Accusations in Lawsuits

Has the executive you are talking to ever been a defendant in a lawsuit? It's a simple question. But there's no simple way to find out.

With no national registry of civil litigation, records on millions of cases are not only scattered geographically, but within each jurisdiction they are also filed in separate federal, state and local judicial systems.

Although databases of case law—the reported legal decisions carried by Lexis, among others—are useful, they are far from complete records of a person's or company's litigation history.

But older cases in rural areas are usually not accessible through computerized databases. It takes “local knowledge” to search efficiently.