Litigation terms
Summary judgment
Summary judgment is a ruling that decides a claim without trial because no genuine dispute of material fact exists and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law — making it the moment a case's factual record faces its first real test.
Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 56 sets the standard: the movant must show there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact. Evidence is viewed in the light most favorable to the non-movant, and the judge’s role is to identify disputes, not resolve them — a credibility contest between witnesses survives; an unsupported allegation does not.
Why it matters in practice
Summary judgment is fought with citations. Rule 56(c) requires parties to support every factual assertion by “citing to particular parts of materials in the record” — depositions, interrogatory answers, admissions, declarations, stipulations. Most jurisdictions formalize this in a statement of undisputed material facts: numbered facts, each with record cites, met by responses admitting or disputing each with counter-cites. Cases die on this document. A “disputed” response backed by nothing, or a cite that doesn’t say what counsel claims, decides issues regardless of what actually happened.
This is why the motion is really a referendum on fact management: teams that can produce, for any material fact, every supporting and contradicting record cite, write these briefs from inventory. Everyone else re-reads the file under a deadline.
In the fact record
A verified fact record is a statement of undisputed facts waiting to be filtered: facts, cites, and known conflicts already paired — including the contradictions that defeat the other side’s “undisputed.”