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How AutoSummons works, and background on the federal rule it implements. This page is general information, not legal advice.

How AutoSummons works

1. Set up your case

Enter the court (picked from a list of federal districts), case number, caption, and plaintiff, add the party or parties to be served with their email address and/or mobile number, and upload your complaint and any supporting documents as PDFs. Uploads are scanned and stored encrypted.

2. We prepare the official forms

AutoSummons fills the official AO 398 (Notice of a Lawsuit and Request to Waive Service of a Summons) and AO 399 (Waiver of the Service of Summons) from your case information, naming the person being served. You review everything before anything is sent.

3. Checkout sends the request

Each recipient is sent the request by email — $10.00 per recipient — and you pay by card. Payment is the send: the moment your order completes, each recipient is sent a secure, single-purpose link, and the sent-at timestamp is locked. That timestamp matters because every Rule 4(d) deadline is computed from the date the request was sent.

4. The recipient reviews and responds

The recipient opens the link on any device — no account, no charge. The portal explains in plain language what waiving means, then presents the complaint and the waiver form. They can sign electronically (after an explicit consent step, under the ESIGN Act and UETA), download the form to return by mail outside the platform, or decline. If they don't respond, we send three reminders — on day 3, day 6 and day 9 after the request — and nothing after that; the request expires on day 30.

5. You watch it happen

Your dashboard shows the live engagement funnel for each request: sent (with the exact address or number used), delivered, link clicked, each document viewed or downloaded with its first-access timestamp, and the outcome — signed, declined, or expired. Every row traces to an entry in a tamper-evident audit log.

6. The outcome

If the recipient signs, you receive a filing packet: the executed waiver PDF plus a certificate of completion recording the signature, consent, timestamps, and document integrity hashes — ready to file with the court, and formal service is excused. If the deadline passes without a response, the request expires and you receive a Service Engagement Report documenting the entire attempt — dates sent, reminders, deliveries, and any engagement — which supports a motion to recover your costs of formal service under Rule 4(d)(2) when you fall back to a process server.

FRCP Rule 4(d): waiver of service, in brief

Rule 4 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure governs the summons — how a defendant is formally brought into a federal lawsuit. Subsection 4(d) provides an alternative to formal service: the plaintiff may ask the defendant to waive service, and the defendant has a duty to avoid the unnecessary expense of formal service.

A compliant request must be in writing, addressed to the defendant, name the court where the complaint was filed, include a copy of the complaint, two copies of the waiver form, and a prepaid means of returning it, inform the defendant of the consequences of waiving and of not waiving, and give a reasonable time to respond. AutoSummons is built around these requirements — a technically defective request is the first thing a defendant fighting a cost award will attack.

The deadlines

  • At least 30 days after the request is sent for the defendant to return the waiver (60 days if the defendant is outside any U.S. judicial district). AutoSummons sets the deadline from the “outside the United States” box on each recipient and shows it on your order page. The day the request is sent (its Eastern Time date) is excluded, every calendar day after it counts, and the window closes at midnight Pacific Time at the end of the last day, so the recipient has the whole of that day wherever in the mainland U.S. they are.
  • A defendant who waives gets 60 days from the date the request was sent to answer the complaint (90 days if outside the U.S.) — a meaningful extension over the 21 days that follow formal service.

What waiving does — and does not — give up

Waiving service waives exactly one thing: objections to the sufficiency of service itself. It is not an admission of anything, and it preserves every other defense, including objections to the court's jurisdiction and to venue. Rule 4(d)(5) says so expressly.

The cost of refusing

Under Rule 4(d)(2), if a defendant located in the United States fails, without good cause, to sign and return a waiver, the court must order that defendant to pay the expenses later incurred in making formal service, plus the reasonable expenses of any motion required to collect them.

Official sources

For what AutoSummons is and is not, see About; for the terms that govern use of the service, see Terms of Service.