Why Process Serving?

This is the worst legal market in 30 years. Having been recently awarded a J.D. no legal connections at "daddy's firm" and sitting squarely in the middle of my class, job prospects are not good. Process serving, or, as I often refer to it as being a legal garbage man, is the closest I can get to the action. Better to be chasing around people with summonses than playing the job hunt game. Or something like that.

If anything, it does "get you in the game" as a good friend and law professor told me. And I'm glad I took the advice and began my new career path (starting from rock bottom). I work for a company that provides me with the papers to serve, so there's no worry about trying to build my own business. As you might imagine, I don't want to do this forever. I work "for" this company as an independent contractor, which means in the end, I decide when and where to work, and can work my own schedule. Pretty cool huh?

Of course, in order to make money, you have to serve people. This is commission only. Process servers generally don't get paid by the hour unless they are staking someone out. This kind of independent contractor work also requires you to keep track of your expenses, these companies don't do income tax deductions, so you had better keep track of your mileage and other business expenses, or you might find yourself on the other end of the process server dichotomy when you find out you owe the IRS.

But having survived law school, not being able to track expenses and keep deadlines would make me the worst prospect possible for an attorney, so these drawbacks to process server work are fairly minimal. Keep track of expenses... keep deadlines. The deadlines of course are the more difficult thing, if you don't server your defendant on time, the summons goes dormant, and your out of a commission. That, as you might imagine is where things get interesting, the serving part. I'll pick up with that in the next post.