Who Can Serve Divorce Papers

When you are going through the divorce process, one of the important things you will learn is about the process of service.  But probably one of the most important times you should be especially aware of how to serve divorce papers is when you have to serve the initial Summons and Petition.

The majority of divorce forms can be served by mailing copies of the filed documents to your spouse.  However, the divorce Summons and Petition must be personally served.  This means that the Summons and Petition must be hand delivered and in certain way.

Rules About Serving Divorce Summons and Petition

A person can act as a process server as long as they are over the age of 18 and not a party to the case.  This means you cannot serve your own divorce Summons and Petition.

People who can be used as process servers:

  1. A County Sheriff or Marshall
  2. A coworker
  3. A friend or relative
  4. A professional process server
  5. Anyone over 18 not a party to the case

I can’t say it enough times that you cannot serve your own divorce papers.  If you do the service will be not be good.  You could go all the way through the divorce process and find out your proof of service is defective because you served your own divorce papers.  The only thing that could save you is in the case where the respondent filed a response.  The filing of the Response is evidence that they have been served and they will determine jurisdiction to be that of the day the Response was filed.

The nice thing about working with our legal document preparation service is that we will take care of all the service of all your divorce forms.  In fact, we usually use an alternative forms of service for the Summons and Petition called the Notice of Acknowledgment and Receipt.

As far as all your other documents that need to be served, we will prepare a mail proof of service to send along with such documents like your Declaration of Disclosure or any other forms that you need served.

We are a licensed and bonded legal document preparation service that specializes in the divorce process