Case Study 2: Divorcing a Husband you Can’t Find

If you are applying for a divorce on your own, you are required to arrange for the delivery of a hard copy of the divorce application into the hands of your husband. This is called personal service. Usually, we hire professional process servers to complete this task. They are relatively cheap. But what if you’re divorcing a husband you can’t find?

How to divorce a husband you can’t find?

However, have you ever thought about what would happen if you had no idea where your husband lived or how to contact him? This is not an entirely uncommon scenario.

Do not panic!

On multiple occasions, our family law lawyers have been approached by worried clients desperately seeking a divorce, yet unsure if they will be granted a divorce.  Often their husbands have changed their mobile numbers, never had an email address, and/or moved into a new home (and nobody knows the address).  Our message to all future clients in this position is – do not worry, there is always a solution. You will get your divorce.

What can you do?

Your first obligation is to attempt service. This means that you have to try and find out how he could possibly be located. We can help you with this.

The types of questions that we will ask you, and you should be ready to answer include:

• What was his last known address?
• What is his full name, and did he have any other names?
• Where does he work?
• Which accountant does he use?
• Does he have social media accounts?
• Does he have an email account?
• What are his telephone contact numbers?
• Does he have family in Australia? If so, who? And where do they live?

What we can do?

We then use the information you will have given us to:

1. Conduct further searches; and
2. Prepare an application for substituted service or no service.

The searches we can conduct include:

• Location searches based on mobile numbers;
• Electoral role searches;
• Property ownership searches;
• ASIC searches for current company roles, and service details.

Most times, together with your help, we will be able to find somewhere to send the paperwork to (whether that is to family member, accountant or place of work). If that is the case, we ask the Court for permission to have the documents served by post or email to an address deemed suitable by our investigations. If however, it has become absolutely impossible to reach your husband, we can also ask the Court to allow us to proceed with the divorce application without having served the documents on your husband at all.