Background: for the last 4.5 years, Impossible Foods has been suing my company IMPOSSIBLE LLC (est. 2010) to cancel our trademarks (including the ones at Impossible.org) so they can sell their fake hot dogs to kids to “save the planet”. Their valuation has plummeted 90%, annual sales are cratering, and executives have fled the company as Peter McGuinness and co attempt to “save the world” by suing our company, and others. Neat business model.
After 4.5 years, Summary Judgment is next week.
If you don’t know what summary judgment is, I’m going to try to do a decent job of explaining it in lay-mans terms.
Please note that I’m not a lawyer, I don’t play one on TV and I’m definitely not YOUR lawyer. You should take this at entertaining at best, wrong at worse and definitely check with your own lawyer before undertaking any lawsuits with billion dollar companies 🙂
Caveats aside, summary judgment is basically a hearing before the trial takes place.
Both sides file briefs ahead of time and then each side speaks a bit about the merits of the claims that should or should not be in the case.
The criteria at this point in the case is that there should be no “dispute of any material fact” for items that the judge is to rule on.
Summary Judgment is also called “Rule 56” and described here:
The court shall grant summary judgment if the movant shows that there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.
While this is my first summary judgment hearing – I can’t speculate too much on how it will go – but I feel strongly about our entire case.
It’s my understanding that it can take weeks or even months for a judge to rule on summary judgment motions – so we really just have to be patient and wait for them to rule.
I might be able to share more once it’s over, but summary judgment is usually the last big activity in a lawsuit before the trial activities start to kick up so we will be preparing to litigate whatever we have to litigate when the trial comes.
Impossible Foods has asked to move the trial to March (originally scheduled in November), so we have a few extra months to go once the hearing hits.
I think that’s it. I’ll keep you posted on what else is coming up.
Keep pushing your limits and go do something impossible.
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