Kern County trial document templates
Not legal advice. Rules checked against the code on August 20, 2026. Verify every date yourself. Read the full disclaimer
Core CCP rules were checked against Westlaw (via CoCounsel legal research) on August 20, 2026. 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.
5 documents, 10 required sections, taken from Superior Court of California, County of Kern’s own published rules and read 2026-09-14. Each one downloads as California pleading paper with this court’s required sections already placed, so the document cannot silently omit one.
A blank template is easy to find anywhere. What is hard to find is which sections this court requires inside the document, because that lives in a local rule nobody indexes. Every heading below is cited to the subdivision it came from, and the rule’s own sentence prints beside it in the reference sheet so you can check your work.
Download these as templates
The reference sheet below carries everything this court requires, each rule quoted from its own text and cited to the subdivision. The pleading paper templates are temporarily down while the line numbering is rebuilt, because the rail did not line up with the body text and a pleading whose lines cannot be cited is worse than no template at all.
Your details optional, blanks print as ruled lines
These stay in this browser. They are not sent anywhere, and the file is built on this machine, so a case name never reaches our server.
- Final Case Management Documents
- Requested and Relevant Jury Instructions (Unlawful Detainer Jury Trial)
- Written Motions, Including Motions in Limine (Unlawful Detainer Jury Trial)
- Requested Jury Instructions
- Proposed Verdict Forms
What each document has to carry
Final Case Management Documents
Prepared by each party. Filed and served, at least 5 days before any final case management conference set in advance of the day of trial, and no less than 15 days before the trial date, whichever date is earlier. Applies to general civil trials in Kern County (the jury instruction and statement of the case items reach cases tried to a jury). Kern Local Rule 3.9(a) (Final Case Management Conference)
- Proposed jury instructions
- The party's proposed jury instructions
- Standard CACI instructions, which the parties are invited to request on the court's Instruction Request form
- Any standard instruction not carried on the Instruction Request form, and any special instruction the party will request, submitted as subdivision (a)(1) directs rather than by the form
- Motions in limine
- All motions in limine in written form
- Any points and authorities in support of those motions
- Witness list
- A list of all witnesses the party intends to call in his or her case in chief
- Generic statement of the case to be read to the jury
- A proposed generic statement of the case, drafted to be read to the jury at the beginning of the case
- Exhibit list, and the exhibits themselves where a conference is set
- A list of all photographs, documents, physical objects or other tangible things the party intends to have marked as an exhibit and introduced in evidence at the time of trial
- In matters where a final case management conference has been set, the listed items themselves, produced as subdivision (a)(5) directs
- Cover sheet listing the documents submitted
- A single cover sheet over all final case management documents
- A list on that cover sheet of the documents submitted
- Format conforming to California Rules of Court, rule 3.1110
Requested and Relevant Jury Instructions (Unlawful Detainer Jury Trial)
Prepared by not stated. Lodged, no later than 9:00 a.m. on the date first assigned for trial. Applies to unlawful detainer jury trials only. Kern Local Rule 3.15.11(c) (Jury Trials in Unlawful Detainer Actions)
- Requested and relevant jury instructions
- All requested jury instructions
- All relevant jury instructions
Written Motions, Including Motions in Limine (Unlawful Detainer Jury Trial)
Prepared by not stated. Lodged, no later than 9:00 a.m. on the date first assigned for trial. Applies to unlawful detainer jury trials only. Kern Local Rule 3.15.11(d)
- All motions, in limine motions included, in writing
- All motions, submitted in writing
- Motions in limine, which the rule includes within that requirement
Requested Jury Instructions
Prepared by each party. Lodged, on the day the jury is sworn, unless the trial judge orders otherwise. Applies to all civil and criminal jury trials. Kern Local Rule 1.4.2 (Jury Instructions/Verdict Forms), lead paragraph
- Copies of requested jury instructions
- Copies of the party's requested jury instructions
Proposed Verdict Forms
Prepared by each party. Lodged, the subdivision states no deadline of its own, so it runs on the only time stated in Rule 1.4.2: the day the jury is sworn, unless the trial judge orders otherwise. Applies to all civil and criminal jury trials. Kern Local Rule 1.4.2(d)
- Proposed verdict forms
- Proposed verdicts in completed form, suitable for use by the jury in the pending case
- A separate form for each verdict
- The caption of the case typed on the form
- Paper carrying nothing on it that identifies the form with any party
When each one is due
Most of these do not run off the trial date. They run off the final case management conference, which the court sets, and counting back from trial instead is the commonest way one gets missed. The full rule list for Kern County carries every rule with its quoted text, and the trial countdown calculator computes the statewide CCP chain.
How these were built
Every rule was researched from the court’s own published text, 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 wants was a further pass, and an adversarial check corrected it: the commonest error was a document whose contents the first pass left empty while the rule enumerated them. Templates are generated in your browser, so nothing you type is sent anywhere. See methodology.
Related: All courts with templates · Kern trial binder rules · Trial countdown calculator