Hey everybody, in this episode about the procedural posture of cases, let's dive a little deeper on what it means when you are reading a court decision in your law school textbook that is deciding a motion to dismiss. Let's talk about it. So I'm doing a bunch of episodes about the procedural posture of cases. Because I think if you have a robust understanding of the different stages of a case and the different types of court decisions that judges have to write up, the different situations that they have to address procedurally in those court decisions, you will have a much better understanding of the implications of the court decisions that you are reading. And with that understanding, you can write better case briefs. You can write better exam answers because you are going to have a deeper, more holistic understanding of what it is you are reading. So I'm doing a few podcast episodes about the different types of court opinions that you are reading in law school. And of course, why are the judges writing these opinions? They're writing the opinions that go into your textbook because the parties have presented the court with a request, with a motion, or with evidence at a trial. And the court has to make a decision about who wins that motion or who wins that trial. Some of the cases, or many of them that you will read, are court decisions where a judge was deciding a motion to dismiss, usually filed by the defendant in a case. Could potentially be filed by a plaintiff in some instances to try to win or strike essentially a defendant's defense in an answer. But for most of this podcast episode, I'm going to talk about motions to dismiss that are filed by the defendant against whom a lawsuit is filed. What is a motion to dismiss? A motion to dismiss is a request that a party files that asks a court to end the lawsuit right then and there before it goes to trial because of a legal problem with the case itself. Because of a legal problem with the case itself. And very often, in most of your doctrinal classes, like torts, contracts, and property, the court is deciding what's called a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim. A motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim. When a defendant in a lawsuit gets sued and they look at the allegations in that lawsuit, they might think to themselves, hmm, I'm reading these allegations. And I think if the plaintiff proves all them, their case is still legally deficient. If they prove all these allegations, they aren't necessarily going to prove all the facts needed to establish a particular type of claim or a recognized claim. So I am going to file a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim. And what I'm going to say in that motion is this: hey, judge, take a look at this lawsuit. Take a look at the complaint or the petition, it might be called in state court. And if you read all these allegations and you add all of them up, the plaintiff says that those allegations add up to some type of legal claim against me, like that I breached a contract or I infringed on a property right, or that I committed some tort against the plaintiff, like negligence, or like battery. But what I'm telling you, Judge, is that there's something wrong with those allegations. There's something wrong with those allegations such that this case cannot proceed any further because if the plaintiff proves all of these allegations, they aren't going to establish the claim that they have identified as the one that they are bringing against me. What could the problem be? The problem with the plaintiff's allegations might be that they haven't alleged key facts that are needed to prove a claim. You might read through their lawsuit, read through their complaint, and it is missing a key fact. And without that fact, it is impossible for the plaintiff to prove a claim. So let's say a plaintiff was going to bring a breach of contract case against some defendant out there. And the plaintiff wrote up their lawsuit. And in that lawsuit, they don't have any allegation that the defendant ever made a contractual offer. Or they don't have any allegation that they ever accepted a contract or that there was consideration. Or they don't allege that the defendant failed to perform the terms of the contract. In that instance, the defendant might say, wait a minute, there are some key allegations missing here. And because they are missing, this plaintiff cannot possibly establish any type of claim. And so, judge, you need to dismiss this case. There's no sense in going forward because we could let it go forward and the plaintiff could prove all this, and they'd still lose when we apply the facts to the law. As a result, you should dismiss the case. That is one way that a party can ask a judge to dismiss a case. A similar way of thinking about this is that the party might say, Judge, if you look at the plaintiff's allegations in the complaint in the lawsuit that they filed against me, even if those allegations are true, they just aren't legally sufficient to establish a claim. They just aren't legally sufficient. And that's similar to saying that something is missing from those allegations. So for example, if a party is bringing a battery claim, one of the things you're going to learn in torts class is that they have to allege that some kind of touching took place. Well, let's say that the alleged battery was the defendant taking a swing at the plaintiff and trying to punch them, but the plaintiff didn't actually get touched by the fist. Maybe the plaintiff alleges in their lawsuit, while the fist didn't strike me, I felt the wind of the fist pass by my face. Well, the defendant might look at that and say, hey, that's not a contact. As a matter of law, this doesn't add up to a battery claim. And the court would analyze that and decide one way or another as a matter of law. If the plaintiff proves these allegations, does it establish a battery claim? Or are the plaintiff's allegations insufficient to establish a battery claim? The same thing with a contract claim. I'll give you a real life example that comes up in actual lawsuits. So one issue that has been frequently litigated is whether in a workplace setting, promises that an employer makes in an employee handbook are enforceable contracts. So at work, you'll have an employee handbook explaining all sorts of things, and the employer might say things in there about what they're going to provide to employees. And an employee might say, hey, that employer breached that handbook, and that handbook's a contract. Some courts have said, as a matter of law, when looking at handbooks, this isn't a contract as a matter of law. This isn't something that any person could possibly could construe as a contract. So we aren't going to let this go forward, passed a motion to dismiss. Other courts might say, well, it could be a contract. Here's what the elements of a contractual offer are in our state. It could be that this handbook potentially meets those that that threshold. And so we're going to let the plaintiff go forward with this case. Now, we're not saying that the plaintiff wins the case. We're not saying that it the handbook is a contract as a matter of law. At the motion to dismiss stage, if the plaintiff wins, all the court is saying is that the allegations that are made could establish a claim. The plaintiff has not won the case if they win the motion to dismiss. All that happens is they get to go to later procedural stages. Their case keeps going down the road. That is the journey that every case is on. And so the case is going to go through the exchange of information and discovery. There might be a summary judgment motion, which we'll talk about as a different procedural posture. There might be a trial. But if the plaintiff wins the motion in a dismiss, all the court is saying is, look, I don't know what happened here. I'm just reading your allegations. And I'm going to assume for purposes of this motion that your allegations are true. Plaintiff, if you prove all these allegations, you potentially could have a claim here. I would allow the judge or a jury to find that you have a claim if you prove these. So I'm going to let your case go forward. In contrast, if the defendant wins a motion to dismiss, then the court is saying, yeah, the defendant wins this case no matter what. As a matter of law, if the plaintiff proves all of these things in their petition, all the facts, they legally cannot win. They legally cannot fulfill the required elements of their claim. In some instances, if a plaintiff pleads a defense in their actual lawsuit, then they could lose on a motion dismissed for that reason too. So let's say in that torts case that I mentioned, the battery case, the plaintiff alleges in their lawsuit, oh, I asked the defendant to take a swing at my face because we were filming a movie and I consented to that. Well, the plaintiff has pled facts to prove the defense of consent. And so in that instance, the defendant can file a motion and dismiss on the basis of their defense and say we win because this defense appears on the face of the lawsuit. However, usually those defenses are not in the petition, right? A plaintiff isn't going to include facts that are bad for them in their lawsuit necessarily. And so usually at the motion to dismiss stage, the defendant cannot raise any legal defenses to the claim unless they appear on the face of the lawsuit. The defendant can't come in with extraneous information outside of the lawsuit. For example, the defendant might have a video of the interaction proving that no striking happened. The defendant cannot bring that in at the motion to dismiss stage. The defendant could bring that in to win the case at the summary judgment stage, but that requires the record to be developed a little bit more. There might need to be statements submitted, depositions taken, information exchanged. Parties can move for summary judgment right away at the beginning of the case, but usually, if there is a problem with the petition or complaint known as the pleadings, then the defendant is going to file a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim. There are lots of opinions in your court, in your law school textbooks where courts are deciding motion dismiss. Why? Because courts are discussing what the elements of the claims are. Courts are discussing whether facts could prove those elements or not. So motions to dismiss are very instructive for learning what the type of claim is and learning what the basic common law or statute is. Now, there are other types of motions to dismiss other than failure to state a claim. We'll talk about them in the context of learning more about civil procedure, where you're learning about these procedures. It could be problems with the pleadings being too vague or conclusory, problems with lack of jurisdiction, problems with the case being filed in the wrong venue, problems with a necessary party not being added to the case. Those aren't really important for your doctrinal classes like torts, civil procedure, contracts, and property. Instead, you're going to mostly be reading motions to dismiss for failure to state a claim. And you're going to be looking for what those outcomes were. You should know for practice, it's not necessarily as important for your law school class, but motions to dismiss can be, when they're granted and the defendant wins, they could be granted with prejudice or without prejudice. And you'll see that in the opinions that you read. So you should know what it means. When a motion to dismiss is granted with prejudice, it means that the plaintiff cannot refile the same claim against that same defendant. If a motion to dismiss is granted without prejudice, then a plaintiff, then the plaintiff can refile the case. The plaintiff can come back to court with a new lawsuit and say, Judge, I fixed it. I've written um a better lawsuit. I've addressed your concerns that were the subject of that prior motion to dismiss. And so I'm ready to proceed. And then the defendant might file another motion to dismiss. A lot of us in civil practice have had kind of um we've spiraled with motions to dismiss, where what happens is you file one and you say, hey, the plaintiff failed to allege something, or there's a problem with how they wrote up this lawsuit. Well, the plaintiffs are smart. They read that and they say, Oh, okay. Well, if there's a problem with how I wrote it, I'll just rewrite it. I will just ask the judge if I can amend my petition. And the judge is almost always going to say, yes, that needs to be allowed under the applicable rules of civil procedure. And so in practice, in-house counsel, you know, when you're representing a company, are usually very smart to question whether a motion to dismiss is appropriate. Because they should be really hard, easy to beat when you think about it. All the plaintiff has to do is write down facts that, if proven, would fulfill the element of a claim. All they have to do is make allegations. The judge is going to consider those allegations as true at that motion to dismiss stage and just ask, do these fulfill the element of a claim? That in many cases should be fairly easy, unless it's a situation where that state law and common law might say, as a matter of law, we've seen this before and we've decided that this particular fact pattern cannot and does not state this type of claim. If that's the case, the motion might hold water. But if the plaintiff can correct the issue with the pleadings and can simply file a new complaint, you might be wasting a lot of time and effort drafting a motion and dismiss because the plaintiff might not even address it substantively. They might just say, Well, I'm going to file a new complaint. But of course, sometimes the plaintiffs will say, No, these are my allegations. I think these allegations state a claim, and they will ask the judge to make a decision in their favor. So that's the potential outcomes of a motion and dismiss. And again, if a judge denies the motion, the case proceeds to the next stage. If the judge grants the motion without prejudice, then the plaintiff can refile it. If the judge grants the motion with prejudice, it should be appealable. So the plaintiff can take that case to the court of appeals and ask the court of appeals the same question. Does this case state a claim? The trial judge said no, it does not. Court of Appeals, I'm asking you to say, yes, it does. And the court is going to usually review that decision de novo, which means the court is going to take a totally fresh look at it. The court isn't going to necessarily defer to the trial court at all, is what that means. So if you're reading a court of appeals opinion on a motion to dismiss, reviewing a trial court's decision granting a motion to dismiss, then you're going to be seeing the appellate court essentially go through the same analysis that the trial court would. The court of appeals will look at the allegations for the first time and ask, if proven true, would these satisfy an element of a claim? If the answer is yes, they could, then the court of appeals will send the case back down to the trial court, reverse the decision, and say, trial court, you need to let this case move forward because these facts could prove the elements. If the court of appeals agrees with the trial court and says, Yeah, these facts cannot meet the elements, then the court is going to uphold that dismissal and not reverse it. If a plaintiff wins a motion to dismiss that a defendant files, so a defendant moves to dismiss the case and the court says, no, we're not going to do that. The defendant generally can't appeal. There are some exceptions and it varies by state, but usually, if you're a defendant and you lose a motion to dismiss, what happens is that you go to the next stage of the case. You move into the discovery stage where you are exchanging information. So that's what a motion to dismiss is all about. Why is that important? As you read cases and as you prepare to write really good exam outlines and really good exam answers. So let's say you've briefed a case and it was clear as you read it, this is a court decision deciding a motion to dismiss. How are you going to use that to craft an exam outline and an exam answer? How could you really do something impeccably smart as you go through that process? That motion to dismiss is teaching you legal rules. It's teaching you what the elements of a claim or defense are. And it's teaching you what facts do or do not state a claim. So if you read a case and that case granted a motion to dismiss, it dismissed the plaintiff's case. Wow. Look at the facts from that the plaintiff alleged. Look at why the court said those facts were inadequate. That's a powerful statement. That's a statement of law that's saying, hey, these facts are not good enough for you to establish this kind of claim. So that means you've got a legal rule. You've got a pretty hard and fast rule that if a plaintiff alleges certain facts, then that case isn't going to get to trial. It's going to be dismissed. So you might write in your outline in the case name, a court held that a battery claim or a breach of contract claim failed to state a claim because it did not allege a contractual offer in that, and then insert the facts. That's one sentence summarizing the key facts and the holding. Wow. Wow. If you have that rule written down in your outline and you see similar facts on your exam, you can pull those out. And you can say, Professor, I see that you've put facts in here that are similar to this case. And guess what? Not only is that a weak case, that's a case that probably doesn't survive a motion to dismiss. Because we read this one case, and here were the key facts and holding of that case. And that case did not even state a claim. Now the defendant might say, you know, it doesn't state a claim because it's similar to this case. But here's a difference I notice. The plaintiff might say that his claim in this in this fact pattern from the problem does state a claim and should go further because here's how it's different. And then ultimately, if the defendant loses that motion, if the plaintiff wins and the case goes forward to a trial, here are the arguments the parties would make to convince a judge that they win or lose on the facts applied to the elements. That's a pretty advanced analysis. You might not be able to do that in all your exam answers. It might not even be necessary. It may not come up that a professor gives you facts that fits in that well. But if the professor does, you will be giving a pretty advanced answer if you're able to mention that. Most of the time, you'll basically just use cases at the motion and dismiss stage to learn the elements of the claim. And then on your exam, you put those rules and elements down when they come into play based on the issue presented, and you talk about who would have a stronger case factually. Your professors are more interested in you using the facts on your exam answer creatively, like a lawyer would, intelligently, than they are in you necessarily trying to. Convey what the legal wrangling could be at the motion to dismiss stage. Instead, your professors want you to read the facts, recite the elements, and talk about how each side would argue about those facts to a judge or jury at the trial stage. But sometimes, again, you might get facts that are close to those motion to dismiss facts that were not sufficient in a case that you read. In that instance, you might mention it and say, not only does this plaintiff have a bad case, they may not even survive a motion to dismiss, just like the plaintiff in this other case we read, Professor. That's a pretty smart answer. If the case is one where the court denied a motion and dismiss, where the court said, yeah, this plaintiff's allegations stated a claim. That isn't necessarily as legally impactful. If you see similar facts on your exam, you know that case survives a motion and dismiss. What you're probably going to want to focus on is exactly who wins that case based on the facts as applied to the elements. Who has the more persuasive case to present to a judge or jury at a trial factually? The facts win cases, not the law. That's a saying you're going to hear a lot in practice. And in a lot of ways, it is true. On your exam answer, the facts win you a better score, not necessarily your impeccable knowledge of the law. But still, I think it's important if you're going to have a mastery of what you're doing in law school to understand the procedural posture of cases. So, after listening to this podcast, you now understand a little bit more about a motion to dismiss. What did we learn to recap it? A motion to dismiss, it's a pretrial motion filed by one party, usually the defendant. A plaintiff could file a motion to dismiss in some circumstances, essentially saying that one of the defendants' defenses should be stricken, but that would depend on the court and the court rules and the procedural wrangling that's allowed in that system. And it's not common at all. So focus usually in almost all instances on a motion to dismiss being filed by a defendant. The goal of that defendant is to get the judge to say, yeah, plaintiff, I'm reading your allegations. I'm considering them in a light most favorable to you. I'm assuming they're all true. But even if you prove all of these, your claim cannot meet the elements of the claim. You've left something out. Something about your allegations is defective. It's a motion that's commonly filed very early on in the case. It's usually the first thing the defendant does if they feel that it's a viable motion because they want the case dismissed. They don't want the case to go on if it's going to be dismissed. I've used the word motion dismiss a lot, by the way. You might uh see the phrase motion for judgment on the pleadings. That's actually how I would usually file them in practice when I was practicing uh civil law. Um, a motion for judgment on the pleadings uses the same standard as a motion and dismiss, but it's a little bit more impactful in that you are asking the court to issue a judgment, which is always with prejudice and decides the case with more finality necessarily than a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim, usually. Procedurally, a motion for judgment on the pleadings in federal court and probably most state courts, I assume, is filed after the defendant files their answer to the allegations. So procedurally, it's decided the exact same way, and you should read it the same way. But a motion for judgment on the pleadings in federal court is filed after the answer is filed. So you file the answer and then you might file the motion for judgment on the pleadings at the same time or later on. And there may be strategic reasons that a defendant wants to do that in certain cases that require a lot of consideration strategically. It could also be called a demur. That's another phrase that you'll see for a motion to dismiss. And again, all the court is doing when it gets that motion is asking: do these allegations in the complaint add up to a claim? I, the judge, am going to assume these allegations are true. I'm going to assume the plaintiff has their best day in court. Could these facts prove the elements that they are required to prove in order to establish a claim? That outcome could result in the case being dismissed. Or if the plaintiff wins, the case could go forward to the discovery stage, to the summary judgment stage. It's going to keep marching down the road that cases proceed upon. So the key takeaway is that a motion to dismiss case decision that you are reading is about whether the case can proceed at all under the law. It's not about whether the facts are true. The defendant can't bring in their facts and their defenses at that stage. They can't bring in things outside of the petition. Their motion has to be based on the facts as alleged in the complaint or petition, as it may be called. This is just a way that the defendant is going to challenge the legal foundation of the claim before it gets close to any trial and usually right after it is filed. In practice, it's something that a defendant will file if they believe the claim is not viable, and when appropriate, and can it can be a powerful early tool to end litigation if there's a fatal legal flaw. But remember that it could be pretty easy for most claims to overcome a motion to dismiss. For example, in personal injury law, there are probably rarely motions to dismiss filed on the basic elements of claims because they're pretty cut and dry. They're easy to allege if those facts happened. And if they didn't happen, the plaintiff probably isn't going to get an attorney to file their case because there was no harm done. So they can be easy to overcome, but when they're appropriate, they can be very powerful. And you're reading them in law school because they will outline for you usually what the elements of the claim are and what facts are needed to be alleged and proven eventually in order to establish those elements. So I hope this was informative. I hope that having gone through this, when you see in your case book that you are reading a motion to dismiss decision decided by a court, you say, aha, I know what this is about. Or when you see an appellate court reviewing a trial court's decision to grant a motion to dismiss, and the appellate court is giving it a fresh look and deciding the same question as the trial court, reviewing it, you say, aha, I know what this is about, and the potential legal significance of this for my case brief that I write, for how I talk about it in class, and even for my outline of my exam answer. So we'll continue talking about the procedural posture of cases in other podcast episodes, but I hope this one was a really solid introduction to motions to dismiss because they are one of the more common types of court decisions that you will read in your law school classes. Thanks everybody. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and we'll see you next time.