§ 25-102.Parties; how designated.

Section 25-102 does one small job, but every later rule leans on it. In every civil action, the party who complains — the one bringing the claim — is the plaintiff, and the party answering that complaint is the defendant. That pairing is so familiar it barely reads like a rule, but it is the label the rest of Chapter 25 and the Nebraska Court Rules use whenever they describe who has to plead, serve, respond, or appear.

The section does not address what happens when a case has more than one plaintiff or more than one defendant, or how a defendant who files a counterclaim is described when asserting that claim. Those situations are common, and courts and litigants handle them by applying the same basic labels to each side of each claim. A defendant who counterclaims, for instance, is still the defendant on the plaintiff’s original claim while functioning much like a plaintiff on the counterclaim.

Because Section 25-102 fixes this vocabulary at the very start of Chapter 25, a reader can move through the rest of the chapter — service of process, pleadings, judgment — without pausing to ask which side a given term refers to.