All of our clients are lawyers, so we don’t hear this quip often. But when we do, it sets my teeth on edge just a bit, because the guy* on the other end of the line is either being extraordinarily rude, or– more likely– he just doesn’t have a solid grasp of what we do and of what’s involved when serving abroad. I always strive mightily to presume the latter.
Lawyers understand that rates are set at a certain level for a reason. A high-degree of specialized knowledge, the particular rarity of of that specialized knowledge among the practicing bar, expert tutelage, and years of experience… all go together to justify an attorney’s hourly rate or, if we’re focused on an outcome rather than time invested, an attorney’s flat rate.
Last fall, I published a post entitled Focus on value– don’t just go for the low bidder when serving overseas defendants. This is rather a sequel to that, with an illustration.
Not long after that post went live, a colleague from Notkansascity rang me up and said, “hey, Aaron, I have a few companies I need to serve in Notamerica.** Can you help me out?”
Of course, I said. Tell me a little bit about the defendants and the case.
We discussed the causes of action and the forum, and I brought him up to speed on the applicable doctrine both here and in Notamerica. Local requirements, the Hague Service Convention, and foreign law… by the end of the discussion he had a good grasp on the rulebook involved.
Turns out it was one of those situations where the defendants are all part of the same corporate family and use twelve different names on their websites and not a single one of them is accurate. No problem, though, as the Republic of Notamerica has a pretty robust corporate registry, not unlike what our Secretaries of State provide here in the U.S. (I sensed a whole lot of “a/k/a” designations coming). Within about ten minutes of searching, I concluded that he’d listed in his complaint more defendants than actually exist; most of them were just trade names or variations on actual entity names, conjured up by some overzealous marketing major who didn’t take BusOrg with Big Tony.
Together we reduced the list to a manageable– and realistic– number, and he asked me to work up an engagement. Ten minutes after I sent it to him, I get a snarky message back. “Wow. X-thousand dollars just to deliver some extra copies? That seems kinda steep.”
He had to have been thinking in terms of his local process server. I’d just spent an hour helping him whittle down a problem that would have cost him ten hours to clean up on the back end. But what process server has the legal acumen to do that?
Except that’s precisely what we do here– we don’t just salute and do what we’re told without saying, “hang on a tick– there’s a better way to approach this situation.” We have two goals in mind for everything we do: (1) protect our fellow lawyers, and (2) make us all better at the practice of law. In short, our mission is to help other lawyers do what they do, better (cue BASF commercial from the 90s). We’re in the business of telling our colleagues where the landmines are buried. We’re in the business of saving bacon. Seriously.
But this guy had reduced what we do to delivering paper. That’s all. Not advising him on the minefield he was about to saunter into. Not preventing the embarrassment certain to befall him when the judge benchslaps him for not doing his homework. He perceived us as a courier service and nothing more– which is even a jab at his local process server.
That begs the question: if all you need is somebody to deliver a stack of paperwork, why don’t you just call FedEx or UberEats or Drizzly? [Easy answer there. Because they don’t know the rules surrounding proper procedure.]
Serving process domestically is a challenging business, and you don’t want to leave it to some schmoe who doesn’t have a clue about applicable rules or about the peculiar things process servers face when they’re out and about. To be sure, I know some awesome process servers and I know some schmoes, and if I were running a lawsuit, I know which ones I wouldn’t hire. They need to do more than simply deliver things.***
Now extrapolate that to Notamerica, where they may or may not even have process servers in the first place (seriously– they don’t exist outside common law systems, and not even everywhere in the common law community). Serving process abroad is significantly more challenging than service here at home, simply because things work differently over there.
Landmines are buried everywhere in the overseas service arena. Some fields are sparsely laden (and thus not difficult to navigate safely), while others are chock-full of incendiaries that can derail a cause of action entirely.
We don’t just deliver paperwork. We navigate through those minefields.
A LOWER-COST ALTERNATIVE…
It may very well be that a litigant simply lacks sufficient resources for his/her lawyer to hire us. I get it, believe me, I get it. So I’m always keen to suggest a lower-cost approach that will help lawyers draft and file their own Hague Service Requests. It’s called Hague Envoy, and it compares to my firm like TurboTax compares to a CPA. Nobody needs to do it alone when there’s software to lend a hand.
* It’s always a guy. Seriously. Women in the legal field are just more respectful and, usually more thoughtful. This assertion is not an absolute, but it’s a rebuttable presumption.
** Tip for non-Geography majors: Notkansascity and Notamerica are fictional places, sort of like those silly jurisdictions like “Erehwon” that they came up with in Moot Court.
*** This is not a slam on the millions of people who deliver our mail, our Amazon packages, our pizza (shout-out to my guys at Minsky’s!)… but it is an argument that process servers must know and do and document a whole lot more.