Law360, New York ( April 7, 2015, 10:23 AM EDT) -- Foreign corporations sometimes assume that they cannot be served unless the plaintiff goes through the steps required by the Hague Convention on Service Abroad of Judicial and Extrajudicial Documents. For foreign corporations facing suit in California's federal courts, case law has made that assumption risky, if not wrong. Courts have allowed plaintiffs to perfect service on foreign parent corporations by serving their domestic subsidiaries under the theory that the subsidiary qualifies as the foreign parent's "general manager." But courts have struggled to come up with a uniform method for explaining which subsidiaries qualify as a "general manager," leaving foreign corporations guessing as to whether they have been properly brought into a case. That uncertainty will likely (and hopefully) soon go away....