Jeff Karotkin: Four Decades in the Trenches of Litigation Support

Jeff Karotkin didn't choose this industry he grew up in it. His parents ran an attorney service, and by the time most kids were figuring out summer jobs, Jeff was already learning what it actually takes to get someone served, get documents filed at the courts. That early exposure didn't just give him a head start. It gave him a point of view that's hard to manufacture.

That perspective has shaped everything he's done since.

Building Something That Lasts at CALSPro
Jeff joined CALSPro then called CAPPS early in his career and stayed involved for
more than 38 years. He wasn't a passive member. He ran the thing: President, Board
Chair, Legislative Chair, education programs. In 1999, the organization recognized his
contributions with the Bert Rosenthal Award, one of its highest honors.
Perhaps his most consequential work there was on California Assembly Bill 747.
Legislation around service of process tends to produce winners and losers. Jeff worked
to get to something better: a bill that addressed practical problems without gutting due
process protections. That's harder than it sounds, and it required him to understand
both sides well enough to find ground they could share.

Taking It National
Jeff served as President of the National Association of Professional Process Servers
(NAPPS) during a period when technology was beginning to reshape how legal
documents get served. As chair of NAPPS' Technology Committee, he worked with the
American Bar Association to help establish best practices for electronic service of
process, essentially helping write the rules before the chaos set in.
His position was consistent: embrace what works, but don't let speed and convenience
erode the reliability that due process depends on.

Competing in the eFiling Market
When California's courts began rolling out electronic filing, Jeff saw what was coming: a
handful of providers would lock up the market if nobody pushed back. He founded the
Coalition for Improving Court Access (CICA) and spent years lobbying for a competitive,
open marketplace, one where filers could choose their service provider, access fee
waivers, and not get squeezed on lack of payment options.

It was unglamorous work. Coalition building usually is. But it mattered, and it changed
how electronic filing developed in California.

The Career Arc
Jeff's professional path reads like a map of the industry's evolution over the past 40
years: He started at his family's firm, Marvin Givant Attorney Service, learning the business
from the inside. He moved to Personal Attorney Service (PAS), helped dramatically
scale it up, and positioned it for acquisition. At One Legal, he spent over a decade
helping build California's dominant eFiling platform and eventually led the service of
process business unit through a full reorganization, rebuilding the team, halving open
inventory, and driving on-time rates up more than 50%. At ServeManager, he shifted
focus to SaaS product development. He's now Senior Director at Steno, focused on
building out litigation support services nationally.

Each move tracked where the industry was heading, from street-level service to eFiling
to software-as-a-service for process servers to what comes next.

Still Watching the Field
Jeff pays attention to things that most people miss until they become problems. He
flagged the proposed 2026 amendments to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 45 early
enough that the process serving industry had time to actually respond. He's published
on electronic service in New Mexico, NYC's new process server regulations, Ontario's
civil rules reform, Florida landlord-tenant notice rules, and the industry's exposure to an
increasingly digital world.

Mentorship isn't something Jeff does formally. It's more that he's been around long
enough, and talks openly enough about what he's learned, that people in his orbit tend
to get better.

The Through Line
What connects all of it, the association leadership, legislation, the coalitions, the product
work, the writing, is a fairly simple conviction: the process of serving legal documents is
not a bureaucratic formality. It's how people get notice. It's how courts work. Get it
wrong, and the whole system gets shakier.

Jeff has spent 40 years protecting, promoting, and preserving the process serving and
court filing industry.