Dispatch desk / Coverage / Saint-Martin
Service of process in Saint-Martin
One island, two jurisdictions, and this is the page for the French side. Get the side wrong and the entire procedure is wrong — which is why we confirm which side of the border your address falls on before anybody travels.
What the Saint-Martin desk handles
- Address verification, trace and locate — ours in every case, whatever the formal route
- Instructing and following through a commissaire de justice where signification is required
- Preparing and transmitting a Hague Service Convention request where that is the route
- Enquiries and observations on the ground, with photographs where lawful and practical
- Divorce, custody and family documents, including diaspora matters
- Debt, judgment and enforcement documents
- Corporate documents at a registered office or place of business
- Probate and succession enquiries
- Reasoned report where a person is no longer at the address, with what we established
- Confirming which side of the Dutch–French border an address falls on, before anyone travels
If what you have is not on this list, ask. We will tell you plainly whether it can properly be served here.
The border is the whole problem
There is no hard frontier on the ground, and that is precisely why files go wrong.
You can drive from Marigot to Philipsburg without stopping, and an address given simply as “St Martin” tells us nothing about which legal system governs it. The French collectivity follows French civil procedure. Dutch Sint Maarten is a separate country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands with its own procedure and its own language requirements. The document, the route and the language may all differ.
So send us the street and the district as you have them, and we will confirm the side before anybody is instructed or charged. If the address turns out to be Dutch, we say so and handle it through our Dutch desk instead — you do not have to start again with someone else.
The other local reality is turnover. A great deal of accommodation here is seasonal or rental, and a good many properties changed hands or were rebuilt after the 2017 hurricane. An address more than a year or two old should be verified rather than attempted.
Because the island is shared, we can sequence a French-side and a Dutch-side matter, or an Anguilla crossing, into one planned trip rather than charging you for separate journeys.
Timing, and what comes back to you
The island is small, so the ground work is quick. Where the formal route is a commissaire de justice or the central authority, the timescale is theirs rather than ours and we will say so plainly.
- A court-ready Affidavit or Certificate of Service, sworn locally
- A record of every attempt — date, time, address and who was spoken to
- A description of the person served and the circumstances of the handover
- Photographs of the location where lawful and practical
- Progress updates by email or WhatsApp while the matter is live
- A reasoned report if service cannot be effected, with what we established about the true address
- A single point of contact who knows your file, start to finish
Why instruct us for Saint-Martin
Because we settle the border question first, for nothing, before anyone spends money on the wrong procedure.
And because we cover both sides of the island and Anguilla from the same desk, so a mistaken assumption about which side your defendant lives on does not cost you a fresh instruction.
French is the language of the courts and of the paperwork; we report to you in English. There is a full French version of this information, written rather than machine-translated, at fr.html. Ask us about the route and any translation requirement before you send. Where formal signification is required we instruct the competent commissaire de justice for the ressort, transmit the file properly, follow it through and return the completed act — you keep one point of contact, and the investigative work on the address stays with us.