* Hint: it’s not easy. If it were, I wouldn’t have a practice.

A plea to the senior partner overseeing a lawsuit:

Stop throwing your junior people to the wolves.

Hear me out here. (This applies equally to non-attorney staff– the more junior they are, the more this is important.)

Litigators are busy people. I get it. You have 168 hours in a week and at least twelve of those need to be devoted to sleep. Especially in complex matters, it’s imperative to delegate different parts of the effort to the right members of the team.

  • “Susan (who just made partner), you’ll run the show on trial strategy & theme.”
  • “Dave (your fifth-year mentee), start thinking about how you’ll run discovery.”
  • “Kathy (your 14-year paralegal), you’re running all support staff functions.”
  • “Timmy (first-year associate who just passed the bar exam), go get these overseas defendants served.”

As if that last one is the simplest and least important part of the quest.

The basis for Timmy’s assignment surely must be the belief that service of process is a simple, straightforward procedure, so it’s not a risk to hand it to somebody who is bright but woefully inexperienced. But it’s a huge risk, and you’re setting the kid up for failure. Or frustration. Or your ire.

Timmy does a Google search for how to serve process in Notamerica, and he finds an august online publication called The Hague Law Blog. He peruses my country-specific post on Notamerica and calls me to ask for a price tag. It’s not that simple, I say. You have options, and that means a wide cost range. But Timmy isn’t privy to your grand strategy, and he lacks the authority to make any decisions, so he and I spend hours going back & forth about options, as he relays information from me to you and your questions back to me through him. He’s a go-between, because you just don’t have the time to deal with something so trivial as service of process.

You’re not only setting Timmy up for failure– you’re wasting your own time and mine because you won’t just pick up the phone and talk to me. We could have a strategy mapped out in fifteen minutes if we could chat directly. And your mind would be put at ease.

And speaking of wolves (just for fun), here’s a gratuitous reference to the glory of the 1980s.