It is 8:26 a.m. in a Stanley Mosk department. A per diem attorney covering a case management conference has the file, the client’s instruction to file a peremptory challenge under Code of Civil Procedure section 170.6, and roughly four minutes before the bailiff calls the calendar. Under the amended rules, that attorney now also needs to account for the firm’s recent challenge history against the assigned bench officer. The Judicial Challenge Portal exists precisely for that moment, and understanding how it works before you are standing at counsel table is the difference between a clean filing and an embarrassing continuance.
The Superior Court of Los Angeles County launched the tool as part of its response to the California Supreme Court’s decision in J.O. v. Superior Court (2026) 19 Cal.5th 753. General Order 2026-GEN-010-01 was amended at the same time, and form X-LIT 035 was revised to match. Those three pieces move together. Treating any one of them in isolation is how practitioners get caught short.
What the Judicial Challenge Portal Actually Shows
Access runs through the Court Access Portal. Once logged in, users select the Judicial Challenges tab. From there, the search can be filtered by organization or law firm, by individual attorney, or by party, and results can be reordered by clicking any column heading. Remote access is supported, which matters enormously for coverage counsel who may be working from a car outside a courthouse in Pomona or Van Nuys rather than from a desk.
The data covers Section 170.6 challenges made within the preceding 365 days of the search date, and the Court refreshes it daily. That rolling window is deliberate. It tracks the kind of recent, repeated pattern that the Supreme Court flagged as evidence of a blanket challenge rather than a genuine, case-specific objection to a particular judicial officer.
One practical observation: because the information is organized by firm as well as by individual, a solo practitioner’s record and a 200-attorney litigation department’s record are both visible in aggregate. Large firms with multiple Los Angeles offices should expect their consolidated history to be more revealing than any single associate realized.
Why J.O. Changed the Calculus
The May 2026 decision identified a specific abuse. Peremptory challenges filed reflexively against every judge of a certain profile are not neutral procedural tools. The Supreme Court described the harm plainly: such filings may be used to shop for a preferred judge, to delay proceedings, to disqualify a bench officer over that officer’s view of the law or personality, to intimidate or punish a judge for prior rulings, or to operate as a vehicle for gender or racial discrimination. Judicial operations suffer. Calendars slip. Other litigants wait.
The Court’s July 2026 General Order established the procedure for identifying bad-faith blanket challenges. The amended version, 2026-GEN-010-01, adds the disclosure mechanics. And the data tool launched alongside it supplies the raw material the Court and the challenging party now both need.
Three Paths When You File a Section 170.6 Challenge
Practitioners effectively face a choice among three approaches, and only two of them are defensible. The amended order requires any party or attorney making a challenge to provide a verified written declaration or an oral attestation under penalty of perjury disclosing their recent history of challenges to the assigned judge, with contemporaneous submission and timely service of that declaration. Alternatively, the challenger may bypass the sworn declaration or oral attestation by accepting the Court’s online data on their past Section 170.6 filings. The third path, ignoring the disclosure obligation entirely, is not a path at all.
Here is how the two legitimate options compare on the factors that matter in practice.
| Factor | Sworn declaration or oral attestation | Accepting the Court’s online data |
|---|---|---|
| Preparation time | Requires drafting, verification and service on the same day as the challenge | Minimal; the record already exists and refreshes daily |
| Perjury exposure | Direct, since the statement is made under penalty of perjury | Avoided by electing the Court’s data instead |
| Control of the narrative | Full; counsel can explain context for prior filings | Limited to what the system displays |
| Suitability for coverage counsel | Awkward when the appearance attorney lacks the firm’s full history | Workable, since the record is court-generated |
The election is not purely administrative. A firm with a clean twelve-month record generally benefits from letting the Court’s own numbers speak. A firm with a cluster of filings against the same department may prefer the declaration route, because a declaration permits explanation that a column of dates cannot. Reasonable counsel will disagree about which is safer, and the answer genuinely depends on the record.
What is not debatable is the timing requirement. Contemporaneous submission means contemporaneous. A declaration prepared three days later, however thorough, does not satisfy the amended order.
A Short Checklist Before the Hearing
- Confirm Court Access Portal credentials are active for whoever will be in the courtroom, not only for the case manager at the office.
- Run the Judicial Challenges search by firm and by individual attorney, then review the results against the assigned department.
- Decide, in advance, whether the challenge will rely on the declaration or on the Court’s data.
- Pull the current version of form X-LIT 035 rather than a saved copy from a prior case file.
- Review the Court’s reference guide and video tutorial before the first live use, not during it.
What the Data Does Not Cover
Confidential cases are excluded outright. Matters with limited confidentiality, including unlawful detainer proceedings, appear with restricted information. Counsel who handle a high volume of residential evictions in Los Angeles County should not assume that the visible record reflects their complete filing history, and should factor that gap into the election between a declaration and the Court’s data.
The 365-day window cuts both ways as well. A challenge filed thirteen months ago falls outside the search results, yet the underlying question of good faith does not evaporate on an anniversary. Prudent practitioners maintain their own internal log of Section 170.6 filings by department, independent of what the Court publishes. Spreadsheets are unglamorous. They are also the thing that saves a litigation manager on the morning an opposing party raises a blanket-challenge argument.
There is also a scale consideration worth stating. The Superior Court of Los Angeles County is the largest trial court in the nation, serving a population approaching ten million across 36 courthouses and more than 4,000 square miles encompassing 88 cities and roughly 140 unincorporated areas. A disclosure regime applied across that volume of filings will produce edge cases. Expect departments to interpret the amended order with some variation during the early months.
Coverage Counsel and the Chain of Custody on Challenge History
The disclosure requirement creates a genuine problem for firms that rely on appearance attorneys. A per diem lawyer retained the night before a status conference in Torrance has no independent knowledge of how many times the retaining firm has challenged that judge in the past year. Yet that attorney may be the person standing at the podium when the issue arises.
Two fixes work. The retaining firm can run the Judicial Challenge Portal search itself and transmit the printed results with the appearance packet, along with a clear written instruction on whether to file the challenge at all. Or the firm can authorize the covering attorney to elect the Court’s online data, which removes the need for the appearance attorney to swear to facts outside personal knowledge. Either way, the instruction belongs in writing, in the same message that conveys the case summary and the hearing objective.
This is where last-minute coverage platforms earn their keep or fail. AppearMe connects attorneys with covering counsel across Los Angeles in minutes, sometimes within one minute in dense metropolitan areas, and the appearance details travel with the request. Firms using the platform should add a standing field to their appearance instructions covering Section 170.6 posture. Three lines of text. It prevents a covering attorney from either filing a challenge the firm did not authorize or declining one the client expected.
Before your next Los Angeles calendar, log into the Court Access Portal, open the Judicial Challenges tab, and run a search on your own firm name. Whatever appears there is what opposing counsel and the assigned bench officer can see. Print it, date it, and put it in the appearance file.
Getting Access: Registration, Roles, and Who Runs the Search
The Judicial Challenge Portal is not a standalone website with its own login. It sits inside the Court Access Portal, which means the credential that already gets your office into case documents and remote appearance scheduling is the credential that opens the Judicial Challenges tab. Firms that have never completed registration will discover this at the worst possible moment, because identity verification is not instantaneous and cannot be rushed from the hallway outside a courtroom.
Decide early who in the office holds credentials. In small practices the answer is usually the attorney of record, but the better practice in any firm handling more than a handful of Los Angeles matters is to credential the calendar clerk or litigation support staff as well. Searches are run by attorney name and by firm name, and the results are only as reliable as the spelling used. Attorneys who practice under a maiden name, a hyphenated name, or an abbreviated firm designation should test every variation once, document which string returns complete results, and record that string in the firm’s internal procedures file. A search that returns nothing because of a typo looks identical to a search that returns nothing because no challenges were filed.
Deadlines the Portal Does Not Move
Nothing about the new disclosure mechanism alters the statutory timing under Code of Civil Procedure section 170.6, and that point deserves emphasis because the convenience of the search can create a false sense of flexibility. Where a case is assigned to a judge for all purposes, the challenge must be made within the statutory window measured from notice of the assignment or from the party’s appearance, whichever controls. In master calendar settings, the challenge is made when the cause is assigned for trial. Miss the window and the quality of your research is irrelevant.
The practical consequence is that the portal search belongs at the front of the matter, not the back. Run it when the assignment notice arrives, while there is still room to consult the client, weigh the reassignment risk, and prepare the paperwork. Running it the morning of a hearing produces information you may no longer be able to act on, and it converts a strategic decision into a scramble. Build the search into the same intake step that generates the conflicts check and the initial calendaring entry.
The Costs That Do Not Appear on a Fee Schedule
Counsel sometimes treat a peremptory challenge as a low-cost option. In a court of this size it rarely is. Reassignment can move a case from a courthouse ten minutes from the client’s office to one across the county, adding travel time to every appearance for the life of the matter. It can reset a trial date. It can land the case in a department with a heavier civil inventory and slower motion calendars. None of that shows up in the filing mechanics, and none of it is visible in the Judicial Challenge Portal results.
There is also the question of what the client is buying. A challenge made because a judge has a reputation for firm case management is a different decision than one made because of a documented ruling pattern on a dispositive issue. Memorialize the reasoning in the file either way. If the challenge history later becomes a point of argument, a contemporaneous memo explaining the basis is far more persuasive than reconstruction months later.
Questions Worth Asking the Client First
- Does the client accept the possibility of a venue shift within Los Angeles County and the added appearance cost that follows?
- Is there a scheduling constraint, such as a witness availability window, that reassignment could disrupt?
- Has the client or an affiliated entity already exercised a challenge in a related matter?
- Is outside counsel guidelines approval required before filing a discretionary motion of this kind?
A Transparency Trend Worth Watching
The Superior Court of Los Angeles County did not create this tool in isolation. Courts across California have spent the past several years pushing case information onto self-service platforms, and judicial challenge data is a logical extension of that trajectory. Whether other large trial courts adopt comparable disclosure in 2026 and 2027 is unknown, but firms with multi-county civil practices should assume the direction of travel and keep their internal challenge logs in a format that can be produced on short notice anywhere in the state.
