Today we are talking about the three ways you can go about serving your spouse in a divorce.

It seems to be a big misconception that you have to personally serve your spouse the initial divorce papers.

If you look at court procedure, you go to your local court website. It’s going to tell you exactly that. It’s going to say, you file your papers, and then you serve your papers and then it has to be served by personal service, which means anyone over eighteen other than you or by process server.

People will routinely hire a process server or they’ll use the local marshal or sheriffs in the court to do their service and that’s just not necessary. We handle high volume of divorce cases and we very rarely serve our documents by personal service.

The only ones that we do are the ones who are starting out in adversarial tone and that’s the only way service will be accomplished.

But if you’re going through an amicable divorce, you guys are working through your divorce in an agreeable fashion as best as you can. You can serve your documents by mail.

Now, when I say by you can do it, not you, it still applies where you are the only one who cannot do it.

So, you can have a friend mail the filed documents to your spouse along with a form called notice of acknowledgement and receipt and this is basically a form that will be received by the other party and they’ll sign acknowledging receiving the divorce forms.

That document has to be mailed back to the person it was mailed from so then you can file the proof of service with the court saying we serve by mail, by notice of acknowledgement of receipt.

That’s how we serve probably 90% of our documents in our amicable divorce cases in California.

The other way is if your spouse is out of state, you can use the notice of acknowledgement of receipt and do it by mail or you can use certified mail process. They’ll allow you to send it certified mail.

Return receipt requested so when the post office delivers it and they sign saying they handed it to your spouse.

When you get that card back you would file that with the proof of service and that would be a sufficient service in you and that would be the method that you would use if they’re out of state.

Those are the three different ways that you can serve. Personal service should be a last resort unless that’s the only way left to go.

Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com.

Give us a call. We can help you with your divorce case anywhere in California. Talk to you soon.

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