Remember when Twombly came out in late 2006 and it showed up in just about every motion to dismiss?

Twombly, Twombly, Twombly.

Everywhere you went, people were talking about "Twombly."

You had to pretend to know something about it at judicial functions, there were teleconferences on it, and associates billed incessantly to copy and paste the part of the brief that dealt with it over and over and over again.

It was the "economic loss rule" of 2007.

Now, it seems, everyone is talking about Iqbal:

“Iqbal is the most significant Supreme Court decision in a decade for day-to-day litigation in the federal courts,” said Thomas C. Goldstein, an appellate lawyer with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington.

On its face, the Iqbal decision concerned the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The court ruled that a Muslim man swept up on immigration charges could not sue two Bush administration officials for what he said was the terrible abuse he suffered in detention.

But something much deeper and broader was going on in the decision, something that may unsettle how civil litigation is conducted in the United States. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who dissented from the decision, told a group of federal judges last month that the ruling was both important and dangerous. “In my view,” Justice Ginsburg said, “the court’s majority messed up the federal rules” governing civil litigation.

Even Justice Souter, who wrote for the majority in Twombly, thought Iqbal went too far, what with expecting judges to use "common sense" and determining what's "plausible" -- hah!

Sheesh, they're federal judges, give them a break!

Indeed, just a few days ago Judge Conway of the Middle District dismissed a false marketing suit involving Seroquel, citing Iqbal.

I hate legal trends, and particularly trendy decisions or theories that are untested and which run amuck for a while before things get back to normal.

So now everything is going to be about Iqbal, at least for the near future, before somebody realizes that maybe we went too far and we can go back to normal pleading practices, you know, Rule 1, Rule 8, Rule 12 -- the oldies but goodies.

And so, kids, now you know why I hate flatbread.

I had some time on my hands yesterday, so I went ahead and did a Jay Z-White Album-style mashup of the Congressional testimony on Iqbal yesterday and John Lennon's seminal Plastic Ono Band album from 1970 -- it starts with a gong and a raspy-voiced John primal screaming "Mama don't GOOOOOOOOOO!!, Iqbal stay home" and ends with Lennon cooing to Arlen Specter "Rule 8 and me, that's reality."

I think it came out pretty.....what, was I the only one to think of that?

But can you believe a group of Congresspeople actually got together yesterday on the Hill and discussed Iqbal, which has already been cited 2700 times in federal court:

"The Iqbal decision will effectively slam shut the courthouse door on legitimate plaintiffs based on the judge's take on the plausibility of a claim, rather than on the actual evidence," Nadler said. The bill will be similar to one introduced earlier this year in the Senate by Sen. Arlen Specter (D., Penn.) but will spell out the new standards more specifically.

The proposed legislation would return pleading standards to where they were after the Supreme Court's 1957 Conley v. Gibson decision, which stated that defendants should have "fair notice" of any claim, but said only cases lacking strong evidence should be dismissed.

Hmm, I've heard of that before -- it's called Rule 8(a).

I knew Specter was old, but he's going all the way back to 1957 and Conley v. Gibson -- hail, that's pre-Mad Men old.

Not so fast, says the dude who actually argued Iqbal, who predicts Gloom and Doom, cats and dogs etc. if we go back to the way things used to be just five months ago:

If passed, the bill could raise legal fees for companies. Electronic discovery proceedings can cost millions of dollars and even tens of millions in anti-trust and other complicated cases, said Gregory Katsas, former U.S. assistant attorney general who helped represent the U.S. government in Ashcroft v. Iqbal.

Come on -- you'd have to be a pretty bad lawyer if you couldn't get a motion to dismiss granted pre-Iqbal if your grounds were that strong.

The problem is the nearly formless "implausibility" standard, which introduces a huge amount of judicial discretion at too early a stage:

"The bottom line is that the Supreme Court knows what the impact of this decision is," Johnson said. "Even defense lawyers have called the Iqbal decision an unexpected gift for the business community."

You know, I find plenty of things "implausible" -- Drew Barrymore dating that idiot from the Mac commercial, for example, but should I get to decide everything?

Ok, don't answer that.