👤Your Role as a Process Server
As a process server, your primary responsibility is to deliver — or serve — legal documents to defendants, companies, and other entities involved in court cases.
📃Preparing Your Documents
When you receive an assignment, you'll need to print and organize the documents. These documents contain important information about the lawsuit, and they're often the first notification someone receives that a suit is active.
Though you do not need to read through every page, it's good practice to check and make sure no errors were made in printing, and that all the pages are present.
🚗Making Attempts
You will navigate to an assigned address and determine if the named entity can be reached there. This may require several attempts on different days of the week and at different times of the day — ideally times when someone is most likely to be home.
After every attempt to deliver the documents, whether successful or not, report the information in ABC Mobile.
⚖️Serving the Documents
This is not your typical delivery service. Each job is an assignment to an address, but process must be served to a person for it to be legally compliant.
When you've located the right individual for service, you'll hand them the document package. The best practice is to try to serve the person named in the documents. We will discuss in detail how to determine who is allowed to accept service.
✅Completing the Proof
The proof is the goal of this entire process. In the legal field, what is written is what matters — which is why great note-taking is critical.
Once you have resolved an address — either by serving the documents or determining that service cannot be completed — the notes you enter into ABC Mobile will be collected onto a proof for you to sign and return.
Always carefully review the details listed on each proof before signing to ensure that your statement is an accurate description of the events. ABC Legal Services will file this with the court as your testimony of what happened.
👥Support and Resources
If this seems like an intimidating process, you're not alone. Most people getting started on serving feel that way — that's why we're here to help and guide you.
We have a variety of in-field assistance always available to you:
• Our searchable resources page in ABC Mobile
• A dedicated support team for our process servers
• The rest of our staff at ABC Legal Services