How To Serve Your California Divorce Papers

Today we’re talking about the next step which is how to serve your Divorce paper.

So in the last video we talked about filing the initial documents to summons, petition, case cover sheet and a form called UCCJEA.

If you completed those correctly and you’ve now got those filed with the court you’ll have a case number issued.

You can’t file your documents until the case number has been issued.

So if you’ve already served your documents prior to filing you’re going to have to reserve them.

We see that happened quite a bit amongst folks trying to do their own paperwork. So if you filed your documents you’ll have a case number.

You would have paid your court fee or gotten your fee waiver at the court and now your documents are ready for service.

So there’s couple ways you can go about doing this. Ordinarily the initial divorce papers need to be personally served.

That means it needs to be served on your spouse by someone over the age of 18 other than yourself.

This could be a family friend. It could be anyone that’s not a party to the case. It could be the Marshalls, the Sheriffs.

You could hire a process server. There are lots of options for personal service. Just remember anyone other than yourself.

You can also do it by mail. This isn’t a widely known tactic but it’s one we utilize in our office in amicable cases where folks are trying to get through their Divorce case together, you can do it by mail.

So what we would do if you’re using our service is we would mail the file documents to your spouse.

And all you’ll have to do is sign the document indicating they received them, mail it back to us and we file that with the proof of service.

Now regardless of how you do this you need to file a proof of service with the court.

There’s nothing your spouse needs to sign when it’s done in person.

Whatever you have served them we’ll fill out the proof of service, they’ll give it back to you or if you’re using our service you give it back to us and we will take it through the courthouse and we will file the proof of service.

That’s would starts the sixth month cooling off period process. We’ll talk about that in the next video you’ll receive.

So by serve it by mail you can do it and it has to be someone other than you. You cannot be the one that mails it to him.

You’ll have to have again some neutral third party over 18 not yourself mail the documents and go through this process which is called Notice of Acknowledgement of Receipt which we use because it saves money.

It saves time. It keeps other people friends and family from having to be involved in your case.

And you don’t have to have a process server going throw something in your spouse’s face which doesn’t make most people happy.

So I hope that will make sense on the process of service once your documents are filed.

Please give us a call if you’d like our assistance. I appreciate you watch this video.

I hope you find that helpful and informational.