California Divorce – How To Serve Petition By Certified Mail

Today, we’re talking about a special way or a specific way of serving divorce documents. And this is what’s called certified mail.

And I’m sure you’ve heard of those certified mail process but what a lot of people don’t understand is you can serve in certain circumstances you can serve your initial divorce documents by certified mail.

There are couple conditions where you can use that and I want to go over that with you.

So normally the initial divorce documents need to be served by process server or by personal service, anyone over the age of 18.

But when your spouse lives out of State, the California courts with your Divorce allow you to serve those initial documents by certified mail.

There are couple conditions on that.

Number one is you have to have somebody else send this certified mail to your spouse.

And of course, this is something that’ll probably only work if your spouse is in agreement because normally either the post office employee will sign off saying that they handed the documents directly to your spouse or if your spouse is home, they will have your spouse, will sign the certified mail receipt which it will be returned to you.

And again you have to use the return receipt on the certified mails.

So it’s a little card that you’ll get back. That’s your proof that the Divorce documents were in fact received by the other party.

So once you get that certified mail card back, you’re going to file that with the proof of service. And that’s how you let the court know that they were served.

So a couple conditions I just want to recap on. And then I want to go in another topic, is, number one, someone else has to mail the certified mail.

Number two you want to use return receipt. In fact you have to use return receipt that’s your only evidence than it was received.

And you’re only going to want to use this if your spouse is out of State.

Now what other conditions?

When you serve your divorce documents in California by a certified mail out of State, normally in a normal divorce after 30 days after your spouse has been served, you can file a default and you can move on with the default case if that’s what the way you’re going to move forward with your Divorce in California.

But when you do it by certified mail, you need to wait 40 days after the service using certified mail.

So it’s normally 30 days. But when you do certified mail out of State, it’s an additional of 10 days. So it’s 40 days after the certified mail receipts said they were served or received the divorce documents before you can file the default or requesting a default in your divorce case.

I hope that makes sense. I’m just trying to prevent people from getting their cases rejected.

We’ve had some clients called us saying, “Hey, Tim I waited 30 days. And I filed my default. And it was rejected.” and I said “You have to wait 40 days because it was a certified mail out of State process.”

Tim Blankenship Divorce661.com, feel free to call the number on your screen, I’d be happy to give you a free consultation.

We do handle Divorce cases anywhere in California.  Thanks for watching.