Court research
Researched where the file actually lives.
Court research means reading the index the court keeps, in the jurisdiction that holds the matter, by the method that court permits. Everything else is an approximation of it.
The problem
Coverage that collapses at the county line
Screening operations rarely fail on the easy jurisdictions. They fail on the county where the clerk changed a policy, the portal covers only part of the index, or the court of record is not where the county name suggests.
Those are the jurisdictions that generate rework, disputes and escalations — and they are the ones a national coverage percentage tells you nothing about.
What we do about it
Treat the jurisdiction as the unit of work
Each jurisdiction is documented before it is served: which court holds the record, how that court is accessed, what identifiers the clerk requires, what the court charges, and what makes it behave differently from its neighbours.
That documentation is what a coverage review hands you — and it is what stops a search being run on an assumption.
What comes back
- The recordCase data captured as the court records it, with the court's own field names preserved alongside a normalised structure so your team can reconcile against the source if a file is challenged.
- The methodWhich access route was used, because that determines what the search could and could not contain.
- The timestampWhen the search was executed against the index — not when the order was placed and not when a database was last refreshed.
- The limitsWhere a court's index does not carry a field, the response says so rather than returning an empty value that reads as a negative.
Which counties are giving you trouble?
Send the jurisdictions where your rework and escalations concentrate. That is the useful test of a research partner, and it is the one we would rather be measured on.
Request a coverage review