MacDonald

INTRODUCTION

In general, a plaintiff must bring a case to trial within five years of the filing of a complaint against a defendant, subject to limited statutory tolling periods. (Code Civ. Proc., § 583.310 et seq.)1 Plaintiff and appellant James MacDonald (plaintiff) initiated this lawsuit in February 2016 and amended the complaint to add defendant and respondent Shereen Arazm Koules in August 2020. The court dismissed the action against Koules in September 2022 for failure to timely prosecute. Plaintiff appeals from the dismissal order. When calculating the length of time a case has been pending against a defendant not named in the original complaint, the court must start the clock on the date the defendant was first named as a defendant in the case. Here, Koules was first named as a defendant in August 2020, but the court calculated the time this case had been pending using the date plaintiff filed the original complaint. The court erred in dismissing the case against Koules under section 583.310 because the case against her had been pending for just over two years when the court ordered the dismissal. To the extent the court relied on the discretionary dismissal provisions of…