The Order of Research
One half of my offspring is obsessed with Broadway and musicals. So obsessed that when she finishes her degree, she is intent on moving to New York City. Me, well just because I enter the Hamilton lottery daily, I have little interest in this art. Still, my daughter has put too much musical knowledge (I mean knowledge of musicals) into my brain. I cannot help, I have found, to know this stuff. And when I found myself teaching a class on the law to college students, I constantly found myself quoting the Sound of Music. That is to understand any particular legal concept, one must start at the beginning, because as I implored my students each week, “it was a very good place to start.” With background research it is important to know the beginning, middle and end and to do the work in an organized manner.
I just wrapped up an assignment which emphasised to me, the importance of doing research in the right order. Here is the order that I generally follow in “standard” background research, and I will undermine my premise right away and say there are often projects where I do not follow this order, but we’ll leave that for another blog post:
Verify a person’s name and determine where they live and have lived
Ascertain the person’s professional history and business affiliations
Search for key public records such as litigation, bankruptcy, tax liens and judgments
News or media searches
Additional Google and Bing “Internet” searches
Quality control
For the sake of brevity in blogging, I will skip explaining what each of these things mean, but rather explain why the order matters, especially in this recent case. Determining where a person lives and has lived is vital because it tells you where to focus your public record research. Knowing professional history and business affiliations tells you who to search. Sure, a lawsuit can be filed where something happened, where the harm occurred so to speak, but that harm is almost always going to occur where a person lives or does business. Besides, public records are generally filed where a person resides or at least owns property. You have to know where to look to do a good job looking. It also goes without saying that if you do not look in the right places, you will not find important public records. When I started doing this kind of research, 30 (yes 30) years ago, my boss (who is also still in the biz), came up with these words of caution regarding where to look, disclaimer words I still put in every research memorandum I file:
Public records are location specific. That is, information filed or maintained by a specific court, agency or other organization can only be found by inquiring with that court, agency, or organization. Public records may exist in jurisdictions not included in our searches. In addition, the indices checked cover a fixed period, normally four to seven years.
The only part of that not standing up all these years is that indices, these days go back way beyond 4 to 7 years.
Public records searched, we get to the news searches and why the order matters. A lot of research stories are about finding the needle in the haystack, that one arcane, hidden, unique article that happened to be out there. In reality, in most business research, the art is not in finding one article but in going through hundreds, sometimes 1,000’s of articles to find the few important ones. Knowing what I know from the first searches helps greatly in refining my news searches. For instance, in this recent project, I identified one lawsuit in my PACER searches of federal litigation records. It was an interesting case, ostensibly a dispute over subpoena enforcement, but filings in the matter pointed to some bigger issues. I could then use the party in the litigation as a keyword in my news research. Within the many “hits” that came up on Lexis/Nexis, there were a few articles that expanded on the issue I had found in my litigation search. The moral of this story, if I had not done the litigation searches first, I would not have known to use that keyword and probably would not have zeroed in on these articles.
It’s been ingrained in my head, that the beginning is a very good place to start. Once I start, though, there’s an order to follow. This order can make the difference in what is found in your research.