A harsh reality in the service of process world: once a Hague Service Request gets to a foreign Central Authority, it’s pretty well locked up– especially once it’s been underway for several weeks or months. No amendments can be made, no documents can be added, and no revisions can be made to the defendant’s address. Most of the time, all we can do is submit another Request, which means more costs and longer delays– especially if the thing has to be translated.

Now that said, in some situations, if we have a great working relationship with that Central Authority, we can shoot over an email that says “hey, Bob,* could we add one more doc to the stack on that Request I FedEx’ed to you last week?” That’s pretty rare, but once in a while it can be done. Once in a very long while.

In 99.44% of cases, the window of opportunity is extraordinarily tight, even if we have a Bob to talk to. Once it leaves Bob’s hands, he can’t do anything with it either. The Central Authority hands the process off to a regional authority, the regional authority hands it off to a local authority, and by the time it gets to the front line judicial officer who will serve it, there’s no tracking it, even if the foreign bureaucrats involved wanted to.

The only way to get that “oh wait– one last document” served is to tee up a brand new request, with all of the additional costs that entails, and hit it down the fairway again. But most courts understand what’s involved in Hague Service, so we very infrequently see a great deal of pushback. Judges and clerks understand, by and large, that things just don’t work over there the way they work here, and it’s not our rules that control the procedure.

As such, I recommend holding off until (if) the defendant appears, then serve that thing on opposing counsel.

* Bob is a generic Central Authority guy. No, his name isn’t really Bob. We don’t have many Bobs around the world.