Lawyer here-100% agree. Calling this a win is super super strange. The only claims that were dismissed were long shots anyway and will just be amended except for extortion.

The court didn’t even find that there wasn’t extortion, just that you can’t privately sue over the kind of extortion claimed here. Which means California could actually still sue over it, just not WPEngine.

Amusingly, the court also refused to take judicial notice of several documents Automattic submitted because WPEngine said they were not authentic copies of the documents.

Overall this is emphatically not a win. They knocked out roughly no interesting claims, knocked out zero claims permanently (the one claim that can’t be amended could still be sued over by California, and they actually might because it’s California), and will have just made themselves work arguing the same claims again once amended.

They will still end up in trial in 2027 or 2028.

The only usefulness of this would have been as a delaying tactic but I don’t see how that benefits Automattic given the PR disaster they made of this

▲

nchmy 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's only super strange if you have no knowledge of who Matt is. Poor attempts at misdirection is his status quo.

▲

alsetmusic 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin, a Joe Biden appointee, denied Automattic and Mullenweg’s bid to strike or dismiss claims including defamation, trade libel, unjust enrichment and intentional interference with contractual and economic relations claims.

The whole thing has been quite entertaining as a disinterested party who has no stake in any of it. I’ve been considering putting a couple of sites back up that used to run on WP. I’m firmly in the static-site-generator camp if I decide to do so to reduce the cost of AI scraping, but our friend Matt sure gave me a reason to replace WP regardless.

Edit: forgot the link.

https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-grants-partial-motion-t...

	▲	_rm 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Plus one on the static site generation. Especially now with AI, it's such a better experience and so much easier than it used to be, plus you'll get the huge performance and security benefits etc. The only use case for WordPress is when you've very non-technical people needing to edit the site's content - a very common and natural situation since most are marketing sites - but even in that case I'd see if Wix could get the job done rather than rigging up a WordPress.
	▲	nchmy 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		you could always use any cms/non-SSG and cache the pages on your webserver or, better yet, CDN. This would essentially be SSG + bells and whistles that make your life easier.

▲

brookst 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Modus operandi, maybe?

	▲	rovr138 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		They still have to do business. Maybe he wants to portray this until the case is seen to calm down users and clients of his companies...

▲

jkaplowitz 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thanks for that informative analysis and extra details!

▲

_rm 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Why do these cases take so long? Is it due to the "American rule", that encourages lawyers slowing everything down to rack up huge billings?

	▲	DannyBee 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Good question, but actually not. The judges do absolutely everything they can to keep these things moving or settle. They force people to mediation, they force people to reduce the claims to get rid of shitty claims, etc. Everything they can to get the vast majority of cases that shouldn't need a judge to resolve (which is most of them), out of court. This does slow things down. To give you a sense of how good we are at that (surprisingly), only 1% of federal civil cases (IE this kind) actually reach trial. Only 0.7% reach a jury. It's not evenly distributed across claim types, but if we could push people to that state faster, you'd get some speedup. Not as much as you think. In federal district court, you will get pushed to mediation very very quickly in most cases. They also have special programs to handle complex litigation, to handle multi-district litigation, etc. From a process standpoint, it's more efficient than i think people give it credit for. Trials themselves are usually quick (a few weeks). But even that volume is immense. In 2024, there were 347,991 new civil cases filed in federal district courts. Up 22% (ie crazytown) from the year before. In 2025, so far, it's back down again, but we'll see. A few years ago it was >500,000 new federal civil cases in a year. There are 94 federal district courts in the US, and 677 federal district judges. The average number of pending cases over the past 12 months, per judgeship, currently stands at 757. Maybe they work slow? Nope - they have, on average, terminated 866 cases each in the past year. So uh, terminated more than 16 cases a week. Each. See here: https://www.uscourts.gov/statistics-reports/caseload-statist... The number of district court judges is set by congress. It has been set at 677 for a long time. For the volume of cases that there are these days, it's not enough if you want them to go to trial in less than a few years. If we ignore the deliberate abuse of things like binding arbitration, etc, it really does exist (as mediation does) to try to get people to stop wasting court time on things that don't need court. Because while sure, you could always say "get more judges", it's very hard to say 500,000 new federal civil cases a year is not crazy. This is just federal district courts, too. State courts get 13-20 million new civil cases a year. While plenty of lawyers play games, it's honestly mostly the clients. Lawyers just get all the blame.