Vanishing Point: Researching Subjects as Courts Scale Back Available Information
Welcome to the May 2019 edition of our newsletter! In this issue, we’ll examine how to research older subjects in an era of courts purging older records.
Researching Subjects in an Age of Purging Records
Most courts tend to be high-traffic places, with hundreds or thousands of cases transacted, in whole or in part, each day. Cataloging all of this information is understandably daunting, and some jurisdictions have responded by streamlining the amount of information made available to the public. The federal court’s online system, for example, only consistently indexes records from approximately 1988 or so (although older cases can still appear depending on the jurisdiction.) The publicly accessible online systems of other states, such as Connecticut or New Jersey, include little to no archival information, instead limiting results to the last 20 or 25 years. When researching a potential employee or board member who is in their 60’s or older, such limits will not suffice for a thorough result.
Many courts whose online information is limited, however, provide other, less efficient options, or market-based alternatives have been created to fill the void. In New Jersey, although the system which once provided older case information is no longer online, it can still be accessed at the public access terminals at the archives themselves; in Connecticut, vendors have purchased the docketing information for older cases in order to provide that service, although the courts do typically destroy cases within a few years if a civil complaint was later withdrawn.
Database services such as Lexis-Nexis or Westlaw provide historical information in most instances, but a recent comparison between New Jersey records housed there and those listed in the archive system found more than 30 cases in the court system that were not in the third-party database.
The trend is unlikely to improve any time soon, as courts continue to struggle against the enormity of the number of filings. Intrepid researchers can often find ways to locate older cases, however – for example, many federal courts have an index card system for older files, and in one instance using this method we found a half dozen cases involving a subject, born in 1930, which pre-dated the online system. In other jurisdictions, some vendors have purchased the rights to scan and index entire years of case filings, essentially outsourcing storage of and access to the data from the court. But such initiative is the exception, not the norm, and as a result a thorough investigation full of redundant queries is the most effective way to find out all that is available about a subject.