How to Search Court Records Like an Expert
In this post, we are going to discuss how to search court records, specifically relating to civil lawsuits.
{If you are interested in reading more about how to conduct a criminal background check (like an expert), check out our previous post.}
I consider court records to be one of the most important and underutilized resources in an investigator’s arsenal, because they are open-source (anyone can access them), they are based on factual data, they can provide an intimate picture of an individual or business and there are millions of data points (millions of cases are filed each year).
As recent as 15 years ago, the only way to search court records was by physically going to each court and searching the records either on a computer terminal or in bound books. Since the late 1990s, however, records have been computerized and with more increasing regularity, the individual courts are putting the records on the Internet.
This is not true for every court, however. Most courts in the United States still cannot be publicly accessed on the Internet, and in some cases still require a trip down to the court (yes, this is 2015).
This post is meant to give you a broad overview of …read more
Source:: Pry-Eye
