Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

Form? Not that I'm aware of. Ask the Court Clerk's office if they have a 'local' form. This is a process requiring custom drafting of pleadings. You are becoming a party in a lawsuit, so it's up to you if you need an attorney to deal with all the legal issues. pleadings, motions, discovery, etc.

Interpleader is a rather unusual action for an individual to be filling. Mr. Nelson is right that you are not going to find a fill in the blanks form. If you provided more details we might be able to give you some sense of whether or not your situation is one that requires counsel or not. The good news is that in many cases the interpleader plaintiff can recover their attorneys fees.

I think Mr. Nelson's answer confuses "interpleader" with "intervention." Intervention in a case is when someone who is not a named plaintiff or defendant applies to the court to be made a party, plaintiff or defendant, becuase he or she feels that his or her rights will be affected by the outcome. Yes, indeed, there are occasions where someone WANTS to be made a defendant in a suit, but I'd have to guess that most interventions are done by wannabe plaintiffs.

An interpleader, as I understand it, does not seek to add a party. Instead, an interpleader is used to ask the court to determine to which of several competing claimants money should be paid or property disbursed. For example, if there is a car accident in which several people are injured and the insurance company has $1 million to pay on behalf of the driver who is at fault, it may interplead the plaintiffs to have the court decide which injured plaintiffs are to be paid, and how much. The full technical definition is given in the Code of Civil Procedure at section 386, and the following subsections 386.1 to 386.6 describe the processes to some extent.

Intervention is covered by CCP sections 387 and 388, primarily the former. It says, to start off, that "Upon timely application, any person, who has an interest in the matter in litigation, or in the success of either of the parties, or an interest against both, may intervene in the action or proceeding......." etc.

The document one files to become an intervenor is called a "Complaint in Intervention." This is the name whether you are aligned in interest with the plaintiff, the defendant, or are opposing both. There is an example of one in the practice manual entitled "Civil Procedure Before Trial - Forms" labeled Form 2.7; Rutter Group is the publisher and you can probably look at and copy the form from the book at a public law library - there is at least one in every county - or send me an e-mail address or FAX number and I'll send it to you.

Please bear in mind that although the above-mentioned document is called a "form," it is NOT a form in the usual sense that you can copy it, fill in the blanks, and hand it to the court clerk along with the filing fee, and you're done! It is more properly a template or a guide for word-processing your own Complaint in Intervention. from scratch, on blank pleading paper. You'll not only need to study the "Form 2.7" itself, but also the text discussing intervention in the Rutter volume covering that subject - Civil Procedure Before Trial, Vol. 1, Chapter 2 pghs. 2.443 and following; and Chapter 6 pghs. 6.14 and following.

If in fact you are doing an interpleader rather than an intervention, please contact me directly or re-post your question with some specifics so we can see why you need to interplead.

If indeed you want to intervene, you probably need to get permission from the court first, and to do that, look at Form 2.5 and possibly Form 2.6 in the Rutter Civil Procedure Before Trial Forms volume, and also the descriptive text in Ch. 2 of Vol. 1, same Rutter series, starting at about Pgh. 2:400. Sorry I omitted this important first step from my previous answer.

I'll get back to you shortly about interpleader.

And if you want to interplead, the use of interpleader is covered in Rutter's "Civil Procedure Before Trial" practice manual in Vol. 1, Chapter 2, Part F, paragraphs 2:470 through 2:497, and there is a "form" or two in the forms supplement.....e.g., Form 2.8. Again, these so-called forms are not for fill-in-the-blanks users. They are designed for lawyers, as models for how to scratch-write a document on their own word processor.