§ 1022.Costs Awarded to Plaintiff When Several Actions Brought

Section 1022 is an older cost-shifting rule aimed at a specific kind of forum-shopping: filing several lawsuits over one claim instead of one. When a plaintiff has a claim on a single bond, undertaking, promissory note, bill of exchange, or similar written instrument—or any other claim—against multiple parties who could have been named as co-defendants in a single action, the statute doesn't let the plaintiff multiply the statutory costs recoverable just by suing them in separate cases. The plaintiff can recover the fixed costs of suit in only one of those actions, and the plaintiff gets to pick which one.

The limit only bites when it could have been avoided. If a co-obligor was in California and available to be served when the first action was filed, that person could have been joined as a co-defendant there, so the plaintiff loses nothing by having the cost recovery folded into a single action. A co-obligor who wasn't reachable in the state at that point falls outside the rule, since joining that person in the same lawsuit was never a real option.

One category of expense escapes the limit entirely: disbursements, the plaintiff's actual out-of-pocket outlays in pursuing the claim, as distinct from the fixed statutory cost items set out in Section 1033.5. Those get recovered in every action the plaintiff files, no matter how many separate suits were needed to reach each defendant.