HOW TO RESEARCH LAWSUIT RECORDS
Knowing how to check a person’s lawsuit record will enable you to check on his character before getting involved with the target on a business or personal basis. And if you find the person is a crook, an incompetent, or some other type of unethical louse, you can protect other people by warning them about him. If your target has been involved in a lot of lawsuits (especially as a defendant), these lawsuits may very well document a pattern of questionable behavior on his part.
Paula Jones (in red), Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, Kathy Shelton (in blue) at Second 2016 Presidential Debate. Paula sued Bill Clinton for sexually harassing her. Kathy was a rape victim who Hillary abused while representing the vermin who raped her when she was 12. The other ladies were also victims of Clintons, but did not sue or file police reports. Photo by New York Times.
HOW TO START A LAWSUIT RECORDS CHECK
Let’s assume you want to check your target’s lawsuit record in your county. You’ll first need to know which courts in your county handle high-dollar cases and which courts handle low-dollar cases.
All states have lower courts and upper courts. Lawsuits for small amounts of money take place in the civil portion of lower courts. (Criminal prosecutions for misdemeanors take place in the criminal portion of lower courts.) Lawsuits for large amounts of money take place in the civil portion of upper courts. (Criminal prosecutions for felonies take place in the criminal portion of upper courts.) NOTE: In recent years, California officials merged municipal courts and superior courts. So all lawsuits except small claims cases wind up in superior courts in these counties. But the court clerks should still note the sizes of these cases.
Once you know the names of the courts, you can go after the records. Start checking in the upper court for high-dollar lawsuits involving your target. Then go to each of the lower courts in your county to check on lower-dollar cases involving your target.
There are three steps to checking a target’s lawsuit record in any county. These are:
1. Find out the case numbers of all cases involving your target.
2. Using the case numbers, have court clerks pull the case files for you so you can look at the legal paper in them.
3. Copy all important or damaging info from each case file.
We’ll now go through each step in detail, using your county’s upper court as an example.
FIND OUT LAWSUIT CASE NUMBERS
The list of all the lawsuits filed in the upper court in your county is called a “civil index” (or docket, or some other name). This list will be on the court’s computer system, on microfilm, in drawers full of index cards, or handwritten into a very heavy set of books. You will have to check this list to get case numbers for all cases involving your target.
If your county has lawsuit (aka civil) records on line, search the county court website to see if your target shows up as a defendant or a plaintiff. Then write down all the case numbers on him or her you find. Remember, on-line records only go back so far.
If you want to see earlier lawsuits, or if your county court does not have lawsuit records on line, call the court clerks in your county courthouse and ask them to do a record check for the person over the phone for you. Or go to the courthouse and have them show you how to check the court index for your target’s lawsuits.
In each county, there will be at least one place where an upper court civil index or lawsuit docket for all upper court cases in that county is available to the public. (In almost all counties, this place is the upper civil court clerk’s office. In a handful of huge counties which have more than one upper courthouse, this place will be the central courthouse’s upper civil court clerk’s office.) To find out where it is, call the court clerk of the upper court whose records you want to check. The clerk’s number will be on the Internet or in the phone book under the upper court portion of the county government listings.
Then, go to the courthouse where the court’s civil database or index or docket is, and look up all civil (aka lawsuit) cases involving your target. Write down the target’s name, and each charge, each case number, and each case date. Remember to check under all aliases – this is especially important if your target is female because odds are she’ll have more than one last name.
Most counties have only one upper court. Some of the larger counties have two or more. Check each extra upper court as applicable.
ENSURE CASES ARE YOUR TARGET’S CASES
Use dates of birth, Social Security numbers, race, addresses, situation in life, and other identifying information that mark your target to weed out other people’s cases from your target’s cases. Carelessness in this regard on your part might put you into a lawsuit – as a defendant!
CHECK THE LAWSUIT FILES
Ask the court clerk in your county’s upper court to have clerks pull civil case files for you. Follow the clerk’s instructions; use the target’s name and each case number.
Once the clerks pull the cases for you, go through each case file to see what the case is about. This information will be in a document called a “complaint” or a “petition” or a “pleading.” In this document, the plaintiff will accuse the defendant of some sort of misconduct (fraud, malpractice, violation of codes, breach of contract, or the like). The plaintiff’s lawyer may amend (update) the complaint every so often, so check all of the complaints. Mark the complaints that contain the most recent and complete information.
Check the target’s response. This legal brief, full of legalese, will usually contain a denial, but little valuable information. Skim through it, then mark it only if you find some information you can use. (Sometimes your target might say something in one case, and contradict himself or herself in another case.)
Scan the rest of the file. Some pages contain interrogatories (questions from one side to the other side) and answers to interrogatories. Some pages contain depositions (transcripts for verbal questions and answers). Other pages have legal motions.
The interrogatories and answers to interrogatories contain some interesting stuff. For example, the questions and answers to interrogatories in a fraud case might lay out the details of what the defendant did to make the plaintiff sue him. Or in a code violation case, here’s where the details of the wrongful activity that reportedly took place might surface. Or in a malpractice case, many of the details of the damage a victim reportedly suffered at the hands of her doctor will appear here. These documents often contain nice-to-know information like the target’s property holdings, business ventures, insurance policy numbers, home address, facts on his life and career, and other such items. Mark any page that contains information that will come in handy.
Likewise, check the depositions with a fine-tooth comb. They will contain many of the same kinds of items the interrogatories and answers to interrogatories contain.
Don’t spend too much time on the motions. They’re usually not pertinent to what you really want to know. However, some motions will hint at the eventual outcome of a case, so check them.
As you work your way through the file, try to figure out the outcome of the case. Some cases are settled out of court, some cases go to an arbitrator hearing or to a court trial, some cases are ended because the plaintiff doesn’t want to continue the fight, some cases are dismissed by judges, and some cases are still active (they haven’t been decided or settled yet). Mark pages which show the case’s outcome.
THEN HAVE PHOTOCOPIES MADE OF ALL PAGES YOU’VE MARKED.
CHECK OUT-OF-TOWN COURTS FOR CASES
It’s possible your target could have lawsuits all over the state (and the country), so you’ll have to know where your target has been in order to perform a thorough check. Also, each county has one or more lower courts, so you’ll have to check the records of each of these courts to get a complete look at your target’s lawsuit record in that county.
You can hire a private investigator or lawyer or paralegal to run a database check on your target like I run on mine. You have to have a valid reason to do this. Legitimate concern and potential litigation (especially if your target has already wronged you in some way) are valid reasons. The lawyer or P.I. will brief you on the others.
If you’re pressed for money, or can’t get a lawyer’s or PI’s help, some of the quickie pay-for-address locator services you see on the Internet may be able to give you multiple addresses on your target. These services don’t have the most complete or the most accurate info, so buyer beware.
Knowing where a person has lived or worked and what aliases he or she has had over the years enables you to do a very good job of finding out his or her lawsuit history. Why? Most people get sued or file suit in the areas they live in or do business in. If someone has lived in several places, this means there are several places to look.
Check to see if each county your target has lived in has lawsuit (aka civil) records on line. If a county does have these records on line, search the county court website to see if your target shows up as a defendant or a plaintiff. Then write down all the case numbers on him or her you find. Remember, on-line records only go back so far.
To search for cases before the start date of the on-line database, or if the county does not have records of lawsuits on line, contact the court clerks in the areas where your target has lived or worked to find out if your target has lawsuits in the upper courts in those counties. If he or she does, you can order the public records on any such lawsuit.
Go to the courthouse to view the case. Make copies of what is important in the case. Or have the clerks of the court or the workers of a courthouse records retrieval service in that town copy the case paperwork for you if a court in question is hundreds of miles away.
CHECKING LOWER CIVIL COURTS
Usually, you won’t find any really juicy lawsuits in lower courts. Most cases at this level involve unpaid bills. (Local government officials do file against tax deadbeats in the lower courts. Sometimes you can verify a target’s holdings or estimate his income by reviewing these cases.) Also, there can be more than one lower court in a county, so this means you will have to check every lower court in the county for low-grade civil dirt on your target. To save time, concentrate on the lower court in the city or township in which your target lives or does business. The procedure for researching lower court lawsuits and checking their files is the same as for researching cases and checking the files in upper courts.
However, don’t ignore small claims courts completely. Even a small claims court case can point to flaws in a person, besides failing to pay his or her just debts or provide promised goods or services. I found a case in a humble small claims court in Geauga County, Ohio, in which a Cleveland abortion doctor named Martin Ruddock had to pay another doctor roughly $700. Small potatoes, right?
Not so fast. The other guy was a psychiatrist who Ruddock had stiffed for his mental treatment. Nothing says you have mental problems quite like having to pay shrink bills.
This may have been the reason Ruddock committed a road rage offense, made a physical attack on his ex-wife’s divorce lawyer in a courthouse, committed numerous acts of medical malpractice, dumped a number of his victims, errr, patients at local hospitals, and locked on to one of the women whose child he aborted so persistently she sued him for sexual harassment as well as malpractice.
By foolishly refusing to pay the shrink bill, Ruddock made the psychiatrist sue him for nonpayment and thereby disclose Ruddock had mental problems and needed therapy! Ruddock brought the unwelcome public record of this lawsuit on himself. Now, that’s nuts!
CHECKING FEDERAL COURTS FOR LAWSUITS
Federal courts handle civil matters such as bankruptcy cases and cases involving alleged violations of federal regulations. So if your target has ever declared bankruptcy (or has had one of his businesses declare bankruptcy), you can find the case in a federal bankruptcy court.
If the Feds have ever sued your target for violations of federal labor, health, safety, environmental, civil rights or tax laws, you can find the case in a federal district court. Ditto if the IRS has filed a tax lien on your target.
And if your target has sued a government body over some sort of alleged violation of his Constitutional rights, the record will be there in the files, too.
Lawsuits which accuse federal officials of personal misconduct and lawsuits which accuse federal officials of official wrongdoing will turn up in federal courts also. Just ask Bill and Hillary Clinton. Paula Jones sued Bill for sexual harassment in U.S. District Court in Little Rock in May of 1994. She charged the former Arkansas governor dropped his pants, showed her his penis, and told her to perform oral sex on him. Meanwhile, a doctors’ group sued Hillary and the members of her health care task force for violating the federal “sunshine” law in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. in February of 1993. The doctors’ group sued Hillary and her winged monkeys because they reportedly tried to keep their actions secret from the public.
What a pair — she gets sued for concealment, and he gets sued for exposure!
The federal courts handle diversity of citizenship cases also. A diversity of citizenship case is one in which the plaintiff lives in one state and the defendant lives in another state, and legal problems would arise in handling the case in the plaintiff’s state court or in the defendant’s state court.
Now that you know the types of lawsuits the federal courts handle, I suppose I should say a few words on how to check the records in these courts. So here they are.
Check the phone book or the Internet for the address and phone number of the U.S. District Court or the U.S. Bankruptcy Court that covers your area. There are several of these courts in most states, and virtually every metropolitan area with a couple of hundred thousand or more people has one. Also, there are federal courts in centrally located small towns in rural areas.
Once you find the right courthouse, research cases just like you would in your county courthouse. The settings are a little more formal, but the concept is the same.
QUESTION THE PARTIES
Those who are in the best position to know about lawsuits are the attorneys for the plaintiff and defendant, the judge, and the plaintiff and the defendant themselves. I have talked with lawyers and opposing parties and judges on many lawsuits over the years to get extra info I needed on cases.
Private party lawyers may or may not talk with you about a case. They don’t have to talk with you. Be respectful in your approach. Have a plausible reason for asking questions about the case. Lawyers for cause groups, on the other hand, are not shy. They like to talk. Be aware they are seasoned shills for their groups.
Government agents and lawyers regulate many facets of everyday life. If your target or his or her organization has run afoul of county or state or federal regulations, agents and lawyers for the agencies that regulate the various facets of an individual’s, business’, or group’s activities may have sued them or filed injunctions or restraining orders against them. Any government agent or government lawyer mentioned in the court actions is a potential info source. Government agents and lawyers will brag about their successes and bitch about their failures. Either way, they might give you info on your target you might not be able to get anyplace else.
Unless you are investigating the attorneys or the judge in the case, the best way to approach them is honestly. When they ask you why you want to know, tell them you are checking the target because you suspect he or she is a crook or his or her organization is somehow a threat to public safety.
If you contact the target’s attorney, do so in the approach of giving the lawyer the chance to explain his client’s perspective. If he’s representing a nogoodnik, he will probably have to represent his client’s interests and come up with alibis and BS to keep you off guard. It could be the plaintiff is in the wrong, and you are giving the defendant a chance to tell his or her side of the story. Or even if the defendant is shady, it could be the government or some other plaintiff is shadier, and the defendant is at least somewhat in the right.
Lawyers are often interested about what you know about the target, as there are many ways for a target to violate laws and regulations. Swap info with them when you can. It can pay dividends.
I contacted health department agents in California to swap info with them on a case I was working. They were trying to discipline a doctor who at that time ran the largest string of abortion facilities in California and his staffers at these charnel houses for major health code violations. I had found scores of malpractice lawsuits women or their survivors filed against these very substandard doctors. I also found some criminal cases against the doctors, ranging from having a non-doctor practicing medicine to homosexual assault. And I had autopsy reports on the women they negligently killed. I got info from the agents to tie up some loose ends on my investigation. They got a bunch of info from me showing how these doctors’ negligence and business practices led to the deaths of several women and the serious wounding of scores of others. The info I gave them indicated the abortion doctors showed a pattern of indifference to the women and girls they worked on, which complemented the health code violations for which they cited these doctors and their employees.
WHAT IF YOUR TARGET IS OFTEN A PLAINTIFF?
If your target sues other people a lot, it could be that he merely has poor judgment in the types of people he does business with and surrounds himself with. Or it could be evidence he’s a crank or a lawsuit extortionist.
Check cases in which your target is the plaintiff like you would if he is the defendant. The file might show he is crooked, insufferable, or some other sort of pain in the backside.
If your target is filing many lawsuits, he or she may well be a nuisance filer intent on robbing people through the court system. This is typically a ploy someone with money uses because he can afford to lose more often than the opponent can afford to lose.
This is akin to the ploy of many companies in fighting worker comp cases tooth and nail even when they are in the wrong. They know they can wear down most of the people who get hurt on the job. The workers have no savings to fight the dishonest corporations’ attorneys.
This approach applies also if your target is a large corporation – like, say, a bank or financial institution or speculator outfit whose people have been foreclosing on tens of thousands of people. Often they have done so illegally and predatorily. But since most people don’t know their rights, the predators have all too often prevailed. If you or someone you know is a victim of such a scam, check in with a legal aid society or a law firm that specializes in fighting this sort of plaintiff piracy.
Lawyers and judges call people who are nuisance lawsuit filers “vexatious litigants.” There can be penalties for these people and their lawyers, if the judge is stern and fair.
Now for a wrap-up on what you should have learned:
Figure out where the person has lived. Some people move around a lot, others don’t.
Look in the county and federal courts where the person has lived for any cases involving the person. If any county has a database for civil records, use it. As needed, have court clerks check the target for lawsuits.
Go to the courthouse to view each case. Or have a courthouse records retrieval service pull the record for you if a court in question is hundreds of miles away. It will cost you much more than if you did it yourself, but if the court is hundreds of miles away, the savings in travel and wages could be worth it.
See what the person was sued for and how the case ended. All too often, a crooked person escapes justice, and sometimes a blameless person is wrongly sued. But usually someone sued for wrongdoing or someone who files a lawsuit wrongfully has done something that won’t make others feel good about him or her.
Make sure records having subjects with names identical to your target are those of your target. This saves you from having to apologize to someone who is not your target who you have wrongly accused of being the same person as your target. Address, age, situation in life, other identifiers mark each person uniquely and can help you determine if the person whose records you are holding is the person you’re looking for.
Make copies, make copies, make copies to verify what happened. Notes are no substitutes for hard copies.
Talk with those involved in lawsuits as needed to get info and advice. Help lawyers and agents when you can; they will often help you in return.
VICTIMS’ RIGHTS MATTER
Lawyers and judges like to think courthouses are like their country clubs — places to keep we the rabble at arm’s length. But we the people have the right to crash their party, and treat the courthouses the way they should be treated — as places where justice should be protected and documents that belong to US are available. Checking lawsuits can help you verify if your target is either good, evil, or somewhere in between before you or someone you care about gets involved commercially or personally with the target.
Bear these things in mind when you dig dirt on your targets. If they are bad people, you are doing a public service by exposing their bad deeds. That’s why I think it’s so important for you good people in society to know how to investigate. Only you have the morals to make the country work fairly and justly. We need more of you.
END NOTES AND THE REST OF THE STORY
Sources for my comments on Dr. Martin Ruddock include the small claims case – Case No. 2000 CVF 00255, Chavinson v. Ruddock, Geauga County Municipal Court. They also include his divorce cases – Cuyahoga County, Ohio Common Pleas Court Case Nos. 82D130625 and 82D131134.
Sources for my comments on Ruddock’s skills as a doctor come from these following malpractice cases – almost all of which were cases women he did abortions on in Ohio filed against him. Women filed Case Nos. 138846, 322217, 350074, 434058, 530859, and CV-05-580079 against him in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court in Cleveland. Women filed Case Nos. CV96-11-4629 and CV97-12-6321 in Summit County Common Pleas Court in Akron. A woman filed Case No. 98-4095 against him in Lucas County Common Pleas Court Case in Toledo. Women filed Case Nos. 86CV1550, 89CV430, 89CV1679 and 90CV1538 against him in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court in Youngstown.
That doesn’t include a list of more than 20 ambulance runs from 2006 to 2010 I got from Cleveland EMTs who had to take victims from his facility to emergency rooms of hospitals.
Info on Paula Jones’ lawsuit against Bill Clinton comes from the lawsuit’s complaint (Case No. LR-C-94-290, filed 5/6/1994, in U.S. District Court in Little Rock, Arkansas). I ordered a copy of this document by writing the clerk of the court at 600 West Capitol, Little Rock, AR 72201.
Info on the lawsuit the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons filed against Hillary Clinton and the President’s Task Force on National Health Care Reform comes from the lawsuit’s complaint (Case No. 93-0399, filed 2/24/1993 in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.).
The public record is full of articles about Paula Jones’ ordeal of withstanding many years of unrelenting character assassination from the Clintons and their flunkies. And there are articles about the attacks leveled at Paula by holier-than-thou Republicans who abandoned her to her legal bills, which evidently were about as large as the amount of money she won.
Paula Jones essentially won the lawsuit she filed against Clinton when he agreed to pay the $850,000 to settle it. The public record shows Clinton’s former law student and Bush 41 appointee judge Susan Webber Wright refused to recuse herself from the case. Ms. Wright threw Paula’s case out, but Ms. Jones appealed her ruling. The parties settled out of court in late 1998 while Paula’s appeal was pending.
Leftist hypocrites who said Bill Clinton’s horndog ways didn’t matter assassinated Paula Jones’ character nonstop for years. During the case, a former boyfriend of Paula’s, like a heel, sold naughty photos of her to a skin mag to cash in on her notoriety and harm her.
GOPers who adopted Paula’s cause for their own motives were fiscally conservative about helping her. As soon as the case was over, they dropped her like a tattered rag doll and ran off like greedy children to a fancier birthday party. Paula’s lawyers grabbed the money and evidently left Paula darn near broke. She lost her first husband to a divorce over the toll the case and the daily attacks took on their marriage. She apparently went into debt, but none of the cheapskates who benefited politically from her bold solitary stand against the Clinton machine would help her. Meanwhile, Clinton supporters gave all kinds of money to the lecher’s defense fund. Paula Jones, broke, single. and desperate, posed for a porn magazine to pay off her debts and put some money aside for the sons she loved. Then the holier-than-thou types joined the slimy Clinton apologists in bagging on her.
All I can say is, “Let he or she who is without sin cast the first stone.” Very few criticized the Clinton machine for trying to strip Paula Jones of her pride. Nobody criticized the lawyers for stripping Paula of her money. Posing for a skin rag is not noble, but it is far more objectionable to commit sexual assault, stalk women sexually, steal money from clients, steal money from the public, commit slander, and pervert justice by failing to recuse yourself from a case involving someone you know.
Ms. Jones remarried and was a factor in the 2016 presidential election. She boldly accused Hillary of hypocrisy and corruption for attacking her and other victims of Bill. She, Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, and Kathy Shelton (who as a girl was raped by a client of Hillary, and Hillary demanded she undergo psychiatric exams and slimed her in other ways) were present as witnesses to the Clintons’ evil acts and as supporters of Donald Trump at their second presidential debate.
Further sources for the info on Paula Jones include a 11/14/1998 Washington Post article, a 6/1/2015 Daily Mail (UK) article by Paul Thompson, a 1/13/1999 article in The Guardian (another UK newspaper), a 1/10/2000 article in Publishers Weekly by Michael Coffey about Clinton apologist Jeffrey Toobin’s book on Bill Clinton (which covered Paula’s affidavit describing Clinton’s plumbing), and the transcript of a 1/13/2000 Larry King CNN show which featured Ms. Jones confronting and tearing up Toobin (whose book at least did contain Paula’s affidavit in which she said Clinton flashed his undersized and leftward pointing member at her and told her to kiss it).
Info on Kathy Shelton came from the Daily Mail 8/9/2016 and 10/10/2016.
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