California court document templates

Not legal advice. Rules attested September 29, 2026; last full pass August 17, 2026. Verify every date yourself. Read the full disclaimer

Each verified rule carries its own date on the methodology page, all of them September 29, 2026: the date the maintaining attorney last attested it. The last full pass, signed off on August 17, 2026, checked the rules against their official sources (the code, the California Rules of Court, or for court holidays the Judicial Council calendar), with the exceptions listed on the about page. Rules still awaiting sign-off are listed on the methodology page as not yet verified. County local rules are paraphrased summaries. Individual department and judge standing orders are included only where the court publishes them and we have read the document, so assume your own department has requirements beyond what you see here. Verify every date against the operative code sections, your court's rules and your department's own order before relying on it. Using this site creates no attorney-client relationship.

A blank pleading template is easy to find. What is hard to find is which sections your court requires inside the document, because that sits in a local rule nobody indexes. These carry the sections. 376 documents across 36 counties, 611 required sections in total, each cited to the subdivision it came from.

Alpine is the clearest example. Its Pretrial Management Conference Statement has to carry subdivisions (A) through (G): a statement of the case to be read to the jury, a witness list with time estimates and running order, an exhibit list with the proposed numbering, factual and legal contentions with points and authorities, the stipulations in the exact language to be read into the record, agreed and disputed jury instructions, and anything else bearing on the orderly progress of the trial. Miss one and the rule has been broken. The template arrives with all seven already headed.

Courts covered so far

Counties whose published rules have been regrouped into the documents they require
County	Documents	Required sections	Prepared jointly
Alameda	12	15	3
Alpine	6	11	0
Butte	11	18	1
Contra Costa	11	44	1
El Dorado	15	24	7
Fresno	19	32	3
Humboldt	9	16	0
Imperial	7	1	0
Kern	5	10	0
Kings	10	18	3
Los Angeles	16	22	2
Madera	10	5	0
Marin	10	6	0
Merced	8	13	1
Monterey	6	19	1
Napa	10	14	3
Orange	9	25	5
Placer	10	10	0
Riverside	15	23	6
Sacramento	12	20	5
San Bernardino	5	9	1
San Diego	12	15	4
San Francisco	20	17	3
San Joaquin	4	9	0
San Luis Obispo	9	31	4
San Mateo	14	27	7
Santa Barbara	16	28	2
Santa Clara	20	27	2
Santa Cruz	14	6	1
Shasta	5	9	0
Solano	3	18	0
Sonoma	6	14	1
Stanislaus	11	11	0
Tehama	4	7	0
Ventura	13	32	7
Yolo	9	5	0

The other 22 counties have their rules published on the trial binder pages and are being regrouped into documents next. A county is listed here only once that regrouping has been checked a second time, because the error that pass catches most often is a document whose required contents got dropped.

What you get

Two kinds of file per court. The pleading paper templates are the documents you file: 28 numbered lines, the attorney block at the top left, the caption, and this court's required sections already placed as headings with ruled space under each. The reference sheet is one editable Word document carrying everything the court requires, each rule quoted from its own text and cited to the subdivision, with a deadline worksheet and an assembly checklist.

Your case details never leave your machine

Fill in your name, firm, bar number and the case caption once and every template on the site comes out carrying them. All of it stays in your browser, and the document itself is built there too, so a client name and a case number are never sent to this site. That is the same promise the calculators have made since launch: what you type is not transmitted.

Downloading needs a free account. The pages are open to everybody and always will be.

Where these come from

Every rule was read from the court's own published text and then checked a second time by a reader told to assume a rule had been invented. Grouping those rules into the documents a court actually hands you was a further pass with its own adversarial check, which corrected 24 things across the first six counties. Nothing here states a requirement that does not tie back to a published rule: the build refuses if it cannot. See methodology and scope.