Last week the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals further clarified pleading standards under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8 in West Penn Allegheny Health System Inc. v. University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. In the 3rd Circuit’s most recent decision in what has been a hot and controversial topic every since the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly , a unanimous bench overturned a district court’s ruling in favor of defendants’ motion to dismiss and held that there is no heightened pleading standard for antitrust and other complex litigation cases. Along with In re Employee Benefit Insurance Brokerage Antitrust Litigation , Phillips v. County of Allegheny , and Fowler v. UPMC Shadyside , West Penn now provides clearer guidance for pleading standards in the 3rd Circuit.

While federal pleading standards have been nothing short of esoteric at times over the last few years, the decision in West Penn fits logically within the 3rd Circuit’s post- Twombly paradigm. In Phillips , a panel of the 3rd Circuit gave its first indication as to how Twombly should be applied. At that time the court of appeals wrote: “The Supreme Court’s Twombly formulation of the pleading standard can be summed up thus: ‘stating … a claim requires a complaint with enough factual matter (taken as true) to suggest’ the required element. This ‘does not impose a probability requirement at the pleading stage,’ but instead ‘simply calls for enough facts to raise a reasonable expectation that discovery will reveal evidence of’ the necessary element.”

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