The case of the day is Chanel, Inc. v. Individuals, Business Entities and Unincorporated Associations Listed on Schedule A (S.D. Fla. 2025). This is a typical internet luxury good knockoff case. There are a lot of these cases nowadays. It’s usual for the plaintiff to sue a long list of seemingly dodgy foreign people and entities in a single lawsuit, to serve process by alternate means, and to ask for and often receive a preliminary injunction.

Today’s decision is one of the lazier of the genre. The judge authorized service by email and the web on the Schedule A defendants. I don’t really blame judges entirely for lazy decisions in these cases, because they the service issue is generally before the court on an ex parte motion. But some judges have managed to get the issues right, and more judges should look into the relevant law to make sure they are getting this right.

The first thing a judge should ask, when asked for leave to serve process by email or via the web, is: does the Hague Service Convention apply? That depends on whether the defendant’s address is known (and whether the plaintiff has used sufficient diligence to learn the defendant’s address, which is a little squishy), and for a defendant whose address is known, whether it is in a Convention state. Today’s decision is silent on those key questions. Why? Because the judge took the shortcut that many of the older cases, going back to Gurung v. Malhotra, took. She reasoned that the Convention simply doesn’t bar service by email, even in states that have objected to service under Article 10’s provisions on alternate methods of service. I’ve addressed this point many times, including in a haiku, and Bill Dodge and Maggie Gardner have done likewise. Here is the reason in summary:

1. The Convention is exclusive. If it applies, you must serve process using one of the methods of service it authorizes or at least permits.
2. The only provision of the Convention that even arguably permits service of process by email is Article 10(a), which permits service via postal channels when authorized by the law of the forum.
3. In a state that has objected to service by postal channels, the objection also covers service by email in light of point (2).

Here is the haiku:

Limited methods.
Email is not on the list.
The plaintiff’s sad tears.