01/05/2017
I thought when I made my first appt with this client that his divorce would be simple. After all, there were no children, no assets or debts and it was a short term marriage. We knew that his partner had returned to Amsterdam but we had his work and home address so I could easily serve him by mail. Also, the Netherlands has a national address registry that is supposed to be kept current. The first indication that there were going to be problems was when he closed his Facebook account and the letters I sent, and that he needed to sign for, were not being received or signed for. Long story short, we had to hire Dutch counsel who tried to have him served by a "bailiff" (aka process server). No luck. So I now had to petition the CA court for permission to serve him by posting notice in a Dutch newspaper even though we now believe he returned to Argentina. Eventually, we published in the newspaper four times, The fact that we ultimately decided to publish according to Dutch procedures and not CA law, was a very real dilemma resolved after advice from a CA lawyer. She advised me to prepare another Affidavit, to be signed by Dutch counsel explaining why it was impossible to comply with CA laws. I finally received four rolled up newspapers from Amsterdam. I now had to make this acceptable to the CA court, This involved somehow finding the ad within the rolled up newspaper, translating the date of publication (I used google) and preparing an Affidavit of Publication attaching copies of the ads, the cover letter from the newspaper and Dutch counsel's Affidavit. The rest of the divorce was easy to complete. Ostensibly the purpose of all of this was to protect Respondent's rights but I am certain that this Argentinian is and was completely oblivious and that he has no idea that he is now divorced. By the way, did I mention that this couple had been married for only three months?
