Anyone who is a defendant in a court case has the right to be informed of the charges against him. This is most obviously the case in criminal law -- it is barbaric, for example, to accuse someone of a serious crime without permitting that person to defend himself, and he obviously can't defend himself if he doesn't know about the charges. But "process" is important in more mundane situations as well: a wife, for example, ought to know that her husband is seeking a divorce against her, and if the two have been separated for a long time, it might not be easy to find her and inform her. (If she's being accused of abuse or infidelity, two grounds for divorce where I live, then it's all the more important that she know about the case.)

Simply mailing documents to a defendant can lead to a lot of problems. For instance, a defendant can claim -- truthfully or otherwise -- that he did not receive notice or have adequate time to file a response. Or she could try to take advantage of the law that is there to protect her, actively hiding from the process documents so that she never needs to be called to the stand (or wherever).

This can stall the entire legal process as the court tries to establish whether everyone has had a fair chance to make their case. This has created the need for a set of forms that establish when and where the appropriate notification was given to the people who needed to receive it. These forms, confusingly, are often called "process."

This in turn has created the need for "process servers," people who are willing to deliver notifications to defendants in person, and who then write a sworn statement saying that they have done so. A process server stakes his own reputation on the claim that a defendant knows about an active suit.

In certain trivial cases the process server can be a friend or family member of the defendant, especially if no snags are expected. But in the case of a hostile defendant, or a celebrity defendant, or a missing defendant, the process server will probably need to be a professional, hired to find the person and deliver the papers even if their target is trying to avoid them. The server's own sworn statement will be entered into the record for the case.

From time to time, the climactic scene in a courtroom drama will have a process server triumphantly entering some criminal's hiding place, thrusting a stack of papers in her face and bellowing, "You've been served!" I don't think it's usually like that, but I will say that the process servers I met when I was working at a lawyer's office were burly, no-nonsense guys that you just don't cross -- their entire job is to deal with people who don't want to see them and they'd grown a pretty thick skin about it. Then again, the one time I had to hire a process server myself, she proved to be entirely incompetent, getting lost in her own neighbourhood and claiming that a house with three people in it was unoccupied. It seems to me that it's a difficult career that paradoxically attracts a lot of flakes and fly-by-nights who assume that taking papers to people is not entirely unlike delivering a pizza.