What This Site Covers, and What It Does Not
Last reviewed: August 2026
In scope
California state court. General civil litigation. Trial court practice.
That means the machinery: how a case starts, how it gets served, what discovery you can take and how much of it, how motions get made, what has to be attached to them, what deadlines apply, and what happens when one is missed.
The primary reader is a practitioner. Usually a solo, or an associate in year one or two who knows the law and has never been shown the mechanics. Pages in the main sections assume you know what a demurrer is and do not stop to explain it.
There is one exception, described below.
The consumer section is different on purpose
Sued for a Debt and Small Claims are written for people representing themselves, not for lawyers. Plain language, every term explained where it appears, no assumed background.
Those sections live behind their own nav items and their own URLs, and nothing in them assumes you have read anything else here. If you are a practitioner they will feel slow, and that is correct.
Out of scope, and I mean it
Family law. Dissolution, custody, support. Some civil procedure carries over and much of it does not, and the differences are exactly where someone gets hurt.
Probate. Its own code, its own rules, its own culture.
Criminal. Covered at calcriminalguide.com, which is written for non-lawyers.
Federal practice. The Federal Rules are a different system and the numbers do not map. A page here about interrogatory limits is about California, and citing it in federal court will not go well.
Appellate practice. Different rules, different deadlines, different everything.
Substantive law. This site is about procedure. It does not tell you whether you have a cause of action, whether a contract is enforceable, or what a policy covers.
Your case. Nothing here is legal advice and nothing here is tailored to facts I have never seen.
Counties
Where a page discusses local practice, it speaks to San Diego first, and to Riverside and San Bernardino with less depth. Those are the courts I work in.
For every other county, including Los Angeles and Orange, this site states the statewide rule and stops. It does not guess at local practice, because a confident wrong sentence about how a department runs is worse than no sentence at all.
This matters more in civil than people expect. Informal discovery conference requirements, reservation systems and standing orders genuinely diverge, and the gap between what the Code of Civil Procedure says and what your department expects is where motions die.
Wherever you are, check the local rules and the assigned department's standing order. Statewide rules are the floor.
Timing
Everything here reflects California law as of the review date on each page. Statutes change, and several of the discovery provisions discussed on this site have been amended more than once since 2019. See Methodology for how often pages get re-verified.
Found something out of scope that should be in it
Or something in scope that is wrong. Either is worth an email.