Baker Donnelson reports that the US Supreme Court has issued a ruling in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly an anti-trust case which may revolutionize pleading in all civil cases. 

"In an antitrust case decided on May 21, 2007, the United States Supreme Court abandoned a fifty-year-old liberal pleading rule in favor of a significantly tougher standard applicable to all civil cases that may make it more difficult for plaintiffs to sue and easier for defendants to end lawsuits early, avoiding expensive litigation. The Court’s rejection of the old standard is unequivocal: the court’s old formulation, quoted for half a century in numerous opinions of the Supreme Court and the lower courts, "is best forgotten as an incomplete, negative gloss on an accepted pleading standard."

THEIR CONCLUSION?

"For fifty years, courts have evaluated all civil complaints under the standard set forth in Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S. 42 (1957), which allowed cases to proceed through the process of pre-trial discovery unless, based on the claims alleged in the complaint, the plaintiff could prove "no set of facts in support of his claim which would entitle him to relief." This meant that under Conley, a case brought under the labor and employment laws, a plaintiff needed only to make allegations that put defendants on notice of what the plaintiff’s claims were without asserting all of the facts that supported the plaintiff’s conclusion that the law had been violated. As long as some set of facts might exist to support the plaintiff’s conclusions, the case could go forward. But in Twombly, the Supreme Court rejected this standard, noting that it has "earned its retirement."

The Supreme Court’s new standard asks not whether it is conceivable that some set of facts could be developed to support the allegations in the complaint, but rather whether the plaintiff has stated enough facts in the complaint to allow a court to conclude that it is plausible that the plaintiff is entitled to relief. Thus, defendants can avoid the costs and burden of responding to a complaint and to a plaintiff’s request for discovery by convincing the judge that the plaintiff’s claims are implausible even if they might be remotely possible. Conley was not an antitrust case, and the Court’s rejection of Conley was not limited to antitrust cases. It is likely, therefore, that this new pleading standard will be adopted in civil cases generally. "