Believe it or not, one of the more common problems divorce litigants have is just finding the person they’re trying to divorce, so that they can be served with the divorce paperwork. This is especially so in central New Jersey (in particular Middlesex County), where we have a large immigrant population, and often one spouse leaves the United States to return to their home country, where New Jersey’s process servers cannot reach them. This video addresses how to handle that situation in the New Jersey family courts.

The text below is a transcript of the above-video.

“Hey guys, I want to do a video real quick on how to serve and divorce somebody who you can’t find. And the reason I’m actually doing this video right now is I just got off the phone with somebody who’s expressed this problem to me. And we get that a lot here, especially in central New Jersey, where we have a large immigrant population in particular from India over in Edison, a lot of Coptic Egyptians in East Brunswick. And it’s not uncommon for either someone’s spouse to have stayed back in India or Egypt or wherever, or they’ve come here, and one of them has decided to go back and now the one who’s still here wants to get divorced, but they can’t find the other person. And the problem is under New Jersey law, you can’t just get a divorce. You have to actually file the divorce and then serve a copy of that divorce on the person you’re trying to get the divorce from.”

“Well, how do you do that if you can’t find the person? Okay, it is not that easy. And I say this because I’ve had to do it before. And so I had to teach myself how to do it. It’s not the kind of thing you’re going to find that’s well articulated in any books. I had to call other attorneys and they didn’t know how to do it. And so through trial and error, I finally got this down to a science and here’s the idea.”

“So normally, if you at least know where the other person is, you would file your divorce and you would serve the person. Or if you didn’t really know where they were, but you knew they were in New Jersey or at least had been, at some point, you get a process server, right?”

“You hire the process server. They go and they knock on the door of the last known address. And they try to serve the person directly. Or if they can’t do it that way, then they do a motor vehicle search to find their old driver’s licenses addresses used on that. They’ll do something called a skip trace to go through different databases, to find addresses. And eventually they’ll find the person or they’ll tell you they can’t find the person. And that brings us to this point: Whether the person is over in India or Katmandu or wherever, or they’re just lost in New Jersey, or you just don’t know where they are. The process at this point is basically the same. And that is you have to do what is called a motion for substituted service. And that gets a little bit complex because under normal circumstances to file a motion, you have to know where the other person is so that you can serve them with a copy of the motion.”

“There’s an exception to that in this case. I’ve done these motions. I’ve created the templates for it. So for me, it’s something I can do in five minutes. I think someone without experience is probably not going to do it correctly the first time. And maybe not the second time, but the idea is you’re basically telling the court, look, we can’t find this person. Here are the efforts we’ve made to find this person. Therefore, I’m asking you to let me serve this person by alternate means. One of the ways would be by publishing a notice in the newspaper, those legal notices sections that nobody ever reads. Well, that’s the reason for those. And then there’s a special way you have to do that. You can’t just publish in there “I’m trying to divorce you.” You have to put the whole thing in. And, that that’s kind of a pain too.”

“That’s not the only method of substitute service. You can give the court any number of different methods, as long as they’re reliable. And the idea here is this is generally reserved for cases where hopefully you’re not dividing a whole lot up, especially if the person has returned to their own country, because if they’re in their own country, it’s very, very difficult to start enforcing court orders. If you’re just looking for a quick, in and out divorce with somebody who’s left and you just want to be done with it, that’s easy enough to handle, if you have an attorney who knows what he’s doing. I’m gonna tell you right now, if you try to do it yourself, you’re not going to get it done right.”

“There are definitely things in divorce law that you can do by yourself. This is not one of them. So my recommendation is find an attorney, who’s done this before, like myself, pay a little bit of money for it and get it done right the first time.”

“And so eventually to kind of wrap this story up, if the judge lets you file by substituted service , from there, it just becomes a regular default process. You would serve by whatever method the judge told you to, whether it’s by publication. When the person doesn’t answer the complaint, you put them into default by the same method, you have to serve them the same way a second time. And once they’re in default, it’s simply a matter of asking the court to issue a final judgment of divorce.”

“All of which is to say it’s not a difficult process, if you know what you’re doing, but there are a lot of different steps to it. And if you don’t follow the steps pretty much to the “T” and you haven’t done it before, it’s going to be very, very difficult to do.”

“All right. So if this is the situation you find yourself in, give me a call, I’ll help you out. I don’t charge a huge sum for these sorts of things, but, it’s much better, I would suggest, to just, hire someone who knows what they’re doing and get it done right, than to try to figure this out yourself, because I’m telling you, there aren’t even too many divorce attorneys who know how to do this. And I know that because again, like I said, when I was trying to figure out how to do this, none of my divorce attorney, friends knew either.”

:All right. So anyway guys, that’s how to get divorced from somebody, if you don’t know where they are, in particular, if they’re in another country. All right. Thanks for watching. Take care of yourself.”

For more information, or to schedule a consultation, please contact attorney Jordan B. Rickards, Esq., conveniently located in Milltown and East Brunswick, in Middlesex County, New Jersey, at 732-297-8200, or send an email to: RickardsLaw@gmail.com.