The Trump International Hotel. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The co-owners of Cork Wine Bar have a number of hurdles to clear for a successful lawsuit against President Donald Trump, who they’re suing over unfair competition in D.C. for the hotel that bears his name on Pennsylvania Avenue. The first one, though, was how to serve him with the court papers.

The suit names Trump personally, in his capacity as a business owner rather than as president, as well as the Trump Post Office LLC, alleging that customers like business advocates, lobbyists, foreign dignitaries, and more are going to the International Trump Hotel and its restaurants to get face time or otherwise ingratiate themselves with the president.

“This is about local D.C.—about our local business and other local businesses,” said co-owner Khalid Pitts at a press conference earlier this month. “This is a business lawsuit.”

Because Trump is named, he must be served with the documents by law, something the Cork Wine Bar legal team succeeded in doing on Tuesday.

“We served him as of yesterday,” says lead counsel Scott Rome. “It actually went a lot smoother than we had feared.”

While Rome imagined that serving the leader of the free world might involve getting around Secret Service or finding a waiter to hand him the documents at a Trump-owned establishment, the actual manner in which it happened is more Office Space than James Bond.

The legal team was able to get in touch with the president’s personal counsel at Morgan Lewis, which accepted service on behalf of Trump. “It can go through email now—it’s a new age,” says Rome, who says he sent the documents to Jason R. Scherr. Scherr has not responded to requests for comment.

“We thought they might avoid service, but it certainly wouldn’t be a beneficial thing to be seen in the public as a president who’s ducking service,” says Rome.

Even if Trump had avoided getting served, the lawsuit would have moved forward anyway. The team served Trump Old Post Office LLC last week by delivering the documents to the hotel. “If we had never served him, the case would continue against the entity,” says Rome. “And that’s part of the problem with continuing to own entities as president.”

Now, they wait for a legal response from Trump’s team and the case will move forward from there. Legal scholars told The Atlantic that Cork’s case “is far more likely to see its day in court” than some other high-profile suits against Trump, like the one filed by a government watchdog group over the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, though still faces “an uphill battle.”

Pitts and Diane Gross, the married couple that owns Cork Wine Bar, are not seeking monetary damages in their lawsuit. Instead, they want a court order that will compel Trump to fully divest from the hotel, which opened this past fall. Other solutions that would satisfy them include the hotel’s closure or Trump’s resignation.

While Donald Trump Jr., his eldest son, has officially taken over as the head of Trump Old Post Office LLC, the president has not renounced his ownership stake in the business.

But the Trumps don’t own the Old Post Office Building, which houses the hotel. That building belongs to the General Services Administration, for which Trump signed a 60-year lease in 2012 that included a clause stating “No member or delegate to Congress, or elected official of the Government of the United States … shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom.”

Some House Democrats raised the alarm before Trump’s inauguration that he would be in violation of the lease when he took office. However, a letter from the GSA last week said that Trump was in “full compliance” by passing along the LLC to his son, even if he could later be enriched by the property.

Rome says “it’s a flat-out wrong interpretation of the lease” but he isn’t surprised. “GSA has been allowing him to keep this lease for all these months,” he says. “If we thought GSA was going to do the right thing and terminate the lease, then we wouldn’t have filed the lawsuit.”

The chief legal officer of the Trump Organization called the suit a “wild publicity stunt completely lacking in legal merit.”

Rome says it is Trump engaging in the wild publicity stunts “to bring more customers to businesses owned by the president. [Trump] could be going to local businesses, he could be going out in the community and doing things that aren’t designed to bring more business to his own companies. When people see that he’s going to BLT Prime every weekend, then people who want to influence him will go to BLT Prime.”

A Washington Post report found that Trump has visited one of his own properties nearly one out of every three days since becoming president.