§ 840.Case Management Conference

This section gives the assigned judge a toolkit for managing what can be an enormous and complicated case. Subdivision (a) requires the court to convene a case management conference under the California Rules of Court and, for basins that must have a groundwater sustainability plan, to manage the case consistent with the Water Code's timeline provisions for those plans.

Subdivision (b) lists nine tools the court may use at or soon after the initial conference: deciding whether to seek adjustment of basin boundaries under § 841, staying the action under § 848, appointing a special master under § 845, scheduling a preliminary injunction hearing under § 847, dividing the case into phases, issuing orders that keep issues resolved in one phase from being relitigated in another, limiting discovery to match those phases, scheduling early resolution of prescriptive-rights claims, and forming classes of overlying groundwater rights holders under § 382's class certification criteria.

Subdivision (c) ties case management to the notice process in § 836: once the plaintiff files notice that mailing under that section is complete, the court must hold a hearing, as soon as practicable, on whether to exempt or separately treat claimants who extract or divert only minor quantities of water under § 833. If the court does exempt or separately treat certain claimants, it must set up an appropriate registration and administration procedure for those claims.