My Study Shows That Nail-and-Mail Service of Eviction Action Summons Is Used in a Majority of Cases. Given the Degradation of USPS Mail Service, the Service-of-Process Statute Should be Amended Accordingly.

When a landlord files an eviction action against a tenant, his process server must serve the summons and complaint at least 7 days prior to the hearing. Service can be direct (personally handing the summons and complaint to the tenant or handing them to her roommate at her home). Alternatively, it can be by “posting” – mailing a copy to her by First Class Mail and affixing one to her home (often called “nail and mail”).

The theory behind the nail-and-mail procedure is that even if the affixed copy blows away or is ripped off, the mailed documents will get to her quickly, and thus she’ll still get a few days to prepare. However, USPS mail service has degraded. If posting is common, many tenants are not getting much time to prepare and in some cases no notice at all.

To determine whether posting is common, I obtained a random sample of eviction cases filed between June 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022 and used court records to determine the frequency of posting. Posting was very common, representing a majority of all cases, and a strong majority of cases in the Twin Cities area (76% in Hennepin County, 59% in Ramsey County, and 56% in Anoka, Carver, Dakota and Washington Counties combined).

As a side result, I discovered that expungement of eviction cases occurs quite frequently – in 10-15% of cases outside of Hennepin County. In Hennepin, the figures were remarkable; 37% of all cases were expunged and 43% of cases heard by the court were expunged (some cases were dismissed by the landlord before the court date).

In this essay, available in PDF or Word, I present the methods I used and the resulting data, and I propose some changes to the mailing part of the service statute (Minn. Stat. § 504B.331). The proposals include doing some or all of the following: allowing tenants to require mailing to include email as well as USPS mail, increasing the mailing time from 7 days to 10 days, and requiring Priority Mail instead of First Class Mail.

The Word version has links to cited materials. Footnotes 4-5 include citations to a variety of evidence of poor mail service. The raw data is available in an Excel spreadsheet, Table RD.

I thank HOME Line’s staff for generating the sample of eviction cases.