[This rant is designed to guide my clients in getting the right paperwork generated for service by diplomatic channels. If I’ve sent you a link to this, that means you have to press the issue with your clerk of court– not because I want to create more work for the court staff, but the opposite. I want to minimize their workload and smooth the road to successful service. I’m not joking here– when I say I need exemplified copies of your Letter Rogatory, I mean exemplified. Not certified, not verified… exemplified. It’s a term of art, used for a very specific purpose.]

When we seek service on a defendant located in a non-Hague Service Convention country (or a recalcitrant Hague country), we often use a Letter Rogatory, in which the judge hearing the case asks a judge in the foreign country to order service effected according to that country’s laws. Once the judge signs the Letter, we send it and the service documents (along with a translation and duplicate copies, as well as a hellaciously expensive postage stamp*) to the U.S. Department of State. From there, the good folks at Foggy Bottom send all that in a diplomatic bag to our embassy in Notamerica, and consular staff there hands it off to the host country’s foreign ministry. Atop that stack of documents is one more page, by which the Secretary of State certifies to the foreign government that, yes, this is an official document signed by a real judge in a real court in the United States of America.

That certification is far easier for the State Department to justify, and thus, far quicker to generate, if the copies of a Letter Rogatory are exemplified. Not certified– exemplified. There’s a difference. (Notice how every single mention of exemplification in this post is in bold italics? That’s by design.)

All federal courts, and more than a handful of states’ courts (including the big systems in New York, California, Illinois, Florida, and Texas) have a standard form for exemplification. They’re not frequently used in many places, but they do exist, and it’s the responsibility of the clerks of court to properly issue them.

But you wouldn’t know it judging by the pushback we’ve received lately from several clerks– in four of the last five Letters Rogatory we’ve generated, the clerk of the court has insisted that “oh, hush– it’s certified, and that’s just fine.”

Except, no. No, it’s not just fine.

So we’ve begun including an additional document in the work product we generate for our clients. Previously, it was simply the draft Letter Rogatory and application for its issuance. The new document is a proposed order that specifically directs the clerk to issue two exemplified copies of each Letter Rogatory.

And still, they don’t get it. We’ve even begun specifying the form number (federal: AO 132, available here) so there can be zero doubt in the clerk’s mind what we need.

No, really. Exemplification is necessary. Don’t let the clerk tell you otherwise.

* A fee of $2,275.00 paid by cashier’s check. The most expensive postage stamp you’ll ever buy.