How we work
Every search leaves a trail you can audit.
Eight stages between your order and your result. Each one records what was done, by whom, and against which court index — because a record without provenance is just a claim.
A records counter and public access terminal. Which of these a jurisdiction offers is what sets the scope of a search there, which is why the method travels with the result.
Original plate · Stage One
Chain of custody
The eight stages in full.
Order received
Ingested from your platform.
Subject and scope validated on receipt. Malformed orders are rejected at intake with a reason rather than failing silently downstream.
Identity & scope
Identifiers checked before dispatch.
Confirmed against what the target court will accept. If a required identifier is missing, we ask before consuming a court fee.
Jurisdiction routing
Resolved to the court of record.
Where a county has no court of record, the order is routed to the district that holds it and the routing is stated on the result.
Courthouse research
Index searched by the permitted method.
Researcher reference and timestamp recorded. The access method used is attached to the record, so scope is never inferred.
Record capture
Case data captured to schema.
Case data is captured to a normalised schema at this stage.
Second review
A reviewer confirms the read.
Identifier match and disposition confirmed by a reviewer who has not seen the first read. Disagreement returns the order to stage four.
Reportability screen
Applied per jurisdiction.
Jurisdiction reportability rules are applied at this stage.
Return
Delivered to your platform.
The completed record is delivered to your platform at this stage.
Provenance
Three fields that make a record defensible.
Whatever route an order takes into us and whatever route the result takes back, three things are attached to it: the court of record the search ran against, the access method used, and the timestamp of the search.
Those three are the difference between a result you can defend in a dispute and a result you have to reconstruct months later. They are not an optional extension, and your own client reference passes through untouched so reconciliation on your side stays a lookup rather than a matching exercise.
Quality control
Two reads, then release.
A single researcher reading a single index is one point of failure. A second reviewer independently confirms identifier match and disposition before a record is released.
Disagreement is not resolved by discussion. It sends the order back to stage four for a fresh search, and the discrepancy is logged against the jurisdiction so patterns surface rather than repeat.
Exception handling
Exceptions are reported, not absorbed.
Court closures, clerk policy changes, index outages and fee changes are logged against the jurisdiction and surfaced on the affected orders.
A turnaround figure that quietly swallows a two-day court closure is a number you cannot plan against. We would rather tell you the court was shut.