Working PI
by Brandon Boyce, P.I.
It’s one of the last good deals in America—the $75 process serve. In some parts of the country, even that is considered overspending. In a business that chugs along by the slimmest of margins, some process servers are charging fifty, sixty bucks to hand off a summons in a never-ending race to the bottom. And making five or six attempts to get it done. Enjoy it now, because the days of getting a competent RPS to touch paper for less than a C-note are critically numbered.
Come January 1, 2027, cheap service will disappear faster than a door-knock on the CALI Listserv. That’s when a new California law goes into effect that will almost certainly have repercussions nationwide. “As go New York and California, so goes the country,” says industry veteran Michael Kern, CEO of Direct Legal Support, Inc. The law, AB 747 (named, presumably, for the passenger-jet-sized hole it may rip through the industry), ushers in a suite of changes that could unintentionally force a much-needed correction in an undervalued industry.
Most notably, affidavits of service will now be required to include photos and GPS coordinates for every attempt made. And at least one photo must be of “the entrance” to the home or business. Does that mean the front door? The gate at the end of a mile-long driveway? The law is unclear, as will be its implementation. Regardless, “Filling out a proof of service by hand is not going to be an option anymore,” said Jackie Janney of Janney & Janney Legal Support and the president of CALSPro, the California Association of Legal Support Professionals, a leading trade association.
Backed primarily by the legal aid lobby, the law purported to protect the integrity of the legal process, especially when it came to unlawful detainers. The California statehouse has no shortage of lawmakers who believe no one should ever be evicted from their home for any reason. (The merits of that position are beyond the scope of this article.) To push the law through, supporters conjured grisly tales of eviction notices being dubiously served, or worse, not served at all. This so-called “sewer service” references an apocryphal practice attributed to servers in New York City who allegedly dropped their papers in the sewer and then claimed, under penalty of perjury, that they had served them. In California, the backers of the law gave “scant evidence that this was happening,” according to Chad Barger, the co-chair of CALSPro’s legislative committee.
So, a law designed to fix a problem that doesn’t exist got signed into law. Welcome to California.
And while much has been written about the sour lemons in this law, let us consider the lemonade. “Costs will go up,” Janney said. “There’s a technology requirement to put these changes in.” Those changes have to be addressed on all platforms and workflows. So process serving might, by hook or crook, get dragged upward from its sullied reputation. “Too many people saw Pineapple Express,” Janney said. The changes to the law “could help elevate us from that kind of thinking.”
Kern isn’t so sure. “That might turn into a positive for the larger companies.” But the smaller firms might not see the benefit. Already the legal support industry is in a state of contraction. Voracious new ventures like New York-based Proceed have gobbled up major players like Rapid Legal, Firefly and tech innovator LegalConnect. In total, the names of 16 recent acquisitions adorn a scrolling banner on the Proceed website like the gaudy merit badge sash of the industrious Boy Scout nobody likes.
In New York City, where the specter of “sewer service” was born, the number of registered process servers plummeted from over 1,700 (10 years ago) to around 400 today, thanks to punitive strictures that went into place in response to the non-existent plague of unserved subpoenas floating out to the Hudson River. The laws penalize the process servers personally. Even a misplaced comma on a proof of service can result in significant fines and reprimands. And you thought being an actor in New York was tough.
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Fighting for Scraps
Nationwide, margins are shockingly low. And PIs are affected by this whether we like it or not.
Some PIs build their businesses on process serving, leveraging licensure for add-ons in support of that core revenue stream: skip tracing, running plates, the lavishly hyphenated stakeout-for-serve. (We need a naming contest on that one.) Conversely, there are PIs who avoid serving papers with the zeal of an immunocompromised doomscroller at the height of COVID. But crowding the middle are many PIs who treat SOP like a mid-’90s friends-with-benefits situation: a steady, unsexy fallback to get through the lean times. It is this contingent that might be in for the rudest awakening. The process serving exemption that comes with a PI license has, let’s face it, led to a lot of investigators charging out into the wilds of process serving without the strong foundation in the rules of the game. Many PIs are aces at putting papers in a litigant’s hands, but then struggle deciding which affidavit to use, or whether serving the clerk at Mailboxes Etc. counts as personal, or substituted, service. Or is it service by mail? (It’s not.)
Adapt or Perish.
Already preparations are underway. The Judicial Council of California has drafted a proposed Proof of Service (the 1- or 2-page document that is the true retail product of process serving) which purports to incorporate the necessary changes. But tinkering with something that had been elegantly effective in its simplicity, like the POS-010 (the workhorse of affidavits), has opened up a Costco-sized can of night crawlers. “It’s a mess,” said Tony Klein on a recent Zoom. If anyone would know, it’s Klein, the man who literally wrote the book on process serving and arguably its most venerated practitioner.
Kern, a past president of both CALSPro and NAPPS (National Association of Professional Process Servers), put it equally bluntly. “It’s painstaking,” Kern said of preparation that goes into implementing the new changes. “You’re going to see people get educated really quick, or get out of the business.”
Janney added, “The industry stands to lose a wealth of institutional and generational knowledge.” Both Janney and Kern grew up in their family businesses. I know many second-generation process servers whose childhood trips to Disneyland were often accompanied by a disclaimer from dad: “Just gotta make two stops first.”
Indeed, the hasty exit from the industry might be inextricably tied to its relatively low bar of entry. With around $300 and a felony-free record, anyone can sashay into the county registrar’s office and leave with a temporary RPS credential. Reality sets in quickly. Much like investigation, the key is finding clients. Without them, the only alternatives are subcontracting for the more established players, or signing on as a full-on W-2, paid-by-the-hour employee. Both are tough ways to make a living.
Post-pandemic, the big-box process-serving companies like ABC Legal made big pushes to fold process serving into the gig economy with recruiting events, easy signups, and “training” that deserves its quotation marks. A few years in, the part-timers and second-jobbers who remain have eked out meager livings by amassing a few hundred grueling serves, but many have never written a proof of service, much less cold-called a potential client. These ranks are likely to see culling.
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Unintended Consequences
There’s a golden phrase in the process-serving business: If the job is exciting, you’re doing it wrong. Well hold onto your body-cams, folks, because this roller coaster is about to hit the big drop, through a ring of fire, into a den of hungry badgers.
I’ve been Chicken Little-ing for months that servers’ phones will start getting subpoenaed. What’s to stop opposing counsel from demanding to examine the accuracy of the device’s time-stamped photos or GPS coordinates? Nothing. And who’d blame them? I’d want my attorney working every legal avenue. But subpoenaed devices aren’t coming home for months. So imagine the unspeakable hardship of losing your ability to call, text, email or nurture your 200-day Wordle streak because your iPhone is locked in an attorney’s desk drawer.
And then there’s personal safety. Even without the new laws, process serving has become dangerously phone-dependent. Many large companies utilize their own proprietary serving apps, which servers are required to use to log their attempts, take photos and get paid. Other process servers use subscription-based platforms such as ServeManager or PST. Every server is using some type of navigation software; not doing so is impossible. Every task that draws a server’s attention down to a screen means one less second of situational awareness. When you’re handing someone potential life-altering news—You’re being sued—Your spouse is leaving you—Hey bro, Home Depot really wants their forklift back—safety dictates that your eyes be up and about.
Another consequence is dissension from the affected players: PIs, sheriffs’ departments, attorneys and process servers. Take it from a member of two entertainment labor unions who’s been on strike twice, there’s nothing the studios love more than the workforce of Hollywood dividing itself into little groups. Trade organizations that relish their exclusivity do so at their own peril. Want to scare the crap out of a corporation, (or, in this case, the backers of a bill)? March into a negotiation arm-in-arm with your fellow aggrieved parties, hatchets buried, interests aligned. It works because there’s power in numbers. Because the enemy of your enemy is your friend. So far, the groups have shown about as much unity as a season premiere of Survivor. Instead of coalition building, certain factions are fighting for carveouts and exemptions to the new requirements. No group should have either. And the legislators, to their credit, seem to get that. For now. By multiple accounts, California’s sheriffs are taking a wait-and-see approach. Kern speculates that “the Sheriffs just might stop serving altogether” if their deputies are forced to comply with the burdensome GPS and photo criteria. An email to the California State Sheriffs’ Association asking for comment went unreturned.
What Goes Up, Stays Up.
Let’s play this out, shall we? The law will come into effect Jan. 1. Almost immediately, the courts will start feeling the effects, warts and all. So ’27 will be the year that we’ll be sleeping in the beds we’ve made. The companies that have made the necessary adjustments in procedure, software, hardware and education will have done so at significant expense. It’s no secret where those expenditures will be recouped. From their customers. In the form of higher prices. Boom. The price of serving process just went up. But there’s more. It’s highly possible that the flaws, limitations and omissions of AB 747 can be identified and remedied with future legislation. Yet wheels of lawmaking turn slowly. Kern predicts that the cleanup work will begin in earnest in ’28. “Cleanup for something that hasn’t happened yet is very hard.” Assuming the most onerous and unworkable facets of the law could eventually be mitigated—if not ceremoniously chucked into, well, a sewer—then the whole endeavor might just arrive, beaten and bloodied, back where it started. The rock-bottom prices will undoubtedly return then, right?
Right?
Not on your life. Did the price of CDs come down when they stopped making them in those artful but pointless foot-long boxes? (History lesson—No.) But let me find a reference from this millennium. A fire at a single oil refinery can send gas prices soaring for months, even if the refinery is back online within hours. The supply chain upheaval of COVID-19 is long over, but the free coffee samples at Trader Joe’s are never coming back! The economics of 2026 have shown us time and again that prices go up quickly at the slightest sign of trouble, and when those troubles are eased, prices may come down a fraction, but never return to where they were.
In the case of process serving, that’s probably for the best.
About the Author
Private Investigator Brandon Boyce is the owner of Window Rock Investigators, based in Los Angeles. In a career spanning 30 years as a screenwriter, TV writer and novelist, he has written the films Wicker Park, Apt Pupil and Bad Samaritan. He was a writer on the Emmy-nominated Hulu/FX series Under the Banner of Heaven. His novels are published by Kensington Publishing. His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals. For more information, email info@windowrocklegal.com.
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