Some of My Best Friends

The Case of the Not So Missing Person

I am a public record researcher. I do not research for free. And I am not talking about pro bono research. There are costs to providing vital information, to providing vital information to manage risks; to providing vital information to help react to unforeseen risks. There are pesky, picayune charges. The Texas Secretary of State charges $1 to look at a company record. There are costs that add up. Downloading many litigation records on PACER or old school, copying a litigation file can exceed $100. Mostly, I pay to get access to more records or gain the ability to more easily search more records. For instance, I pay a fee to Nexis so I can search the millions of documents within their databases. On the other hand, what does it cost to “google” something, or once upon a time, run it in the Alta Vista search engine.

There’s a saying among us research types, never let the client find something you did not also find. In other words, while you may scouring all those Nexis libraries, the client is poking around on Google. Do not discount what they see just because it came included in the cost of their monthly internet bill. More importantly, there’s just so much damn interesting stuff out there. Especially when you have friends out there.

Maybe not friends. Like your lawyer. Who does work for you. Then puts on his website the work. Maybe not the exact work, but work that mentions, well let’s call them, issues you had. So when I did my paid searches, did I find those issues. I mean I found one thing bad on you, but not the things mentioned by your lawyer. Except if you lawyer said he was on this, well you had it right. There it was. The google search finding what the paid searches did not. Was it rock solid, a huge tranche of finding. No, but a little nugget that was enough to give the client pause.

So, there you have it. A case solved because someone felt the need to brag about helping you with issues you would have rather left unsaid combined with the fact not all searches cost money to do.