative provision. Janssen’s oncology franchise in the relevant therapeutic area includes its bispecific antibody amivantamab, marketed as RYBREVANT, used in the treatment of EGFR-mutant non-small cell lung cancer. Summit Therapeutics is developing ivonescimab, an in-licensed bispecific antibody targeting PD-1 and VEGF, in multiple non-small cell lung cancer indications including EGFR-mutant disease.

Any consultant or expert with prior or current involvement in any PD-1, PD-L1, EGFR, VEGF, or bispecific antibody program in non-small cell lung cancer is presumptively excluded from receiving Janssen’s confidential material under the order’s Competitor definition. The exclusion has the practical effect of narrowing the universe of qualified expert witnesses available to either side.

The artificial intelligence and machine learning training prohibition. Paragraph 11 of the protective order, titled “Use in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Systems,” provides that discovery material shall not be used to “train, fine-tune, or otherwise develop” any machine learning or artificial intelligence model except for a model developed and used solely for the case itself.[7] The provision further prohibits submission of discovery material to any AI or machine learning service that retains data for model training, and requires that any model trained on discovery material be destroyed in the same manner as the underlying material.

The AI training prohibition is not boilerplate. The provision was negotiated into the order by the parties and entered by the magistrate judge. Its presence indicates that the parties contemplated that the document production in this case might be of the scale and character that AI-tool use would be a real concern. The provision also indicates that the parties were aware of the defendant’s own positioning in artificial intelligence applied to pharmaceutical research, an area in which Nwachukwu has publicly identified herself as a founder and principal of an independent venture.

The litigation funding exclusion. Paragraph 12 of the protective order categorically prohibits funders of litigation from accessing or receiving copies of confidential, proprietary, and sensitive commercial information produced in the case. The order defines funders of litigation broadly to include “any entity or individual engaged in the business of litigation funding,” their employees, counsel, consultants, and agents, whether foreign or domestic. The provision references the Department of Justice’s Foreign Agents Registration Act and the Department of Justice Data Security Program as applicable compliance frameworks.

A litigation funder exclusion of this scope is unusual in an employee trade secrets case. Its inclusion indicates that one or both parties specifically considered the possibility that third-party litigation funding might enter the case and negotiated against it in advance.

The reference to the Foreign Agents Registration Act and to the Data Security Program is the kind of provision that does not appear by accident; it indicates a contemplated concern about foreign-source funding of the litigation. The presence of the provision does not establish that any litigation funder is in fact involved on either side. It establishes that the parties thought the question worth foreclosing at the protective order stage.

The structural reading. Read together, the four provisions describe a case in which the parties contemplate a large and competitively sensitive document production, expect that the defendant herself may be excluded from seeing the most sensitive material, anticipate that the universe of qualified expert witnesses will be narrow because of conflicts in the relevant therapeutic area, contemplate that artificial intelligence systems will be a vector of concern, and have foreclosed third-party litigation funding from accessing the discovery record. This is not the architecture of a routine employee-departure dispute. It is the architecture of a case in which both sides expect serious, contested, document-intensive proceedings.

A reader of the protective order who has not read the underlying complaint can nevertheless draw inferences from the order’s text about what the parties think they are litigating. The complaint and its exhibits, which I will examine in a subsequent piece, supply the factual allegations that the protective order’s architecture is designed to manage. For present purposes, the order alone establishes that the case exists, that it is in active federal court discovery, and that the discovery framework has been negotiated and entered with provisions that reveal the shape of the dispute.

Summit’s posture. Summit Therapeutics is not a party to the case. Summit’s involvement, as pleaded in the complaint, runs in two directions. The first is that the defendant, on Janssen’s information and belief, is currently employed by Summit.

The second is that the prayer for relief asks the court to enjoin the defendant from using Janssen’s confidential information in connection with Summit, among other competitive businesses.

The relief Janssen seeks therefore reaches into Summit’s commercial activities to the extent that those activities involve confidential information Janssen alleges the defendant brought with her. Summit’s response to the existence of the case has, to date, consisted of the disclosure in its May 1, 2026 Form 10-Q. The company has issued no separate statement on the litigation.

What comes next. With the protective order entered, the case is in active discovery. The parties will exchange Rule 26(a) initial disclosures, file a Rule 26(f) joint discovery plan, and proceed to a Rule 16 scheduling conference before Magistrate Judge Bongiovanni. Document production will follow under the protective order’s terms. Depositions of Janssen and, potentially, Summit personnel are foreseeable within the discovery period the scheduling order establishes. The Scientology Money Project will follow the docket and report developments as they occur.

Closing. The existence of a federal trade secrets case in which a Nasdaq-listed biopharmaceutical company is pleaded as the destination employer of a defendant accused of downloading thousands of confidential files from a former employer is, by itself, a material disclosure for Summit’s shareholders. It is one of several pressure points the company is currently navigating. I will examine the substance of the underlying complaint in a subsequent piece. For tonight, the operative fact is that the case is now in active federal court discovery under a protective order whose terms reveal what both sides expect the case to involve.

The Protective Order: