Settlement and costs
The cost-shifting machinery, the demands that move risk onto someone else, and what happens after judgment.
The sequence
- Any timeStatutory offer servedNot less than ten days before trial, and it dies on the earlier of trial or 30 days.
- Pre-suitPolicy limits demandIt strips the limit only if refusing it was unreasonable and you can prove the refusal.
- MediationWhat is said becomes unreachableProtection attaches to writings made for the mediation, not only to those made during one.
- JudgmentNotice of entry servedThe 15-day memorandum clock runs from this, not from entry.
- +15 daysMemorandum of costs, then taxFifteen days each way, and only one of the two gets a service extension.
This sequence is the shape of the stage, not a calculator. Dates come from calcourtdeadlines.com.
Guides in this stage4
- The policy limits demandIt strips the limit only if refusing it was unreasonable and you can prove the refusal. Made for the first time inside a mediation, you probably cannot.
- CCP 998 offers to compromiseSix ways an offer dies. A written acceptance will not save a missing acceptance provision.
- Sharing a demand with a co-defendantThey cannot compel it and you may share it. What almost everyone gets wrong is the price: the subdivision that lets you disclose is the one that ends the protection on that letter.
- The memorandum of costs, and the motion to taxFifteen days each way, and only one of them gets a service extension. Hoover and Russell have never been reconciled on how a late memorandum gets excused.