Options On Serving California Divorce Summons When Spouse Out Of State

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with Divorce661.com. And I what I want to talk about today is the two different ways you can serve your spouse If they live out of state.

If you notice on the FL-115,this is the proof of service of summons. So we’re talking about serving the initial documents once you establish a case for the court in California. One of the options is what’s called a mail and acknowledgement service and specifically doing a registered or certified mail with return receipt requested.

This is on page 2 of the 115.So if you and your spouse are amicable and you do have a spouse out of state, you can, when they say you, someone else has to do it. Someone has always has someone else always has to serve the summons and petition and you can do that by mail. You can do that by mail within California using a notice of acknowledgement form 117.

But when you are serving a document out of state and you’ll still use the 117,you need to do it by certified mail and you need to do it with return receipt so you have evidence that it was delivered and signed for by your spouse or just slightly different when the other party lives out of state.

Now, let’s assume that your spouse is not amicable. Now with our clients that’s not the case because we only work with amicable clients, so this is never an issue. But that said if they refuse to sign or maybe they’ve moved and they no longer are at that address that you don’t know where they live. The next option is simply going to be doing it by personal service which is the standard normally.

If you don’t know where they live, my recommendation is you contact a process server company in that state and find one that is also a private detective of sorts that can do some type of background search and they can do a search and maybe find where they are listing their credit cards, or maybe they did a lease application or something like that because they do have to be served for the 6 months to start.

So if you filed for divorce, you know, two months ago, but you still haven’t been able to get them served your six months has not started yet. That six-month cooling-off period. So get a private detective service who’s also a process server. There are many of them out there. You can use a service like napps.org, it’s basically a site where you can enter a zip code or an area of where the other party lives and locate a Iicensed process server anywhere in the country.

Tim Blankenship Divorce661.com. I hope you’re having a great day. We’ll talk to you soon.