Walking into the lawyers’ lounge at the federal courthouse in Miami, Michael Daugherty found his lawyer, Ropes & Gray partner Doug Meal, poring over documents, deep in concentration as he prepared for arguments.

It was June 2017, and Daugherty was where he wanted to be—finally—in his years-long fight against the Federal Trade Commission. A year earlier, he felt oddly relieved when the FTC found that his medical testing company, LabMD, had failed to adequately protect patients’ personal information. For Daugherty, the decision at least meant escaping the FTC’s administrative process and taking his company’s defense to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.