Have you heard the term “Gutter Serves”? I had not until I got into this industry, from the time of first hearing about it it is something that I and professional process servers everywhere are always afraid of. One bad process server lying on his paperwork can taint the entire industry, one bad server within a company can ruin a company’s name.
What is a “Gutter Serve”? This is when a server does not go out to serve the papers but rather just fills out his affidavit claiming to have served someone, he just chooses a date and time, uses an address give for the defendant and claims he served them. Since in the collection industry it is in the high 90’s where default judgements are awarded and defendants do not show up for court this is a safe gamble for a server. An unethical individual can get away with this for a long time, and since most process servers are paid per job they can make more money with no work. I came across this article today about one instance where this happened to a man in California:
click here to check out some details.
I do not know the details of ABC Legal and how involved this individual was with their company. More than likely the individual was a contract company that ABC Legal used in that area, they are a large forwarder of process service including a contract with the State of Utah to serve the Office of Recovery Services papers by sending papers from Utah out to Washington state then back to smaller Utah companies. Most of the time problems like this are one individual that does something like this not a company wide issue. I have done work for ABC Legal and have never been pressured or felt like they wanted anything less than inaccurate returns of service. They have never complained about a non serve coming back to them if the address was bad. On the other hand I have had other clients try to pressure us to just get a return of service, saying that they know where they work and all they need is a judgement and they can garish wages. Those type of clients are no longer a client of ours.
So what can the industry do to correct this, what can the courts do, private process serving companies? We have seen the city of New York put in place laws that require a date and time stamped photo to be taken at each serve. From the law maker standpoint this is what they felt was needed, I hope here in Utah that we do not need the state managing our industry, that we can do it from with in. Here at Statewide Process Servers we have tried to stay ahead of the trends. While I hire only guys I trust, I also verify. We want to have an overwhelming amount of evidence that our servers did what they swore to on their returns of service. All of our servers are utilizing the latest in technology. They use smart phones with software that allows them to take a photo at each attempt, bad address, serve, and non serve, that logs the date and time they took it and the gps location they were at when they did. Clients can log in and look at this information. On our end we can pull up logs of each individual and it will flag any inaccuracies, if a server claims to have served two papers at the exact same time or if they served a paper and 5 min later served another but the distance between them was 30 miles it will flag it. Despite what we do with in our own company and with our servers, we at times also have to hire other companies to serve for us out of state and we have to trust that they will do what they agree to do and not perform gutter serves.
In every industry you will have people looking to make a dollar in the easiest way possible, I hope that professionals in the industry will push for high ethics from their servers and that attorneys will demand the same. We need to be aware of the problems and do what we can to eliminate those willing to put their own interest ahead of ethics.