Investigators and Process Servers: What’s the Difference?

Photo by Cristina Gottardi

The differences between process servers and private investigators are all about assignments and economics, not character or capability.

Many professionals provide services to attorneys, including licensed private investigators and certified process servers. I count many process servers and private investigators as friends, and I respect their varied talents and abilities. In this article, however, I’m going to argue that trying to provide both services simultaneously may be a challenge for your business.

There are big differences between the two services. These differences are not based on character or capability, but on assignments and economics.

A civil process server is a professional charged with delivering “summons, subpoenas, and other process performed in civil actions throughout the state.”[1] In plain English, process servers attempt to locate witnesses or defendants to effect lawful service. This may include interviewing neighbors, family members, employers (if known or developed), or associates to determine the subject’s whereabouts.

Process servers who are also licensed investigators may have access to proprietary databases, which they may use to conduct routine “skip tracing” investigations. These databases provide information about real property, vehicle registrations, and family and associate contact information.

These tasks have a single objective: serving process on the named witness or defendant. Process servers generate revenue by charging a fee for this service (or non-service), and submitting an affidavit of service with the invoice. In other words, process servers, with limited exceptions, charge a flat fee, regardless of how much time and effort the service requires.

This singular focus and revenue model contrasts with the work of licensed private investigators, who provide a variety of services to accomplish different objectives. These might include:

  • Conducting surveillance to determine the activities of a claimant or a spouse
  • Interviewing witnesses to establish liability or to verify an alibi
  • Researching assets of a debtor or the background of a prospective partner or investor
  • Photographing a crash scene or crash vehicle for submission to an expert or to prepare an exhibit

A professional investigator usually generates revenue by billable hours, rather than a flat fee. Invoices reflect the variety of tasks completed and billed. The duration of the assignment may be a single hour or may carry on for months or even years.

Naturally, these varied tasks require specific skills, many of which are beyond those required of a process server. For example, process servers should certainly be good people finders and have at least the communications skills required to knock on doors and ask basic questions. However, they generally don’t need to be able to conduct comprehensive witness interviews or write detailed reports.

There are big differences between the two services. These differences are not based on character or capability, but on assignments and economics.

For process servers, the driving revenue generator is the number of papers served and affidavits completed. They’ve got to work quickly and efficiently and stay focused on the labor-intensive task of effecting proper service on witnesses and defendants.

If a witness or defendant is extra hard to find, a process server might team up with a professional investigator, whose skill set may include more in-depth online research, witness interviews, surveillance, and field photography. In those cases, the investigator’s research and interview skills will often result in a successful service on a challenging defendant. The cost will be higher than the ordinary cost of the service.

But without the research, the defendant might never have been found, and the litigation would have stalled indefinitely.

The Best of Both: Cooperation between Investigators and Process Servers

Here’s a case study highlighting a successful cooperation between a licensed private investigator and a process server:

An attorney needed to serve defendants in a crash case. A young man from the Northeast was involved in a serious crash in Florida while driving an SUV registered to an elderly man in the Midwest. The process server in the Midwest could not locate the owner of the vehicle. The person who lived at the address on the vehicle registration claimed that the owner had Alzheimer’s and had moved to an unknown location.

Our agency was called in to find the elderly defendant.

We could not identify a more recent address for the vehicle registration than the address on the crash report. We contacted an experienced investigator who worked in that region. He found and interviewed a relative of the elderly driver. The relative explained that the man did, in fact, suffer from dementia and had lived with her for several months. The man’s daughter had then taken him and his SUV to South Florida, where she lived.

His dementia progressed until he was incapable of driving. The daughter took away his keys and asked a friend to keep the SUV for her, to prevent her father from getting behind the wheel.

This friend maintained the father’s vehicle for some time. Her son had recently moved down from the Northeast. On the night in question, he had sneaked the SUV out for a “joy ride,” which ended with the crash that seriously injured our client.

Our PI-associate used the information from these interviews to coordinate with the attorney and process server — and serve the elderly defendant/SUV owner a subpoena.

As for the young driver from the Northeast, the server attempted service on him at two addresses. At the second address, an unidentified woman claimed he had moved back north. The server had the good sense to copy down license plate numbers from two vehicles parked there. With these tag numbers, we identified the “unidentified” woman as the defendant driver’s mother. This turned out to be the “friend” to whom the elderly owner’s daughter gave the SUV. We then scoured social media and found the driver’s friends, family, and a number of potential contacts in Florida and the Northeast.

The investigation is ongoing, but the point of this story is that when investigators and process servers work together on complicated cases, you get the best of both skill sets and work strategies. In this case, the process server collected enough information at the scene for the investigator to develop additional leads at the computer.

As pointed out above, both professionals play vital roles in the litigation process. Knowing when to bring in a licensed investigator and when to rely on a process server can mean the difference between success and failure in a case.

It’s unrealistic to expect a process server to have the same skills as a professional investigator. It’s also unreasonable for a process server to offer investigative services to attorneys who require a high level of investigative skills to adequately represent their clients. Likewise, busy licensed investigators generally don’t have time to make multiple attempts to serve a summons for a flat fee.

Final Report

When business is slow and the economy is stagnant, it’s tempting to venture outside our established professional capabilities. I try to resist this temptation. Professional investigators or process servers offer their attorney-clients a level of specific competence developed from years of experience in a particular specialty. Straying beyond that expertise rarely produces good results for the attorney or the client’s litigation effort. And you run the risk of damaging your reputation in one field or another.

I know of some agencies that provide both process service and investigations. Perhaps it’s possible to do both well. But to my mind, it’s challenging to run complex investigations and still get an eviction notice served and the affidavit submitted and billed. It’s an issue of pacing and time management: slow-burn, deep-dive investigations vs. speedy locate-and-serve.

If you try to do both simultaneously, one or the other endeavor is likely to suffer.

You’ve worked hard to establish yourself as a competent professional, either as a process server or as an investigator. Pursuing a business with two distinctly different revenue models can be frustrating and counterproductive. You may be able to do it for a period of time, but generally, you do it at the cost of excellence in one specialty or another.

About the author:

Mark J. Murnan (President, Chief Investigator) is president and chief investigator of Complete Legal Investigations, Inc. in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. He’s a Certified Legal Investigator (CLI®) and a Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE®). Mark studied criminal justice at the University of Nebraska and served in the United States Air Force, where he attended the Defense Language Institute and was subsequently assigned to the Air Force Security Service (now the Electronic Security Command). He’s the author of Marketing to Plaintiff Attorneys, and co-creator of “Investigators in Cars, Drinking Coffee.” Subscribe to that YouTube channel here or email him at mark@completelegalinv.com.

See also:

“Skip Tracing” and Location Investigations: What’s the Difference?


[1] Florida Statute 48.011, 2011