Legal Question in Civil Litigation in California
Identifying Doe defendants
I need to amend my complaint to reflect new defendants.
The two named defendants are a woman and her company an
LLC and I also included Does 1-25.
I used the judicial form complaint for Breach of Contract and for
Fraud.
I have since discovered the woman's daughter is a member of the
LLC company.
Through an Admissions Deemed Admitted Motion granted, I now
have admissions staing the woman's husband was a silent partner
and had knowledge of the fraudulent agreement and stood to
benefit from money I loaned the company and her. Ditto for the
daughter.
The second issue is about changing the actual complaint instead
of just ficticious names. Do I need to? The Cause of Action for
Breach uses the term ''defendants'' in every line of the complaint.
But in my description of ''the agreement'' I used the co. name and
the woman's name. Since I never talked to the Does I couldn't use
their names in the description of my agreement.
The Cause of Action for fraud says ''defendants'' everywhere too.
My description of the fraud uses the term ''defendants''.
Should I just file a change of Doe names or do I need to rewrite/
amend the wording in my complaint?
1 Answer from Attorneys
Re: Identifying Doe defendants
Admissions -- whether actually admitted by the party or deemed admitted by the court -- are only binding on *that* party. The woman's "admissions" about her husband and her daughter have no effect upon their rights, and the court will not hold them to admissions they never made. It would not be just for one person to be able to make others liable by "admitting" their liability, and it is equally unjust to make any factual findings this way. After all, you could have inserted *anybody's* name in your questions and they still would have been deemed admitted, but you can't make anyone you choose liable this way.
That said, the procedure for what you want to do is to file a motion to amend the complaint to add Doe defendants. You should attach the proposed amended complaint as an exhibit and, of course, you need to serve the other parties. If your complaint does not specifically say that Doe 1 did some things, Doe 2 did others, and so on, then references to "defendants" should encompass the Does and you should only need to add their names to the caption in place of Does 1 and 2.
Please note that I have not seen your complaint and that it is possible you wrote it in a way which would require more substantial changes. Note also that if the court grants your motion you will still have to serve the summons, complaint etc. on the new defendants.
The Court will want to know why you now believe that the husband and daughter are liable when you didn't have enough information to name them originally. It will not be impressed if your only answer is that the original defendant didn't respond to discovery and that the court deemed her to have made admissions about other members of her family.
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