Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: All right, let's get this started.
You know, we spend a massive amount of time on this show talking about systems, big abstract systems like the economy or cloud computing or supply chains.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Right.
[00:00:13] Speaker A: But today we are going to look at a system that is much grittier, much more tangible, and honestly, a lot more critical to how our society actually holds itself together.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: It's one of those things that's completely invisible until it breaks.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: Exactly. But before we get into the gears of the legal system and we are going deep today, I need to give a quick nod to the people who help us keep the lights on here. This deep dive is made possible by our local business sponsor, 337 Media.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: That's right.
And honestly, if you're operating a business in Acadiana, you know, the digital landscape is. Well, it's competitive, it's crowded, for sure. 337 Media is really the engine behind a lot of the successful local brands you see popping up in your feed. They aren't just building beautiful websites. They are mastering local. Local SEO, which is huge. Yeah.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: Because if you have a great service, but Google doesn't know you exist, I mean, do you really have a business?
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Not really.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: So if you want to support the companies that support this deep dive and help your own brand get found, check out the link in the Description and give 337 Media a visit. They are the real deal.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: Absolutely. Support local.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: Now let's get to our main topic.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: I'm gonna start with a premise. When most people think about a lawsuit or the legal system in general, they picture the courtroom.
You picture the judge in the heavy robes, the lawyer slamming the table, the you can't handle the truth moment.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: Naturally, that's the dramatic climax. I mean, that's what makes for good television. If you don't have the shouting match, you don't have a third act sue.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: But looking at the research you've pulled for today, there is a massive invisible layer of infrastructure that happens way before anyone steps inside a courtroom. Yes, there's this logistical hurdle that. That if it fails, the entire justice system just stops. It freezes.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: It completely halts. We're talking about service of process. And I know that term sounds incredibly dry.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: A little bit, yeah.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: It sounds like checking a box at the DMV or something, but it is actually the ignition switch for due process.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: Okay, so let's break that down. For someone who, you know, isn't a lawyer and maybe hasn't been sued recently, what exactly is the mechanism here?
[00:02:19] Speaker B: The mechanism is constitutional. In the United States, you cannot Take legal action against someone, you can't sue them, divorce them, garnish their wages, whatever. Unless you can prove with a rock solid paper trail that they have been officially notified.
[00:02:34] Speaker A: You have to physically put the documents in their hands.
[00:02:37] Speaker B: Exactly. You have to. If you can't do that, the judge literally cannot hear the case.
[00:02:42] Speaker A: So today's deep dive isn't about the law itself.
We aren't debating statutes.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: No, not at all.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: It's about the logistics of the law. And specifically, we are looking at a very unique case study that highlights just how hard this can be. We aren't in Manhattan. We aren't in downtown Chicago.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: We are looking at the 15th Judicial District Court of Louisiana.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: The 15th JDC.
[00:03:03] Speaker B: Correct. This covers three parishes. Lafayette, Vermilion and Acadia. And that third one, Acadia Parish, is where things get really interesting from a logistical standpoint.
[00:03:13] Speaker A: Right. The rice capital, Crawley, and Rain, the fraud capital of the world.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: It sounds charming, doesn't it? Sounds like the setting of a cozy mystery novel.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: It does.
But as I was reading through the source material on Lafayette Process Servers llc, that's the company we're analyzing today, I realized that for a process server, charming usually means an absolute nightmare to navigate.
[00:03:34] Speaker B: Yeah, that is a pretty fair assessment.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: The central conflict in this deep dive is really about geography versus technology.
What? We live in an era where we assume Google Maps knows everything. We have this faith that if I type in an address, a blue line appears and I arrive at the front door.
[00:03:51] Speaker B: Right.
[00:03:52] Speaker A: But the data shows that in Acadia Parish, that assumption just. It completely breaks down.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: Oh, it breaks down hard. The problem is that finding a reliable process server in these rural areas is notoriously difficult. You have these massive national legal support companies. Think of them like the Uber of process serving.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:04:11] Speaker B: They claim to cover the entire country. They say, sure, we cover zip code, code 70526 in Crowley.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: You treat it just like a zip code in the suburbs of Dallas or something.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: Exactly. But they don't have employees there. So when a lawyer in New York hires this national platform to serve a paper in Crowley, the platform just subcontracts it out. They might mail the papers to a local sheriff who is already overworked, or they hire a gig worker, some inexperienced contractor who sees a pin on a map and thinks it's an easy 20 bucks.
[00:04:40] Speaker A: And that's where the middleman problem hits.
Right? Because that gig worker doesn't know the terrain. They don't know the culture.
[00:04:46] Speaker B: And in the 15th JDC, the terrain dictates everything.
That is why the Mission of this deep dive is to explore how Lafayette Process Servers, led by founder Scott Frank, operates differently. They represent the hyperlocal model, right? They don't treat Acadia Parish as a remote outpost. They treat it as. As their backyard.
[00:05:07] Speaker A: I want to drill down on that backyard concept because I looked at the map. Lockheed Process Servers is headquartered in Karen Crow, right? Karen Crow to Crowley isn't exactly next door. It's not a cross country flight, but it's a drive.
Why do they consider that local?
[00:05:22] Speaker B: This is a key insight into how rural logistics work versus urban logistics. I mean, distance is relative in a dense city. Five miles might take an hour in traffic.
Here, Scott Frank points out that Karen Crow to Crowley is a straight shot down I10. It's a 20 minute commute.
[00:05:40] Speaker A: So mentally, they don't view it as a road trip.
[00:05:42] Speaker B: Precisely. To them, Crowley, Rain, Church Point, Iota, Esterwood, these aren't out of town. This is the daily route, the Acadia route. They're running the Acadia route every single day. And because the 15th JDC connects these parishes legally, they have to treat it as one ecosystem. If you serve the papers in Crowley, you might be filing the return in Lafayette. It's all connected.
[00:06:04] Speaker A: Okay, so you're willing to make the drive, but let's go back to the Google Maps broken idea. I'm a city mouse. You give me an address, I assume I can find the front door. Why is serving a paper in Church Point zip code 70525 so much harder than serving one in a subdivision?
[00:06:20] Speaker B: This is where we get into the rural route challenges. And this is fascinating if you like infrastructure or geography. The sources paint a vivid picture of this. Imagine you have an address on Highway 35 or Grand Rain Road or Law Tell Highway.
[00:06:35] Speaker A: Okay. I'm picturing a two lane highway. Fields on both sides, right?
[00:06:38] Speaker B: In a subdivision, the logic is linear. House 100 is next to House 102, which is next to 104. In rural Acadia Parish, you run into what's locally known as family land.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: Family land.
Unpack that for me. That sounds like a cultural term, not a legal one.
[00:06:54] Speaker B: Well, it's both. Historically, a family buys a large plot, maybe 40 acres. Over generations, they parcel it out to kids and grandkids.
So you pull up to a mailbox on the highway, but the house isn't there. There's a long gravel road. You drive down it and the road splits. There are three different trailers and two houses scattered back there.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: And I'm guessing they don't have neat little numbers on the doors like a hotel?
[00:07:16] Speaker B: Rarely. And maybe the person you are suing.
Well, let's say the grandson lives in the third trailer back, but the mailbox at the road belongs to his grandmother in the front house.
[00:07:24] Speaker A: So a national contractor or someone relying purely on GPS sees that setup and just panics.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: They panic because they don't know which door to knock on. They see beware of dog signs. They don't want to trespass on the wrong relative's property. So they turn around, drive away and mark the job as bad address or non serve.
[00:07:44] Speaker A: They fail because they don't understand the layout. They just don't have the context.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: Exactly. Whereas a local server like Scott Frank's team understands the sociology of the property. They know how to verify residents without causing a scene. They know that family land implies a cluster of relatives. And they know how to navigate that social web to find the right person.
[00:08:04] Speaker A: There was another detail in the notes that really stuck out to me on this. The rice mills. This felt like something out of a movie.
[00:08:11] Speaker B: Oh, yes. This is a classic example of boots on the ground intel versus an algorithm.
[00:08:15] Speaker A: Because Crowley is a rice capital. Yeah. A huge portion of the workforce is employed in these mills.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Right. And if you are trying to serve a subpoena or say a garnishment to someone working at a mill, you can't just waltz in at 2.0pm Right.
[00:08:28] Speaker A: I imagine security is tight.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: Security is tight. The noise is deafening. And the supervisors aren't going to shut down the production line just so you can hand over a divorce paper.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: So the national algorithm fails again, the.
[00:08:40] Speaker B: Algorithm doesn't know the shift schedule. Scott Frank mentions that to catch someone at a rice mill, you have to know exactly when the shift change happens. You have to be there at say, 5.45am standing by the gate as they walk out to their truck.
[00:08:54] Speaker A: That's not just knowing where they are, that's knowing when they are.
[00:08:58] Speaker B: And that is the difference between a successful service and a failed one. It's that granular level of detail. It's knowing the rhythm of the town.
[00:09:06] Speaker A: I want to pivot to another specific hurdle you mentioned in the data, which I think affects a lot of rural areas, not just Louisiana. The P.O.
[00:09:14] Speaker B: Box, the Bane of the process server's.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: Existence in towns like Church Point and Iota. I assume most people don't get mail at their physical house.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: Correct. If you live way down a gravel road, the postal carrier isn't driving to your door. You have a box at the post office in town.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: Okay, so why is that a Legal problem. Can't you just mail the lawsuit to the P.O. box?
[00:09:34] Speaker B: No, this is a hard rule. In service of process, you generally cannot serve a lawsuit to a P.O. box.
[00:09:41] Speaker A: Why not?
[00:09:42] Speaker B: You must serve a person at a physical location. You need to hand the papers to a human being or at least leave them at their domiciliary establishment, their actual home, with someone of suitable age. You can't hand a subpoena to a metal box.
[00:09:54] Speaker A: So if I'm a lawyer and my client says, I want to sue Mr. Smith, but the only address we have is P.O. box 45, Churchpoint.
I'm stuck.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: You are stuck. The lawsuit cannot start. Yeah, unless you have skip tracing.
[00:10:09] Speaker A: Okay, Define that term. Skip tracing. It sounds like bounty hunter slang from the 1980s.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: It comes from the phrase to skip town. Historically, it was tracking down debtors who vanished. Today, it's a sophisticated blend of data analysis and investigation. Okay, this is where Lafayette Process Servers shifts from just being drivers to being investigators.
[00:10:27] Speaker A: How does it actually work? Are they hacking into systems or something?
[00:10:30] Speaker B: No, no, nothing illegal. But they have access to proprietary databases that the general public doesn't. They look for headers. Headers, utility headers, credit headers.
Think about it. When you sign up for electricity or apply for a credit card, you have to provide a physical service address. A 911 address.
[00:10:49] Speaker A: Right, because the power company needs to know where the meter is.
[00:10:51] Speaker B: Exactly. That data gets aggregated. So Scott Frank's team uses these databases to correlate that anonymous P.O. box to a physical 911 address.
They turn P.O. box 45 into a 123 gravel road. Third trailer on the left.
[00:11:07] Speaker A: That's the digital side of it. But the notes mention they also do due diligence and witness location. Is that just more of the same thing?
[00:11:14] Speaker B: It goes a step further. Sometimes the databases are wrong. People move. Due diligence in this context is a legal standard. If you truly cannot find someone, you can't just shrug and tell the judge, I tried.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: You have to prove it.
[00:11:26] Speaker B: You have to prove it to a high standard. You have to provide a notarized affidavit detailing every single attempt. I check the database. I visited the house on Tuesday at 6pm I spoke to the neighbor. You know, Lafayette Process Servers builds that evidence package so that if the person is truly gone, the attorney can ask the court for other ways to serve them.
[00:11:45] Speaker A: So they are basically building the lawyer's excuse.
[00:11:48] Speaker B: They are building the lawyer's defense against a claim of bad service.
It's insurance.
[00:11:53] Speaker A: I want to talk about money for A second. Because all this specialized work, driving down gravel roads, staking out rice mills, running database checks. This sounds expensive.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: It certainly can be.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: And one of the biggest complaints I see from people hiring services these days is the hidden fee. You know, the fuel surcharge, the out.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: Of area fee in the process serving industry that is rampant. It's called the rural surcharge.
[00:12:17] Speaker A: How much could we talking?
[00:12:18] Speaker B: Oh, it can easily be an extra 50, 75, or even $100 on top of the base rate. Competitors will look at a map, see that Church Point is north of the interstate, and just slap a remote location fee on the bill.
[00:12:30] Speaker A: Which has to frustrate the attorneys. They have a budget. And explaining to a client why it costs an extra hundred bucks just because the defendant lives near a farm is tough.
[00:12:40] Speaker B: It drives them crazy. But this brings us back to Scott Frank's business model. Remember the backyard concept?
[00:12:47] Speaker A: Because they're already driving there, Right?
[00:12:49] Speaker B: Lafayette Process Servers has a flat rate policy for the entire parish. They don't charge mileage or rural surcharges for rain or Church Point.
[00:12:59] Speaker A: Explain the economics of that. I mean, how do they not lose money driving 20 minutes for a flat rate?
[00:13:04] Speaker B: Volume and density. It's the bus route model. If you are driving a bus to Crowley anyway to serve five papers, picking up a sixth paper for a flat rate is pure profit. You don't need to charge extra for the gas. The bus is already moving.
[00:13:18] Speaker A: Whereas the national company is treating it like a private taxi ride.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: Exactly. The national company has to hire someone for that one job. Scott Frank is aggregating volume across the whole 15th JDC. It's an economy of scale applied to rural logistics.
[00:13:32] Speaker A: That also impacts speed, doesn't it?
[00:13:33] Speaker B: Hugely. The national companies rely on batch runs. They might hold onto a paper for a week, waiting until they have enough work in Crowley to justify sending a contractor out.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: That sounds dangerous. If you have a deadline, it's terrible.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: If you have a temporary restraining order or a subpoena for a hearing next week, you can't wait for a batch run.
Scott Frank's team offers rush service same day or next day.
Because they are local, they can pivot instantly. They don't have to wait for the bus to fill up. They are the bus.
[00:14:03] Speaker A: So we've covered getting the papers to the person.
But there's a whole other half of this equation that I think people forget. Once the guy at the rice mill takes the papers, the job isn't done, is it?
[00:14:17] Speaker B: No. And this is where the amateur servers usually mess up. You have to Tell the court what happened. You have to navigate the bureaucracy, the clerk of court, the gatekeepers.
Navigating the 15th JDC means you have to deal with the specific filing procedures in each parish. For Acadia Parish, that's the clerk of court in downtown Crowley, on North Parkerson Avenue and Lafayette.
[00:14:37] Speaker A: Process servers handles that part. Or do they just mail the proof back to the lawyer?
[00:14:42] Speaker B: No, they handle it physically. They act as a runner. They do physical filing, document retrieval, and something called a walk.
[00:14:48] Speaker A: Walkthrough. That sounds like real estate. Let's do a walkthrough of the kitchen.
[00:14:51] Speaker B: Different context entirely. In the legal world, a walkthrough is a VIP service. Normally, you file a document and it goes into a pile. Maybe a judge signs it in three days, maybe five.
[00:15:02] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:15:03] Speaker B: A walkthrough means the process server physically takes the document, walks it past the clerks, finds the judge's assistant or the judge themselves, and gets it signed right then and there.
[00:15:15] Speaker A: So it's skipping the line.
[00:15:16] Speaker B: Legally, it's ensuring immediate attention for urgent orders. You can't do that with an app. You can't do that by mail. You can only do that if you know the building, you know the people inside it, and they trust you.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: That requires trust.
And that brings me to the man behind the operation we keep mentioning. Scott Frank. Who is this guy? Because handing someone your legal documents, that requires a lot of faith.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: Credibility is the currency here. Scott Frank isn't just some guy with a car and a website. He has positioned himself as a pillar of the business community.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: I noticed in the notes he's on the board of the Better Business Bureau.
[00:15:50] Speaker B: Yes, a board member of the BBB. And the company is a plus accredited since 2024. That is a significant signal. It tells lawyers I operate ethically. I'm not cutting corners.
[00:16:01] Speaker A: He's also plugged into the chambers of commerce.
[00:16:03] Speaker B: Yeah, multiple One, Acadiana, the Youngsville Chamber, the Baton Rouge Area Chamber. He's networking, but he's also treating this as a professional industry, not a gig.
[00:16:13] Speaker A: Integrating into the fabric of the local economy.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:16:16] Speaker A: And he's a content creator.
I saw mention of a podcast in.
[00:16:20] Speaker B: The source material, Paper Trails. He actually hosts a show discussing these logistics.
[00:16:25] Speaker A: That's remarkably meta. We're doing a deep dive on a guy who does deep dives on his own industry.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: It's smart, though. He's educating the market by explaining why it's hard to serve papers in churchpoint. He validates his own value proposition, showing the work.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: Which brings us to the final piece. Technology. We'd spent the first half of this show kind of bashing national apps and algorithms. But Lafayette Process Servers isn't anti technology, are they?
[00:16:50] Speaker B: Not at all. They are actually very high tech, but they apply it differently. They use tech for the client experience, not to replace the execution.
[00:16:59] Speaker A: Give me an example. How does it look from the user side?
[00:17:02] Speaker B: The document upload feature. In the old days you'd have to fax documents or courier them. It was slow, paper, heavy. With Scott's platform, a lawyer can upload the PDF directly via the website. They can see the pricing and instantly.
[00:17:16] Speaker A: So the front end feels like Uber or Amazon.
[00:17:18] Speaker B: Exactly. It's seamless. And crucially, they provide immediate service returns. When that guy at the rice mill gets served, the lawyer gets a notification, the proof is filed. You aren't left wondering, did it happen?
[00:17:31] Speaker A: You know it happened.
[00:17:32] Speaker B: You know it happened. It seems like they found the sweet spot. They use the software to handle the admin, the tracking, the uploading, but they use actual humans for the hard part, the driving and the knocking on doors.
[00:17:44] Speaker A: That is the perfect summary. They are modernizing a traditional industry without losing the traditional skills required to actually do the work right.
[00:17:52] Speaker B: They know that an app can't open a gate, but an app can tell you the gate has been opened.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: So let's zoom out. What is the takeaway here for our listener? Maybe they aren't a lawyer. Maybe they never plan to sue anyone. Why does this matter?
[00:18:04] Speaker B: It matters because access to justice is a term we throw around a lot. We think of it as this high minded, abstract ideal.
But practically speaking, access to justice is a logistical challenge.
[00:18:17] Speaker A: It's about infrastructure. It's about plumbing.
[00:18:19] Speaker B: It is if you have a perfectly valid lawsuit or a necessary protective order, but you cannot physically locate the other person because of a gravel road or a PO box, you do not have justice. You just have a piece of paper.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: That's a heavy realization. The system relies on the map.
[00:18:35] Speaker B: The system relies on the person reading the map. Successful legal process in the 15th JDC and really any rural part of America requires boots on the ground. It requires local knowledge. It requires knowing that the family land has three houses and knowing which one is the target.
[00:18:50] Speaker A: It's the difference between an algorithm that assumes the world is a grid and a human who knows the world is messy.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: And that raises a provocative thought to leave our listeners with. We are moving toward a world of AI and automation. In law. We talk about robot lawyers, sure, but can an AI drive down a muddy road in Esterwood? Can an AI negotiate with a protective dog until it can, justice is going to remain a fundamentally human logistical endeavor.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: That is a powerful place to land. Justice is logistics.
Now, before we sign off, we do need to cover our legal bases.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: Yes. A very important disclaimer. Lafayette Process Servers, LLC is a commercial agency. They are not a law firm. They do not provide legal advice.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Right. Any references we made to the clerk of court or filing indicate professional interaction for logistical purposes only. They are the messengers, not the attorneys.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: They move the paper. They don't argue the case.
[00:19:46] Speaker A: Important distinction. Well, that wraps up this deep dive into the Rice Capital and the hidden world of legal logistics.
[00:19:52] Speaker B: It's been a pleasure exploring the back roads of the 15th JDC with you.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Thanks for listening, everyone. Keep curious, and we'll catch you on the next deep dive.
[00:00:00] Speaker A: All right, let's get this started.
You know, we spend a massive amount of time on this show talking about systems, big abstract systems like the economy or cloud computing or supply chains.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Right.
[00:00:13] Speaker A: But today we are going to look at a system that is much grittier, much more tangible, and honestly, a lot more critical to how our society actually holds itself together.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: It's one of those things that's completely invisible until it breaks.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: Exactly. But before we get into the gears of the legal system and we are going deep today, I need to give a quick nod to the people who help us keep the lights on here. This deep dive is made possible by our local business sponsor, 337 Media.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: That's right.
And honestly, if you're operating a business in Acadiana, you know, the digital landscape is. Well, it's competitive, it's crowded, for sure. 337 Media is really the engine behind a lot of the successful local brands you see popping up in your feed. They aren't just building beautiful websites. They are mastering local. Local SEO, which is huge. Yeah.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: Because if you have a great service, but Google doesn't know you exist, I mean, do you really have a business?
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Not really.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: So if you want to support the companies that support this deep dive and help your own brand get found, check out the link in the Description and give 337 Media a visit. They are the real deal.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: Absolutely. Support local.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: Now let's get to our main topic.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: I'm gonna start with a premise. When most people think about a lawsuit or the legal system in general, they picture the courtroom.
You picture the judge in the heavy robes, the lawyer slamming the table, the you can't handle the truth moment.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: Naturally, that's the dramatic climax. I mean, that's what makes for good television. If you don't have the shouting match, you don't have a third act sue.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: But looking at the research you've pulled for today, there is a massive invisible layer of infrastructure that happens way before anyone steps inside a courtroom. Yes, there's this logistical hurdle that. That if it fails, the entire justice system just stops. It freezes.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: It completely halts. We're talking about service of process. And I know that term sounds incredibly dry.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: A little bit, yeah.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: It sounds like checking a box at the DMV or something, but it is actually the ignition switch for due process.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: Okay, so let's break that down. For someone who, you know, isn't a lawyer and maybe hasn't been sued recently, what exactly is the mechanism here?
[00:02:19] Speaker B: The mechanism is constitutional. In the United States, you cannot Take legal action against someone, you can't sue them, divorce them, garnish their wages, whatever. Unless you can prove with a rock solid paper trail that they have been officially notified.
[00:02:34] Speaker A: You have to physically put the documents in their hands.
[00:02:37] Speaker B: Exactly. You have to. If you can't do that, the judge literally cannot hear the case.
[00:02:42] Speaker A: So today's deep dive isn't about the law itself.
We aren't debating statutes.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: No, not at all.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: It's about the logistics of the law. And specifically, we are looking at a very unique case study that highlights just how hard this can be. We aren't in Manhattan. We aren't in downtown Chicago.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: We are looking at the 15th Judicial District Court of Louisiana.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: The 15th JDC.
[00:03:03] Speaker B: Correct. This covers three parishes. Lafayette, Vermilion and Acadia. And that third one, Acadia Parish, is where things get really interesting from a logistical standpoint.
[00:03:13] Speaker A: Right. The rice capital, Crawley, and Rain, the fraud capital of the world.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: It sounds charming, doesn't it? Sounds like the setting of a cozy mystery novel.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: It does.
But as I was reading through the source material on Lafayette Process Servers llc, that's the company we're analyzing today, I realized that for a process server, charming usually means an absolute nightmare to navigate.
[00:03:34] Speaker B: Yeah, that is a pretty fair assessment.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: The central conflict in this deep dive is really about geography versus technology.
What? We live in an era where we assume Google Maps knows everything. We have this faith that if I type in an address, a blue line appears and I arrive at the front door.
[00:03:51] Speaker B: Right.
[00:03:52] Speaker A: But the data shows that in Acadia Parish, that assumption just. It completely breaks down.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: Oh, it breaks down hard. The problem is that finding a reliable process server in these rural areas is notoriously difficult. You have these massive national legal support companies. Think of them like the Uber of process serving.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:04:11] Speaker B: They claim to cover the entire country. They say, sure, we cover zip code, code 70526 in Crowley.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: You treat it just like a zip code in the suburbs of Dallas or something.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: Exactly. But they don't have employees there. So when a lawyer in New York hires this national platform to serve a paper in Crowley, the platform just subcontracts it out. They might mail the papers to a local sheriff who is already overworked, or they hire a gig worker, some inexperienced contractor who sees a pin on a map and thinks it's an easy 20 bucks.
[00:04:40] Speaker A: And that's where the middleman problem hits.
Right? Because that gig worker doesn't know the terrain. They don't know the culture.
[00:04:46] Speaker B: And in the 15th JDC, the terrain dictates everything.
That is why the Mission of this deep dive is to explore how Lafayette Process Servers, led by founder Scott Frank, operates differently. They represent the hyperlocal model, right? They don't treat Acadia Parish as a remote outpost. They treat it as. As their backyard.
[00:05:07] Speaker A: I want to drill down on that backyard concept because I looked at the map. Lockheed Process Servers is headquartered in Karen Crow, right? Karen Crow to Crowley isn't exactly next door. It's not a cross country flight, but it's a drive.
Why do they consider that local?
[00:05:22] Speaker B: This is a key insight into how rural logistics work versus urban logistics. I mean, distance is relative in a dense city. Five miles might take an hour in traffic.
Here, Scott Frank points out that Karen Crow to Crowley is a straight shot down I10. It's a 20 minute commute.
[00:05:40] Speaker A: So mentally, they don't view it as a road trip.
[00:05:42] Speaker B: Precisely. To them, Crowley, Rain, Church Point, Iota, Esterwood, these aren't out of town. This is the daily route, the Acadia route. They're running the Acadia route every single day. And because the 15th JDC connects these parishes legally, they have to treat it as one ecosystem. If you serve the papers in Crowley, you might be filing the return in Lafayette. It's all connected.
[00:06:04] Speaker A: Okay, so you're willing to make the drive, but let's go back to the Google Maps broken idea. I'm a city mouse. You give me an address, I assume I can find the front door. Why is serving a paper in Church Point zip code 70525 so much harder than serving one in a subdivision?
[00:06:20] Speaker B: This is where we get into the rural route challenges. And this is fascinating if you like infrastructure or geography. The sources paint a vivid picture of this. Imagine you have an address on Highway 35 or Grand Rain Road or Law Tell Highway.
[00:06:35] Speaker A: Okay. I'm picturing a two lane highway. Fields on both sides, right?
[00:06:38] Speaker B: In a subdivision, the logic is linear. House 100 is next to House 102, which is next to 104. In rural Acadia Parish, you run into what's locally known as family land.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: Family land.
Unpack that for me. That sounds like a cultural term, not a legal one.
[00:06:54] Speaker B: Well, it's both. Historically, a family buys a large plot, maybe 40 acres. Over generations, they parcel it out to kids and grandkids.
So you pull up to a mailbox on the highway, but the house isn't there. There's a long gravel road. You drive down it and the road splits. There are three different trailers and two houses scattered back there.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: And I'm guessing they don't have neat little numbers on the doors like a hotel?
[00:07:16] Speaker B: Rarely. And maybe the person you are suing.
Well, let's say the grandson lives in the third trailer back, but the mailbox at the road belongs to his grandmother in the front house.
[00:07:24] Speaker A: So a national contractor or someone relying purely on GPS sees that setup and just panics.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: They panic because they don't know which door to knock on. They see beware of dog signs. They don't want to trespass on the wrong relative's property. So they turn around, drive away and mark the job as bad address or non serve.
[00:07:44] Speaker A: They fail because they don't understand the layout. They just don't have the context.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: Exactly. Whereas a local server like Scott Frank's team understands the sociology of the property. They know how to verify residents without causing a scene. They know that family land implies a cluster of relatives. And they know how to navigate that social web to find the right person.
[00:08:04] Speaker A: There was another detail in the notes that really stuck out to me on this. The rice mills. This felt like something out of a movie.
[00:08:11] Speaker B: Oh, yes. This is a classic example of boots on the ground intel versus an algorithm.
[00:08:15] Speaker A: Because Crowley is a rice capital. Yeah. A huge portion of the workforce is employed in these mills.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Right. And if you are trying to serve a subpoena or say a garnishment to someone working at a mill, you can't just waltz in at 2.0pm Right.
[00:08:28] Speaker A: I imagine security is tight.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: Security is tight. The noise is deafening. And the supervisors aren't going to shut down the production line just so you can hand over a divorce paper.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: So the national algorithm fails again, the.
[00:08:40] Speaker B: Algorithm doesn't know the shift schedule. Scott Frank mentions that to catch someone at a rice mill, you have to know exactly when the shift change happens. You have to be there at say, 5.45am standing by the gate as they walk out to their truck.
[00:08:54] Speaker A: That's not just knowing where they are, that's knowing when they are.
[00:08:58] Speaker B: And that is the difference between a successful service and a failed one. It's that granular level of detail. It's knowing the rhythm of the town.
[00:09:06] Speaker A: I want to pivot to another specific hurdle you mentioned in the data, which I think affects a lot of rural areas, not just Louisiana. The P.O.
[00:09:14] Speaker B: Box, the Bane of the process server's.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: Existence in towns like Church Point and Iota. I assume most people don't get mail at their physical house.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: Correct. If you live way down a gravel road, the postal carrier isn't driving to your door. You have a box at the post office in town.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: Okay, so why is that a Legal problem. Can't you just mail the lawsuit to the P.O. box?
[00:09:34] Speaker B: No, this is a hard rule. In service of process, you generally cannot serve a lawsuit to a P.O. box.
[00:09:41] Speaker A: Why not?
[00:09:42] Speaker B: You must serve a person at a physical location. You need to hand the papers to a human being or at least leave them at their domiciliary establishment, their actual home, with someone of suitable age. You can't hand a subpoena to a metal box.
[00:09:54] Speaker A: So if I'm a lawyer and my client says, I want to sue Mr. Smith, but the only address we have is P.O. box 45, Churchpoint.
I'm stuck.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: You are stuck. The lawsuit cannot start. Yeah, unless you have skip tracing.
[00:10:09] Speaker A: Okay, Define that term. Skip tracing. It sounds like bounty hunter slang from the 1980s.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: It comes from the phrase to skip town. Historically, it was tracking down debtors who vanished. Today, it's a sophisticated blend of data analysis and investigation. Okay, this is where Lafayette Process Servers shifts from just being drivers to being investigators.
[00:10:27] Speaker A: How does it actually work? Are they hacking into systems or something?
[00:10:30] Speaker B: No, no, nothing illegal. But they have access to proprietary databases that the general public doesn't. They look for headers. Headers, utility headers, credit headers.
Think about it. When you sign up for electricity or apply for a credit card, you have to provide a physical service address. A 911 address.
[00:10:49] Speaker A: Right, because the power company needs to know where the meter is.
[00:10:51] Speaker B: Exactly. That data gets aggregated. So Scott Frank's team uses these databases to correlate that anonymous P.O. box to a physical 911 address.
They turn P.O. box 45 into a 123 gravel road. Third trailer on the left.
[00:11:07] Speaker A: That's the digital side of it. But the notes mention they also do due diligence and witness location. Is that just more of the same thing?
[00:11:14] Speaker B: It goes a step further. Sometimes the databases are wrong. People move. Due diligence in this context is a legal standard. If you truly cannot find someone, you can't just shrug and tell the judge, I tried.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: You have to prove it.
[00:11:26] Speaker B: You have to prove it to a high standard. You have to provide a notarized affidavit detailing every single attempt. I check the database. I visited the house on Tuesday at 6pm I spoke to the neighbor. You know, Lafayette Process Servers builds that evidence package so that if the person is truly gone, the attorney can ask the court for other ways to serve them.
[00:11:45] Speaker A: So they are basically building the lawyer's excuse.
[00:11:48] Speaker B: They are building the lawyer's defense against a claim of bad service.
It's insurance.
[00:11:53] Speaker A: I want to talk about money for A second. Because all this specialized work, driving down gravel roads, staking out rice mills, running database checks. This sounds expensive.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: It certainly can be.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: And one of the biggest complaints I see from people hiring services these days is the hidden fee. You know, the fuel surcharge, the out.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: Of area fee in the process serving industry that is rampant. It's called the rural surcharge.
[00:12:17] Speaker A: How much could we talking?
[00:12:18] Speaker B: Oh, it can easily be an extra 50, 75, or even $100 on top of the base rate. Competitors will look at a map, see that Church Point is north of the interstate, and just slap a remote location fee on the bill.
[00:12:30] Speaker A: Which has to frustrate the attorneys. They have a budget. And explaining to a client why it costs an extra hundred bucks just because the defendant lives near a farm is tough.
[00:12:40] Speaker B: It drives them crazy. But this brings us back to Scott Frank's business model. Remember the backyard concept?
[00:12:47] Speaker A: Because they're already driving there, Right?
[00:12:49] Speaker B: Lafayette Process Servers has a flat rate policy for the entire parish. They don't charge mileage or rural surcharges for rain or Church Point.
[00:12:59] Speaker A: Explain the economics of that. I mean, how do they not lose money driving 20 minutes for a flat rate?
[00:13:04] Speaker B: Volume and density. It's the bus route model. If you are driving a bus to Crowley anyway to serve five papers, picking up a sixth paper for a flat rate is pure profit. You don't need to charge extra for the gas. The bus is already moving.
[00:13:18] Speaker A: Whereas the national company is treating it like a private taxi ride.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: Exactly. The national company has to hire someone for that one job. Scott Frank is aggregating volume across the whole 15th JDC. It's an economy of scale applied to rural logistics.
[00:13:32] Speaker A: That also impacts speed, doesn't it?
[00:13:33] Speaker B: Hugely. The national companies rely on batch runs. They might hold onto a paper for a week, waiting until they have enough work in Crowley to justify sending a contractor out.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: That sounds dangerous. If you have a deadline, it's terrible.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: If you have a temporary restraining order or a subpoena for a hearing next week, you can't wait for a batch run.
Scott Frank's team offers rush service same day or next day.
Because they are local, they can pivot instantly. They don't have to wait for the bus to fill up. They are the bus.
[00:14:03] Speaker A: So we've covered getting the papers to the person.
But there's a whole other half of this equation that I think people forget. Once the guy at the rice mill takes the papers, the job isn't done, is it?
[00:14:17] Speaker B: No. And this is where the amateur servers usually mess up. You have to Tell the court what happened. You have to navigate the bureaucracy, the clerk of court, the gatekeepers.
Navigating the 15th JDC means you have to deal with the specific filing procedures in each parish. For Acadia Parish, that's the clerk of court in downtown Crowley, on North Parkerson Avenue and Lafayette.
[00:14:37] Speaker A: Process servers handles that part. Or do they just mail the proof back to the lawyer?
[00:14:42] Speaker B: No, they handle it physically. They act as a runner. They do physical filing, document retrieval, and something called a walk.
[00:14:48] Speaker A: Walkthrough. That sounds like real estate. Let's do a walkthrough of the kitchen.
[00:14:51] Speaker B: Different context entirely. In the legal world, a walkthrough is a VIP service. Normally, you file a document and it goes into a pile. Maybe a judge signs it in three days, maybe five.
[00:15:02] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:15:03] Speaker B: A walkthrough means the process server physically takes the document, walks it past the clerks, finds the judge's assistant or the judge themselves, and gets it signed right then and there.
[00:15:15] Speaker A: So it's skipping the line.
[00:15:16] Speaker B: Legally, it's ensuring immediate attention for urgent orders. You can't do that with an app. You can't do that by mail. You can only do that if you know the building, you know the people inside it, and they trust you.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: That requires trust.
And that brings me to the man behind the operation we keep mentioning. Scott Frank. Who is this guy? Because handing someone your legal documents, that requires a lot of faith.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: Credibility is the currency here. Scott Frank isn't just some guy with a car and a website. He has positioned himself as a pillar of the business community.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: I noticed in the notes he's on the board of the Better Business Bureau.
[00:15:50] Speaker B: Yes, a board member of the BBB. And the company is a plus accredited since 2024. That is a significant signal. It tells lawyers I operate ethically. I'm not cutting corners.
[00:16:01] Speaker A: He's also plugged into the chambers of commerce.
[00:16:03] Speaker B: Yeah, multiple One, Acadiana, the Youngsville Chamber, the Baton Rouge Area Chamber. He's networking, but he's also treating this as a professional industry, not a gig.
[00:16:13] Speaker A: Integrating into the fabric of the local economy.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:16:16] Speaker A: And he's a content creator.
I saw mention of a podcast in.
[00:16:20] Speaker B: The source material, Paper Trails. He actually hosts a show discussing these logistics.
[00:16:25] Speaker A: That's remarkably meta. We're doing a deep dive on a guy who does deep dives on his own industry.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: It's smart, though. He's educating the market by explaining why it's hard to serve papers in churchpoint. He validates his own value proposition, showing the work.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: Which brings us to the final piece. Technology. We'd spent the first half of this show kind of bashing national apps and algorithms. But Lafayette Process Servers isn't anti technology, are they?
[00:16:50] Speaker B: Not at all. They are actually very high tech, but they apply it differently. They use tech for the client experience, not to replace the execution.
[00:16:59] Speaker A: Give me an example. How does it look from the user side?
[00:17:02] Speaker B: The document upload feature. In the old days you'd have to fax documents or courier them. It was slow, paper, heavy. With Scott's platform, a lawyer can upload the PDF directly via the website. They can see the pricing and instantly.
[00:17:16] Speaker A: So the front end feels like Uber or Amazon.
[00:17:18] Speaker B: Exactly. It's seamless. And crucially, they provide immediate service returns. When that guy at the rice mill gets served, the lawyer gets a notification, the proof is filed. You aren't left wondering, did it happen?
[00:17:31] Speaker A: You know it happened.
[00:17:32] Speaker B: You know it happened. It seems like they found the sweet spot. They use the software to handle the admin, the tracking, the uploading, but they use actual humans for the hard part, the driving and the knocking on doors.
[00:17:44] Speaker A: That is the perfect summary. They are modernizing a traditional industry without losing the traditional skills required to actually do the work right.
[00:17:52] Speaker B: They know that an app can't open a gate, but an app can tell you the gate has been opened.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: So let's zoom out. What is the takeaway here for our listener? Maybe they aren't a lawyer. Maybe they never plan to sue anyone. Why does this matter?
[00:18:04] Speaker B: It matters because access to justice is a term we throw around a lot. We think of it as this high minded, abstract ideal.
But practically speaking, access to justice is a logistical challenge.
[00:18:17] Speaker A: It's about infrastructure. It's about plumbing.
[00:18:19] Speaker B: It is if you have a perfectly valid lawsuit or a necessary protective order, but you cannot physically locate the other person because of a gravel road or a PO box, you do not have justice. You just have a piece of paper.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: That's a heavy realization. The system relies on the map.
[00:18:35] Speaker B: The system relies on the person reading the map. Successful legal process in the 15th JDC and really any rural part of America requires boots on the ground. It requires local knowledge. It requires knowing that the family land has three houses and knowing which one is the target.
[00:18:50] Speaker A: It's the difference between an algorithm that assumes the world is a grid and a human who knows the world is messy.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: And that raises a provocative thought to leave our listeners with. We are moving toward a world of AI and automation. In law. We talk about robot lawyers, sure, but can an AI drive down a muddy road in Esterwood? Can an AI negotiate with a protective dog until it can, justice is going to remain a fundamentally human logistical endeavor.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: That is a powerful place to land. Justice is logistics.
Now, before we sign off, we do need to cover our legal bases.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: Yes. A very important disclaimer. Lafayette Process Servers, LLC is a commercial agency. They are not a law firm. They do not provide legal advice.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Right. Any references we made to the clerk of court or filing indicate professional interaction for logistical purposes only. They are the messengers, not the attorneys.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: They move the paper. They don't argue the case.
[00:19:46] Speaker A: Important distinction. Well, that wraps up this deep dive into the Rice Capital and the hidden world of legal logistics.
[00:19:52] Speaker B: It's been a pleasure exploring the back roads of the 15th JDC with you.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Thanks for listening, everyone. Keep curious, and we'll catch you on the next deep dive.
