What To Do if You Can’t Locate Your Spouse for Divorce?
How do you proceed in a divorce if you’re unable to locate him to get service of process, to get him served? I’m Tulsa attorney James Wirth, and that is the question we have. That comes up a lot with people, particularly if they’re going pro se, handling on their own. Their cases just stall out and don’t go anywhere because they run into roadblocks they don’t know how to get around.
One of those roadblocks is, how do you get service if you don’t know where they are? Well, the first thing that I want to say is that the system is designed so you should always be able to get service. You don’t want a scenario where someone can evade service and therefore stall the case and prevent you from moving through. You know, litigation, our judicial system would come to a grinding halt if all you had to do is avoid service to prevent cases from moving forward.
How To Give Service of Process
But there is certain due diligence you have to do to try to give actual notice according to Oklahoma statutes before you can get to kind of the catch-all provision. So how do you give service of process? Well, the first obvious one is in person. If a process server or the sheriff’s office can do personal service of those documents, then they would sign and file an affidavit indicating that it’s served. That’s good service.
The other one is certified mail. If it is restricted delivery to the person that you need to serve, they sign for it, you get that green card back, then you can file that as proof they were served on that date. Another one, you can serve another person 14 or older at that person’s residence. The process server can serve it to that person even though it’s not the person you intend to serve. If you can show that the person you’re intending to serve resides there and you gave it to somebody 14 or older there, then they can do an affidavit and that is good service.
What Is Not Considered Good Service?
Okay, so what is not good service? Okay, well, just send them an email, letting them know about it, or if you just hand it to them and you’re not a process server. So those are actual notices, but not good enough. Send them a text message, and tell them over the phone. Actual notice, but not proper service by the statute.
Now, what is the situation where you cannot locate them? The process server, you don’t know where to send them. Well, then you wanna look at doing due diligence and then a request to do service by publication. That is your catch-all provision. If you do due diligence and you can’t get them served, then you go to the judge and say, hey, I’ve tried everything, I can’t get them served.
Get Help From an Attorney
Can I do service by publication? And the judge should say yes, or the judge might say, I don’t think you’ve quite done your due diligence yet. Why don’t you try this and this? Come back to me if that doesn’t work. But in any case, there should never be a scenario where it’s impossible to get service. We don’t want that kind of roadblock. What we want is due process and notice, but we don’t want roadblocks. We want cases to be able to move forward.
So go through the processes, and try to get them served. If that doesn’t work, get permission from the court to do service by publication. And then you put publication notice in a legal newspaper in the county where the proceeding is going on. And the statute has, it’s gotta be in a certain number of times over a certain time. Those publications that do that know what those are. And then once that’s done, just like as if they were personally served by a process server, they’ve got a limited amount of time to file a response of pleading. If they don’t, you can request a default judgment against them.
Get a Low-Cost Initial Strategy Session
So if you can’t get service, there’s a way. You just gotta go through the processes. If you’re dealing with this though, you may want the help of an attorney, and you’re gonna want to talk to an attorney privately and confidentially to receive legal advice specific to your circumstances. To get that scheduled with an attorney at my office, you can go online to makelaweasy.com or call us at 918-879-1681.
