[maxwell69]

Ex refuses all mailings of my default 2 year separation divorce petition for a year, exes former lawyer accepted a copy but it was denied as service by PA court because my ex did not get served personally. A year later ex finds out house in foreclosure and uses an attorney to file a "petition for special relief" to obtain belongings he did not retrieve as per a PFA orcer 3 years prior. Petition is "attached" to the divorce petition I filed, and ex uses a copy of the divorce petition as "evidence" in his petition for special releif. Hearing takes place with myself and his attorney, we agree on specific items that ex is asking for, go before judge and order allowing ex to obtain belongings is expidited. However divorce is not finalized. How to I prove to the court that although I never served him as he refused service that a divorce decree should be given as he actually responded to the divorce in his petition (it was stated that we were separated over 2 years and irritrevable breakdown of the marriage occurred in his own petition) and since he attached a copy of the divorce petition as evidence this would establish that he was served or has knowledge of the divorce especially as his petition for special relief was "joined" by the court to the divorce action? He filed the petition Jan 7th, and only asked for personaly belongings, nothing else has been filed in regard to the divorce by him. What do I need to do to get the court to give a final decree and convince the court that he was served to do it?

[AK lawyer]

The court has specific rules governing how service of process is to be accomplished. The problem would be that, while he is aware that the divorce petition has been filed, he is not aware that he has been served with process.

If you cannot get him served any other way, you should consider asking the court to authorize service by publication (if allowed in your jurisdiction). To do this, you would file a motion with the court setting forth everything you have tried to accomplish service of process, including the facts of the "petition for special relief" which demonstrate that he is aware that the divorce petition has been filed.

I would also recommend that you include, with your motion, a form of notice to be published. This is because publication is expensive. You would not want to go through with the time and expense of publication only to find that the court doesn't think the words you used were sufficient. Also, in my experience, many notices published in newspapers are unnecessarily wordy. Newspapers charge by the word (or column inch) and there is no need to waste money.