What Is California Code of Civil Procedure Section 2031.010?

California Code of Civil Procedure Section 2031.010 is the statute that gives any party in a California civil lawsuit the right to demand that another party produce documents, electronically stored information, or tangible things for inspection, copying, testing, or sampling, and to permit entry onto land or property in that party’s control for the same purposes.¹ It is one of the most powerful discovery tools in state civil practice, and it comes wrapped in strict procedural rules. The two mistakes that cost parties the most are missing a response deadline (which automatically waives every objection, including privilege) and missing the 45-day window to challenge someone else’s inadequate response.

What You Can Demand and From Whom

Section 2031.010 authorizes five categories of demands. You can require another party to produce documents for copying, to permit inspection and testing of tangible things, to allow entry onto land or property they control so you can measure, photograph, or sample it, and to produce electronically stored information for inspection or copying.¹ “Documents” is broad: contracts, emails, financial records, photographs, text messages, anything stored in retrievable form. “Tangible things” covers physical evidence like a defective product or a piece of equipment involved in an accident.

The items must be in the other party’s “possession, custody, or control.” Courts read those three terms separately. You possess or have custody of something when you physically hold it, whether or not you own it. Control reaches further, to anything you have a legal right to obtain on demand, such as records held by your bank, accountant, or a cloud storage provider where you have an account. Some California courts extend control even beyond legal rights to situations where a party has the practical ability to get the records, though that broader test is not universally applied.

One boundary worth flagging: Section 2031.010 applies only to parties in the case. To get documents from a nonparty, you use a deposition subpoena under a different set of statutes.

When You Can Serve the Demand

Defendants can serve an inspection demand at any point after being served with the lawsuit. Plaintiffs must wait until 10 days after the summons is served on (or the appearance of) the party who would receive the demand.² The 10-day plaintiff rule applies in unlawful detainer cases too, but response deadlines there compress to five days instead of 30.

On the back end, discovery must be completed at least 30 days before the initial trial date, and discovery motions heard at least 15 days before trial.³ Wait too long to serve and you can find yourself unable to enforce anything before the cutoff.

How the Demand Must Be Drafted

Section 2031.030 sets specific format requirements, and courts reject demands that don’t follow them. Each set must be numbered consecutively across all sets you’ve served in the case. Below the case caption, the demand must identify who is making it, the set number, and who is responding.⁴

Each individual demand must be separately numbered or lettered and must do all of the following:

Describe each item with reasonable particularity. You can name a specific document (“the lease agreement dated March 5, 2024”) or a category (“all communications between Defendant and XYZ Corp. regarding the project”). Vague catch-all requests invite objections and usually produce nothing useful.
Set a reasonable time for response, no earlier than 30 days after service (five days in unlawful detainer cases).
Specify where the inspection, copying, or testing will occur.
Describe the activity, including whether any testing or sampling will alter or destroy the item.

For electronically stored information, you may specify the format of production: native files, PDFs, or TIFF images with extracted text, for example.⁴ Specifying up front prevents fights later about whether a printed screenshot of a spreadsheet counts as producing the spreadsheet.

The Response Deadline and the Waiver Trap

The responding party has 30 days from service to serve a written response. Mail service within California adds five calendar days. Mail service from or to an address outside California but inside the United States adds 10 days. International service adds 20.⁵ Parties can agree in writing to extend, and courts can grant extensions for good cause.

Miss the deadline without an extension and you automatically waive every objection to the demand, including attorney-client privilege and work-product protection.⁶ The demanding party can then move to compel a response, and the court must impose monetary sanctions against the non-responding party or their attorney unless it finds substantial justification or other circumstances making sanctions unjust.

Relief from waiver is possible but narrow. You must have since served a response that substantially complies with all the response requirements, and your original failure must have resulted from mistake, inadvertence, or excusable neglect.⁶ “I was busy” rarely qualifies. Calendar the deadline the moment the demand arrives, and if you need more time, negotiate an extension in writing before the clock runs out.

How to Respond

The response must address each demand individually, in the same order and using the same numbering as the demand itself.⁷ For each item or category, you have three options.

Statement of Compliance

If you agree to produce, your statement must confirm that all responsive items within your possession, custody, or control will be included.⁸ You can comply in whole or in part. When you actually produce, each item or category must be labeled to correspond with the specific demand number it responds to.⁹

Statement of Inability to Comply

A bare denial is not enough. The statute requires you to confirm that you conducted a diligent search and reasonable inquiry, then explain why you can’t produce: the item never existed, was destroyed, was lost or stolen, or is no longer in your possession, custody, or control. If you know or believe someone else has it, you must give that person’s or organization’s name and address.¹⁰ A one-line “no responsive documents exist,” with no description of the search, is an invitation for the court to order you to try again.

Objection

If you object, identify with particularity the items falling within the category you’re objecting to and state the specific legal ground. Boilerplate (“overly broad, unduly burdensome, and oppressive”) without tailored explanation will not hold up. If the objection rests on privilege or work-product protection, you must name the privilege and provide enough factual detail for the other side to evaluate the claim.¹¹ In practice, that usually means a privilege log listing each withheld document with the date, author, recipients, their roles, the general subject matter, and the specific privilege claimed. Vague entries such as “email between counsel and client re: legal matter” get challenged.

For ESI, a responding party can object that the information comes from a source not reasonably accessible due to undue burden or expense. To preserve that objection, the response must identify the types or categories of ESI sources claimed to be inaccessible.⁷ Backup tapes, legacy systems, and deleted-but-recoverable data are typical examples.

Protective Orders

When objections aren’t enough, the responding party or any affected person can move for a protective order under Section 2031.060. The motion must include a meet-and-confer declaration showing you tried to resolve the dispute informally first. On a showing of good cause, the court can:¹²

Excuse production entirely for some or all items.
Extend the response deadline beyond the standard 30 days.
Change the location of the inspection or production.
Impose conditions on how inspection or testing is conducted.
Restrict disclosure of trade secrets or confidential business information to specified people or on specified conditions.
Order produced items sealed and openable only by court order.

Even when ESI is reasonably accessible, the court can limit discovery if the same information is available from a more convenient source, the request is unreasonably duplicative, or the likely burden outweighs the likely benefit given the amount in controversy and the importance of the issues.¹²

Motions to Compel: Three Different Motions, Three Different Rules

California recognizes three distinct motions in the inspection-demand context. Confusing them is a common mistake.

No Response At All

When a party completely fails to respond, the demanding party moves to compel under Section 2031.300. No meet-and-confer effort is required, because there’s nothing to meet and confer about. There is no specific filing deadline for this motion, though waiting too long creates practical problems as trial approaches.⁶

Inadequate Response — the 45-Day Rule

When the response is incomplete, evasive, or the objections lack merit, the motion to compel further responses under Section 2031.310 applies. The requirements are strict. You must show specific facts establishing good cause for the discovery you’re seeking. You must submit a meet-and-confer declaration. And you must file the motion within 45 days of being served with the response, plus mail-service extensions under Section 1013.¹³ Miss the 45-day window and you permanently waive your right to challenge that response. The parties can extend the deadline by written agreement, but it takes affirmative action; it doesn’t extend itself.

Agreed to Produce but Never Did

Sometimes a party serves a response promising to produce but never follows through. Section 2031.320 lets you move to force the party to do what they already agreed to do.¹⁴

Sanctions

The court has a graduated toolkit that escalates in severity:

Monetary sanctions, ordering the offending party or their attorney to pay the other side’s reasonable expenses, including attorney’s fees, caused by the misconduct.
Issue sanctions, treating certain facts as established in favor of the party harmed by the abuse, or barring the offending party from supporting or opposing particular claims.
Evidence sanctions, prohibiting introduction of specific evidence at trial.
Terminating sanctions, striking pleadings, staying proceedings, dismissing the action, or entering default judgment.
Contempt of court.

Monetary sanctions are mandatory unless the court finds substantial justification or that sanctions would be unjust.¹⁵ Terminating sanctions are reserved for extreme cases, typically after repeated violations and lesser sanctions have failed.

A safe harbor applies to ESI: courts generally will not sanction a party for information lost, damaged, or overwritten through the routine, good-faith operation of an electronic information system, absent exceptional circumstances.⁶ The duty to preserve evidence once litigation is reasonably anticipated is not eliminated, but automatic deletion by systems running as designed before a preservation obligation arose is protected.

Format Rules for Electronically Stored Information

ESI is now the dominant category of evidence in most civil cases, and Section 2031.010(e) explicitly authorizes demands to inspect, copy, test, or sample it.¹ If your demand specifies a production format, the responding party should produce in that format. If you don’t specify, the responding party must produce either in the form ordinarily maintained or in a reasonably usable form. Neither side can be forced to produce the same ESI in more than one format.⁹

Format disputes matter. Native files preserve metadata (creation dates, edit history, author information) that PDFs and printed copies strip out. If metadata is important to your case, specify native-format production in the demand. If you’re responding and the requested format would be unnecessarily expensive or would reveal metadata you consider irrelevant, object and state the form you intend to use instead.

Modern ESI reaches well beyond email and word-processing files. Slack and Microsoft Teams generate conversation threads that don’t fit the traditional document-production model. Mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp and iMessage present collection challenges, and standard exports may miss attachments and metadata such as read receipts and timestamps. Cloud hyperlinks embedded in emails (a shared OneDrive folder instead of an attached file, for example) raise questions about whether the linked content falls within the producing party’s possession, custody, or control. Addressing these issues in a written ESI protocol before production begins prevents expensive fights later.

Supplemental Demands

Discovery rarely ends with one round. Section 2031.050 lets you serve supplemental demands targeting documents and information acquired or discovered after your initial demand. You can serve two supplemental demands before the initial trial date is set, and one more after it is set, without needing court permission.¹⁶ Additional rounds require a motion showing good cause. Supplemental demands are especially useful in cases that run months or years, where new documents keep being created.

How Section 2031.010 Differs From Federal Rule 34

If you’ve handled document requests in federal court, California will feel familiar but has real differences. Both systems allow inspection, copying, and testing of documents, ESI, and tangible things, both require descriptions with reasonable particularity, and both set a 30-day response window (though the federal starting point can shift with the timing of the Rule 26(f) conference).¹⁷ The differences that matter:

Nonparty discovery. Federal Rule 34(c) routes document demands to nonparties through a Rule 45 subpoena. California’s Section 2031.010 applies only to parties; nonparty documents require a deposition subpoena under a separate set of statutes.
Waiver consequences. California’s automatic waiver of every objection, privilege included, for a missed response deadline is more severe than the federal approach, where courts have more discretion to excuse late responses.
Supplemental demands. California provides for them explicitly with defined frequency limits. Federal practice handles ongoing discovery obligations differently, often through supplemental disclosures under Rule 26(e).
ESI format defaults. Both systems default to production in the form ordinarily maintained or a reasonably usable form when no format is specified, and neither requires more than one form.¹⁷

Attorneys who move between both systems should be especially careful about California’s 45-day motion-to-compel deadline. Federal courts don’t impose the same hard cutoff, and the habit of negotiating at a leisurely pace can be fatal to a California discovery motion.

1
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 2031.010
2
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 2031.020
3
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 2024.020
4
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 2031.030
5
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 1013
6
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 2031.300
7
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 2031.210
8
Justia Law. California Code of Civil Procedure 2031.220
9
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 2031.280
10
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 2031.230
11
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 2031.240
12
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 2031.060
13
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 2031.310
14
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 2031.320
15
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 2023.030
16
California Legislative Information. California Code of Civil Procedure 2031.050
17
Legal Information Institute. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 34