AMC: The End Has Only Just Begun

A Press Release, A Status Quo Order, and a Proposed Settlement Walk Into a Bar...

Fair warning: This post is going out far too late at night for anyone’s good, due to some very demanding personalities on the interwebs. This is an absolute guarantee that the email version you’re probably reading will contain typos (and perhaps some flagrant errors) and will require correction(s) once I re-read it, come sunrise (and better judgment). Do me a favor: download the app and click the header above to read the current version there. This way, I can feel 1% less bad, for each person who does me such a kindness. And that way, you’ll always have the most up-to-date version instead of whatever Jurassic Park Edition remains in your inbox since I inevitably only notice typographical errors after committing to send.

Alright, now that we are over here in the app …. we’re in the app, right?

Right?

Ok, good. Now, let’s get down to business, and rewind back to the beginning of the evening, many hours ago when I was positively a spring chicken compared to whatever I am right now.

::old school rewind noise::

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The Lead Up

After spending the last forty-five minutes walking around the neighborhood trying to think of an appropriate way to begin this piece, I still haven’t settled on one, so I’m just going to dive in. And by “dive in”, I most certainly mean, “spend the next several hundred words weeding out the people unwilling to read for a while to get to the good stuff” because oh, y’all. Oh. My. G-d.

You thought the last piece on AMC was good? I know you did. The parties thought it was so good, they didn’t even dare brief the response, they just went ahead and agreed to the depositions—my presumption being that they didn’t want to have to read my six thousand word disquisition on their two thousand word answering brief. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Although, in light of recent events, I suppose that it’s theoretically possible that they were asymptotically approaching some sort of settlement discussions and decided just to play soft ball instead of hard ball, but let me have my little fantasies, won’t you?

Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be any one perfect point of entry for all that is going on today. There are too many things to say, too many sparkling gems to goggle at, too many thoughts fighting to get out of my brain all at once, like my go-to Simpsons metaphor that plays on repeat in my mind. (Fun fact: back when I practiced patent litigation in Wilmington, one of my mentors whose office was next door to mine and who worked on biotech patents took to gifting me those little stuffed microbes, and my favorite was the Escherichia Coli that I always kept by my computer monitor. He still sits on my desk. The stuffed microbe, that is.)

Explaining everything that is going on with the AMC case right now requires me to teach you a lot of things that a lot of you don’t know diddly squat about, so please, give me a little grace. I know there are also a lot of you who know a lot about what I’m going to say. I promise it will be fun anyways, because … isn’t it always? Because let me tell you, there is at least one aspect of all of this that has me feeling quite spicy. 🌶️

There are so many questions: what did the parties file? what’s going to happen? how should we think about it? what is the weather like? what was the deeper meaning of Ursula LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas?

(Ok, we might not cover that last one in this piece, but oh, g-d, if you haven’t read it, you must. And you should discover your own takeaway.)

Before we get to Comp Lit II, let’s start with the basics, as in, “what actually happened today in the AMC case”?

Settlement, I hear some of you say.

Tut, tut, tut. Not so fast, y’all.

Much more precisely, and to the absolute point, what happened today was the announcement of a proposed settlement. You will note my harping and obsessive highlighting of this distinction as we go through the rest of this piece, below. Because it is very relevant to slowing this train tf down, which does not seem like what the parties are hoping will happen.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We’ve got to back way up and then take the long road down this path, so get your hot cocoa, coffee, beverage of choice, whatever you need, settle in by the fire or the appropriate landscape feature of choice, because it’s going to be a long one. It’s going to be a fun one. We’ve got to go backward before we can go forward. There will be detours and off-ramps and probably a couple of potholes, but don’t put a rabbit to me, let’s go for this ride, it’s gonna be wild.