§ 2032.210.“Plaintiff” and “defendant” defined

This short section makes sure Article 2's demand procedure reaches cross-claims, not just original complaints. Throughout the article, plaintiff includes a cross-complainant, and defendant includes a cross-defendant.

That matters because personal injury claims often arrive as cross-complaints, not just original complaints, such as when a defendant sued over a car accident cross-complains against a co-defendant. Without this definition, it might be unclear whether the streamlined one-exam demand process in the rest of this article applies to those cross-claims the same way it applies to the original pleading. This section removes that doubt.