TL;DR: think Miranda. Anything you say in a filing about proof of Hague Service could be used against you. So don’t say anything. Also, I’m a nerd who digs arcane Latin terms like probatur even though I never studied Latin.
A bit of background is in order here.
My firm’s primary job is
This is a tough one to explain to civilians (read: litigants), which is one reason we don’t work directly with civilians. Lawyers get it, which is one reason we love working for lawyers, and only for lawyers. Not to sound too much like Henry Hill, but pre-payment is just something we can’t waver
I haven’t written much about this topic except to update a couple of past posts, bringing them in line with recent developments as to electronic service and the Hague Service Convention. Frankly, the developments don’t alter my usual contention a whole lot, but they do provide some persuasive authority for e-service’s use in certain scenarios.
A harsh reality in the service of process world: once a Hague Service Request gets to a foreign Central Authority, it’s pretty well locked up– especially once it’s been underway for several weeks or months. No amendments can be made, no documents can be added, and no revisions can be made to the defendant’s address.
TL;DR… be patient. It’s a process.
Several years ago, I published a pair of posts that are even more important to keep in mind now, in a post-pandemic world:
The spring of 2019 seems like a decade
For starters, it’s officially been simply Czechia since 2016 (see here). Peggy and I were just there a couple of weeks ago, and even the Czechs still call it the Czech Republic and Czechia interchangeably; admittedly, so do I. What they don’t call it anymore: Czechoslovakia– that nation ceased to exist three decades
The Dutch– an exceedingly practical and direct people– have a saying: Goedkoop is Duurkoop. Cheap is expensive. We of the anglophone persuasion have a variation on that theme: you get what you pay for.
But the Dutch version captures reality far more forcefully. Cheap is expensive is an apt way of articulating the constant
Our firm routinely handles service in complex cases involving multiple defendants in multiple countries, nearly always pursuant to the Hague Service Convention. In many of those cases, two or three (or even more) defendants are domiciled at the same address– especially in cases involving several subsidiaries of global conglomerates. One would think that should produce
Shortly after I hung out my shingle, I posted that defense counsel should always question the validity of Hague Service. Why?
Whenever I receive a Hague Service Certificate from a foreign authority, I pass it along to my client with a few pieces of advice– all sketched out in various blog posts. This is merely a consolidation of a few things to keep in mind on the back end of Hague service…
