Bringing Defamation and Trade-Libel Claims in UPEPA States

The Uniform Public Expression Protection Act has rewritten defamation practice in every state that has adopted it, collapsing the timeline between filing and dismissal into a sixty-day gauntlet that punishes generic pleading and rewards procedural fluency. With fourteen states now operating under the uniform framework and more legislatures considering adoption in 2026, plaintiffs’ counsel who draft on pre-UPEPA templates expose their clients to mandatory fee-shifting under Section 10, while defense counsel who treat the special motion as a standard 12(b)(6) forfeit the automatic discovery stay and the burden-shift built into Section 7. This program maps the statute section by section…