How Process Serving Actually Works

I’m Brandon Yadegar. I’m going to walk you through a few real life cases. I’m the Director of On-Call Legal. We serve thousands of lawsuits. We serve nationwide and we actually also serve internationally. We serve everywhere from Paris to the Middle East to Africa. A lot of attorneys believe that they have to serve the documents based on the state that they’re serving in, but they actually have to serve the documents based on where the documents were filed originally. An ORAP is when you have a judgment on somebody and you need to collect on that judgment. The other side is very aware and they know that it’s coming. So they’re very evasive. And the attorney tried another company and that person went through a lot of different avenues to try to get the party served. Eventually they got lucky. And after they spent a considerable amount of resources and time and money, they did stakeouts and hours and hours of money they invested. The person finally got the party served. But the problem was that the person that served the documents was not a registered process server. And one of the rules for an ORAP is that you have to be a registered process server. So they ended up having to get that tossed out of the courthouse and they were lucky that the judge gave them another attempt to serve it. And we ended up going back and serving the documents for a fraction of the price and doing it with our own server. For us, the beauty of California is you only have to follow a California law. So for instance, California has a very loose language about the times that you could serve somebody. They just say that it has to be a reasonable time. Now, reasonable could be relative, right? Like you might think it’s reasonable to serve somebody at 9:30 p.m., somebody else may not think that, but the judge is not going to throw it out. Whereas like there is other states that you can’t serve past nine. You can’t serve earlier than seven a.m. California doesn’t have those things. So even if I’m in Georgia and Georgia has those laws, as long as I’m serving California docs, I could serve them at 9:30 or 10 o’clock in the night or at like five in the morning. For court filings, we get the most rejections from documents missing information. And sometimes it’s not about the information missing, but maybe they’re missing a particular form. Sometimes their forms are outdated, sometimes they’re just filing in the wrong jurisdiction. For instance, you may be on a border or an area that you believe this court is the closest to you but it actually falls into this jurisdiction. If I’m serving California documents, I have to go based on California rules. I have a client that is in California, but he has attorneys that are barred in Texas. One of the rules in Texas is also the same thing as the federal subpoenas where you can’t serve them to just anybody. If I have a serve for Matthew, it has to go to Matthew. And then if I try and I go and serve him, it doesn’t work out. I have to file something with the court with the judges giving me permission to serve Matthew’s sister or whoever Matthew lives with. But I have to go get that order before I can do what’s called a substitute service, meaning serving anybody other than Matthew. When evasive defendants can be served, sometimes you get lucky and you serve them on the first attempt, go about it the right way, but it can also go for weeks on end of not being served if they’re very crafty. Usually what we do to get evasive defendants served is we set up a stakeout. We wait for them to either leave the house, or come home, and that usually gets them served. Don’t go with the first person that gives you the lowest rate and the industry is very similar to all the other industries. You get what you pay for. Usually expertise goes a long way. The more experience you have, the better you get at it, the more likely it’s going to come out, the accurate service.