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alex here with the legal nuts and bolts video on early case termination it's just this catch-all phrase i've decided to create because i wanted to create a follow-up video to the videos the complaint and the answer if you haven't seen the videos the complaint and the answer there's two different videos one's called the complaint what's called the answer please stop this video and watch those two videos in order this video will make a lot more sense to you if you watch those videos if you can recall i've also done videos on the technical stuff that i'm about to talk about in this video i'm going to mention that as i go through this video so anyway i'm just going to go into it those two videos cover the sort of opening up of the case the and again this isn't going to be like i'm going to use ordinary i'm trying to i'm going to try to use ordinary sort of examples and analogies to explain my understanding as to how all this works and hopefully it helps ordinary people that are not attorneys understand this because i'm not an attorney so maybe that's just something that i'm better at doing than attorneys i don't know i hope so i really hope these videos help you guys because sometimes they can get pretty crazy in the technical sense and i worry about that but anyway in the complaint i talk about how that's kind of setting up it's like opening up a box and putting in all the things that the court's going to look into the issues go in there the targets go in there and by targets i mean people business entities etc the answer is very similar in the sense that it is clarifying for the court what those particular issues are going to be because that's what the answer addresses it admits and denies certain things and it's going to set forth um you know it's like acknowledging or responding to the person who set forth the boundaries of the case so this video goes into the topic of ending cases early what i mean by that is not going all the way to trial and i think that one of the things that ordinary people struggle with is they don't understand that at different parts of the process there are different purposes that are satisfied most of the time an ordinary person thinks they're fighting the whole case the whole time all the way through when they're not that's not how it works so most people who are completely ignorant they know the concept of a jury trial and they know the concept of a hearing most people have seen judge judy in the people's court so they know what a hearing looks like on tv and most people know the concepts like beyond a reasonable doubt and jury trial they know how they know what those things are and they might have an idea as to how they look but what most people don't know is how do you get there you don't just automatically get that that jury trial sort of situation just because you want one and early case termination is the way that cases are defeated without going to trial they're defeated because there's no point of even going to trial now that's a concept that i know a lot of people struggle with they think that the constitution says they have a right to a trial and well you do if there's a point to the trial you have to show that there's a point now a lot of people think that this isn't fair because it's your right but at the same time i think it helps at least it helped me it helped me to understand that i was using up all these other people's time to have to deal with my case and i hope it helps my viewers to understand the same thing if you're going to have any kind of litigation in court you're using up a bunch of people's time attorneys we're they're getting paid admittedly the court which is getting paid but i'm not sure that they're getting paid what they can for thousands of cases that they process and then if it's a jury trial this is where it's really in my opinion egregious if you waste a juror's time because they are paid from my understanding it's not even close to what it is to lose a day's worth of work i haven't looked at the exact dollar amount but if you're having if you're asking for a jury trial you should really take a step back and think is this case legitimate and i'm not saying in the sense of my issue is not important to society because it's only like 20 bucks i'm not trying to talk in the sense of the value of your case i'm trying to talk about it in the sense of the effort that you're going to put into your case to put on a presentation that's worthy of their time so whether it's like a 10 million dollar thing or a dispute over 2 000 it's a question of you having to put in a tremendous amount of work to sort of justify all of these people coming into the courthouse and listening to you i feel like that is valid i feel like society and the government and even the constitution it's a valid request to expect you who's bringing stuff to court to actually put a tremendous amount of effort into showing that there's even a point to going to a trial too many people i think don't look at it this way and they think they're just entitled to it and therefore they should have one and it's not like that you can't just roll out of bed walk into court talk and expect to be it's not fair to everyone involved so early case termination is a series of mechanisms that are available to attorneys to shut cases down well not just attorneys even to you as a non-attorney to shut cases down quickly without going to trial in a lot of times if you're a non-attorney and you're going into court and you're representing yourself and you don't know what's going on most likely this is what's going to destroy your case it's one of these various different mechanisms so i'm not going to talk about each of the mechanisms because i already have separate videos on those topics anyway i will talk very briefly about them and then i would recommend if you want to learn more about it to go in and watch that a separate video on that particular topic and then of course you can always look at statutes rules and case law and then there's videos from attorneys on youtube who are fabulous and go into all kinds of technical stuff that i'm just not going to go into i'm just trying to get people to understand the sort of general idea as to why all this stuff is happening you know when you go in and you don't know what's going on it can feel very unfair but once you start to understand the point behind everything it makes sense and even though it still doesn't feel quite as fair because you're not an attorney and you haven't done this a thousand times at least you understand the meaning behind why they're doing stuff at least it doesn't seem like a completely alien concept to you so the first one is um the motion to dismiss i think it's shorthand for motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted it's a bunch of words but the point of it again watch my video on the topic motion to dismiss the point of it is to attack the complaint or the petition if somebody's filed that if you remember if you watch the video of the complaint you'll see that it sets forth the targets to the lawsuit and the issues the purpose of the motion to complain isn't even to get into any of the proof or any of the who's right and who's wrong it's just looking at the complaint only that's all that's the one target of that specific mechanism and that mechanism is picking through the complaint and it's saying this case should be thrown out because even if everything in this complaint is true you still aren't entitled to relief now there's some exceptions to that and i talk about that in the video emotions motion to dismiss but when when i'm talking about everything in quotation marks i'm talking about specifically allegations so sometimes people will put in something in a complaint like they'll state something that's conclusory that stuff is just ignored by the court they don't they'll decide that later if you even get to a child but they're looking at your allegations you know if if you're alleging certain things and those allegations aren't enough to satisfy the elements of a particular cause of action so like let's say you sue somebody for fraud well fraud has like certain elements to it that you have to prove but in the complaint you have to at least allege them if you haven't even allege them in the complaint like maybe you're missing one of them or maybe you're not alleging it with sufficient particularity or something like that then somebody can say you we should just throw this case out this person has an even alleged element number three of fraud if i'm not even being accused of something why are we gonna bring all these people into court and have a trial you have to at least accuse me of it and so that's what the that's what they're doing with the motion to dismiss they're attacking the complaint or the petition and they're saying that they're the allegations in here aren't sufficient and they can use that partially too they don't have to throw the whole case out sometimes you'll bring like five causes of action and they might say we want to dismiss causes number two four and five because those allegations aren't good enough there's also other quirky things that they can use to sometimes get around your allegations so sometimes you'll have allegations that are good but maybe statute of limitations is expired or something like that and so they'll say well these aren't true and they do satisfy fraud but look here's this law that says that they should have brought that within two years and it's too late now so it's still the same thing it's just a sort of offhanded ninjutsu sort of way that they did it same thing with um not complying with statutes sometimes there's like a you try to do like a professional malpractice something like for like doctor medical malpractice stuff like that um there's like specific laws that say when you sue someone for that you have to add an affidavit from an expert or something like so there's sometimes weird requirements that are specific to certain types of causes of action and they'll say okay you've alleged everything you needed to but you didn't comply with a specific law that the legislature passed and they said you need to you know put the affidavit in the complaint you forgot to do that or you didn't get one or whatever so those are there's also people like you may have alleged everything correctly and you just targeted the wrong person somebody will will say hey dismiss this with respect to me because i didn't do that somebody else hit their car not me so anyway um that's what you're dealing with the motion to dismiss it's specifically targeting the complaint and only the complaint too often people will look at that and they think that the whole case is on the line now no it's not the whole case it's just that one piece of paper that's setting forth the boundaries of the case um and then there's a few others i'll talk about so there's one called motion for judgment on the pleadings that that takes the case out early because the answer admits certain things so let's say the complaint alleges five or six different things and the answer they admit him i know it sounds weird but it's happened it's rare if somebody's admitting everything you can just do a motion for judgment on the pleadings you don't have to get a jury in the courtroom and all that stuff you can just say hey look i alleged them i accused them of doing seven things and they admitted them can i just get my judgment now yeah you can if you want to learn more about that watch the video on the topic topic typing uh motions for judgment on the pleadings um i think those are the two main ones that they use and i believe if i remember correctly that a motion for judgment on the pleadings the answer has to be filed otherwise i mean there's only a pleading singular there's no plural pleadings there and then for emotion to dismiss if i remember correctly that's one of those quirky things that they can do without answering so they can just target they can attack your pleading your uh your complaint and um they don't even have to have an answer on file yet but if i remember correctly there's all kinds of stuff in the rules of civil procedure as to how it works and i think that after it's denied then they have to file an answer at you know some point in time after that um and you know people have asked me people who have done this before obviously and have some experience they've said hey how come you get to amend the complaint shouldn't it just like it's not fair why should you get to you know it's targeting the complaint the motion to dismiss is targeting the complaint so it's reasonable for the system to say yeah go ahead and add the things that are missing from the complaint i mean it's kind of a cheesy move to allow cases to be thrown out because of technicalities that's what ordinary people view it as technicality when ordinary people say hey this case didn't go to trial because some sentences were missing they forgot to allege something most people don't like that doesn't sound like a fair justice system so yes oftentimes somebody will file a motion to dismiss and the judge will agree and they'll say yeah there's some allegations in here that you need to you know they have to be in here or you're not you know accusing them of enough stuff now that's not the opportunity to start lying and bringing up accusations that aren't true but it is legitimate that sometimes people just didn't forget to mention a specific thing and so the court system has that mechanism where they'll let you amend your complaint to include the parts that are missing so that the case can proceed you just have to sort of understand the point of the process to really understand why they do these things otherwise it just seems like it's cheatsy or unfair or strange to you if you watch the complaint and then you watch the answer and then you finish watching this video hopefully you'll have an idea as to what the whole point of the pleadings phase is you just you're just kind of setting up a scaffolding like a wireframe nothing's going to get fleshed out until later and so i mean that's the whole point of that beginning process is there even a case to even spend any time on there's also really weird things that are available in unique circumstances one of them is the anti-slap special motion to dismiss and i say it's weird because i'm not sure that i've ever seen anything else like it i think this is the only thing out there that operates in this way and it's because of the constitution it's because of the first amendment the right to free speech is so powerful that they created a special mechanism that allows somebody to force the court to look seriously at the first amendment principles very quickly and to crush cases out immediately it has to do with finances and all kinds of um i'm going to use the word evil but evil tactics that some companies and people used in the old days which was to sue people when you knew you couldn't win but you just sue them anyway just to scare them because they're poor and they don't have any money and make them just shut up anyway i have a video on the topic i think it's called anti-slap motions finally i can get past that portion to the other portion there is a middle phase the discovery phase um and once your case survives the beginning the pleadings everything's fine the pleadings look good there's some claims that can go forward on then you go through all the research and stuff and that's the discovery phase please watch my video on the topic discovery in that video there is it like branches out into five or six different videos there's all these different discovery tools which i won't talk about but watch that video and and it'll mention all the different tools and you can watch those videos on top of that and learn the scary process but this is the time when motions for summary judgments start popping up and those are the motions that are also trying to kill a case early on trying to early uh terminate your case very early on or your case or if you're the other side their case or whatever if you're just observing you just want to learn how it works in the case those work differently those are those are they seem to have a dual purpose on the one hand in a way it's it sort of attacks your failure to do enough to get to the bottom of what sorts of issues that are going to be decided by the jury or the judge if it's a bench trial and what i mean by that is there is a responsibility on the person bringing claims to to do some work to find out what kind of evidence is going to be brought up at the trial a lot of people think that the point of the trial because they've watched just judy and the people scored this is why they think that they think that the point of the trial is to bring all the evidence up but really with normal formal court systems it's more the presentation it's like the powerpoint the stuff that's going to get addressed is brought up before and that's brought up during the discovery phase and there's all these different tools that people use to force the other side to answer certain questions to force the other side to produce certain documents also subpoenas get issued to third parties that are involved in the lawsuit which orders them to turn over documents depositions are done which is a way to question witnesses before going to trial and so there is sort of this onus on the person who's suing to really gather all this stuff up and um that is attacked at the summary judgment phase if you don't do enough like um mine you have to do the research to find out where all the lines are because there's boundaries and technical details that i'm not going to talk about there's just too much research to do on your own for that but i'm just trying to explain the point of it if you just like skate through the process and you don't even try i've seen people file motions for summary judgment saying that there's no issues for the jury to decide or the judges aside the other side hasn't asked for anything or they haven't asked for enough or they they maybe you have gotten maybe they have gotten a few things out in discovery but those particular things really don't create any issues of material fact for the jury or the judge to decide and so what they're trying to say is we should just decide these now summarily without going to an evidentiary hearing or a trial they're trying to kill the case now because they're saying there just aren't any issues that really need to be discussed at a trial and since there aren't the court should just decide these issues now now that doesn't always mean it's going to work out in that particular person's favor because sometimes there's pure questions of law that have no facts or there's questions of law where the facts have been decided that actually are still in favor of the plaintiff it's it happens sometimes sometimes there's just nothing for the court to decide at a trial and it backfires on the defendant because the court's like yeah based on the law the plaintiff does win so it's rare but it does happen and then there's the other sort of side of the summary judgment coin which is that you thoroughly have done all of the discovery you possibly could do and that um based on the things that have come up maybe the evidence that's come up that the depositions that have been done that there for whatever reason looking at all that stuff all that evidence there isn't actually something that's genuinely there that there's like a dispute um because sometimes there are issues of material fact that aren't in dispute there's all kinds of quirks so like i was trying to say it's another mechanism to terminate a case early it's a lot more complicated than the other ones because it involves the process of finding all the evidence and it involves the process of determining what is in conflict what is there for a jury or a judge to decide to weigh to to weigh the pros and cons of what what is there that's contradicting something else that needs a fact finder um so if you want to learn more about that please watch my video on the topic motions for summary judgment um the only other thing that i guess i can mention in closing that terminates a case early is default if you want to learn more about default watch the video default that's typically just that the other side just didn't answer the lawsuit since they didn't answer it you just win automatically by default watch that video i explain more and then the other thing is case terminating sanctions so sometimes somebody um just does not participate fairly in the discovery process and so the court says since you aren't participating fairly um you just lose as your punishment like shame on you now since we can't get through discovery because you're not playing ball we're gonna just go ahead and terminate the case early just like we wanted but you lose so if you want to learn more about that watch the video on the topic compelling discovery i think of talk about case terminating sanctions in that video so just so you guys know this is a video that i'm hoping people watch after the complaint and after the answer and hopefully it helps people understand why there's all these different mechanisms in place to terminate cases early it's there to save people time it's there to save people stress it's there to save people money it's there to make it so that the person who is suing has done all of the work that they're expected to do to really earn that right to a trial especially if there's a jury you really want to earn that right to force those strangers because it's not just 12 you get a whole like there's this process called jury selection they bring in like 50 60 70 people um that's a lot of people that have to come in and listen to a person and to to have them waste their time over you know a particular litigant who just didn't do anything at all and just wants to talk to them that's really messed up and so the system has all these mechanisms in place to force you to do all of the work to show number one you actually have brought a case and number two you have you know you've done you've done your due diligence you've done your job to gather up all the evidence that you possibly can to put forth a presentation that's the key word because once you get to the trial it's a presentation if you want to learn more about what i'm talking about there watch the video on the topic trial format and even more importantly trial format revisited i hope that this makes sense to people i hope that my viewers agree with me i mean if i was a juror i would be annoyed if i went into court and somebody i had to sit in the jury's box and somebody didn't do any work at all and it was a sloppy case i would i mean i wouldn't mind doing my job as a citizen of this country under the constitution to go in and sit you know on a jury and be a juror but you have to at least try you have to at least bring a real case that has real issues nobody wants to go in there for something frivolous that's just that's not cool and if you don't agree with me let me know down in the comments but that's my feeling i i mean you're talking to the person who didn't even ask his parents for money to litigate my child custody case that's how bad i felt so bad about asking my own family for five thousand dollars for an attorney retainer that i represented myself i just i don't like to waste other people's time it's a sensitive thing for me and so my view of this whole early case termination thing is very in line with that sort of idea that before you you know burden other people with these particular issues that you at least go above and beyond to put the best presentation on you possibly can for them anyway i'm gonna go ahead and in this video now if you have any questions feel free to post them down in the comments below and i will see you guys next time you