Sometimes when you need papers to be served, the individual cannot be found at home. Whether the person has moved and you don’t have a current address, or if they are avoiding service by not being at home or answering the door, it might become necessary to serve the papers somewhere else at another time. The obvious place to find someone is at their place of employment. But can someone be served at work?
Rules about Serving Papers
There are few hard rules about where papers can and cannot be served. Papers can be served almost anywhere that the individual to be served can be found. This means that you can even have someone served while they are at a regularly scheduled meeting or event. It also means that legally, at least, you can serve papers to someone at their place of employment, but it isn’t quite so cut and dry.
Not Required to Cooperate
Employers are not legally required to cooperate with process servers. If the process server can walk into the place of employment and see the individual to be served, service can then happen. If the process requires the process server to go through management or office personnel to gain access to the person to be served, those individuals have no obligation to cooperate. They can refuse to notify the employee that you are even there. They might also ask you to come back during their regularly scheduled break.
If you have papers that need to be served and the individual is avoiding service, they can easily enlist the aid of their employer to avoid service at work. And, when that happens, there is little that you can do other than find another place to serve the papers.
If you are having difficulty getting papers served, we can help. Contact us today for more information or to get started.
