Lewis v. Hilltop Group, L.P.

Background

Plaintiffs Samuel Lewis and Patricia Olison filed a class action complaint alleging that Defendants failed to keep their senior community safe and refused reasonable accommodation requests. The complaint asserted claims under the Fair Employment and Housing Act, the Fair Housing Act, California Government Code § 11135, the Disabled Persons Act, and the Unruh Act, along with claims for breach of the warranty of habitability and negligence.

Defendants answered the complaint and listed seventeen affirmative defenses. An affirmative defense is a legal defense that accepts or assumes the opposing party’s allegations for purposes of raising another reason the claim should not succeed. Plaintiffs moved under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(f) to strike all seventeen defenses.

Legal Standard

Rule 12(f) permits a court to strike an insufficient defense or matter that is redundant, immaterial, impertinent, or scandalous. The court explained that an affirmative defense is sufficiently pleaded if it gives the opposing party fair notice of the defense. Motions to strike are disfavored, and the court may not use such a motion to resolve disputed and substantial factual or legal issues.

The court reconsidered its prior view and held that the heightened pleading standard from Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal does not apply to affirmative defenses. Instead, the defense must meet the fair-notice standard. The court concluded that the defendants’ defenses were not so clearly insufficient that striking them would be warranted, and it declined to strike them merely because they were allegedly stated in boilerplate or conclusory terms.

Rulings

The court denied the motion to the extent it was based on the defendants’ failure to plead sufficient facts.

The court struck the following defenses without leave to amend:

- The First Affirmative Defense, “Failure to State a Cause of Action”; - The Thirteenth Affirmative Defense, “Reasonable Accommodation”; - The Fourteenth Affirmative Defense, “Business Necessity”; - The Fifteenth Affirmative Defense, “Legal Necessity”; and - The Seventeenth Affirmative Defense, “Additional Unknow Defenses/Reservation of Rights.”

The court concluded that “Failure to State a Cause of Action” and “Reasonable Accommodation” attacked whether Plaintiffs had proved their initial case rather than serving as affirmative defenses. It also held that reserving the right to assert unspecified defenses later was not itself an affirmative defense. The court found that the “Business Necessity” and “Legal Necessity” defenses did not apply to the claims at issue. Although the reservation-of-rights defense was stricken, the court stated that Defendants were not precluded from asserting additional affirmative defenses later.

The court therefore granted in part and denied in part Plaintiffs’ motion to strike and otherwise denied the motion in its entirety.