Some of the nerviest people associated with the practice of law have to be the process servers. They are the neutral third parties required for taking a summons and complaint from the plaintiff’s lawyer to hand to a defendant to start a suit. Most of their work is mundane enough, but then, there are defendants who don’t want to be served who make the process a challenge.
Washington law allows process
servers to go onto private property to serve papers. While I was contract City
Attorney for Normandy Park, the police got an emergency call from a process
server who had entered through a gate to serve papers at a front door. The defendant was furious, and used his
remote control to close the gate before the process server could leave. The
defendant was walking up the driveway with a gun in hand when the process
server called 9-1-1. He was locked in his car and weeping when the police arrived within minutes,
and talked the defendant into backing off.
One of our assistants,
Michael Dodd (who later became a lawyer), couldn’t get a defendant to come to
the door to receive papers, so Michael walked up behind the guy’s house and
pulled the main breaker in the guy’s outdoor circuit box. When the guy came
outside to see what was happening, Michael served him.
When we had trouble serving a
judgment debtor with papers for a collection proceeding, the client sent us a
private detective who would do the job. “He’s a funny little guy who wears his
pantlegs tucked into his boots,” the client said. The detective told me that he was a
specialist in tracking stolen horses. In our case, he went to the defendant’s
house and rang the doorbell. It was summer and the door was open and the
detective could hear him moving around inside, but couldn’t quite see him
through the screen door, and the defendant refused to come out. So the detective
went to the guy’s driveway and shook the guy’s pickup truck as hard as he
could. That set off the car alarm, and
when the defendant came charging out to check on his truck, he was served.
My paralegal assistant John
Powers was willing to try to effect service when our usual vendors hadn’t
succeeded. He relied upon his superb physical fitness, and upon his years of
experience with a gas company, to get into places where the vendors wouldn’t
go. He watched somebody drive out of the garage to a condo building in Canada,
and just like you see in cops-and-robber movies, he rolled under the
automatically-closing door. Once inside, he served papers. He scrambled over an
8-foot fence to knock on a door, and that’s where the experience with the gas
company came in. “How did you get past my dog?” the astonished defendant
asked. But guys who shut off gas service
learn how to sweet-talk canines.
The service that gave John
the greatest pleasure was a pure ruse.
He found out that the defendant worked in a building at Boeing that was not
open to the public. (In fact, through resources of his own, John knew on a map
exactly where the guy sat.) He walked up to the receptionist, looking very official with clip board in
hand, and told her that he had an appointment with the defendant, who sat in cubby
XX. “Oh, he has moved,” the woman told him. “Come on in; I’ll point the
way.” John walked up to the defendant,
handed him the papers, and told him they were legal papers from our client, the
civil engineer who hadn’t been paid. The defendant was flabbergasted. “How did
you get in here?” he wanted to know. “You can’t be in here by yourself; I guess
I should escort you out.”
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