DocketEye is not your registered agent

The papers travel from the plaintiff to the state and from the state to whatever address is on file. We stand outside that line. What we can do is read the register and tell you what address the letter would go to — before anyone sends one.

What a registered agent is

A registered agent is a person or company that has agreed to receive legal papers on behalf of your business, at a named street address, during business hours. They are listed as the agent in the state's own records. When they are handed a summons, your company has been served, and everything that follows from service follows — whether or not the papers ever reach you.

In New York there is a second layer that catches every LLC. The Secretary of State is the agent for service of process on every LLC from the day it is formed, whether or not the company also appoints somebody commercially. A plaintiff serves Albany, and the state forwards the papers to the address on file for that entity.

What DocketEye is instead

Two things, both of which sit beside that process rather than inside it:

We read the address the state holds for each company you add, out of the state's own public register, and print it next to the address you gave us. If they are not the same street address, the letter the state sends is going somewhere you are not.
We watch the court and agency sources listed on our coverage page and email you when a filing there names a company on your account. That page also names what each source cannot see, and the courts we do not read at all.

Neither of those makes us a recipient of anything on your behalf.

What this means in practice

Do not list DocketEye as your registered agent on a state filing, on a contract, or anywhere else. We are not one, and a filing that says we are would be wrong at the state.
Do not have papers sent to us. Papers delivered to us have not been served on your company, and we have no standing to accept them or to act on them.
Our alert is not service, and it is not notice. It is a message telling you that something has appeared in a source we read. The legal fact of service happened elsewhere, at its own time, and it does not wait for us.
We do not give legal advice and we do not tell you any date by which you have to act. If you have been sued, that is a conversation to have with a lawyer.

The address on file is the thing to fix

If the address the state holds for your company is not somewhere your mail is read, that is the root of the problem and it is fixable at the source. In New York, changing the address the Department of State holds is a Certificate of Change, filed with the Department of State, $30. That is a fact and a fee, not advice, and you do not need us to do it.

What we do is tell you that the address is stale in the first place, which is the part almost nobody checks. That check is free and stays free, with no card.

If you want a registered agent

Commercial registered-agent services exist and charge roughly $100 to $125 a company a year to receive mail and forward it. That is a different product from this one, we do not sell it, and we have no arrangement with any provider of it. Using one does not remove the Secretary of State as the agent for service in New York — it adds a second route, and the address on file still matters.

This page is part of the terms of service. If anything on the site ever reads as though we accept service for you, that is a mistake on our side — write to us and we will fix the page.