Summary judgment is a pretrial ruling by the court that can dispose of all or some of the issues in a case. There must not be any fact issues, and the law that applies must favor the party asking for the summary ruling. The recent Woods summary judgment decision is a good example of the Court being asked to make a strictly legal determination of whether a duty was owed based on the given facts in the record. In Woods, the Montana Supreme Court decided that under MCA 27-1-1102, there was no duty owed by the mental health professional.
