at all in the office. No co-worker to whom we can deliver the documents, let alone the person we want to serve. Or the place of business may only be occupied by people on certain days of the week. All across the country, Friday appears to be the new Saturday. How about serving process on a company? That means delivering the documents into the hands of an appropriate person at the company’s office. But, as I just said, in today’s ‘new normal’ we often find there are just no people around, appropriate or otherwise. This is true even for large or relatively large businesses. Again, let’s remember the basics. If you want to serve process to a company, you generally need to deliver the documents to a person authorised by law or by the company methods of delivery are allowed to constitute service of process. One of those alternative methods is to leave the documents at the person’s place of business with a co-worker. Either way, experience shows us that service at a person’s place of business, even when via ‘substituted’ service, is often the fastest, simplest and least costly method to get the job done. But, that was then. This is now. Like it or not, what is clear these days is that we can no longer expect that someone is likely to be found as his or her place of employment. This is because of remote working, or ‘working from home’; whatever you want to call it. It started during the height of the pandemic and it caught on, at least for those for whom it is an option. That amounts to a whole lot of people. Now we often find there is nobody THOUGHT LEADER 63 What used to be best practices are not necessarily so in today’s new world.
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