§ 2035.030.Filing of verified petition; form and content of petition; court order

This section spells out both where to file a pre-filing discovery petition and what it has to contain. Venue turns on the expected adverse party: the petition goes in the superior court of the county where at least one expected adverse party lives, and only if none of them lives in California does the petitioner get to file instead in a county where the eventual action could be brought. The petition itself has to be verified and titled in the name of the person seeking the discovery.

The substance required is detailed enough to let the court, and the parties on notice, evaluate the request rather than rubber-stamp it. The petition has to explain why the petitioner, or its successor in interest, expects to become a party to a California action, and why that action cannot be brought now. It has to describe the subject matter of the expected case and the petitioner's connection to it, attaching a copy of any written instrument bearing on that subject matter. And it has to lay out the mechanics of the discovery itself: which methods from Section 2035.020 the petitioner wants to use, what facts the petitioner hopes to establish, why those facts need to be locked in before the case is filed, who the expected adverse parties are, and, for each source of discovery, that source's name and address along with the substance of what the petitioner expects to learn from it. The petition ends by asking the court for an order authorizing exactly that discovery.