Alright. Let’s do this One. More. Time.
Rule 4. Summons
(f) Serving an Individual* in a Foreign Country. Unless federal law provides otherwise, an individual—other than a minor, an incompetent person, or a person whose waiver has been filed—may be served at a place not within any judicial district of the United States:
The hits just keep on coming, y’all. I recently fielded a call from a lawyer in Notkansascity who needed help serving a defendant in Hong Kong. Or at least, he said, he needed help getting his summons and complaint translated into Mandarin– it seems his process server was already taking care of “that Hague thing.”
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
Sorry to be so loud with that.
Well, no, actually. I’m not sorry. I tried to lay all this out last spring, but here we go again.
At least once a month– still– I’ll hear from a very well-meaning client, seeking to rein in costs and save his/her client a boatload of cash and
Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen an uptick in the number of plaintiffs’ attorneys who submit FedEx receipts, attesting to delivery of Hague Service Requests to Central Authorities, filing them as proof of service. In most instances, it’s
* Hint: it’s not easy. If it were, I wouldn’t have a practice.
A plea to the senior partner overseeing a lawsuit:
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.
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
No, really. It’s gamesmanship, it’s wrong, and it’s prejudicing your client. Think Charlie Brown and Lucy and that blasted football.
If defense counsel were going to accept service on their client’s behalf, they’d have done it already, so quit screwing around and recognize that time’s a-wastin’. Quit letting them pull the ball
[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.
Another statement we hear regularly from colleagues who very legitimately seek to save costs or just cover all possible bases– and others who just want to shortcut the process in a super-cheap, super-quick way without worrying about proper procedure:
We’re going to serve alternatively instead of using the Hague.
Impossible to let that one go
