The Last Post of 2020
Assorted Things I’m Wishing for In 2021
Everyone’s wish for 2021 is that it is not 2020. That we can travel. Be with friends and family. Mask up less. Yes, yes, yes. But are you also wishing you could get back to the poker table. Hit some of those tourneys at the Horseshoe Hammond? Waiting for all that has left me plenty of time to think about more specific wishes. My (the researcher) specific needs , and things that should be on your wish list too.
To be an open source researcher is to always be wishing. I have been an open source researcher for so long that early on we did not even call ourselves open source researchers. All that time, I’ve been wishing for more sources, more access. I’m a huge believer in the value and worth of public record research. I have written about this often. Yet, I recognize that public records, open sources, are limited. I wish for more public records, and I wish that more records were available for online/Internet access. But like wishing for less covid and more cards, we need to say more.
As a researcher, my biggest wishes fall into two categories. I wish certain things were easier to search, and I wish that certain things were easier to get. By get, I mean get from the Internet. Through my browser. Not by going to an office or making a FOIA request. I also mean get without paying too much. With that get, how much can I do with it? There’s a lot I can get, I wish I could do more.
Let’s start with a feint, a digression. Court records, civil and criminal litigation records are public records. But they contain information that is, or can be, solicitous, embarrassing, rude. They let people peer into information that other people would rather they don’t otherwise see. And when the Federal Government decided to build a database of its court records, it recognized the prurient nature of these records. A fee and a log-in were their way of saying, you can look but we’re trying, a little, to keep everyone from looking. They made a deliberate point in making it not easy, not open. There are many things that are public records that are still hard to get at; that I feel are deliberately made hard to get.
We are talking to you Delaware Secretary of State. When you are teaching corporate law to second year law students, you tell them that companies incorporate in DE for certainty and its experienced Chancery Court. An associate working her way up at Big Firm will tell you it has to do with takeover and other corporate control laws. We asset searchers will tell you it’s just to keep things hidden. To get Delaware company records, you have to order them. And pay. No searching on business address or officer. My biggest research wish is to have online access to DE company records.
Delaware is the worst; the biggest, baddest black hole for researchers of companies. There are, however, many other holes in company records that I’d like filled. I could wish big and say, give me access to Bermuda or all the other offshore places people set up companies. Really, I’d be happy with a few things. Why cannot all states have their company records on Opencorporates.com. My state, Illinois, does not have its company records there. Just as frustrating, many states, like Illinois, do not make their company records searchable by officer on their own web sites, and while I CAN do an officer search on Lexis (or Westlaw) for Illinois, there are states where you cannot do an online search by officer name anywhere.
Another set of records on my wish list is court records. Today, in 2021, there are places around the country, where you cannot easily look up court records online. One state that comes immediately to mind is North Carolina, but I have a client in New Hampshire, so I know that state too, has no online access to court records. I cannot find a list of the specific states not on Opencorporates, but here’s a list of which states have their court records online.
Court records. Everything seems to always come back to court records. It’s the biggest area where I also wish for better searches or search strategies. About the first thing you learn when doing background research is that there is no grand database of court records across the whole USofA. Yes, there are states that allow you to search all their court records in one fell swoop, but mostly it’s county by county. And yes, there are tools, resources, like Court Link, that give researchers broader access to court records, but they still follow the PACER rule of putting up hurdles. Recently, I’ve learned of this cool site, that claims 481 million court records. I’ve actually made some good use of it. I wish it would have more than 481 million court records because there are many more court records out there. I wish for more ways to be able to search court across multiple court records.
I wish also that within this world of court records, there could be many more ways to search. On one hand, public court records, such as the online abstracts, almost never contain useful data. A good amount of time, they don’t even provide the nature of the suit. Why can't they index more stuff? And that’s not even getting into wishing more courts would put case filings in their electronic records. Even when courts do put useful information in their records, they rarely make it searchable. PACER has “advanced’ searches, and these can help in pin-pointing things or when you are searching on a common name. But what about searching on “NOS”, which stands for nature of suit, meaning broad categories of federal litigation. In many cases, I do not care about all the litigation, just the fun ones, like securities lawsuits say (NOS 850). You can sort PACER results by NOS, but not search on it. Believe me, I can write much more on my court search wishlist.
I can write much more on all my research wishes. There are many. I’ve completely skipped the area of social media where my wishes are vast. The good news is that each year more records are available for online research, and each year it is easier to research online. What’s on your wish list for open source research in 2021?