Legal Question in Construction Law in California

Re: 20 day preliminary notice

Your question is a little too short and vague to give you a good answer. Besides, if you are a licensed contractor, you're expected to know this. However, the right to file a preliminary 20-day notice does extend to others as well, including suppliers of materials and lessors of equipment, some of whom may be new to this field and not have any particular training or qualifications. Or, perhaps, you are the owner, who has just been given a 20-day preliminary notice.

The best general advice I can give is to look up and study Civil Code sections 3097 and 3097.1, covering the notice itself and the proof of service of the notice. The contents of those sections is way too long to boil down into a LawGuru answer to a question this vague.

The basic purpose of the 20-day preliminary notice is to notify the owner (the person for whose benefit a prime contract is being carried out) that the person giving the notice, although perhaps not previously known to the owner, is in a position to have a lien on the owner's property by virtue of providing labor, materials, equipment, etc. Prime contractors and others in direct contract with the owner do not need to serve 20-day preliminary notices, since the owner already knows about them.