Wholesale county court research
County court research, done at the county court.
We are the research layer beneath the background check — retrieving criminal and civil records directly from county courts for consumer reporting agencies, background screening companies and data platforms.
A wholesale partner only. We sell to screening companies, never to their clients.
What we are
One discipline, carried out at depth.
Stage One does not sell a screening platform and does not compete with our clients. We do one thing: retrieve criminal and civil records from county courts on a wholesale basis, and return them in a form your platform can consume without rework.
That focus is the product. It means we can tell you which court holds the record, how it will be accessed, what identifiers the clerk requires and what it costs — jurisdiction by jurisdiction, rather than as a national average.
The gap we fill
A database says a record may exist. A courthouse says what it holds.
Aggregated databases are pointer systems. They are fast and broad, and they are not the record. Everything below is why a county-level search still exists.
Aggregated database result
- Snapshot of whatever the contributing source last uploaded
- Refresh interval set by the vendor, not the court
- Dispositions and sealings may lag or never arrive
- Coverage gaps are invisible in the response
County court research result
- Read from the court's own index on the day of the search
- Current disposition as the clerk records it
- Access method stated on the result, so scope is never implied
- An identified researcher and a timestamp behind every record
Coverage
Every county, drawn. Coverage stated per county.
The plate shows all 3,143 county and county-equivalent jurisdictions in the United States. That is a geographic fact about the country rather than a claim about us — which is exactly why it carries a source.
Our own coverage is published per county, never as a national total, and it reaches this site and your coverage list from one repository rather than from a marketing figure. Send us the counties you order in and we return the court of record, access method, identifier requirements and fee for each.
Chain of custody
Eight stages, and you can see all eight.
Order received
Ingested from your platform.
Identity & scope
Identifiers checked before dispatch.
Jurisdiction routing
Resolved to the court of record.
Courthouse research
Index searched by the permitted method.
Record capture
Case data captured to schema.
Second review
A reviewer confirms the read.
Reportability screen
Applied per jurisdiction.
Return
Delivered to your platform.
Next step
Send us your counties. We'll send back the list.
Give us the jurisdictions you order in most. You get back the court of record, access method, identifier requirements and pass-through fee for each one — the document you actually need before a pricing conversation is worth having.
A county courthouse entrance. Every record we return was read inside a building like this one, by a person who went there — which is the whole of the difference between a court search and a database lookup.
Original plate · Stage One