FOIAengine: A Tale of Two Law Firms
When most people think about the Freedom of Information Act, they imagine journalists prying loose hidden facts or activists holding officials accountable. But FOIA is also a workhorse tool for lawyers. As two law firms’ 2025 FOIA filings with the Food and Drug Administration show, the same statute can serve very different legal purposes.
In 2025, Siri & Glimstad and Hyman, Phelps & McNamara were the leading law firm submitters of FOIA requests to the FDA, according to PoliScio Analytics’ competitive-intelligence database FOIAengine, which tracks FOIA requests in as close to real-time as their availability allows. The two firms accounted for 13 percent of the 1,098 requests to the FDA made by 368 law firms last year.
Their numbers are similar – but dig a little deeper and the contrast becomes sharper. One firm uses FOIA strategically, for navigating drug approvals and market competition. The other wields it more like a searchlight, constantly illuminating the inner workings of government decisionmaking in search of courthouse wins.
Together, their requests offer a window into how modern law practices operate behind the scenes.
FOIA as Regulatory Road Map: The Hyman Phelps Model
Hyman Phelps is a Washington-based boutique firm specializing in FDA regulatory law. Its 2025 FOIA requests—73 in total—read like a map of the drug approval process.
Most of the firm’s requests are tied to specific products and applications, especially ANDAs (Abbreviated New Drug Applications, the FDA pathway for most generic drugs) and NDAs (New Drug Applications, typically used for brand-name small-molecule drugs). Other documents sought by Hyman Phelps are equally familiar to anyone who works in pharmaceutical regulation: approval letters, tentative approval letters (notices that a generic drug meets FDA standards but cannot yet be marketed), CRLs (Complete Response Letters, which explain why an application cannot yet be approved), and SBAs (Summary Basis of Approval, the FDA’s narrative explanation of why it approved a product).
This is not document-gathering for curiosity’s sake. These records being sought under FOIA are the building blocks of a regulatory strategy.
In the world of generic drugs, timing is everything. A single FDA or court determination can control which ANDA applicant is recognized as the first filer—and therefore entitled to 180-day exclusivity, the period during which FDA generally may not approve competing generics. Hyman Phelps’ FOIA requests frequently target the internal FDA memoranda that explain how exclusivity decisions were made, or the correspondence that shows when an application was deemed approvable.
Seen in isolation, the firm’s requests may look scattered: dozens of different drugs, ranging across therapeutic areas. But taken together, they tell a coherent story. This is a firm using FOIA to reconstruct FDA decisional records—to understand what the agency decided, when it decided it, and on what rationale. That information feeds directly into client counseling, advocacy before the FDA, citizen petitions, and litigation over regulatory outcomes.
In short, FOIA requests function here as an extension of the regulatory process itself. For Hyman Phelps, it’s a way of reading the agency’s playbook after the fact.
FOIA as Investigation: The Siri & Glimstad Approach
The 79 FOIA requests filed in 2025 by Siri & Glimstad, a national litigation firm, could hardly look more different.
Instead of focusing on drugs or applications, many of its requests are organized around people—specifically, senior FDA officials. Repeatedly, the firm asks for “all communications” involving figures such as Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, also known as CBER, which oversees vaccines and biologics; former Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock; and other senior leaders.
The subject matter is similarly distinct. A large share of the requests concern Covid vaccines, especially Moderna’s products and the KidCOVE pediatric trial. Others seek records about adverse events, deaths, internal debates, or the FDA’s use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in regulatory decisionmaking.
What is largely missing are the staples of regulatory practice: approval letters, SBAs, CRLs, or patent-exclusivity records. Siri & Glimstad is not trying to figure out how to get a drug approved—or how fast. It is trying to understand how the FDA made some of the most consequential public-health decisions in modern history.
The structure of Siri & Glimstad’s requests reinforces that conclusion. Many are broad and open-ended, covering emails, text messages, and attachments across defined time periods. This is classic investigative FOIA—the kind used to surface inconsistencies, reveal internal disagreements, or document the influence of outside actors.
In effect, FOIA here serves as a stand-in for civil discovery. When traditional litigation tools aren’t yet available, FOIA offers a way to examine government conduct from the outside.
For more about Siri & Glimstad, see our January 2024 article about the firm’s efforts to end-run laws protecting vaccine makers from Covid-vaccine lawsuits, and our October 2024 article on the firm’s requests for information on possible human harm from cell phones and cell towers.
Two Firms, Two Philosophies of Transparency
The contrast between the two firms underscores an often-overlooked truth: FOIA is used for many purposes. It is a flexible instrument whose function depends entirely on the user’s objective.
For Hyman Phelps, FOIA is about regulatory precision. The firm’s clients—pharmaceutical companies navigating complex FDA pathways—need to know how the agency has interpreted statutes and regulations in real cases. FOIA provides access to precedent, not in the judicial sense, but in the administrative one. It helps answer questions like: How did FDA handle a similar application? What triggered a delay? Why was exclusivity granted or denied?
For Siri & Glimstad, FOIA is about accountability and narrative. The firm’s requests suggest litigation or policy challenges focused on whether the FDA acted appropriately, transparently, or lawfully—especially under the extraordinary pressures of the pandemic. Here, FOIA is less about regulatory outcomes and more about process, governance, and trust.
Both uses are legitimate. Both are powerful. And both depend on the same statute. One model treats the agency as a decision-maker whose reasoning must be carefully understood and anticipated. The other treats the agency as a powerful institution whose actions must sometimes be questioned, exposed, and challenged.
To the outside observer, a FOIA log is just a spreadsheet. To those who know how to read it, it’s a portrait of legal strategy.
FOIAengine is the only source for the most comprehensive, fully searchable archive of FOIA requests across over 40 federal departments and agencies. FOIAengine has more robust functionality and searching capabilities and standardizes data from different agencies to make it easier to work with. Learn more about FOIAengine here. Sign up here to become a trial user of FOIAengine.
PoliScio now offers everyone free daily FOIAengine Email Alerts when a new FOIA request matches one of your personal keywords. Sign up here to create your account and identify your keywords.
FOIAengine access now is available for all professional members of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of journalism. IRE is the world’s oldest and largest association of investigative journalists. PoliScio Analytics is proud to be partnering with IRE to provide this valuable content to investigative reporters worldwide.
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Next: The latest FOIA requests to the SEC, FTC, and FDA.
Randy E. Miller, co-creator of FOIAengine, is a Washington lawyer, publisher, and former government official. He has developed several online information products and was a partner at Hogan Lovells, where he founded the firm’s Brussels office and represented clients on international regulatory matters. Miller also has served as a White House trade lawyer, Senior Legal Adviser to the U.S. Mission to the World Trade Organization, policy director to Senator Bob Dole, and adjunct professor at Georgetown University. He is a graduate of Yale and Georgetown Law. FOIAengine is a product of PoliScio Analytics (PoliScio.com), a venture specializing in U.S. political and governmental research, co-founded by Miller and Washington journalist John A. Jenkins.
Write to Randy E. Miller at randy@poliscio.com.
