Legal Question in Civil Litigation in California

Each defendant must be served. A summons must also be completed and presented to the court clerk when filing the complaint. The court will issue the summons and return it to the person filing the complaint. The original summons must later be filed with the court along with the proof of service showing that a copy of the summons and complaint was served on each defendant.

You will get a stamp by the court proving you served the summons. A third party will serve the summons, not you. This is called the process server.

If this is a difficult problem for you, with all respect you might want to stop and consider that you really don't know what you are doing. If winning the case is important to you, get help from somebody who does know what they're doing, and I don't mean your Aunt Sally.

Once you start serving the defendants and they file demurrers or serve discovery on you, and you have a limited time within which to respond, you'll really be in the soup.

You list all the defendants on one summons, just as you list them on the complaint. The names much match the complaint exactly. You then have someone who is over 18 and has no interest in the outcome of the case serve each defendant with a copy of the summons and a copy of the complaint. You then file a proof of service signed by that person, and list all the documents served (summons, complaint, any other papers the court gives you to serve with the complaint, etc.) on one proof for each defendant. Mr. Stone is correct, however, if just getting the defendants served is this much of a challenge for you, you have virtually ZERO chance of getting all the way through the case and winning anything.