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In this case, I want to help you understand what summary judgment is by talking about how it came up in a real-life actual case.

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Welcome to Law School Decoded, the podcast that pulls back the curtain on what it's really like to succeed in law school. Let's get started.

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So in law school, you're going to be reading court decisions in your case textbook, and those court decisions will be written by judges during different stages of real lawsuits that happened between real parties at some point. So the parties came to court with a dispute, they filed some kind of legal action, they defended that legal action, and throughout the case, the judge is deciding various legal issues and writing legal opinions. And those opinions are often published, and some of them are selected to be put in a case textbook, or at least excerpts of them. It's usually not the entire decision. So that's what you're reading throughout your law school journey. In many of those classes, some of the decisions that the court will be writing and that you will be reading were at the summary judgment stage of the case. What is the summary judgment stage of the case? That's what we're going to talk about in this episode, looking at a real life example. So before I even talk about what summary judgment is, let me get into the example. There was a case where someone alleged that he was assaulted by workers at a facility. He said, Hey, I was at that facility, and the workers beat me up and threw me out the front door, and they had no cause or justification to do that. And so I experienced a battery. I experienced this intentional tort, and I experienced damages because they beat me up. And so that was the testimony. That's what the person said happened to them. The defendant denied it. The people who were sued and the company that was sued due to their actions said that didn't happen. And moreover, we have security video showing it didn't happen. And so that case was filed. After the case was filed, the defendant, you might think, if if they really have security video, if this really didn't happen, didn't file a motion and dismiss. That's the first motion you can basically file to get a case kicked out of court. But why didn't the defendant file the motion and dismiss? Well, because the plaintiff's allegations were that this assault happened. And when a court is deciding a motion to dismiss, all the court is doing is looking at those allegations in the lawsuit filed by the plaintiff and saying, if these allegations are true, then does the plaintiff have a claim? The court does not look at anything outside the four corners of the complaint with very limited exceptions. So unless one of those exceptions is met in the jurisdiction at issue, then you can't file a motion and dismiss just because you disagree with the plaintiff's allegations or just because you think they are false. You have to tell the court, hey, even if you take the plaintiff's allegations as true for one reason or another, they don't have a legal claim. So in this particular case about the battery, the company that was sued for its employees' actions by this plaintiff didn't file any motion to dismiss. They let the case go on. And they took the deposition of the person who brought the case. They got documents from the person who brought the case. And in the deposition, they asked the person about what happened. The plaintiff said, yep, I was assaulted there. I was thrown out, and this is exactly when it happened, and this is how it happened, and this is who I think did it. And then the defendant played the video of the alleged incident at the deposition. And what the video showed at the deposition was that the person was escorted out the door calmly by staff at the facility. The video did not show any assault. And the person had testified specifically that the assault happened as they were on the way out the door, that he was literally thrown out the door, like picked up off his feet in the process, like beaten up, picked up, and then thrown out the door. But the video showed that he wasn't beaten up. The video showed that he wasn't thrown out the door. So the video showed that his allegations were false. And he didn't really have anything to refute that the video was authentic or that it depicted the time period when he said the assault occurred. So at that point, the company that was sued moved for summary judgment. So all this evidence had been collected. Discovery had closed, meaning the parties weren't collecting evidence anymore. There was a record, which means there was a bunch of information out there, there was testimony, there were documents, there were statements taken. The company then filed a motion for summary judgment, and this was in federal court. So the motion was filed under Rule 56 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. And what that summary judgment motion said was, judge, if you look at all the evidence, there is no genuine dispute about whether this person was assaulted, and we must win as the defendant in this case. Alright, so what is a party arguing and what is a court deciding when presented with a motion for summary judgment? When a party moves for summary judgment, what they are saying is that there is no genuine dispute of material fact, and therefore that party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. There are three components to that. Genuine dispute, material fact, judgment as a matter of law. Let's take the second one first and talk about material fact and what that means. Genuine dispute of material fact. I'm saying it over and over again because you need to know it really, really well. A material fact is anyone that would change the outcome of a case because it could cause an element of a claim, for example, to go one way or another. So in a battery case like this one, one of the elements that the plaintiff has to show, as you know from your torts class, is that they were intentionally touched in an unwelcome, offensive way, right? They have to show that intentional touching. Whether the person was touched is a material fact for the claim. Whether they were touched is a material fact. That is the material fact. So it's an element of the claim. A material fact is often an element of a claim. Genuine dispute, what does that mean? A genuine dispute is one where there is admissible evidence that a party could present to prove the fact in their favor, and so could the other side. So in this case, if there weren't any surveillance video, imagine if the parties were just going into court and saying, Judge, the plaintiff testified that they were assaulted. The defendant says that they did not assault this plaintiff. Well, the court might say, Look, folks, that is a genuine dispute. One side says one thing, another side says one thing. I can't determine who's telling the truth right now. I need to have a trial, and I need to hear you all testify. I need to assess your credibility so I can decide the truth about this genuine dispute of material fact. So when you put those two together, a genuine dispute of material fact is just the parties being able to present a trial-worthy disagreement based on evidence about something, about a topic that could cause the claim to go one way or another. So in this case, this example case about the assault, was there a genuine dispute of material fact? The material fact is whether or not, right, the person was battered, whether they were intentionally touched, whether they were assaulted as they were leaving. If the plaintiff had evidence that they were assaulted, and the defendant had genuine evidence that the plaintiff was not assaulted, the court might say, okay, this case needs to go to trial, because I don't know who's telling the truth. I really have no idea. And so I need to hear you all testify and assess your credibility. What the court would do in looking at all the evidence, by the way, is consider it in a light most favorable to the non moving party, and a light most favorable to the non moving party. What does that mean? Well, that means in our case that we're going through, the court was going to consider the evidence in the light most favorable to the plaintiff who brought the case because the defendant is the moving party. The defendant is the one moving for summary judgment and saying, I think this case should get thrown out. I don't think this plaintiff has a case. And so the court is going to look at that evidence and say, okay, I'm going to consider the evidence in a light most favorable to the defendant. What that means is that if the plaintiff and defendant have conflicting testimony, for example, the court is going to assume that the plaintiff's testimony is true and can be proven, and it will essentially ignore the defendant's testimony. Why is it doing that? Why is the court approaching a summary judgment motion that way? Well, it's because the court hasn't actually heard the parties testify yet. The court hasn't actually assessed their credibility. The court hasn't brought them into a room and tried to review who is lying and who is not. And so say the defendant is lying and decide denying that this assault happened, or say a defendant lies and says, I didn't run that red light. I didn't assault that person, I didn't engage in embezzlement, whatever it is. Without a trial, it wouldn't be fair for the court to take the defendant at their word, right? It would be really unfair. So instead, the court will say, okay, if you move for summary judgment, I'm going to look at the other party's evidence and I'm going to ask, can they prove their case in their best day in court, looking at the evidence in the record that's been gathered from discovery? How does that apply in a case like the one we're going through as an example with the video? Well, here's what the court actually did. The court said, okay, on one hand, I've got this plaintiff who's testifying I was assaulted. And the plaintiff provides details, they say when it happened, they say how it happened. On the other hand, the defendant has presented this video, and that video tends to show that this person was not assaulted in the interaction that they described and at the time that they said they were assaulted. No, the video shows them calmly walking out, escorted, untouched, nothing happening that could lead to a claim. And so as I look at that, I've got the plaintiff's testimony on one hand, and I've got this video on the other hand, and I have to take the evidence in a light most favorable to the plaintiff. That means often the plaintiff would win and we'd take their word for it. But here, is there a genuine dispute about the material fact of whether this plaintiff was assaulted? Is there a genuine dispute about that based on this evidence that I'm looking at? Is there a dispute so genuine that we need to have a trial? What do you think the court said? Did the court allow the case to go to trial or not? The court said no. This case will not go to trial. I'm going to grant summary judgment for the defendant. What did that mean? It meant the court was saying there is no genuine dispute based on the evidence I'm looking at about whether this plaintiff says and actually was assaulted. The plaintiff says they were assaulted, but they said it happened at a particular time in a particular place, and we have surveillance video of that particular time and that particular place. That surveillance video shows beyond any genuine dispute that the plaintiff was not assaulted at that time. No, the video shows that the plaintiff walked out of the building untouched. The plaintiff's testimony cannot create a genuine dispute about what happened. So even though I'm supposed to take the evidence in a light most favorable to the plaintiff, here that evidence is not enough to overcome summary judgment. Even though I have to take the evidence in a light most favorable to them, here there is irrefutable evidence showing that the plaintiff was not assaulted on their way out of the building. Now, what if the facts were a little bit different? What if the defendant played that video at the deposition for the plaintiff, and the plaintiff looked at it and said, Oh no, that's a different day. That's not when the assault happened. Or oh no, that assault happened right before this video was taken. Or what if the plaintiff said, That's not me? That isn't me in that video. Well, how would those facts affect the outcome of the summary judgment motion? Those facts would tend to prove that the plaintiff could have been assaulted at another time. The plaintiff could say, Hey, this video doesn't show anything. The defendant might say, No, wait a minute, you've told us before that this video, you know, shows you the time when you were assaulted, or we don't have any other video of you ever entering our premises. The plaintiff might say, No, no, no, I was there another day. You just must have lost the video or something. All of those kinds of facts might do more to create a genuine dispute about a material fact. All of those facts could lead to the plaintiff overcoming the summary judgment motion. If the plaintiff wins that summary judgment motion, do they win the case? No, they do not. The case simply goes to trial for a court or a jury, a judge to decide who's telling the truth, who's credible, and who's not. After a defendant wins a summary judgment motion, the plaintiff can appeal that. The plaintiff can take that decision to a court of appeal and say, I think the trial court should not have dismissed my case at the summary judgment stage. That decision was wrong. In that instance, the appellate court is going to review the trial court's summary judgment decision de novo. What that means is that the appellate court is going to look at the evidence anew. The appellate court isn't going to defer to the trial court at all or say, oh, we think the trial court's reasoning was really important here. No, the appellate court is just going to look at the evidence and ask, should the defendant have won summary judgment? So it's going to look at the evidence a lot like the trial court would. Why are summary judgment decisions in that procedural posture important? Well, they are a key part of the case because the parties have presented all their evidence and the court is going to decide at this stage whether the case goes to trial or not. Many cases, many cases have summary judgment motions filed in them. Many civil cases, it's a key, important part of the case. Parties who are on the defense side want to file a summary judgment motion because they don't want the case to go to trial. But by the way, plaintiffs can and do file summary judgment motions too, and they can win them. So plaintiffs can file motions and say there is no genuine dispute about whether, you know, this defendant breached a contract. We had a contract, the defendant admits it, the defendant didn't perform, so the facts are clear. I'm entitled to summary judgment, I'm entitled to win this case. We don't need it to go to trial. Or maybe we just need it to go to trial on what my damages are. That's really the only issue that I need to present more evidence on that we have a genuine dispute about. That could happen. There's all sorts of different scenarios like that that you should be ready for. Summary judgment motions are informative in law school because the court opinions can be really thorough, really well written, really well thought out, and explain legal rules impeccably clearly. So that's why you find them in a lot of different case textbooks, is because the judges are having to go through a lot of evidence, summarize it really, really well, and then decide does this case get thrown out or does it keep going forward? And the courts are deciding how does this evidence apply to the material facts or the elements of the claim? So the court has to list out what the elements are, and then the court has to list out the facts, and then it has to apply the facts to the elements and ask: if a party proved these facts, could they win the case? The court might say, no, there's no genuine dispute of material fact. These facts simply will not prove a case as a matter of law. Remember I said that earlier? As a matter of law, what the court is saying is, hey, this dispute legally is not sufficient to get to a trial. What the court is saying is I'm going to grant summary judgment and dismiss this case before we get to a trial. And that's impactful. That's an informative precedent when a court decides whether to grant or deny a summary judgment motion. If the court grants the summary judgment motion, it's telling the world, hey, if you bring a case to this court with these facts, it's not going to get through. It's not going to get to trial. Eventually, it's going to get dismissed because it's not enough. So in the case I just mentioned, parties now know that their oral testimony cannot create a genuine dispute about what video shows about an event, right? At least under those facts that I gave. Maybe the hypotheticals could change it that I went over. But parties know that if you come to court and you say I was assaulted and a video shows otherwise at that exact moment, at that exact time and place, then you will not be able to proceed to trial and ask a jury to award you damages for that assault. That's an impactful precedent for people who allege that they have experienced injuries and for defendants who are defending those cases. Now, if this court, if this jurisdiction had said, hey, we think the plaintiff's testimony was enough in that case to create a genuine dispute as to whether they were assaulted, or maybe the facts were a little bit different than what I said. Maybe the assault happened at a different time, or the video didn't show the right person. Could be all sorts of disputes. But the court could look at that evidence and say, we're going to deny this summary judgment motion. We think that this evidence is enough to go to trial. Well, that's really important to know legally if you're a practitioner, because of course you want to bring cases that have enough evidence to go to a trial. And if you're a defendant, you want to know if the case is likely going to be dismissed before trial at summary judgment or whether it needs to go to trial. And so that's a process in the case that you work through. And legally, as you're reading these cases, it's informative for you, the law student, to know does this evidence add up to a claim or not? Now, when you're writing your law school exam answer, you aren't necessarily focusing on whether the parties in the problem are going to get summary judgment. That's not something you're really going to be too concerned about. You're more worried about the persuasive strength of the case based on the facts presented and the elements of the claim. But let's just think for a moment about the hypothetical that we went over in this podcast episode and how it might play out if you were given that hypothetical on the exam. And let's say you had actually read the court opinion that I've been talking about. You read a court opinion that said, hey, when a party brings a battery case, here are the elements. And I'm looking at this battery case about someone who was thrown out of an establishment at the summary judgment stage, and I'm looking at the evidence. And what I have is a plaintiff. Testifying that they were battered, but I have video surveillance showing that they were not battered, that proving that they were not battered. So you've read that case in your class. And on your exam, you're presented with a similar factual scenario. So imagine your exam problem is telling you a battery potentially happened. Someone believes that they were battered. They're going to say that they were battered. They could be the plaintiff in a battery case. However, the exam problem goes on further to tell you someone checks the video surveillance of the area at the time they say they were battered, and it doesn't show any battery occurring. In fact, it shows something completely different and shows an absence of any battery. Okay, well, use common sense. That's similar to the case you read in class. So what would you do? You would say one issue is whether that particular plaintiff may have a battery claim against one or more defendants. And you name who those people or organizations are. And then you say, here's the rule about a battery, here's the elements of a battery claim, whatever it is, however that was presented to you in your class. Then you go on to say, well, this plaintiff may not have a very strong battery claim. And the reason why is because the problem says we checked the surveillance camera, and there is no indication of a battery taking place. Therefore, it's unlikely that a judge or jury hearing the evidence would conclude that a battery took place. Now, you might mention at the end of that exam answer, by the way, this is really similar to the case we read in class where a party testified that a battery happened, but video surveillance indicated it did not. That case did not even survive summary judgment because there was no genuine issue of fact as to whether a battery occurred, even taking the plaintiff's evidence as true because video evidence definitively proved that the battery did not happen. Okay, so you might say that. You might drop that in there. That's a pretty darn advanced exam answer. I don't think that you really need to go that deep into the course material to get an A in your class. I got A's in lots of classes without dropping that kind of information about the procedural posture of cases. However, if you have that advanced of an understanding of what you're learning about in summary judgment cases and you're able to recall and compare that to the facts that the professor is presenting to you in the exam, that may help you present an even stronger answer, a truly exceptional answer that shows a remarkably knowledgeable grasp of the course material. So consider that as you are preparing for your exam, as you're preparing your outlines. If a case is a summary judgment case, maybe for each case that you read that's a summary judgment one, you're able to do a one-sentence rule statement for your outline that says, in XYZ case, a plaintiff's claim did not survive summary judgment where the plaintiff claimed a battery happened, but surveillance video showed it did not. That is a rule statement that you could just pluck onto your exam. Now, of course, you're going to want to put the actual case name in. You might put you know the names of parties and what their role was in the case to make that a better rule statement. But that's an example of how you might leverage some summary judgment decisions extremely well, but you don't necessarily need to. Usually, these cases are being presented to you for the purpose of learning things like what are the elements of the claim? And how are individual elements of those claims interpreted and analyzed by courts at different procedural postures of the case. And so that particular case I just presented you in real life, we were analyzing when does a plaintiff show that an intentional touching occurred such that they can establish a battery claim, because that's an essential element. So it's a case that you'll put under that issue in your outline. And maybe you'll be able to grasp the material so well that you can tell your professor, hey, as a matter of law in this case, this case did not survive summary judgment because this was the evidence. And this evidence was not enough to fulfill that particular element for this or that reason. Then you compare that case to what you're seeing in the exam problem because what's more important on your exam than knowing the law you learned is knowing how to talk about the facts in the problem. Use the context clues, use the characters presented to you and what you learn about them. We'll talk about all this in other podcast episodes, but you're going to want to analyze whether the parties in that problem have a strong case or not. Of course, if the problem describes a scenario where a party has way more evidence of the battery than the case where I got summary judgment as the defendant in the case I described to you, in that instance, you are going to want to make that clear. Hey, it looks like this plaintiff has a strong case for battery. And here's why. Here are the elements and here are the facts proving each element. And again, then you use the facts that the defendant has to argue, hey, here's what the defendant would say to a jury to try to win the case on their end. And here's the elements that the defendant should challenge. Maybe those are intentional touching, maybe not. So it's just important to understand that a summary judgment posture of a case happens usually after the parties have litigated the case for a while. It sometimes takes a year or more to get to summary judgment. And at that point, the parties have made allegations in court in the complaint that they filed. The defendants have filed answers, admitting or denying those allegations. The parties go through the discovery process where they exchange a bunch of information, documents, interrogatory answers, materials, electronically stored information, and they exchange and take deposition testimony to hear what each other have to say about the facts of the case. After all that is usually when summary judgment comes up. Often it's the defendant moving for summary judgment, but it could be the plaintiff moving for the summary judgment. And what the moving party is saying is, judge, I don't think there is a genuine dispute of material fact as to this or that required element of a claim or defense at issue in this case. So the court should just issue a judgment as a matter of law on that and not have the claim presented at trial to the court and to a jury potentially. Instead, the court should say, hey, there really isn't a genuine dispute created by the evidence about that material fact. The fact has to be material. It has to potentially change the outcome of the case. Inconsequential facts that don't matter aren't going to tip the scales when it comes to winning or losing a summary judgment motion. So say there's a dispute in that case I mentioned about how to spell the defendant's name, right? Maybe the plaintiff spells it one way, the defendant spells it another way. That's a dispute, and it may be a genuine dispute. But is it about a material fact that would change the outcome of the case because it would change how a jury could decide the elements of the case being true or and proven or false and not proven? No, of course not. So that isn't a material fact. A genuine dispute about the material fact means that the parties have both introduced evidence that could prove the fact in their favor and against their opponent. If a plaintiff introduces evidence showing that the material elements could go their way at trial, that a jury could find for them based on the evidence, in that case, the plaintiff should survive summary judgment if they are the non-moving party, because the court is always going to take the facts in a light most favorable to the non-moving party. So that's an example of how summary judgment works. I hope that thinking about summary judgment in a real-life example like I've presented will help you in two ways in law school. One, when you read cases in any doctrinal class, I hope you a bit better understand what procedural posture the case is in when the court is deciding a summary judgment motion and you're reading a summary judgment court opinion. I hope you understand where the case is a little bit better, and I hope you understand a bit better what the implications are of that decision. The court isn't saying one side wins or loses, usually. Instead, what the court is saying is whether there is a genuine dispute of material fact about a potential issue in the case, one or more issues. If the moving party wins the summary judgment motion, then that issue no longer goes forward to trial. Potentially an entire claim won't go forward to trial. If the moving party loses their summary judgment motion, all it means is that that claim will go forward. Both parties, by the way, could file summary judgment motions on the same issue. So in the example I gave in this podcast about the video surveillance, the plaintiff could file a summary judgment motion and say, hey, as I view the evidence, there's no genuine dispute of material fact about whether I win this battery case. I win the battery case because I have definitively proven using the non-moving party's evidence and the light most favorable to them that a battery occurred. So for example, let's say the defendant testified in that case and testified a deposition and said, Yep, I committed the battery. I intentionally touched that person. There was no justification for it. There's no defense. I hurt them. I shouldn't have done it. The plaintiff might file a summary judgment motion and say, I win. I have proven through these depositions that a battery occurred. There's no genuine dispute about that, and it's a material fact. So we don't need a trial. The court can just enter a judgment in my favor and let's start talking about damages. Let's start talking about what I'm owed. If there's no genuine dispute about what the amount of damages are, that can also be an issue for summary judgment. So I've moved for summary judgment as a plaintiff in contract cases where I say, hey, court, there's there's no genuine issue of material fact. The defendant had a contract with me, they breached the contract, and the amount of damages is pretty certain. This is the value of the contract. And so that's the amount that the court should award. And I've I've won those motions when there is no genuine dispute of material fact about the elements of a contract claim. So I hope number one, this helps you understand a little bit more about summary judgment decisions when you face off with them as you read through your case textbook. Number two, I hope this might help you in particular with civil procedure, because summary judgment under Rule 56, the federal rules of civil procedure, is probably the one that attorneys know best. It is usually a battle that is litigated in most cases, because one party or both will believe summary judgment is proper in their favor. They don't want to go to trial. They don't want to sit there all day, all week, maybe for a month trying a case. No, they want to win just by submitting a motion. And summary judgment can allow either party to do that. And so it can be a powerful tool. In another sense, it can be a powerful and dangerous tool because it could dismiss someone's claim before they have a chance to present it at trial. So if there's a genuine dispute of material fact, a court will not grant a summary judgment motion. The court will say, we need this to go to trial. And so as a result of that, the motion is important to the procedural posture of cases. So I hope this was a really good overview of summary judgment through the lens of an actual example. Thanks so much for listening. We will see you next time.

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That's it for today's episode of Law School Decoded. Visit us online at Lawschooldecoded.com and make sure to subscribe. Until next time, keep decoding the law one step at a time.