Community Legal Assistance Society - BC Judicial Review Self-Help Guide

How to Serve Other Parties

Typically, other parties will be individual people, corporations (including companies, societies, and co-ops), or government bodies.  To personally serve these parties your stamped petition and affidavit, you must do the following:

  • Individual: you must personally hand the documents to the individual. While you can normally rely on the information on your tenancy agreement, in exceptional circumstances you may want to find out who owns the property. To do this you can do a land title search.
  • Corporation:
    • You can personally leave the documents with a manager, clerk or secretary at a branch office of the corporation; or
    • if it is a BC corporation (including a company, a society, or a co-op), you can send the documents by registered mail to the corporation’s registered office. You can find out a company, society, co-op’s registered service address by doing a search of the British Columbia Corporate Registry. If you have a short deadline for service, using registered mail to serve a corporation may not be good option.
  • Government bodies other than the Attorney General: you must personally hand the documents to a clerk, agent or secretary at the agency’s office.

Remember to keep a record of the date and time of service, and the name of the person you physically give the documents to.  Note that, if you are serving all the parties in the same way (for example, by personally handing over the documents), you can use the same service letter for each party. If you are using a different method of service for each party, you will need to use separate cover letters for each of them setting out how you served that particular party. Alternatively, you may use the same cover letter and write under each party’s name how you served them. Keep a copy of all of your signed cover letters.

If you do not live near enough to one of the parties to be able to serve them as set out above, you can arrange for someone else to serve the documents for you. This person will have to be able to provide an affidavit of service. See the section Proving Service for more information on the affidavit of service.

You should include a cover letter with the documents that you are serving.

This is a blank service letter that you can download and fill in: Blank Service Letter

This is an example service letter that you can use as a guide: Example Service Letter

 

This website, jrbc.ca or judicialreviewbc.ca, is produced for educational purposes only. This website has information on common situations, but does not cover all possible situations. You should not rely on this website as legal advice. If you have a legal problem, you should get legal advice on your particular situation.

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Site by the Community Legal Assistance Society. Content available under Creative Commons CC BY-NC licence. This guide is made possible by funding from the British Columbia Ministry of Justice and the Law Foundation of British Columbia. This guide was originally produced by David Mossop, Q.C.
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