In fact, in the TASS proceedings, the law does not oblige the claimant to have a lawyer. It can explain the service to the claimant himself.
In France, the Hague service has to be used as soon as a judicial or extrajudicial document has to be served to a contracting state. The solution is the same for the application of bilateral agreements or in the European Union for the application of the EC regulation 1393/2007. See for example, the Roda Golf & Beach Resort SL case of the EUCJ, (25 June 2009, case n°C-14/08) in which the European court reasserts the application of the regulation for the service of an extrajudicial document.

I think the French decision is useful for American lawyers because it’s an example of a case that implicitly rejects the view one sometimes hears that the Convention applies only to service of process in the strict sense, i.e., to service of a summons rather than to service of other judicial documents. See, for example, Christopher Voltz’s suggestion about avoiding the need to translate a complaint when serving it in China, or the Supreme Court of Colorado’s decision in Willhite v. Rodriguez-Cera.