FOIAengine: Requests to SEC Preceded Stock Troubles and a Surprise Resignation
For a company that most Americans have never heard of, Medpace Holdings, Inc. (NASD:MEDP) sits remarkably close to the center of the modern drug-development economy.
The Cincinnati-based contract research organization, or CRO for short, helps small- and medium-sized pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies run the human trials that underpin FDA approvals. Medpace’s 6,200 employees recruit patients, manage trial sites, coordinate data collection, and help shepherd experimental drugs through the regulatory process – complexities that often are difficult for the biotech start-ups that represent 90 percent of Medpace’s business.
In plain English, CROs are outsourced managers of the drug-testing process, often overseeing large global studies. Instead of a biotech company running a giant Phase 3 trial entirely in-house, it often hires a CRO like Medpace.
“We understand the unique challenges” of emerging biotech companies, Medpace says on its website.
By early 2026, Medpace had grown into a multi-billion-dollar public company, with 2025 revenue of $2.5 billion, operations around the world, and a reputation on Wall Street for strong execution and unusually high profit margins. The company is by no means the largest in the CRO space – some players are many times its size – but it enjoyed a reputation as a more operationally disciplined, more profitable, and more biotech-focused
CRO than its larger peers.
But in recent months, a different narrative has begun to emerge around the company – one centered on slowing growth, rising clinical-trial cancellations, securities litigation, and quiet signs that sophisticated investors and lawyers were probing Medpace before the broader market fully appreciated the risks.
The earliest signals of trouble came through Freedom of Information Act requests to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
As our regular readers know, FOIA requests to the federal government can be an important early warning of bad publicity, litigation to come, or uncertainties to be hedged and gamed out. We saw an early FOIA signal about Medpace in PoliScio Analytics’ competitive-intelligence database FOIAengine, which tracks FOIA requests in as close to real-time as their availability allows.
On February 20, 2026, analyst Joshua Moll at London-based hedge fund Ilex Capital, which manages roughly $7 billion in assets according to industry reports, made a request to the SEC for “all emails to and from SEC employees in the Enforcement Division that reference Medpace.”
The Ilex request did not seek routine filings or comment letters. Instead, it specifically targeted internal SEC Enforcement Division communications referencing the company. Of significance, Moll’s request came soon after MEDP’s stock price dropped by almost 50 percent in a matter of days.
We were unable to verify, combing through the most recent SEC 13F filings, any MEDP ownership by Ilex. We reached out to analyst Moll, via an email address published on Ilex’s website, to see if he might have been acting on a hunch. We didn’t hear back.
But then came a second request to the SEC seeking records relating to Medpace from January 1, 2025 forward. That request came on March 30 from Chunhui Li, a litigation associate in the Washington, D.C. office of law firm McDermott Will & Schulte.
Now there were two signals that indicated possible troubles ahead for Medpace.
The Ilex Capital and McDermott request were noteworthy, because they arrived before a wave of threatened securities litigation publicly engulfed the company following sharp stock declines tied to deteriorating “book-to-bill” ratios and rising cancellation concerns.
The book-to-bill ratio – a metric obscure to most retail investors but closely watched in the clinical-research industry – measures how much new future business a company signs relative to the amount of existing work it is currently burning through. A ratio above 1.0 suggests a growing pipeline of future clinical-trial work. A falling ratio can signal slowing demand and diminishing future revenue.
For years, investors viewed Medpace as one of the industry’s stronger performers, benefiting from a boom in biotech funding and outsourced clinical development. But that confidence cracked in February after investors focused on weaker bookings, higher cancellation rates, and signs that biotech customers were becoming more cautious about launching or continuing trials.
Medpace’s stock fell sharply after the disclosures, threatening a growing swarm of shareholder litigation by plaintiffs’ law firms.
Among the securities class action firms publicly soliciting Medpace investors are Bleichmar Fonti & Auld; Levi & Korsinsky; Robbins; Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check; the Rosen Law Firm; and others. The emerging lawsuits generally allege that Medpace misled investors about the strength and durability of its growth pipeline, including cancellation trends and backlog quality.
The lead plaintiff in one class-action filing, Jan Durbin, is represented by Strauss Troy, a Cincinnati-based law firm that appears to have partnered with Levi & Korsinsky in the litigation effort. Cincinnati’s Keating Muething & Klekamp is on record as defense counsel for Medpace. The first court hearing in the case was just set for June 23 at the U.S. courthouse in Cincinnati.
At least so far, no public evidence has emerged showing that the SEC itself opened a formal enforcement investigation into Medpace, nor has the SEC publicly alleged wrongdoing. But the FOIA requests suggest that sophisticated actors were interested enough in the possibility of regulatory scrutiny to begin probing SEC Enforcement references before the litigation wave took off.
We reached out to Medpace for comment but did not receive a response. The company’s annual meeting, where the recent events will likely be addressed, is scheduled for this Friday, May 15.
Meanwhile, another development raised additional investor questions.
On April 21, Medpace disclosed that company president Jesse Geiger had notified the company of his intent to resign and retire effective May 31. In a Form 8-K filing, the company stated that Geiger’s departure was “not the result of any disagreement with the Company regarding its operations, policies, or practices.” Founder and CEO August Troendle is expected to reassume the president role temporarily while the company searches for a successor. Troendle’s stake in Medpace is worth in excess of $2 billion – even after selling hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Medpace stock over the past two years, including large sales near the company’s peak valuation in late 2025.
The timing of Geiger’s resignation – arriving amid stock volatility, litigation, and mounting scrutiny of the company’s growth metrics – drew attention from plaintiffs’ firms and investors, though no evidence has surfaced linking Geiger personally to any alleged misconduct.
The Medpace story remains unusual in another respect: despite the company’s size and importance inside the pharmaceutical ecosystem, the controversy has received relatively little attention from mainstream news organizations.
That may reflect the complexity of the underlying issues. Unlike classic corporate scandals involving accounting fraud or bribery, the Medpace litigation centers on subtle but critically important indicators inside the clinical-research business: cancellations, bookings, backlog quality, and investor visibility into future demand.
But those same complexities may also help explain why hedge funds, securities lawyers, and investigative requesters began quietly circling the company before the broader public narrative fully formed.
For FOIAengine, the emerging Medpace chronology offers another example of how sophisticated actors increasingly use public-records laws not merely to investigate past controversies, but to identify potential future ones.
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John A. Jenkins, co-creator of FOIAengine, is a Washington journalist and publisher whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and elsewhere. He is a four-time recipient of the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award Certificate of Merit for his legal reporting and analysis. His most recent book is The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist. His next book, Summer of ’71: Five Months That Changed America, about the fateful year before Watergate, will be out in June. Click here to watch the official book trailer. Jenkins founded Law Street Media in 2013. Prior to that, he was President of CQ Press, the textbook and reference publishing enterprise of Congressional Quarterly. FOIAengine is a product of PoliScio Analytics (PoliScio.com), a new venture specializing in U.S. political and governmental research, co-founded by Jenkins and Washington lawyer Randy Miller. Learn more about FOIAengine here. To review FOIA requests mentioned in this article, subscribe to FOIAengine.
Write to John A. Jenkins at JAJ@PoliScio.com.