⚖ Oral Arguments, with Context

The Fifth Circuit hears a dispute between businesses that connect online customers with mental health professionals for emotional support animal letters. Greater Guide, which operates American Service Pets, accuses a rival and related defendants of using fictitious customer applications to obtain access to its providers. They then complained about those providers to state licensing boards. Greater Guide says this was a campaign to drive providers away and damage its business. The defendants describe their conduct as legitimate investigation of whether professionals properly evaluated customers before providing the letters. Those competing characterizations are important: the underlying fraud allegations have not been proved at a trial. The district court dismissed the federal claims, ruling that the regulatory complaints were protected and that the computer-fraud and civil racketeering claims were inadequately pleaded. A central issue is Noerr-Pennington, a doctrine generally protecting requests for government action from antitrust liability, even when motivated by competition. That protection has a narrow exception for sham petitions. The dispute is how to evaluate a series of complaints, rather than just one. Greater Guide will argue that the campaign must be considered as a whole, and that its opponents relied on standards they invented rather than applicable law. The defendants will argue that the complaints had a reasonable regulatory basis and are protected. The court will also consider the separate allegations about accessing the website and the claimed costs of responding to that conduct under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Breaking a website's terms is not automatically the same as violating that federal statute. For the civil racketeering claim, listen for the disagreement over whether the alleged transactions adequately establish a pattern of fraud, separate from the protected regulatory complaints. The question here is whether the pleaded facts support federal claims that may proceed, not whether every accusation is ultimately true.

Greater Guide v. SAPS (No. 25-30677) — U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, argued November 3, 2026.