A Dallas jury spent the week hearing dueling accounts of corporate greed versus bribery and cover-ups as AT&T and former top sales partner Fiberwave squared off in a $50 million breach-of-contract trial. The case, now playing out in a borrowed courtroom inside the George Allen Courts Building, centers on whether AT&T illegally withheld commission payments from a company it accuses of running a kickback scheme, or whether AT&T simply refused to pay for work it had already benefited from.
Fiberwave, formerly known as Spearhead Consulting, claims it is owed $50 million for marketing and reselling AT&T services to businesses, according to The Dallas Morning News. The company argues AT&T benefited from its work and failed to pay for it, and that it should be paid regardless of AT&T's right to terminate the underlying agreement. AT&T counters that it ended its contract with Fiberwave in 2024 because of a Department of Justice investigation and an alleged kickback scheme, and that its service-provider agreement allows it to limit commission payments when a provider breaches the law or knows of a government investigation.
A Web of Companies and a Longtime AT&T Executive
The dispute traces back to relationships stretching over more than a decade. Spearhead Networks entered a service-provider agreement with AT&T in 2010, and Faisal Chaudhry, who left AT&T in 2008 after four years there, went on to operate Spearhead Networks as a subcontractor for Fiberwave. Spearhead Consulting renamed itself Fiberwave in 2023, and the company maintains that Fiberwave and Spearhead Networks are separate companies, while AT&T claims the two are treated the same under their agreement.
Chris Percy worked for AT&T for 26 years, rising to vice president in 2018, before leaving the company in 2019 to join Spearhead Consulting. Percy had also terminated Chaudhry's employment during his time at AT&T. Per AT&T's counsel, the company's internal investigation revealed that Percy received $225,000 from Chaudhry, which was deposited into a college savings account for Percy's son. AT&T's telling holds that Percy used the funds to buy his son a Ford Explorer and pay tuition at Southern Methodist University.
AT&T's suspicions were fueled in part by federal scrutiny. The company received grand jury subpoenas from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California in 2022, along with three IRS subpoenas and two FBI subpoenas, all requesting hundreds of documents related to Spearhead Networks and several former AT&T employees. AT&T also hired the law firm Sidley Austin to conduct an internal inquiry, which ran concurrently with the government investigation and took nearly two years to complete.
Pre-Trial Rulings Narrowed the Case to Contract Terms
Long before the jury was seated, presiding Judge Andrea Bouressa had already stripped away much of the case's fraud and defamation framing. In a July 24, 2026 memorandum opinion, she granted summary judgment dismissing Fiberwave's fraudulent inducement claim, finding that AT&T's receipt of kickback reports in 2016 and 2018 was not enough to prove fraud because AT&T had investigated those reports at the time and deemed them unsubstantiated, according to The Texas Lawbook. In the same ruling, the judge dismissed AT&T's own fraud counterclaims against Fiberwave, Chaudhry, and Percy, finding AT&T had not presented sufficient evidence of fraudulent concealment regarding the alleged kickback payments, per Dowd Bennett LLP's summary of the decision.
The judge had trimmed the case months earlier as well. In an October 29, 2025 opinion, she ruled that contract limitation-of-liability provisions barred Fiberwave's business disparagement claim but allowed its tortious interference and defamation claims tied to direct damages from AT&T's post-termination conduct to move forward, per the Texas Civil Justice League's account of the ruling. Then on January 8, 2026, Bouressa granted no-evidence summary judgment for AT&T on Fiberwave's remaining defamation claim, ruling that an AT&T email to sales partners stating that “Acting with integrity and doing the right thing are part of our culture” amounted to non-defamatory opinion rather than a verifiable false statement.
With fraud and defamation claims disposed of on both sides, jurors are left to resolve a narrower but still consequential question: interpreting an AT&T guidebook provision that caps vested post-termination compensation at no more than 36 monthly payments remaining on an order. Judge Bouressa has ruled that provision ambiguous, leaving unresolved whether the payment window runs from an order's start date or its termination date, an issue the compensation-window dispute will now put directly before the jury.
AT&T Also Wants Fiberwave to Pay Up
AT&T is not merely defending against Fiberwave's claims. The company contends Spearhead violated its contract by filing suit using confidential information, though Spearhead says it removed that confidential information at AT&T's request. AT&T is also seeking $8.4 million for the cost of its internal investigation, per its counsel. Fiberwave filed its underlying suit against AT&T in February 2025, and AT&T's fraud claims against Chaudhry, Fiberwave, and Percy could not proceed to trial following the summary judgment rulings.
A jury of five women and nine men, drawn from a pool of 70 potential jurors, was seated for the one-week trial. Matthew Muckleroy represents Spearhead Networks, which characterizes the matter as a breach-of-contract case, while attorney Pete Marketos represents AT&T.
A Rare Jury Trial for Texas's New Business Court
The proceedings carry significance beyond the dollar figures at stake. The trial is one of the very first jury trials held in the Texas Business Court since the specialized system launched, according to Mayer Brown's analysis of the court's early operations. The Texas Business Court was created under House Bill 19 in 2023 and officially opened on September 1, 2024, to handle high-stakes corporate disputes exceeding a $5 million amount-in-controversy threshold, per White & Case LLP.
Because the new court still lacks its own dedicated courthouse, First Division proceedings in Dallas are borrowing space in District Judge Eric Moyé's courtroom inside the George Allen Courts Building, the same Texas Lawbook report notes. In its first year of operation, from September 2024 through August 2025, the Texas Business Court received more than 165 lawsuit filings statewide, with the Dallas First Division and Houston Eleventh Division handling the vast majority of cases, according to a report from Okin Adams. On July 29, 2026, Governor Greg Abbott reappointed all 10 inaugural Texas Business Court judges, including Judge Bouressa, to new two-year terms beginning September 1, 2026. Before joining the business court, Bouressa served as the inaugural judge of Collin County's 471st Judicial District Court, created in 2019, where she resolved as many as 200 civil cases per month.
Hoodline has previously tracked how the Texas Business Court is reshaping corporate litigation across the state, including a $100 million grudge match between American Airlines and JetBlue. The AT&T-Fiberwave trial adds another data point to that emerging body of case law, this time testing how the court's judges manage a full jury proceeding rather than the motion practice that has dominated its docket so far.
