Lesson

It's time to draft Sarah's complaint! Where do you start? Well, the complaint’s primary purpose is to tell the other parties and the court what your lawsuit is about, so it must contain several key items:

1. The parties’ names;
2. The legal claims you are making based on your client’s facts;
3. The relief you want the court to grant;
4. The reasons why the court you’ve chosen is the right one to handle the suit; and
5. A request for a jury trial, if you want one.

You're good on the first bullet (and we'll address bullets 3-5 in later lessons). But what about the second one? How much do you have to say about Sarah’s claims in your complaint? How many details do you have to include? After all, this early in the process, you only know a small piece of what’s been going on inside Goliath Corp. . . .

Fortunately, the rules recognize that when plaintiffs file their complaints, they still have a lot to uncover about the facts they will need to prove their claims at trial. Finding that additional information will come later in the discovery process, which the rules describe in great detail (we’ll get there!). Because a plaintiff will need discovery to flesh out her claims, Rule 8—which governs almost all complaints—sets a flexible standard.

Rule 8 says your complaint should contain “a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.” Lawyers often call this standard notice pleading: all your complaint has to do is put the defendant on notice about the subject of your lawsuit. For decades, the U.S. Supreme Court's interpretations of Rule 8 set a very low bar. The Court explained in the 1957 case Conley v. Gibson that a complaint was sufficient "unless it appears beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of his claim which would entitle him to relief" (emphasis added). Writing a complaint was not “a game of skill" in which some technicality could doom a plaintiff. Instead, the Court intended that the "no set of facts" rule would “facilitate a proper decision on the merits.”[i]

Great news, right? Rule 8 isn’t there to trip you up, so surely you can’t go wrong in pleading Sarah’s claims. Not so fast!  Enter Iqbal, the 2009 U.S. Supreme Court case that threw lawyers nationwide into a tizzy.

Iqbal arose after the 9/11 attacks, and the plaintiff claimed that the federal government was unfairly targeting Arab Muslim men for detention and mistreatment. The complaint relied on the old, familiar "notice pleading" standard and listed the elements of the plaintiff's legal claims without specific facts. The Supreme Court rejected the Iqbal complaint, saying it contained “mere conclusory statements” that the government broke the law. Rule 8, the Court said, requires something more: enough facts to make the claims “plausible” and allow a judge to infer the plaintiff might win. Those facts don't have to make it likely or probable the plaintiff would win, but they have to do more than raise "a sheer possibility that a defendant has acted unlawfully." Under Iqbal, if a complaint does not support its claims with factual context, the judge should not allow the case to continue.

Iqbal left everybody wondering how much tougher the plausibility standard would be than notice pleading. A decade later, we still aren't sure: Iqbal says its analysis is "context specific," and different judges interpret it differently. Some judges don't seem to think much has changed and allow claims to survive on what looks like Conley's "no set of facts" rule. Others are stricter about requiring a plaintiff to pair legal conclusions with concrete facts. What is clear is that when you draft Sarah’s complaint, you want to keep Iqbal in mind and leave no doubt that the facts support her discrimination claims. Next time, we'll see how you do just that.

[i] Rule 9 sets a slightly stricter rule for pleading a few types of claims.  The classic example is that if you claim fraud or mistake, you have to state what specific fraud or mistake you are talking about.  For our purposes, though, we can stick to Rule 8.