Serving papers in Fort Lauderdale
Downtown and Flagler Village, Las Olas, Victoria Park, Rio Vista, Harbor Beach, Coral Ridge, the Galt Ocean Mile, Sailboat Bend, Riverland and Edgewood.
Fort Lauderdale is the county seat of Broward, which is the 17th Judicial Circuit. A Miami-Dade certification does not cover a Fort Lauderdale address, so every job here is assigned to one of our process servers certified in the 17th Circuit.
You order the same way as anywhere else we serve, online or by phone, with one flat price per level. Up to 4 attempts at different times of day within your level's time, with a Saturday attempt when that time includes a Saturday, and a notarized affidavit of service.
A Fort Lauderdale mailing address is often another city
The Postal Service uses "Fort Lauderdale" as the mailing city for a large part of central Broward, including addresses that are really in Plantation, Lauderhill, Lauderdale Lakes, Oakland Park, Wilton Manors, Tamarac or unincorporated Broward. Summonses copy the mailing address, so the city on the papers is often not the city the house is in.
We work from the street and number, not the city line, and the affidavit records the address as it actually is. All of those cities are in Broward, so the same 17th Circuit servers cover them.
Beach towers and gated buildings
Along A1A, the Galt Ocean Mile and the beach high-rises have front desks and controlled entries, and much of the city lives behind a gate or a guard. Florida Statutes section 48.031(7) requires a gated residential community, including a condominium or cooperative association, to grant entry to a process server attempting to serve a resident. Each building policy and each attempt is recorded.
Canal streets that dead-end
Fort Lauderdale is built around hundreds of miles of canals. In neighborhoods like the Las Olas Isles, each street runs out onto its own finger of land and stops at the water, so two houses that look close on a map can be a long drive apart. Addresses are checked on the map before a server leaves.
Circuit and county civil cases are filed at the Broward County Courthouse, 201 SE 6th Street, in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Send the case number with the papers so the affidavit matches the court file.