In six semesters of law school, including two of Civil Procedure, the only time I remember ever hearing a professor mention service of process was in Business Organizations class (known elsewhere and in earlier times as Corporations). That was it.

My BusOrg professor, known to frequent readers of this blog as Big Tony, was a seasoned litigator before joining the ivory tower, so we thought he had considerably more street cred than other faculty who had never practiced. Well, Big Tony hammered into our brains that, if you’re going to sue an entity, you damn sure better name it properly, and you damn sure better serve it properly.

Then we moved on to other things, like formation and resident agents and winding up. Service of process wasn’t mentioned again. Ever. In any class. The Hague Service Convention certainly never came up, until the very last paper I completed as a 3L– and that was for an independent study.

Now, I went to a third-tier, red-headed stepchild law school– a state institution that constantly takes a back seat to the flagship of the system two hours to the east (and of dubious superiority). But my alma mater prides itself to this day on producing nuts and bolts lawyers who can handle day-to-day practice. We had fantastic training in trial advocacy skills, client counseling, and drafting of instruments– for clients, rather than just for appellate courts (though we got huge doses of that, too). The one nut & bolt combination that was left out of the training, though, was the very first step in a lawsuit after the thing gets filed. Service was just taken as assumed– and I doubt highly that my alma mater is any different than the rest of the legal academy.*

Don’t make service an afterthought. It’s like choosing your place kicker after the draft because you don’t want to waste a pick (never mind that the top twenty-five scorers in NFL history are all place kickers). Service is the kickoff in litigation, and without a good kickoff, the game is lost before it starts. It’s not a given, and it’s dangerous to consider it so. Valid service is a cornerstone of due process (see Mullane), and without it, the case goes nowhere.

I really shouldn’t complain about the gaping hole in our legal training– it’s impossible for law professors to imbue their students with all the knowledge necessary to practice. And my stockbroker makes a payment on his boat every month thanks to litigators who recognize what they don’t understand and should hand off to someone else to execute.

But this one is important. So if you’re a law professor, especially one who teaches CivPro, take five minutes out of the 2,100 allotted to you in the semester,** and discuss it.

If you’re a litigator, remember that service is step ONE once you have a case number and an issued summons. Don’t make it an afterthought.

* I had a moment of glee a few years into practice. I was giving a CLE lecture in a conference room in Paris, talking about the fun I have working with the Hague Service Convention. As I dug into the substantive stuff, it dawned on me that, to my left was the associate dean who taught my first semester of CivPro. On the opposite side of the room from him was the associate dean who taught my second. They were both fantastic teachers, but “good grief, guys. One of you could have at least mentioned this stuff!”

** Fourteen weeks in a semester, three credit hours, 150 clock minutes a week, 2,100 total. And you thought lawyers couldn’t math.