“War Story”

Every profession has its “war stories”, interesting or unique events, victories or defeats. Doctors talk about their patients, people who work in retail or the food industry talk about customers, cops talk about criminals,  and lawyers talk about cases they’ve handled.

A few weeks ago, a friend posted on Facebook about an issue she was having with a process server, and it reminded me of one of my “war stories”.

Background information:  a process server is a person who has been hired to serve legal papers on an individual or business that’s being sued. A court does not have jurisdiction to handle the lawsuit unless the legal papers have been given to the defendant in a manner that complies with the rules set down by the court.

The ideal situation is for the process server to hand the documents directly to the person being sued.  But that isn’t always possible.  

So the process server may leave the documents at the defendant’s house even if the defendant isn’t home.  But in that case, the process server must also mail a copy of the documents to the defendant.

What would you do if those legal papers were mailed to you in this envelope:

Seriously, we had a process server use one of those envelopes.

The person who received this envelope sued the process server, the company he worked for, and the law firm, for harassment.

Needless to say, we had to find another process server...