We were asked to locate and serve and American resident of Southeast Asia in a trust and estates matter (he was he settlor). Through social media searching we found his group of friends and then contacted one of them to ask about a second person (not the person we were investigating). In the course of the conversation we were given the phone number of our subject. A lawyer working for us in that city then arranged contact with the subject and professed interest in the subject’s hobby – wine collecting. The subject then provided his address. He was visited by process servers several times before agreeing to accept service.

Our bill was $7,300.

This case took four months to complete, because the social media research needed to be so extensive before we found any whiff of this individual. Then, we needed to find just the right way to approach someone who ran a high-profile wine collecting club in the city. That person took a week to reach by phone, and then it took another week to contact the settlor we were looking for on the pretext that we were moving there and needed to evaluate the wine storage facilities and ask about import duties.

Once we had the settlor’s phone number (but not an address), we then needed to find the right person to approach him. This turned out to be the nephew of a lawyer recommended to us, who was in fact a wine collector himself. A meeting was arranged to tour the settlor’s wine collection, and we were able to use this address to serve him the next week.