California Divorce How To Serve Divorce Petition By Substituted Service
Today, we’re going to talk about substituted service.
When you file for divorce in California, those initial documents, in most cases need to be served in person.
There are some other ways that can go about that, but generally speaking it needs to be served in person by someone other than you over the age of 18.
Now one of the problems that can may come up is that you’ve attempted to serve your spouse multiple times or maybe you a hired a process server to serve your spouse multiple times, but they are either never there or they’re trying to avoid service for some strange reason, or they won’t come to the door for instance.
Let’s say that your spouse lives with their parents or some other person. And they never come to the door.
And we’ve had that happened in cases, we go there, we know they live there, that’s where their address is.
They’re living with their relative or spouse maybe family member something like that. But that person never comes to the door.
What you can do is you can do something called substitute service, where you can serve another person, another responsible party.
In this case, let’s say you’re serving your spouse’s mother in law of serving the person and knowing that, that person will take it to the person that you’re really trying to serve.
So I don’t want to complicate that. But in doing so that cannot be your first step.
You can’t simply go to the house Oh, she’s not here. Or she doesn’t come to the door and do substituted service on her.
You have to make multiple attempts and you’re going to have to write declaration indicating that on these dates, at these times, you’ve gone to the properties several times they’ve never come to the door.
And then you’ve done the substitute service by serving in this case the mother who in term should give the documents to the other party.
In these cases when you have substituted service, it’s also going to alter the timeframes in finalizing your case.
What that means is when you go to file or requesting a default, if it’s a default type case, instead of waiting 30 days to file the default, you’re going to have to wait 40 days to file the default.
This is both on substituted service and service by certified mails.
So just keep that in mind.