How to write legal pleadings Oct 1, 2012 6:21 pm (PDT) .

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How to write legal pleadings. 1. analyze the issues and the raw materials that can be used to resolve the issues and raw materials. 2. organizing them so that they can be written about. 3. producing a first draft. 4. rewriting through several further drafts until the final product is achieved. Writing is thinking. What are the issues? How can the authorities be interpreted? What inferences can be drawn from the facts? What interpretations and inferences are most likely to persuade a court? The false assumption that facts are facts, and that they can be, or ought to be, described in a just a couple of ways. That assumption will lock you into the first credible idea that comes into your mind, and it will blind you to all the other possibilities. Unplanned writing resembles an irritating and inaccessible stream of consciousness. An outlining method is simpler and helps you write. A flexible collection of lists. Your raw materials (cases, facts, hypotheses, and so on) flow through it and into your first draft. The first draft is the least important part. Your only goal during the first draft is to get things down ton the page so that you can rewriting. The first draft has no other value. Regardless of how many faults it has, the first draft accomplishes its entire purpose merely by coming into existence. Incubation is where your unconscious will continue to work on the first draft. After a while, ideas will come into your head, unexpectedly, and you will need to sit down and start writing again. We tend to freeze when we write because once we put words down on the page they seem permanent. But permanence is an illusion. Rewriting. Will this skeptical person see issues that you have not addressed? The amount of understanding reflected in a good final draft is many times the amount that surfaced in the first draft because the writing process and the thinking process are inseparable, each stimulating and advancing the other. You do not learn the details of an argument until writing it in detail, and in writing the details you uncover flaws in the fundamentals. When legalese threatens to strangle your thought process, pretend youre saying it to a friend. Then write that down. Then clean it up. Organization of proof of a conclusion of law. State your conclusion first. 1

Say the rule next. The prove the rule. Apply the rule last. Along the way, counter analyze opposing arguments. Variations in depth go to rule proof, to rule application, or to both. In one situation, rule proof might need only a sentence, while rule application would require three pages. Each can be explained in a way that is conclusory, substantiating, or comprehensive. Conclusory explanation does no more than allude to some basis for the deduction. A conclusory explanation is appropriate only where the reader will easily agree with you, or where the point is not important to your analysis. A substantiating explanation goes more deeply into the writers reasoning, but still does not state the analysis completely. A substantiating explanation is appropriate where the reader needs more than a conclusory explanation, but where the point being made is not central to your analysis. A comprehensive explanation includes whatever analyses are necessary to satisfy an aggressive skepticism. Rule proof and rule application can be augmented with further detail about the law and the facts, with added or expanded counter-analyses, and with policy discussions sufficient to give the skeptical reader confidence that the laws goals would be achieved through your conclusion. Review of Organization of proof of a conclusion of law. 1. The writers conclusion. 2. The rule on which the conclusion is based. 3. Rule proof begins with an explanation of the controlling case. 4. If you had to make a decision based on the writers analysis, would the explanation of the case convince you? Or would you want to know more about the courts reasoning? 5. A counter analysis of an argument that could challenge the writers rule proof. The controlling case is old enough that it might be infirm, and the Restatements position suggests that the common law elsewhere has evolved away from the case. The writer says that the case represents the sounder policy. Does that satisfy you? Would you want to know whether these theories about policy have been adopted by courts in this jurisdiction or in others? 6. Rule application begins with a sentence that points to the most determinative fact. 7. A counter analysis of an argument that could challenge the writers rule application. What will happen if the prediction in the writers rule proof turns out to be wrong? In other words, what will happen if the local courts adopt the Restatements rule? The writer shows that the result would be the same under either rule. Some more tips and general rules. A cryptic explanation is never enough because a cryptic explanation omits any statement of the rule on which the conclusion is to be based. First, how much explanation will convince the reader that the conclusion is correct? That depends on 2

the readers level of skepticism. Second, how much explanation will prevent the reader from studying independently the authorities you rely on? Third, how much explanation would tell the reader those things needed to make an informed decision? Put another way, if the reader were to go to the books, would the reader be startled to find the things you have left out? Part of your job is to leave things out. Part of your job is to leave things out because the reader is counting on you to cut out the things that do not matter. Do not explore an issue in more depth than a reader would need. Err on the side of making a more complete explanation until you have gained a better sense of what must be fully proven and where proof can be at least partially implied. What to do what you review your writing. 1. For each issue, have you stated your conclusion? If so, where? 2. For each issue, have you stated the rule or rules on which your conclusion is based? If so, where? 3. For each issue, have you proved the rule? If so, where? And do you explain the rule proof in an appropriate amount of depth? 4. For each issue, have you applied the rule to the facts? If so, where? And do you explain the rule application in an appropriate amount of depth? 5. Have you completed rule proof before starting rule application? 6. Have you varied the sequence of the paradigm only where truly necessary? 7. Have you organized a multi-issue presentation so that the reader understands how everything fits together? 8. Have you organized around tests and elements, rather than around cases? The law is, after all, the rules themselves, and a case merely approves a rules existence and accuracy. Cases are raw materials to be built into a coherent discussion organized around the applicable tests and their elements. A mere list of relevant cases, with discussion of each, is not helpful to a decision maker, who needs to understand how the rules affect the facts. 9. Not making the mistake might use five cases to analyze the first element of a test, one case, if it is dispositive, to analyze the second, three for the third, and so on, deploying cases where they will do what is needed. 10. Have you avoided presenting authority in chronological order unless you have a special need to? Present authority in the order of its logical importance, not the order in which it came to be. 11. Have you collected closely related ideas, rather than scattering them?

Selecting authority. A gap exists where the jurisdiction whose law governs a particular cases does not have all of the legal rules needed to decide the case. No local authority on point. We bring a suit based on this new cause of action, the courts will have to fill the gap by deciding whether to recognize it locally. For example, suppose that local authority, precedent or statutory, has enunciated a rule and definitively 3

explained its policy. But suppose our cases facts are on the margin and we are not sure whether the rule should reach that far, and if so, how. Gaps occur because law makers cannot foresee every type of controversy that the law could be called upon to resolve.

Hierarchy of authority. First, there is mandatory authority. Law and the decisions of the appellate courts to which an appeal could be taken from the trial court where the issue is being or could be litigated. Persuasive primary authority, which need not be obeyed, has been produced by an entity empowered to make law, but not by the entity whose law controls the matter at issue. Some mandatory authority outranks other mandatory authority. A constitution prevails over an inconsistent statute. A constitution or statute trumps an inconsistent regulation promulgated by an administrative agency. That is basic civics. A constitution is the fundamental law creating a government in the first place. A legislature can enact only those kinds of statutes allowed by a constitution. And an administrative agency is still more subservient and is allowed to regulate only to the extent permitted by statute. Later enactments prevail over earlier ones. A later statute prevails over an earlier one, but not over an earlier constitutional provision. A constitutional or a statute will prevail over an inconsistent common law precedent. Case law made by higher courts prevails over inconsistent case law made by lower courts. Later decisions prevail over inconsistent earlier ones from the same court. Second, there is persuasive authority. Primary occurs in four forms. 1. decisions by the courts of sovereignties whose law does not govern the particular dispute in question. 2. decisions by coordinate appellate courts, to which an appeal could not be taken from the trial court where the issue would be or is being litigated. 3. decisions made by trial courts, regardless of the sovereignty 4. dicta in any decision The same opinion is mandatory to the 9th circuit itself which is bound by its own prior decisions. Decision by the United States Supreme Court are mandatory in every federal court because the Supreme Court has the power ultimately to reverse a decision by any federal court. Decision of the U.S.Supreme Court are mandatory authority in a state court only on issues of federal law because the U.S. Supreme Court has no jurisdiction to decide matters of state law. Secondary persuasive authority forms include. 1. restatements, by the American Law Institute. 2. treatises written by scholars, and, 4

3. articles and similar material published in law reviews. If secondary authority is both on point and needed to fill a gap in the law, a court is most likely to be influenced by a restatement. Legal encyclopedias, legal dictionaries, digests, and American Law Reports are not authority. Only the true authority is the decision itself. If you cite to a legal dictionary or encyclopedia, the reader will doubt you, and you risk creating an impression of sloppiness. Most courts are curious about foreign precedent when local law is not dispositive. Even then, a decisional court will not be influenced by foreign holdings that are inconsistent with policies embedded in the decisional courts own local law. Foreign precedent and non-mandatory authority to fill a gap in local law. You can use foreign law only after laying a foundation for it. When you define the gap and specify how local law does not dispose of the controversy is laying the foundation. To lay the foundation, first, state the issue precisely. Next, explain what local law has decided. And finally, show how that does not resolve the dispute. Define what local law has not decided. How to select non-mandatory precedent. First, whether a precedent is no point with the issue before the decisional court, or, if not on point, whether a sound analogy or synthesis makes it useful anyway. Second is the quality of the precedents reasoning. Third is the identity of the precedential court. Is it the highest court in its jurisdiction? Fourth is the treatment of the precedent in other reported opinions. Fifth is the clarity with which the holding is expressed. Sixth is when decided. Seventh is positions taken by the judges in those courts. How to work effectively in the library, and in doing legal research for your pleadings. Your goal is to discover authority against, as well as for, your conclusion because you cannot predict without counter analyzing that authority, and you cannot persuade a court without arguing against it. You are already doing good, keep it up. Start writing before you have finished the research. Gradually spend an increasing proportion of your time writing and a progressively smaller proportion researching. Early in your research, snatches of what you will write, a paragraph or two, perhaps, will come to you while you are working in the library. They are worth writing down. You will do a better job overall if you resist the anxious urge to put off writing until you are fully protected with authority. I cant write, I dont have enough. If you try to do all the research before beginning to write, you will waste large amounts of time in the 5

library because you will not be able to know when you have already found everything you need. Writing tells you when you have enough because writing determines what you need. Research, thinking, and writing are not really separable activities. They are all part of a single process of creation. Start organizing the entire discussion as soon as your research as begun to show you the contours of what you will say. Working with precedent. Three steps in analogizing or distinguishing. First, make sure that the issue in the precedent is the same one you are trying to resolve. Second, identify the precedents determinative facts. Do not look for mere coincidences between the precedent and the current case. Look for facts that the precedential court treated as crucial and on which it really relied. Finally, compare the precedents determinative facts to the facts you are trying to resolve. Although you may find policy openly stated in precedent, it is perhaps more often implied though the courts reasoning. Synthesis is the binding together of several opinions into a whole that stands for a rule or an expression of policy. It is not a synthesis to describe case a, then b, then case c, then d and then stop. That is nothing more than an amplified list. The raw materials have been held up to view, but not sewn together. To turn it into a unified whole, step back and ask yourself what, under the surface, the cases really have in common. Identify the threads that appear in all four cases, tie the threads together, and organize the analysis around the threads themselves. The reader cares more about threads than cases. First, state it in an opening sentence that includes the synthesized rule or statement of policy. For example. Although the Supreme Court has not ruled on the question, the trend in the Courts of Appeal is, then insert statement here. Rules guide, but they do not control decision. There is not precedent that the judge may not at his need either file down to razor thinness or expand into a bludgeon. Working with facts. If we say that the defendant struck the plaintiff accidentally, we have inferred what the defendant was thinking at the time. That is a factual inference. An inference of fact is not a fact. It is a conclusion derived from facts. A characterization is not a fact. It is only an opinion about a fact. In court a party has carries his burdens to make certain allegations and to submit a certain quantum of evidence in support of 6

those allegations. Because it is not omniscient, a court cannot decide on the basis of what is true. In a procedural sense, litigation is less a search for truth than it is a test of whether each party has carried burdens of pleading, production, and persuasion that the law assigns to one party or another. Because of the adversary system, the court is not permitted to investigate the controversy. It can do no more than passively weigh what is submitted to it, using as benchmarks the burdens set out in the law. Thus, if a party does not allege and prove a fact essential to that partys case, the court must decide that the fact does not exist. Learn the ways in which the law compels lawyers to focus on whether a party can carry or has carried a burden of pleading, production, or persuasion. The absence of an allegation can itself be a fact. At trial, no witness has testified that the plaintiff suffered any physical or psychological injury or even any indignity. Example of assertive statement of lack of fact. 3 types of determinative facts. 1. determinative facts determine courts decision. If a change in a fact would have caused the court to come to a different decision. 2. explanatory facts help make sense out of an otherwise disjointed situation. 3. coincidental facts have no relevance or usefulness, they just happened. Sort out the determinative facts and treat them as determinative. A partys thoughts do not mesh nicely with the laws categories of states of mind. Each litigant will build inferences from the circumstances surrounding the actions. The law must have a way of judging states of mind, and it relies heavily on circumstances. Circumstantial propositional evidence may cut both ways in two situations. When the same evidence tends to prove or disprove the same factual proposition. Or when it tends to prove one factual proposition while also tending to disprove another. But unless the common experience is crystallized in an explicitly stated generalization, one has no focal point for considering how uniformly common experience supports the generalization. With this generalization explicitly stated, one has a basis for gauging with some degree of accuracy the probative value of the evidence. One method of testing the degree to which common experience uniformly supports a generalization is to add, except when, to a generalization, and see how many reasonable exceptions one can identify. Unless the reader is told how the data support the inference, the writing is not probative. A mere recitation of data is not a proof. Proof is an explanation of how the data support the inference. First drafts are not lean. Rewriting is the discipline of exercise and diet that trims a passage down to something easily read and understood. Transitional words and phrases, can very economically show relationships between ideas. Accordingly. Additionally. 7

Although. Analogously. As a result. Because. But. Consequently. Conversely. Despite. Even if. Even though. Finally. For example. For instance. For that reason. Furthermore. Hence. Here. However. In addition to. In contrast. In fact. In order to. In spite of. In that event. Instead. More over. Nevertheless. Not only, but also. On the contrary. On the other hand. On these facts. Rather. Similarly. Since. Specifically. Such as. There. Therefore. Thus. Under these circumstances. While. First decide whether you want to emphasize the facts or the conclusion you draw from them. 8

This attorney served and filed a pleading alleging extremely unlikely facts without making any factual investigation and under circumstances indicating that his clients only motive for litigation was harassment. He made numerous frivolous motions, including, etc. he has now brought an appeal without any basis in stature or precedent, and he has submitted a record and brief not in compliance with the courts rules. He has thoroughly disregarded the professional obligations of an attorney. Your job is to make desired things happen. Beware of thinking that prevents strategy, such as overlooking opportunities, relying on unrealistic assumptions, and engaging in wishful thinking and other forms of self deception. Problem identification versus passiveness which takes you down the most common, easy road. Solution generation involves temporarily suspending judgment. Workable ideas tend to arrive mixed together with unworkable ones. Judges need more than raw information about the law and the facts. They make decisions by choosing between theories, and you will lose if your adversarys theory is more attractive than yours is. Judges are professional buyers of ideas. A persuasive theory is a view of the facts and the law, intertwined together, that justifies a decision in the clients favor and motivates a court to make that decision. Explains what and why, and is a compelling story that has both the rational and psychological appeal and thus is persuasive both to the mind and the heart. George Vetters 6 bench marks of a marketable theory. 1. the theory must have a firm foundation in strong facts and the fair inferences to be drawn from the facts. 2. built around the high cards, the incontestable or virtually incontestable facts, self-certifying documents, admissions against interest, testimony of independent witnesses, clear scientific facts, etc. 3. not inconsistent with incontestable facts. 4. it should explain away in a plausible manner as many unfavorable facts as it can. 5. the theory should be down to earth and have a common-sense appeal. 6. not based on wishful thinking. If a theory assumes that the parties behaved differently from the way people normally do in similar circumstances, the theory is not commonsensical unless it includes a very persuasive reason for the difference. Theories that impute deceit to disinterested witnesses, for example, are less attractive than those that suggest honest but faulty abilities o observe and remember. Innocent misunderstandings are much more common than lying and stealing. Develop contradictory theories together, your adversarys most likely theory while creating your own. The most easily sold theories are those that are based on easily believable interpretations of the evidence and the authorities. That would lead to reasonable results. That do not ask a judge to believe that people have behaved in improbable ways. That ask for narrow decisions rather than earth-shaking ones. 9

Most judges are fairly astute at surmising how various kinds of people behave under given circumstances. Judges see the world as a place that works well when people are reasonable, rather than extreme. A trial court is a place of routine, and trial judges want to make decisions the way they are usually made and not in ways that would greatly disturb the world. The trial judge needs and wants to know, through those rulings, what the supervising courts expect. Appellate judges are conscious of their responsibility to see the bigger picture and to keep the law as a whole fair and reasonable, even if that requires modifying the common law now and then to fit changes in society. Appellate courts generally presume the decision below to be correct, reversing only if deeply troubled by what happened in the lower court. Theories presented to high appellate courts are generally more policy oriented than trial court theories. Luck is the residue of design. Luck is preparation and opportunity crossing at the same moment. First, open doors to factual possibilities, then find out how the law treats those possibilities and discovery whether there is evidence to prove them. A theory will not spring forth in final form from your mind. Instead, a germ first occurs and then grows as new information is learned and more law researched. Research guides the growth of the theory, the theory guides the course of the research, each filling in the gaps of the other. First isolate the legal and factual issues in the case. Be sure about the nodes on which the case will turn. Omit what the court will ignore, explain away things that would otherwise harm your case. Vividness helps the reader remember the story and its theory and makes it more believable. Imagery makes a theory real. Arguments are the primary tool lawyers use to persuade people to do things. An argument is a group of ideas arranged logically to convince a reader or listener to do a particular thing or adopt a particular belief. Arguments and be expressed or implied, by reciting the facts in a way that suggests the argument. Frame the issues, develop the theories and arguments, adduce the evidence. Complete and concise arguments that can be quickly understood. The judge depends on the litigant to explain what the law is and how it governs the case. A judge know nothing at all about the facts of a case except for what can be learned through the litigants and their evidence. Teach them your case. Brief is a manual on how to make a particular decision. 14 argumentation techniques. 1. Design a compelling theory and back it up with compelling arguments. 2. Include both motivating arguments and justifying arguments. 3. Limit your contentions to those that have a reasonable chance of persuading the court. 4. Organize to emphasize the ideas that are most likely to persuade. 5. Make your organization obvious. 10

6. Give the court a clear statement of the rule or rules on which the case turns. 7. Rely on an appropriate amount of authority with appropriate amounts of explanation. 8. Explain exactly and in detail how the law governs the facts. 9. To the extent they advance the theory, make the facts and people involved come alive on the written page. 10. Tell the judge exactly what will happen in the real world if he decides for you or your opponent. 11. Reinforce the theory with carefully chosen wording. 12. Confront openly your weaknesses and your opponents strengths. 13. Enhance your credibility through careful editing and through the appearance of the memorandum or brief. 14. Make it easy for the judge to rule in your favor. Proof is a well argued theory that compels a decision favorable to your client. A motivating argument alone is not enough because even a motivated judge is not supposed to acct without a solid legal justification. The law usually can be interpreted in more than one reasonable way. You might be tempted to throw in every good thing you can think of about your theory and every bad thing about your adversarys theory, assuming that all this cannot help and might help. That is shotgun writing, and it hurts more than it helps. Instead, focus sharply on the strong contentions. Develop them fully, and leave out the weak ones. That creates a document that is more compact but explores more deeply the ideas on which the decision will be based. A good argument begins by subduing the judges skepticism into a general feeling of confidence that the theory can be relied on, and then, on that foundation of confidence, it builds a feeling that your client is the inevitable winner. Weak contentions interfere with this. If a judge believes that you have indiscriminately mixed unreliable contentions with seemingly attractive ones, the judges natural temptation is to dismiss the whole lot as not worthy of confidence. Motivating arguments should be introduced very early in a presentation, in the first paragraph. To merge motivating and justifying arguments, first, write a justifying argument, then add motivating arguments. The opening paragraph that introduces the motivating argument should precede all statements of rules, proof of those rules, and rule application. Word for word, the opening paragraph is the most powerful argumentative passage you can write. It is worth rewriting and rewriting again many times until it introduces your motivating arguments in the most persuasive way. Use a these sentence to state each contention before you begin to prove it. For example. There are three reasons why. First, second, and finally. Another example. Not only has the defendant violated one thing, but she has also violated another thing. 11

For any given rule, the authority can usually be interpreted to support several different formulations from broad to narrow. After all the work of explaining the law, a beginner might assume that the application to the facts is obvious, but it hardly ever is. Do not assume that merely mentioning the facts is enough. You must show the court exactly how the determinative facts require thedecision you seek. Before you begin to write, make a list on scratch paper of the determinative facts. For each fact, ask yourself what the fact illustrates about the people involved. Ask yourself further what the fact illustrates about what happened. If a fact will seem compelling to a court, that fact will speak for itself. All you will need is a calm description of the fact, in simple words and with enough detail to make the picture vivid. Be truthful in exposing the difficulties in your case. Tell us what they are an how you expect to deal with them. Judges do not trust easily. Edit out every form of intellectual sloppiness, inaccuracies, imprecision, incorrectly used terms of art, errors with citations and other matters of format and layout, mistakes with the English language, its spelling and punctuation, typographical errors, invective and unnecessary personal statements about parties, attorneys, or judges, and empty remarks that do not advance the argument, such as rhetorical questions and irrelevant histories of the law. First and most basically, a lawyer is forbidden to knowingly make a false statement of law or fact to a court. R.P.C. Rule 3.3 a. Second, a lawyer is required to inform a court of legal authority in the controlling jurisdiction known to the lawyer to be directly adverse to the position of the lawyers client and not disclosed by opposing counsel. The system of adjudication would suffer immeasurably if courts could not depend on lawyers to give a full account of controlling law. Third, a lawyer is not permitted to advance a theory or argument that is frivolous or unwarranted under existing law, except that a lawyer may make a good faith argument for an extension, modification or reversal of existing law. You should frontally attack a statute only if there is significant doubt, shared by respected lawyers, about its validity. Attack an opening argument if it has been made by your adversary, of if there is a reasonable possibility that the court might think of it and be persuaded by it. Otherwise, the court will assume that you have no defense to such an argument. But make your own arguments first. You will win more easily if the courts dominant impression is that you deserve to win, rather than that your adversary deserves to lose. A defensive tone can undermine an otherwise worthwhile argument. And your theory will be more easily understood if you argue it before you attack opposing arguments. 12

If you are responding to a memorandum or brief that your adversary has already propounded, you know most of the arguments that threaten you because they will appear in the document to which you are responding. The court might itself think up other arguments not mentioned by your adversary. Even if an argument has not been mentioned by your adversary, attack it if it has a reasonable chance of occurring to and persuading the court. In non-responsive writing, where you will not see your adversarys writing before submitting your own, use this criterion for all opposing arguments. Give an attack on an adverse argument as much emphasis as necessary to convince the judge not to rule against you. How to refer to what the opposing counsel has said, with transition into counter argument. Examples. 1. The plaintiff misconstrues 4 o 1 d 1. Four other circuits have already decided that 4 o 1 d 1 provides for x and not, as the state contends, for y. Follow with an analysis of the circuit cases. 2. No appellate court has held to the contrary, and the few district court decisions cited to by the plaintiff are all distinguishable. Follow with an analysis of the district court cases. 3. The legislative history also demonstrates that congress intended to provide for X and not for Y. Follow with an analysis of the legislative history. 4. Section 4 o 1 d 1 provides for X and not for Y. 5. Although the House Judiciary Committee report states that its bill would have provided for Y, 4 o 1 d 1 more closely tracks the bill drafted in the senate judiciary committee. Both that committees report and the conference committee report flatly state that 4 o 1 d 1 provides for X. 6. Every circuit that has faced the question has held that 4 o 1 d 1 provides for X. Analysis of circuit cases. The few district court cases to the contrary are distinguishable. 4 types of trial court motions. 1. motions that challenge the quality of an adversarys allegations. 2. other motions that challenge the manner in which the litigation began. 3. motions that challenge the quality of a partys evidence. 4. a large catch all category of miscellaneous case management motions. The burden of pleading is a partys obligation to allege, in its pleading, facts that, if proven, would entitle the party to the judgment it seeks. In a civil case the plaintiffs complaint must allege facts that, if prove, would constitute a cause of action. If defendant pleads a counterclaim or an affirmative defense in the answer, that answer must allege facts that, if proven, would substantiate a counterclaim or affirmative defense. And in a criminal case, the governments indictment or information must allege facts that, if proven, would be a crime. In a civil action, a defendant can, before answering a complaint, move to dismiss it for failure to state a 13

cause of action. Because this motion tests the sufficiency of allegations, and nothing more, the record is limited to the four corners of the complaint. The question is not whether either party has proved anything. Instead, the court assumes, for the purpose of the motion only, that the factual allegations in the complaint can be proven, and the court then decides whether, if proven, those allegations would amount to a cause of action. If the court concludes that they could not, it strikes the cause of action from the pleading. If the court strikes all the causes of action pleaded in a complaint, the complaint itself is dismissed and the litigation is terminated unless the plaintiff can serve and file an amended complaint with additional or reformulated allegations that would survive a motion to dismiss. Similarly, a plaintiff can move to dismiss a counterclaim or an affirmative defense pleaded in the defendants answer. And in a criminal case a defendant can move to dismiss one or more counts in the indictment or information, or the entire indictment or information. Because, at this stage in litigation, no evidence has been submitted, lawyers do not describe the facts alleged in the pleadings as things that actually happened. Until it receives evidence later in the case, the court has no idea whether the alleged facts happened, and the facts therefore are described purely as allegations. If the defendant admits, in the answer, an allegation made in the complaint, the allegation is considered established without the need of evidence. A defendant who pleads an affirmative defendant assumes the burden of persuading the fact finder of the existence of facts that substantiate each element of that defendant. The motion should be granted if the opposing party has failed to satisfy a burden of production and if the law is such that the movant is entitled to a favorable judgment. A fact is not material merely because it is logically connected to the controversy. A fact is material in this sense only if it is truly determinative or, put another way, capable of altering the outcome of the litigation. A fact is not genuinely disputed just because the parties have different opinions about it. On a motion for summary judgment, an alleged fact is genuinely at issue only if the evidence would support a decision for either party. If a reasonable jury could go one way or the other, then the case deserves a trial and deliberation by a trier of fact, even if we could make a good prediction about what the trier of fact would decide. What matters is whether it is possible for rational juror to disagree with each other about how to interpret the evidence. If a plaintiff moves for summary judgment, you are wrong if you define the issue as whether the plaintiff should win the case. The issues the judge will see are whether there is a material dispute of fact and whether the plaintiff is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. Remember that in a motion or appeal the threshold rule is not the rule of substantive law that provides the remedy sued for. The threshold rules are procedural. 14

In a trial court, the threshold rules are the rules that govern how the motion is to be decided. On appeal, the threshold rules are the ones that govern the trial courts decision plus the appellate courts standard of review. A conclusory explanation is usually sufficient for rule proof. You should provide more only in two situations. 1. Where authority will help you guide the court in rule application. 2. Where the parties disagree about the proper formulation of a procedural rule. In the library you are looking for two kinds of rules. 1. for the rules that govern the substance of the controversy. Causes of action, crimes, affirmative defenses, other forms of rights and obligations. 2. procedural rules that govern how the decision is to be made. Examples. 1. rules setting out the tests for granting various motions. 2. rules controlling how the court must evaluate the record before it on the motion to be decided. 3. if an appeal has been taken, the rule defining the standard of review in the appellate court. Much time will be saved in the library if you first identify the type of motion involved and the look in the procedural statutes and court rules and in the digests for procedural rules that govern the motions disposition. For any given motion, you will probably find part of the procedural law in a statute or court rule and the rest in interpretive case law. Point headings. Organization of the formal outline. I. Point heading. A. sub heading. 1. secondary sub heading. 2. secondary sub heading. B. sub heading. I I. Point heading. A solitary sub heading is inappropriate. If you find yourself with an A, but no B, either create a B, or incorporate the substance of A, into the point heading itself. Point headings appear entirely in capital letters. Sub headings are underlined in the Argument but not in the Table of Contents. All headings and sub headings are single spaced. In the argument, headings and sub headings are centered with extra margins on both sides and white 15

space above and below. 1. When collected in the table of contents, the headings and sub headings should lay out a complete and persuasive outline of your theory. 2. Each point should be an independent, complete, and freestanding ground for a ruling in your favor. 3. Headings and sub headings should not assume information that a judge would lack when reading the table of contents. 4. The sub headings should be neither too many nor too few. 5. Each heading and sub heading should be a single sentence that can be immediately understood. 6. Each point heading should identify the ruling you want. 7. The controlling rules should be identified in the headings or sub headings. 8. The one, two, or three most determinative facts should at least be alluded to in either the headings or sub headings. 9. Headings and sub headings should be forceful and argumentative. If the court were to believe everything you say in and under that heading, but were to believe absolutely nothing else in the Argument, would you win? You have a real point only if the court can make some ruling in your favor based on what is in and under that heading alone. How to tell your story persuasively. Here is how to paint the picture in the statement of the case. 1. Reflect your theory throughout the Statement. 2. Breathe life into the facts by telling a compelling story about people. 3. Choose the method of organization that tells the story most persuasively. 4. Start with a punch. 5. Focus on facts that would show that you have satisfied a procedural burden, or that your adversary has failed to do so. 6. Emphasize favorable facts. 7. Neutralize unfavorable facts. 8. Humanize your client. Six standards for judging the effectiveness of a question presented. 1. The issue must be stated in terms of the facts of the case, rather than in terms of assumed conclusions of law or fact. 2. The statement must eliminate all unnecessary detail. 3. It must be readily comprehensible on the first reading. 4. It must eschew self-evident conclusions. 5. It should be so stated that the opponent has no choice but to accept it as an accurate statement of the question. 6. It should be subtly persuasive. 7. It should clearly define the decision the court has been asked to make.

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