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Superior Court Judge · Superior Court of California, County of Contra Costa
What applies in this courtroom
86 verified requirements may apply in this courtroom, by layer: 2 published by Judge Peter Chang · 71 county-wide · 0 circuit-wide · 13 statewide. Only the judge's own rules are specific to this courtroom; the other layers apply by court, county and state scope, and a court- or case-specific order can displace them.
The tabs below show the judge-and-division layer only. The Full Premium Report assembles the complete stack — every requirement, deadline table, ruling intelligence, live case-type scan, and source appendix in one cited document.
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Judge — Department 7, Peter L. Spinetta Family Law Center, 751 Pine Street, Martinez, Superior Court of California, County of Contra Costa
On this assignment since September 14, 2026
2 verified rules specific to this judge's division, grouped by requirement category. 86 total requirements apply in this courtroom across all layers — the Full Premium Report assembles the complete stack.
No judge-level deadline on record runs shorter than a statewide deadline with the same trigger. The sentinel compares quoted timing across every published rule scoped to this judge on each visit — a clean result today is re-earned tomorrow.
Department 7's best practices: courtesy copies of pleadings filed within 5 court days of a hearing in the mailbox; e-mails (a joint written request to vacate); filings (the RFO, RESPONSE and REPLY; exhibits over 10 pages; AI disclosure); the long cause pre-trial order; the mandatory settlement conference (Local Rule 5.7; the worksheet for self-represented parties); remote and in-person appearances; DV stipulations; requests to continue (Local Rule 5.4(e) and 5.9(g)); Zoom details.
Department 7's long-cause pre-trial order: expert witness disclosures 50 days before trial; declarations of final disclosure 45 days before trial (Family Code § 2106); discovery completed 30 days before trial; discovery motions heard 15 days before the trial date (Section 2024.020), witness lists, the meet and confer and Income & Expense Declarations; 7 days before trial the disputed issues list, trial briefs (20 pages), joint motions in limine, the Section 4320 analysis and exhibits (hard copy sets, electronic exhibits on a USB drive); and the additional requirements (service, electronics, witnesses, objections, closing trial briefs and statements of decision under Code of Civil Procedure section 632).
No judge-scoped deadlines on this tab. Deadlines are extracted only when the source rule text states them — we never infer or calculate dates the rule does not explicitly contain.
Timing shown here is quoted from the rule text. Compute your actual date against the court's calendar and the rule itself — not legal advice.
No verified ruling summary yet. BenchPath generates ruling summaries from opinion and docket corpora (CourtListener where covered) and publishes them only after human review — fabricated judicial analytics are exactly what this platform refuses to ship.
Use the live case-law search below to see what exists for this judge today.
Answer three quick questions. The platform pulls Peter Chang's full public case-law record from the source, newest first — your matter never narrows the pull; it directs the relevance ranking and the dual-AI analysis. Every hit comes back Bluebook-cited with the opinion's own words quoted verbatim. The scan takes the time precision takes.
Case-law search
CourtListener · free connector · liveCoverage note: CourtListener is strongest for federal courts and state appellate courts. Florida circuit-court opinions are sparsely represented — an absence of results is a coverage gap, not evidence about this judge.
last checked September 28, 2026
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Judge — Department 7, Peter L. Spinetta Family Law Center, 751 Pine Street, Martinez, Superior Court of California, County of Contra Costacurrent
September 14, 2026 — present
assignment source →No source changes detected for this judge yet — when the underlying court pages move, it shows up here first.