How Lawyers Use FOIA for Radically Different Agendas
FOIAengine: A Tale of Two Law Firms
By Randy E. Miller, Law St. Media, Jan. 22, 2026
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.
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