Which website (or lawyer) to visit if I want to do some business investigation on a person or company?

March 21, 2009 6:22 AM

Which website (or lawyer) to visit if I want to do some business investigation on a person or company?

For personal reasons, I need to find information such as what companies are registered under a certain person's name, or who is registered under a company, what percentage of shares does each person own, etc. Note that the companies I want to investigate are private companies.

Are there any websites that will have those information? If not, will a lawyer or accountant be able to find that information for me?

posted by willy_dilly to Law & Government (6 answers total)

I take it you want to accomplish this anonymously. Otherwise, you could just ask them. To start, if you know the state of incorporation of the companies, you can contact the Secretary of State of the particular state. There is an office with a name like, "Division of Corporations" or something similar and they will have basic information about the company. Even private companies have to submit annual filings, so you might find some basic information there.

If you already are involved in litigation with these people, or plan to be, your attorney can subpoena the information from the companies themselves.

For this kind of thing you have to be somewhat creative. I'd try to talk to a good private investigator in the jurisdiction. Do the companies have public contracts? Have they bid on public contracts? Are the bidding documents public?

If you have access to Lexis/Nexis (which many lawyers have) there may be articles about the companies and their shareholders.

Just a few thoughts. If you have subpoena power, it's amazing what you can find.
posted by tesseract420 at 6:58 AM on March 21, 2009

Here's another one--if you think the companies have been sued, you can check the county courthouse to see if their names come up. If they do, pull the file. The information might be there. The attorney representing their opponent might be listed and might be helpful. Depositions may be filed or could be ordered. The problem is that you have to do this on a county by county basis. Some court clerks have the plaintiff/defendant tables on line. The feds sort of do--the system is called PACER, there's been a lot of press about it recently. Even though PACER is offline for free users, you can still purchase access on a pay as you go basis.
posted by tesseract420 at 7:06 AM on March 21, 2009

Also, if you are willing to spend a few hundred dollars, Lexis-Nexis has specific business research products and public record products. They are both pretty comprehensive, but not perfect. Most of what you seek is public information, it just isn't all easy to find.
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly at 8:27 AM on March 21, 2009

I would try to find a private investigator with a good reputation in finding business information. They're probably just going to use publicly available databases or Lexis, but that's what you pay them for -- to know where to look and to have access to the databases.
posted by footnote at 9:56 AM on March 21, 2009

I think Dun & Bradstreet may have some reports that contain this information, though I'm not sure if it approaches that level of detail. I usually use them as one part of my plan when accepting large purchase orders.
posted by crapmatic at 11:05 AM on March 21, 2009

What do you mean by which companies are "registered under a certain person's name" or who is "registered under a company"? In most places, companies have to have "registered agents" who will be publicly identifiable, so you can probably search to see who the registered agent of a specific company is, and you may be able to find out which companies any individual is the registered agent for.

Beyond that, additional information for private companies may not be available. You won't generally be able to find who owns how many shares or even all the names of the shareholders. Even if you can, the shareholders may be entities and not humans.

If you could be more descriptive about the "personal reasons" you have the need for this information, it might be easier to help you do what you want to do. However, most private companies do not disclose this kind of information and don't have to. You may find references to this information or find it in other documents, but you won't generally be able to find this sort of information in the same way that you can for public companies.
posted by iknowizbirfmark at 5:01 PM on March 21, 2009