Civil lawsuits, regardless of their eventual complexity, all begin the same way: with the filing of the complaint. North Carolina Rule of Civil Procedure 8 requires that the complaint contain a “short and plain statement” of the events that form the basis of the claims for relief. G.S. 1A-1, Rule 8(a)(1). Courts and scholars have often referred to this requirement as notice pleading.
In Turpin v. Charlotte Latin Schools, Inc., No. 86A23-2 (N.C. Aug. 14, 2026), the North Carolina Supreme Court (NCSC) clarified that notice pleading remains the standard in North Carolina and applied that standard to a complicated set of claims brought by parents against a private school following the expulsion of their children. In doing so, it also endorsed a rule that has long been part of North Carolina Court of Appeals (NCCOA) jurisprudence: that documents central to a claim, referenced by the allegations, but not attached to the complaint may be considered by the trial court to be part of the complaint on a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss. Turpin, slip op. at 10. This post contains a refresher on notice pleading and considers the doctrine of incorporation by reference in Turpin.
Notice Pleading Basics in State Court
A complaint filed in a North Carolina state court must contain two things: “(1) [a] short and plain statement of the claim sufficiently particular to give the court and the parties notice of the transactions [or] occurrences … showing that the pleader is entitled to relief, and (2) [a] demand for judgment[.]” G.S. 1A-1, Rule 8(a). A complaint does not need to detail every fact that the plaintiff intends to prove at trial. See Sutton v. Duke, 277 N.C. 94, 100 (1970) (“[W]e conclude that the legislature intended to relax somewhat the strict requirements of detailed Fact pleading and to adopt the concept of ‘notice pleading.’”)[1] At this early stage in the litigation the plaintiff may not know every fact that it will eventually need to prove. The information-sharing process prescribed by the discovery rules—North Carolina Rules of Civil Procedure 26-37 and 45—can help parties gather evidence on the way to trial, narrowing issues and winnowing legal theories to those best supported by the facts. Aside from asking the court for relief, a complaint has one job. It must put the defendant on notice of the events that led to the complaint, which enables the defendant to admit or deny the allegations, assert defenses, and serve discovery requests. As the NCSC has stated consistently for over fifty-five years, “a complaint complies with the rule if it gives sufficient notice of the events or transactions which produced the claim to enable the adverse party to understand the nature of it and the basis for it, to file a responsive pleading, and—by using the rules for obtaining pretrial discovery—to get any additional information he may need to prepare for trial.” Turpin, slip op. at 8–9 (quotation omitted); see also Sutton, 277 N.C. at 104 (1970). “Few complaints fail” at this stage. Turpin, slip op. at 9.
For those complaints that may not provide sufficient notice to a defendant of the events that underlie the claims, the North Carolina Rules of Civil Procedure contain a mechanism to test whether the complaint meets notice pleading requirements: the defendant’s motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted, commonly called a Rule 12(b)(6) motion. I have written about these motions here. A Rule 12(b)(6) motion asks the court to dismiss the complaint when, assuming the factual allegations in the complaint are true, “it appears certain that plaintiffs could prove no set of facts which would entitle them to relief.” Turpin, slip op. at 3.
What does it mean to take every factual allegation in the complaint as true? The NCSC’s opinion in Turpin looks at this part of the standard in detail.
Factual Allegations Treated as True
When a trial court decides a motion to dismiss a complaint under Rule 12(b)(6) it must take the factual allegations in the complaint as true and draw all reasonable inferences in the plaintiff’s favor. Howell v. Cooper, 288 N.C. 71, 78 (2025). (“Moreover, we construe the complaint liberally.”) But this liberal construction does not mean the court must accept every statement in a complaint. A trial court is “not required [] to accept as true allegations that are merely conclusory, unwarranted deductions of fact, or unreasonable inferences.” Good Hope Hosp., Inc. v. N. Carolina Dep’t of Health & Hum. Servs., 174 N.C. App. 266, 274 (2005) (quotation omitted). The trial court will not test the plaintiff’s evidence on a Rule 12(b)(6) motion but will look to see only if the plaintiff has alleged “the substantive elements of at least some legally recognized claim.” Stanback v. Stanback, 297 N.C. 181, 204 (1979).
When a party files or responds to a motion to dismiss and attaches a forecast of evidence to be produced at trial—perhaps affidavits, some types of documentary exhibits, interrogatory answers, or deposition testimony—and the trial court does not exclude this forecast of evidence, the Rule 12(b)(6) motion is converted into a Rule 56 motion for summary judgment:
If, on a motion asserting the defense numbered (6), to dismiss for failure of the pleading to state a claim upon which relief can be granted, matters outside the pleading are presented to and not excluded by the court, the motion shall be treated as one for summary judgment and disposed of as provided in Rule 56, and all parties shall be given reasonable opportunity to present all material made pertinent to such a motion by Rule 56.
G.S. 1A-1, Rule 12(b).
Courts decide a motion for summary judgment based on a different standard: whether “there is no genuine issue as to any material fact and that any party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.” G.S. 1A-1, Rule 56(c). Even though not all civil trials use juries, one can think of this standard as the trial court deciding whether there is anything for a hypothetical jury to determine at trial, such as issues of witness credibility or the weight of the evidence.
A Rule 12(b)(6) motion, on the other hand, “is addressed solely to the sufficiency of the complaint[.]” Wake Cty. v. Hotels.com, LP, 235 N.C. App. 633, 649 (2014). If the defendant includes attachments to the motion to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6), how does the court test the sufficiency of the complaint under the liberal notice pleading standard? Rule 12(b) suggests that the court could decline to consider the attachments. Cf. Rule 12(b) (“If … matters outside the pleading are presented to and not excluded by the court …”) When a trial court’s review of a Rule 12(b)(6) motion is limited to the pleading, it is not converted to a motion for summary judgment. Blue v. Bhiro, 381 N.C. 1, 7 (2022) (presentation of factual matters outside the complaint during oral argument is not evidence and therefore not a matter outside the pleading). But there is another way.
Incorporation by Reference
The doctrine of incorporation by reference allows the trial court to look at documents outside the complaint but to treat them as if they were part of the complaint on a Rule 12(b)(6) motion.
Consider a claim for breach of contract, one of the claims in Turpin. To state such a claim, the complaint must allege “the existence of a contract between plaintiff and defendant, the specific provisions breached, the facts constituting the breach, and the amount of damages resulting to plaintiff from such breach.” Turpin, slip op. at 12 (quoting Intersal, Inc. v. Hamilton, 373 N.C. 89, 108–09 (2019)); see also Cantrell v. Woodhill Enterprises, Inc., 273 N.C. 490, 497 (1968). What is the simplest way to determine whether a contract exists and what provisions it contains? The contract itself! If there is no dispute about the authenticity of the contract, the contract can become part of the complaint if the plaintiff attaches it as an exhibit to the complaint or if the defendant attaches the same to a motion to dismiss. The North Carolina Court of Appeals has stated that a trial court may even reject allegations in the complaint that are contradicted by a document incorporated by reference. Wilson v. SunTrust Bank, 257 N.C. App. 237, 244 (2017).
In Turpin, one of the contracts central to the complaint was the enrollment agreement. The plaintiffs alleged that the private school breached the enrollment agreement by expelling their children for reasons not authorized by the contract and under “a false pretext.” Turpin, slip op. at 13. In order for a court to determine whether the plaintiffs have properly stated their claim, the court needs to know what specific provision of the enrollment agreement the school allegedly breached and what the school did to breach that provision. The plaintiffs referred to a specific provision of the enrollment agreement in their allegations but did not attach the enrollment agreement to the complaint. When the defendants moved to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6), they attached the enrollment agreement, enabling the trial court to review it as part of the complaint without converting their motion to a motion for summary judgment.
The precise language of the enrollment agreement is critical. Notably, one of its provisions allowed the school to expel students “if it concludes that the actions of a parent/guardian make [a positive, collaborative working] relationship impossible or seriously interfere with the School’s mission.” Turpin, slip op. at 11–12. At a glance, this provision seemed to grant the school broad, unilateral authority to expel students. This provision did not require the school to provide notice to parents or an opportunity for parents to be heard but it did require the school to reach a conclusion about the actions of a parent or guardian when expelling students. The plaintiffs in Turpin claimed that the school did not reach this conclusion but expelled the students for a different reason, relying on the “contractual grounds as a false pretext” even though it “knew the [plaintiffs] were being collaborative and respectful and knew that their views did not interfere with the mission of [the] school.” Id. at 13.
The NCSC reasoned that this claim satisfies North Carolina’s notice pleading standard because it put the school on notice of the events that formed the basis of the complaint. If any set of facts exists in which the school expelled the students for reasons not allowed by the enrollment agreement, then the complaint must survive the Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss under North Carolina’s notice pleading standard. Even if it is unlikely that the plaintiffs will ultimately be able to show a genuine issue of material fact at summary judgment or to prove its case at trial, the litigation will proceed past the Rule 12(b)(6) motion into discovery.
Allegations Regarding Mental State
Does any of this analysis change because part of the plaintiffs’ claims involve what the school knew or intended? No. When a claim relies on the state of mind of the defendant, under North Carolina Rule of Civil Procedure 9(b), the plaintiff need not allege exactly what is in the defendant’s mind, but can “aver [intent, knowledge, or other condition of mind] generally.” G.S. 1A-1, Rule 9(b). Put another way, a Rule 12(b)(6) motion does not test whether the plaintiff can make specific allegations about what was going through a defendant’s mind (or the mind of a defendant’s agent in the case of an entity defendant). This question can be better tested later in the litigation after discovery. At the pleading stage, the plaintiffs may have multiple theories about what the defendants were thinking. After serving interrogatories and conducting depositions, the plaintiffs will likely have a better idea of whether the evidence supports any of those theories.
Takeaways for Practitioners
North Carolina’s notice pleading standard does not change after Turpin: the trial court treats the factual allegations as true when considering a Rule 12(b)(6) motion, however unlikely it may be that a plaintiff can prove the allegations at trial. Turpin explicitly allows a trial court to consider documents that are central to the complaint and referenced by the allegations as part of the complaint though not attached to the complaint. The result is that a defendant may attach documents central to the complaint and referenced by the complaint to a motion to dismiss without converting it to a motion for summary judgment.
[1] The court in Sutton goes on to state that “the additional requirements in our Rule 8(a)(1) manifest the legislative intent to require a more specific statement, or notice in more detail, than Federal Rule 8(a)(2) requires.” Sutton, 277 N.C. at 100. In the fifty-six years that have passed since the decision in Sutton, it may be that the federal rule now requires more detail than the North Carolina rule. As the court in Turpin identifies, a tension exists between North Carolina’s notice pleading standard and pleading requirements applied in federal court over the last nineteen years. Turpin, slip op. at 24. North Carolina Rule of Civil Procedure 8(a)(1) and Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Rule 8(a)(2) contain nearly identical language but United State Supreme Court cases interpreting the federal rule require some showing of plausibility in the complaint. See Turpin, slip op. at 23. See also Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 570 (2007) (“[W]e do not require heightened fact pleading of specifics, but only enough facts to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.”) and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678 (2009) (“A claim has facial plausibility when the plaintiff pleads factual content that allows the court to draw the reasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged.”)
