Let’s face it, nobody likes being sued. Nobody likes getting legal paperwork put in one’s hands and signing off on a form or saying something that formally starts the lawsuit process. If you get sued, chances are, you will lose money. In fact, the likelihood is very high. Even if you win your case, it may be an empty victory because you spent money on a lawyer. You spent your time. After all, time is money. So, it is not a surprise that a lot of people are really going out of their way to dodge the process service system. Of course, responsible people just meet the challenge head-on and hire an attorney and let the process take its course. However, there are quite a number of respondents that just would rather deal with lawsuits by becoming scarce. Here are 5 ways respondents dodge process servers:
Pick-up and go
This is pretty straight forward. Once certain respondents have clear understanding that they may be getting sued or they get a weird feeling that they will be sued, they just pick-up and go. In other words, they just leave wherever they are living and completely vanish without a trace. If you think this is impossible, think again, it happens quite a bit.
No forwarding address
One of the most annoying things that respondents do to avoid process servers is to not leave a forwarding address. It is as if they just completely disappeared out of thin air. Of course, this is not always possible because there are other ways to track people that don’t want to be tracked. In this modern days and age, we are always leaving a paper trail. We may not be conscious about it, but that paper trail still exists. The real clever process servers do know how to get around with people who fail to leave forwarding address or intentionally leave no forwarding address.
Tell people to lie
One of the hardest groups of people to deal with when it comes to serving legal docs is people who actively instruct others to lie on their behalf. These are people who basically tell family and friends that they don’t live there anymore, that they don’t know where they are and basically coach people to legally protect them from being served – because there are certain circumstances where you can be served even though you are not in a place to take service. There are certain people that are related to you or that you are in some sort of a legal relationship with that can stand in your place as far as being served legal docs for lawsuit purposes. By actively telling this people to lie, you don’t only engage them in a possibly illegal conduct, but you are thwarting the legal process.
Switching among many different locations
Another particularly common approach to dodge process services is to basically switch many different locations. In each location, people don’t know that you’ve been there or in each location, you actually tell people to lie for you.
Leave the country
The most extreme way to dodge process services, of course, is to leave the country. This may not seem extreme. This might seem rare, but guess what? It happens quite a bit. It doesn’t happen all the time, though. It happens enough for it to be worth a while to understand this way of dodging legal notice or legal service.
