§ 25-331.Third-party action; procedure.

Section 25-331 is Nebraska’s third-party practice statute, letting a defending party pull an outside person into an existing lawsuit rather than filing a separate action later. A defending party, acting as a third-party plaintiff, can serve a summons and complaint on a nonparty in two situations: when that nonparty is or may be liable to the defending party for all or part of the plaintiff’s claim, or when that nonparty’s negligence was or may have been a proximate cause of the transaction or occurrence underlying the plaintiff’s claim — subject to the limits in section 25-21,185.11. If the third-party complaint is filed more than fourteen days after the defending party served its original answer, the defending party needs the court’s leave, obtained by motion, to file it.

Once served, the third-party defendant steps into the case with all the rights and obligations of a defendant, including those the rules promulgated under sections 25-801.01 and 25-1273.01 create. From there, the statute maps out who can claim what against whom. The third-party defendant can assert against the plaintiff any defense the third-party plaintiff has to the plaintiff’s claim, plus any claim of its own arising from the same transaction or occurrence. The plaintiff, in turn, can assert against the third-party defendant any claim arising from that same transaction or occurrence. The defending party can assert a claim that the third-party defendant is liable for all or part of the claim against the defending party. A third-party defendant can even bring in a further nonparty of its own, under the same standard that let the original defending party implead in the first place. Any party can move to strike, sever, or separately try the third-party claim.

The statute closes with a mirror-image provision: when a claim is asserted against a plaintiff — through a counterclaim, for instance — that plaintiff may bring in a nonparty under the same standard available to a defending party. This keeps third-party practice available to whichever side ends up defending against a claim in the case, not only to an original defendant.