No matter what sort of thing you’re talking about, what kind of activity or event you can imagine, it’s usually not just the way it is on TV and in the movies. Process serving isn’t either, in some pretty important ways. For people who need these services done, knowing that can be important.
The Big Screen
First of all, on tv and in the movies, process serving is highly dramatized, like everything else. There’s always this moment of apprehension where the process server is chasing the guy down an alley, or throws papers right at his chest and says “you’ve been served,” kind of in the same way that those competitive dance competitions use the phrase…
In real life, it’s much more often just a simple orderly handing of a paper to someone, or something that doesn’t have the panache to go with 1970s car chase music. There’s not always that tension that you see in the dramatized version – although that tension can definitely be there in some cases! It depends.
The Rules on Process Serving
Television doesn’t always give you a sense of the professionalism that you need for process serving, either.
Professional process servers understand, for example, the rule of trespass, and where you can and can’t go to deliver papers.
There is this sense of unbounded confidence in many of the TV depictions of process serving, where people might crawl in a window, jimmy a door, or just bound onto someone’s private property to serve the papers – and in reality it’s a little more complex than that.
Specifically, we’ve seen people file lawsuits against process servers who trespassed in order to serve the papers. So you really have to be cognizant of that issue when you’re doing the work!
Process Serving and Payment
Here’s another truism from television and movies – on the screen, you rarely see anybody paying anybody for process serving.
You see the whole thing ‘in media res’ – in the middle of the act, with the implication that somebody somewhere paid somebody to serve the papers.
You don’t see the main character serving papers. It’s an extra. But nobody goes into how they got hired to do that.
By contrast, on our site, you can see all of the process serving costs broken down into easy amounts. You’ll see that we really offer affordable process serving at reasonable prices, and support our law firms and client offices that way.
So no, real process serving isn’t like it is in the movies. It’s a day in, day out sort of thing that requires some professional knowledge and skill. So call us if you need this done! We’ll treat the process with the attention to detail that it deserves, for your sake, and for ours.