• Process servers may not harass those that are being served legal papers.student with papers image by Petro Feketa from Fotolia.com
  
  Process servers have the unglamorous task of serving legal papers to those that are required to appear in court as part of lawsuit or other cases compelling them to give testimony before the court. Laws pertaining to process servers restrain how these professionals may conduct business, how papers may be served and when process servers may perform duties.
  
  

License Requirements

• Process servers operating in any of the city of New York's five buroughs must be licensed by the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs. Process servers need only file an application for a license with this department to be granted one and the city maintains no education requirements. The rest of the state does not maintain any requirements for process servers to conduct business except that each be over the age of 18.
  
  

Who May be Served

• A person may be served papers through the mail, in person or through an agent such as an attorney. According to the website for Serve Now, process servers must deliver a notification of a suit or summons to an attorney with the person named in the suit or summons has one retained. When a person is served a summons to appear or notification of a lawsuit he is required to fill out a receipt to be given to the process server or sent into the court by mail. It is a crime in New York to forge a signature on such a receipt.
  
  

When Papers May Be Served

• A summons or notice of pending lawsuit may served during normal business hours Monday through Saturday. Papers may not be served on Sunday in New York for any reason. Additionally, papers may not be served on Saturday to someone that considers the day holy per his religious beliefs. Anyone who maliciously seeks to serve papers to someone in order to violate his religious beliefs is committing a misdemeanor level offense in the state of New York.
  
  

Doing the Job

• A problem with process servers in New York has been that some of them have not been doing the job of serving papers, leaving hundreds of people unaware of lawsuits and obligations to appear in court according to a 2010 article published on the website of the New York Times. As a result, in 2010 a law was passed by the City Council that will require process servers operating in New York City to use global positioning systems to record the date, location and time of all papers served and to pass a test as part of gaining a process server license.