Q: How do I go about posting in Sonoma CA for divorce? I am from Or and I've already taken care of posting here but no CA

A: First you need to clarify what you mean by posting? I don't really know what you're talking about but I would guess that it's something like posting a notice because you couldn't find the person to serve him or her. I would never use posting as a form of substituted service. The primary form of service is personal service and you need to do your best to figure out how to serve someone personally as your first choice. There are all sorts of creative ways that people use to find the person they need to serve. At a minimum you can pay a private investigator to search their database and see if the person you're looking for pops up. It is relatively inexpensive to do this.

If that fails then what I generally do for my clients is figure out all the ways one might indirectly notify the person we're trying to serve. That might be sending notices to other friends and relatives that we believe have contact with the person we're trying to serve and mailing to all their last known mailing addresses and the address that the DMV has on record. What I then do is go before the judge with an affidavit stating everything I tried to do to find the person and explaining why it failed, and then I present a proposed order of all the ways I'm going to try to substitute serve the person. This could be a list of all the people I'm going to mail a copy of the complaint to who might tell the person about the pending divorce. I suppose that posting a notice somewhere could be part of that but I would never use that. A better idea is to publish a notice in a newspaper of common circulation in the town where the person is believed to be living.

Anyway, you give the judge the proposed order with all the message you're going to try and the judge signs off on it and then you're good to go in terms of preceding.