Beating a Summary Judgment Motion Before It Could Land

The situation

Amrit worked as a real estate agent and Hua as an office manager, and together they had spent three years building a second income: a small franchised food kiosk they operated evenings and weekends in Stratford. The franchise came with a supply arrangement — the regional franchisor, represented in dealings with them by an account manager named Jing, financed the kiosk's equipment and charged ongoing licence fees tied to a minimum weekly order volume. The equipment financing balance sat at roughly $140,000, amortized over the term of the franchise agreement, and the licence fee structure assumed steadily growing sales as the kiosk's regular customer base built up.

Business had been steady but not spectacular, and midway through their second year the couple fell behind on orders during a slow stretch. The franchisor's position was that Amrit and Hua had breached the supply agreement outright by failing to meet the minimum order volume, and it terminated the arrangement and demanded immediate repayment of the outstanding equipment financing plus roughly $80,000 in what it called lost future licence fees, for a combined claim of about $220,000. Amrit and Hua disputed the termination itself, arguing the franchisor had first stopped delivering promised marketing support and had missed several scheduled equipment services that made it harder to keep up with orders in the first place. When the franchisor's holding company filed a lawsuit for breach of contract seeking that amount, the couple retained our firm to defend it.

The problem

A civil claim like this normally heads toward a full trial, where both sides call evidence and a judge weighs credibility. But a few months into the case, the franchisor's lawyers took a different route: they brought a motion for summary judgment, asking the court to decide the case on paper, based on written evidence and legal argument alone, without ever hearing live testimony. Summary judgment is available when a judge can be satisfied there is no genuine issue requiring a trial — in effect, when one side's version of events is so clearly right, and the other side's defence so lacking in real substance, that a full trial would serve no purpose. It is a powerful tool for a plaintiff with a strong paper case, because it can end a lawsuit in months instead of years, and it can do so without ever putting the defendant's story in front of a judge in person.

The motion arrived with a strict, court-imposed deadline for Amrit and Hua to file responding material — sworn evidence and legal argument answering the franchisor's position. It is not a deadline that bends easily, and asking for extra time close to the date is neither guaranteed nor free of cost. A party who misses it, or who files a thin, unsupported response, risks the motion being decided on the moving party's evidence alone, with no trial to follow and no second chance to explain their side. Amrit, juggling the notice with a full slate of real estate closings, set it aside intending to deal with it "that weekend" — and the weekend slipped twice. By the time the couple called our office, roughly ten days remained before the response was due, and neither of them had yet gathered the emails, delivery logs, or service records that supported their side of the story. Ten days is workable for a focused response, but only if the work starts immediately and nothing further is lost to hesitation.

What we did

1. Confirmed the deadline first, before anything else. Our first call established exactly how many days remained and what the court required in the responding record, so the couple understood the real stakes: missing it meant arguing on a weaker footing, or in the worst case losing the chance to put their side before a judge at all.
2. Built the evidentiary record around genuine issues, not general complaints. "The franchisor treated us unfairly" does not defeat a summary judgment motion. What defeats one is specific, documented facts a judge cannot resolve without hearing from witnesses. We worked with Amrit and Hua to assemble the concrete record: emails showing marketing support had been promised and then withdrawn, a service log showing missed equipment maintenance visits, and order records showing the volume shortfall began only after those service gaps started.
3. Drafted affidavits that stuck to what the couple could personally attest to. Sworn evidence on a summary judgment motion has to be specific and admissible — vague assertions or hearsay get little weight. Amrit and Hua each swore to the events they had witnessed directly, with the supporting documents attached as exhibits, rather than arguing conclusions in their own voice.
4. Framed the legal argument around the real dispute: which side breached first. The franchisor's motion assumed the couple's shortfall was a simple, undisputed breach. Our responding argument set out why that assumption was contested — if the franchisor's own conduct had made it impossible to hit the volume targets, a judge could reasonably find the franchisor breached first, and that question could not be answered without hearing both sides testify and be cross-examined.
5. Filed within the deadline, with room to spare. The full responding record — affidavits, exhibits, and written argument — was served and filed four days before the cutoff, leaving time to fix formatting issues and confirm nothing had been missed, rather than filing in a last-minute scramble.

The outcome

Faced with a responding record that raised genuine, document-backed disputes about who breached the agreement first, the franchisor's lawyers withdrew the summary judgment motion rather than argue it before a judge who would likely have sent the matter to trial anyway. Withdrawing spared both sides the cost of a motion hearing that was unlikely to resolve anything, and it meant Amrit and Hua avoided the single biggest risk in the case: a judgment for roughly $220,000 entered against them without ever getting to tell their side of the story to a decision-maker.

The underlying breach of contract claim did not disappear — it proceeded toward the ordinary steps of a civil lawsuit, including document exchange and questioning under oath, with both sides now working from the same body of evidence the motion had forced into the open. Amrit and Hua went on to reach a negotiated resolution with the franchisor months later, on terms that reflected the genuine dispute over responsibility rather than a one-sided outcome imposed on paper. What mattered most, though, happened earlier: catching the deadline with time to spare, and building a record that showed real, contested facts, kept the case in the hands of a trial process built to weigh conflicting evidence — instead of ending on a motion the couple were one missed weekend away from losing by default.

Looking back, Amrit described the ten days before the deadline as the most stressful stretch of the entire dispute, more so than the lawsuit itself. The claim had been sitting in the background for months, manageable in the abstract; it was the sudden, hard deadline that turned it into an emergency. That is often how summary judgment motions land on a defendant — not as a slow-building crisis, but as a short, unforgiving window in the middle of an otherwise ordinary case, arriving at whatever moment happens to be least convenient.

What you can learn from this