California Partition Law Blog
A property’s legal description is an essential element of any property transfer, and it serves as the basis for most property-based lawsuits. Quiet title summons, partition complaints, and lis pendens notices must all contain legal descriptions, just to name a few.
Funnily enough, however, despite the legal description importance, there is no standard form in use. It can be a property’s address (if it has one), a metes and bounds description, or (commonly), it can reference a county’s official map.
But what is not sufficient, at least by itself, is a property’s assessor parcel number (APN). This is because an APN is a number assigned to a parcel map to designate property or groups of properties as being subject to certain taxes. The county assessor isn’t concerned with assigning numbers to correctly measure the physical size of the lot. Instead, an assessor may combine properties or cut them in half for taxation purposes.