For those of you that are not familiar with the process serving industry, allow us to bring you up to date. Just about every process server in the United States today that is making their living serving process, belongs to various municipal, city, county, state, national, or international professional association of some sort.

A process server may take in your process to be served and then have to locate another process server in the area where your process is addressed to and make arrangements with that local server for service. In the process serving industry we call that networking and networking can be very dangerous if not handled correctly.

In the networking community you have no control nor knowledge what company, what server or if that server will even be in business 30 days after your paper is served. What happens if you have a question or concern regarding your paper(s) served? There are many alleged process servers who do not serve process nor have they ever served process and yet they advertise all over America and internationally, that they are process servers. In the process serving industry they are known as “spin doctors” as they do nothing but take in work and money and “spin” the process to another company or sub-contractor. While the “spin doctor” can give you a lower rate, your level of service is based on that rate. The “spin doctor” does not have the liability for auto insurance, auto maintenance, auto depreciation, and excessive wear and tear on their vehicle, like the true process server does, nor are they utilizing fuel at outrageous prices. I suggest to you that if you have never served a piece of process, then you are not a professional process server.

In addition to a “spin doctor” not serving YOUR paper, there are always additional fees for each paper served. A “spin doctor” takes a percentage of the fee for himself before sending your paper on to the actual process server with his fees. Many times there are charges for number of attempts, waiting time, with various forms of rush, priority, and seniority fees to raise your fee in order to spin the process to a local server. This is a bait and switch fee structure that is not professional and can easily increase your fees drastically. This is exactly the reason the majority of the industry has gone to a pre-pay basis, to avoid this type of confusion and piracy.

Due to budget cuts many of the smaller sheriff’s departments must operate along these same premises. In addition you find salaried personnel versus commissioned personnel in the private sector with nepotism and politico, socio infa-structure playing a major role in who gets served, when they get served and if at all, they get served.

This is how it works