Reasons to Hire a Process Server after a Car Accident

You’re driving the kids to school. The light turns green, you cross the intersection, and a car that ran the red hits you square in the side at speed. The SUV rolls and comes to rest with the windows gone and the frame bent. The kids are terrified, you’re shocked and sore, and you have no idea yet who’s hurt or how badly. All of it on the same commute you drive every morning, a few blocks from your house.

You have less control over this than you’d like. You can drive carefully for thirty years and still not control the person coming the other way.

Then it gets worse: the driver who hit you has no insurance. Now you’re taking them to court to establish fault, and quite possibly back to court again to collect what the judgment says they owe. None of that starts until they’ve been served.

Hiring a certified Arizona process server is the first practical step. Here’s why it’s worth doing properly.

Avoid Mistakes

Bad service costs you weeks. Documents handed to the wrong person, left at a door instead of delivered, served outside the window, or served correctly but with a return of service that doesn’t hold up. Any one of those can get an attempt thrown out, and you start over with the clock still running.

Arizona certifies process servers by county, and the certification exists because the details are easy to get wrong. Working with a certified process serving company is how you keep a procedural error from becoming the reason your case stalls.

Speed The Process

Personal injury claims in Arizona run against a statute of limitations, and even with time to spare you want the medical bills addressed sooner rather than later.

There’s also a practical reason to move fast. Once someone knows a case is coming, they get harder to find. A server who can go out the same day is working before that happens, which is why same day and rush service exists. When an address turns out to be stale, a skip trace finds the current one instead of burning another week.

Help Your Lawyer

Your server isn’t only serving the defendant. Witnesses get subpoenaed. Experts get subpoenaed. Records custodians get subpoenaed. Someone has to deliver all of it and document every delivery, and court runs and filings come with the territory.

If you’re weighing whether to handle the claim yourself, read up on hiring a lawyer for a personal injury case first. An attorney knows which facts of your accident actually drive the value of the claim, and will argue them for you. The other driver’s insurer has people whose job is to pay you as little as possible, and they are good at it. Your process server is part of the team that keeps your side moving.

What To Have Ready

Service goes faster when you hand over more than a name. A current or last known address, a work address, the hours they’re likely to be home, a vehicle description, and a physical description all shorten the job. If you have a photo, include it. Every one of those details is one fewer attempt.

If you need service anywhere in Arizona, start it early. The paperwork can’t do anything until it’s in the other person’s hands.