Litigation and regulatory records

Allegation, pending, decided: three different facts

Court records describe events at different stages, and a dossier must label each correctly.

• Allegation: a complaint, claim form or petition has been filed. It states one side's case. The only verified fact is that a filing exists, with its date, parties and claims pleaded.
• Pending: the case is open; there may be interim orders, a defence, a counterclaim or a settlement in progress. The verified facts are the docket entries and their dates.
• Decided: a court has given judgment, or the case was dismissed, discontinued or settled. The verified fact is the disposition and, where published, the reasoning. Note whether an appeal is possible or under way.

Each stage is a separate claim in an OpenDossier file, with its own document date. A reader sees complaint filed 3 March 2025, motion to dismiss granted in part 9 September 2025 and settled, terms confidential, 14 January 2026 as three lines, not as one impression. The company's role is always stated: plaintiff, defendant, third party, or merely mentioned.

United States court sources

Federal civil, criminal, bankruptcy and appellate dockets are on PACER, which charges per page with a fee waiver below a quarterly threshold (check the authority). CourtListener's RECAP archive republishes PACER documents that users have purchased, free, with docket alerts; coverage is partial and the dossier records which was used. Bankruptcy filings are the most important federal record for a counterparty, because a Chapter 11 petition changes everything about enforcing a contract.

State courts hold most commercial disputes, and their online access varies by state and county: some publish full dockets and documents, some only case indexes, some nothing. The dossier names the counties searched and the known gaps, since a state search is never complete.

Regulator pages matter as much as courts. SEC litigation releases and administrative proceedings, FTC cases and proceedings, CFPB and state attorney-general actions each publish enforcement with documents. A settled administrative order typically includes no admission of liability; the dossier says so rather than paraphrasing an order as a finding of wrongdoing.

Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan

Singapore. Published judgments of the Supreme Court and State Courts are free on eLitigation and the Judiciary site. Court file searches for live cases are available through eLitigation to parties and, for a fee, to others; the Insolvency Office publishes winding-up and bankruptcy notices in the Gazette.

Hong Kong. The Judiciary's Legal Reference System publishes judgments free. Cause-book and writ searches are conducted at the court registries. Winding-up petitions are gazetted.

Taiwan. The Judicial Yuan's 法學資料檢索系統 publishes judgments of all levels free. Names of natural persons are partly anonymised; companies are generally named with their 統一編號 absent, so entity matching relies on name, address and representative. Case progress for live matters is on the courts' 案件進度查詢.

Japan. The courts' 裁判例検索 publishes a selection of judgments, not all, and party names are anonymised. There is no public online docket for civil cases; a counterparty's litigation history in Japan is usually learned from the company, from the 官報 (Official Gazette, published online since November 2025) for insolvency and public notices, and from the press. The dossier states this limitation explicitly.

Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom

Canada. CanLII publishes decisions from federal and provincial courts and tribunals free. Court dockets are provincial; Ontario and British Columbia offer online case searches with varying document access. Insolvency filings are on the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy's searchable database (fee: check the authority).

Australia. AustLII publishes judgments free. The Federal Court's Commonwealth Courts Portal and state court lists give case status. ASIC's Published Notices site lists insolvency and external-administration notices free, and ASIC publishes enforcement outcomes, enforceable undertakings and banning orders.

United Kingdom. BAILII and the National Archives' Find Case Law publish judgments free. County Court judgments against companies are on the Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines (fee: check the authority). The Gazette carries insolvency notices free, and Companies House links insolvency events to the company record. The FCA publishes final notices and the Competition and Markets Authority publishes case pages.

In every jurisdiction the dossier records the index searched, the search terms, the date and the coverage limits, so that no cases found is a reproducible statement.

Reading regulator enforcement pages

Regulators publish in formats that are easy to misread. A few rules keep a dossier accurate.

• Distinguish licence and registration status (a fact about authorisation) from enforcement (a fact about a finding or settlement). MAS, for example, keeps a Financial Institutions Directory and a separate Enforcement Actions page.
• Record the instrument: warning letter, enforceable undertaking, civil penalty order, administrative order, criminal conviction. They carry different weight.
• Record whether liability was admitted, denied or neither.
• Record the date of conduct and the date of the order; a 2026 order can concern 2019 conduct under previous management.
• Record whether the regulated entity is the counterparty, its parent or a sister company.

Regulatory pages also include investor alerts and unauthorised-firm warnings, which name entities that are not authorised. These are allegations by a regulator, often unanswered, and the dossier labels them as such and offers the company a right of reply.

Presenting records fairly

A dossier that overstates a court record is both unfair and unreliable, and in several jurisdictions it may be defamatory. OpenDossier applies the following presentation rules.

• Quote the disposition in the court's own words, and link the document.
• Never describe an allegation as a finding; never describe a settlement as an admission.
• Show dismissed and withdrawn cases alongside live ones; a pattern of dismissed claims is different from a pattern of judgments.
• Give the company a right of reply through the Trust Workspace; the reply is shown with the record, dated and attributed, and does not remove the record.
• Age the record: a ten-year-old small-claims matter is shown but not summarised as a current risk.
• Where a record is anonymised or the match is probable rather than confirmed, say so and hold it as an open question.

The aim is a file that the company itself, reading it, would accept as accurate even where it is unwelcome. That standard is also the one that stands up when a reader has to justify a decision later.