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Conducting a thorough Party Name Search using the Court PC Online
Database -- 7 Points to Remember
No.
1 - Corporations aren't people, my friend, and people aren't
corporations
You're searching for litigation
involving an individual, and you've run the Party Name Search for that
name as an individual. Consider running
the party's last name through the business name records to check for any "irregular
entries," such as a person serving as an administrator or executor
of an estate, a person using a DBA name, or an individual name
mistakenly entered where a business name should go. One out of
every 50 entries in the business name data fits one of those three
categories. Court PC never charges for duplicate name searches,
so why not take the extra step?These "irregular entries" are
simple data entry errors that occur at the courts, either because of
confusion about how a database works, or confusion about how a name as
it appears on the summons should be entered. Many are never caught or
corrected by the parties to the case, as on paper they often look just
like they should. But they won't appear in the results of a Party Name
Search if you just use the Individual option to search by First
Name/Last Name. It's a simple matter of "Garbage In, Garbage Out," as
early programmers used to say.
Of course, this is also true for such
entries on the CT Judicial Branch website. If the courts have entered a
name in the wrong place and the wrong order, you won't find it there either.
For example, in the data extract below, the record in the Entity Name column of
the fourth line -- ANITA
FLAY ADMIN. ESTATE OF JOHN J. BALLETTI
-- won't be found by entering the
last name FLAY and first name
ANITA -- and it doesn't matter
whether you're searching Court PC or the Judicial Branch data. On both
systems, you'd have to enter the name to search as
ANITA FLAY to match this
record.
You can only catch records entered
in this way by running another search for the name as a
Business/Organization. You're basically just running the same name
twice, and since Court PC doesn't bill you for any obvious duplicate
searches, why not do it?
Another reason for running a
search this way on the Court PC data is that you can take advantage of
our wildcard search features. Enter the search using leading wildcards
to find the name anywhere it appears in the Entity Name field -- just
enter *FLAY. You can't use wildcards this way on the CT Judicial Branch
data.
No. 2 - Individual
Names are Frequently entered as if they were Business Entities, etc.
The image below is an extract of
some records in our database, with the yellow highlighted rows showing
names of individuals entered as entities. Please note that these names
appear exactly as entered by the CT Judicial Department.
Many of these individuals have been
listed in a specific capacity, such as
ANITA FLAY ADMIN. ESTATE OF JOHN J. BALLETTI etc., or
those five records beginning
APPORTIONMENT PLAINTIFF. Some are just plain
entered incorrectly, such as ANNE MARIE JOHNSON and
ARCHIE JOHNSON. They belong in the data
with all the other individual names. Either way, these may be records
you should probably know about whether you're producing a report for a
client or using them for yourself.
No. 3 - Finding
Relevant Records regardless of Name Order
When the courts' data entry clerks
have a wide open field like the Entity Name field above to work with,
they can enter names in any order, so
ANNE MARIE JOHNSON
above could also appear as
JOHNSON, ANNE MARIE in the
same field. How would you locate both records using the least number of
searches?
Let's take the name ANITA
FLAY again, which could be entered as ANITA
M FLAY, FLAY ANITA and a few other variations.
Start by entering your search term as *FLAY
to get results for ANITA FLAY plus any
extensions of the name FLAY, including FLAY ANITA.
This search will yield all ten records with the letters FLAY
in them.
To see only those results
containing the name ANITA, go to "PARTY NAME
SEARCH RESULTS" where you'll see the label "Business/Organization
Name" and a blank text box
(see red arrow
below).
Enter just ANIT
(no asterisk wildcard) in the box and click the
"Refine Search" tab.
This will remove records like
CHARLES D FLAYHAN ASSOCIATES, INC.
and FAZZALARO & FLAY
from the report, and show only records containing the terms
FLAY
and
ANITA, regardless of order (see image below).
The report header (dark grey bar) will also display the criteria used
for refining the search, so you can track the results more easily.
No. 4 -
Search and Repeat as Needed
You can use the Refine Search feature as
often as needed with no additional charges -- simply click the "Back
to Original Results" tab at the top of the page to
restore the original results, and you can enter another name to
refine the search again.
For example, if you're searching the
names GREGORY SMITH, MALCOLM
SMITH and GLEN SMITH,
and you want to run the surname
SMITH through the business name records, just run the
search as *SMITH
first. This should produce well over 2000 records, which of
course you won't want to review one by one. So you want to
refine the search using
GREG
to see any records for GREG(ORY)
SMITH. Return to the original results and
refine the search again using MALC, then
repeat for GLEN. This will only
result in one search being logged, no matter how many times you
refine it.
Of course, much of the time you won't find
any matching records using this technique. But there are
enough records for individuals in the business names data to
make it worth your while to take this small extra step to be
thorough. And when you find one, it can make you look so good
to your clients.
No. 5 - Name
Reversals -- was that Warren Christopher or Christopher Warren?
My sense is that most name
reversals seem uncommon when the data entry clerks use both a last
name field and a first name field, as in the Party Name Search for
an individual. However, there must be some inadvertent ones where
either name could be a first or last name, such as CHRISTOPHER
ALLEN (possibly ALLEN CHRISTOPHER) or MORGAN HOWARD
(possibly HOWARD
MORGAN). I leave it up to users to judge for themselves how these
should be handled, based on the name they're searching, but I'd be
likely to run them both ways. There are also a lot of unusual first
names out there -- if I search my database for the last name JOSEPH,
I see records showing first names such as FABIOLA, TOTINO, ULRICK
and WILNER.
Any of those could be legitimate first names, but I
can't be sure they're not, so I'd search them as both FABIOLA JOSEPH
and JOSEPH FABIOLA,
etc. I guess these unusual first names are simply called
into question because of the commonness of the surname JOSEPH.
Again, it's a judgment call -- would I search ANDERSON
COOPER as COOPER ANDERSON? Probably not.
This applies to your basic name search for an
individual name where you have two defined name fields, one for
first name and one for last name. The problem comes with individual
names entered in the single, longer unspecified name fields, which
are the business name field in the CV/FA data and the name field in
the CR/MV data. Since the CR/MV records usually only involve
individuals and contain a fair number of actual (or potential) name
reversals, I set that up to search for names in either order by
default. I couldn't justify doing that bi-directional search
logic for the business name field as this includes mostly legitimate
business names.
So, if you're searching for an individual on
the business name field, I'd recommend running that as mentioned
below, e.g. search for business names containing *SMITH
and then refining for GREG to catch entries as either
"Greg Smith" or "Smith, Gregory" -- unless the name is very short
and likely to result in many thousands of matching records, like
*FORD (matches to Hartford...,
Stamford..., etc.) *ROSS
(Blue Cross/Blue Shield...)
or *LEE
(Fleet Bank, etc.). There I'd run it once as
*JOHN*FORD
and again as *FORD*JOHN, and so on.
No. 6 - I
repeat, "Corporations aren't people, my friend"
I also frequently run business names or parts
of business names as a last name, just to be sure. There aren't
that many instances of a business name entered in the last name
field of the data, but I have seen them. I believe it's just a
little harder for the courts' data entry clerks to enter business
names that way, as a business never has an actual "first" name.
There's a data field that requires them to
designate that a party is an individual, a business, a government
entity, etc. If the "individual" value has been entered for that
field, good database design would require them to enter a first name
before saving the record or give them an error message if they
omitted the first name. Likewise, it would register an error if
they tried to enter a first name when the "business" value had been
checked. Honestly, I don't know exactly how the logic of the
state's database is designed with regard to this issue, but errors
do occur.
That said, they can easily make
this error if they enter anything
in the first name field. Again, it's worth looking at some actual
data from my database.
No. 7 -
Business Names are occasionally entered as if they
were Persons, etc.
I took the most recent set of CT Judicial data
I had and searched for the letters
*LLC in the Last Name field of records that had been
designated as individuals. There weren't a lot of records
that met my criteria out of 1.7 million names, and some of these
were actual individuals with surnames like Willcox and Shallcross.
But note the lines below in the Last Name column with "surnames"
such as PRAMCO CVLLC or simply LLC (with JAYLU
in the first name field). Or look at the last names
PETERSON LLC
(first name
VENTURES)
and
FINANCIAL HOLDINGS LLC
(First name DPF). These are just
obvious errors. They're totally unlike the examples above,
where an individual litigant has been named in a particular
capacity, such as administrator of an estate or apportionment
defendant.
It happens occasionally, and you
should probably run the business name as a surname, too, since
public records searching is not something that should be done
halfway. Remember that as long as I can tell that
your search terms are for one name (even if you run it five or six
different ways), I'll only bill it as one search.
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Posted: February 2014 
