Stop Letting Defense Counsel Get Away With Fatal Mistakes in Their Summary Judgment Motions.
We reviewed court orders from over 50 California elder abuse cases. Nearly every defense MSJ motion had at least one structural defect. In several cases, that defect alone denied the motion — before the court reached the merits.
Download the free MSJ audit worksheet →The motion lands on your desk. Sixty pages. Expert declarations. A Separate Statement with forty numbered "undisputed material facts." It looks like the Death Star.
Here's what's actually happening on the other side: that motion was assembled by someone who does this constantly. Templates. Standard arguments. Same expert declaration they've used in the last eight cases. And because they've done it so many times, they sometimes stop paying close attention to the details.
Before you write a single word about the merits, spend one hour reading their papers carefully. Not for the substance. For the structure.
We reviewed court orders from over 50 California elder abuse cases. Nearly every defense motion had at least one structural defect. Not a weak argument — a procedural flaw. The kind that, when you find it and put it in front of the court correctly, denies the motion before the judge evaluates a single expert declaration.
In one 2026 California ruling, defense's entire Separate Statement contained three "undisputed material facts." All three were legal conclusions — things like "the care provided was within the standard of care" and "there is no evidence of recklessness." The court denied the motion on that basis alone, without reaching the expert declarations, without reaching the merits.
In another 2026 ruling, plaintiff pulled the exhibit pages defense cited for their care-delivery facts. Twelve of those pages didn't show what defense claimed they showed. For those twelve facts, defense hadn't met its initial burden. The burden never shifted. Motion denied.
That's not a fluke. That's what happens when someone files a motion on autopilot and nobody on the other side reads it carefully enough to call it out.
The satisfaction isn't "I beat the big firm." It's simpler and better: I read it. They didn't. The court noticed.
The free worksheet covers Audit 1: the Separate Statement defect.
Work through every numbered UMF. For each one, ask a single question: is this a concrete fact, or is it a legal conclusion dressed up as a fact? The worksheet gives you:
- The audit table — one row per UMF, one column for the fact, one for your classification
- The objection language for the Response to UMFs
- The standalone brief section you add before you touch the merits
If you find defective UMFs — and in our corpus, the odds are high that you will — you may have grounds to deny the motion before writing a single word about what actually happened to your client's mother.
Get the Free Defense MSJ Audit Worksheet
PDF guide + fillable Word audit worksheet. Delivered instantly.
The complete Defense MSJ Audit Worksheet — all seven audits, including the UMF/evidence citation mismatch, the MSA framing defect, the corporate attribution burden check, the Garibay expert foundation attack, and the reply new-matter objection — is Book 4: Get Past Summary Judgment. $97.