About seven years ago, defense counsel insisted that a witness we wanted to depose no longer worked for the defendant and that they had used exhaustive means to locate her to no avail. It was critical that we depose this witness before an upcoming hearing. I was not well versed in locating people at the time so we ended up contacting an investigator to do the job. I called him and gave him all of the information we had available regarding this witness and told him we needed him to rush the job as we had to have her served with a subpoena within 48 hours. Less than 15 minutes later, he faxed me a good address for the witness and an invoice for $150.00. I could not believe what he was charging us for what must have taken him less than five minutes. That is what inspired me to educate myself regarding online public records. Now, the only time I pay someone to find a person for me is if I am overwhelmingly busy.
If you are interested in doing your own people finding, here are a few tips:
- Gather all possible information already in your possession regarding the person in question. (Name, date of birth, addresses used in the past, etc.)
- Go to the county assessors web site for the county or counties of the past addresses you have. Look up the property records for those addresses to see if the person owned or possibly still owns that property. If those counties have the option to search by name, search for your person. People don’t usually move far so you might get lucky and get a hit. (I know this is how my investigator found my witness 7 years ago because I asked him.) This is the link to the site State and Local Government on the Net which has a fairly comprehensive and up to date listing of government web sites by state.
- If you have the name and date of birth and your state allows people to retrieve driving records, get a copy of the person’s motor vehicle record. Also, some states will allow you to search for vehicle ownership records using the person’s name and date of birth. If they’ve recently registered a vehicle or renewed their registration, you might get a good address. Here is the California DMV’s list of links to other state DMV offices.
- Search Zaba Search for your state and any other states where you know the person has lived in the past. A lot of the information on this site is based on property records.
- Search the court records for your state if they are available online. Fortunately, Colorado was the first state to make all district and county court dockets available online. (You can use either LexisNexis Courtlink or CoCourts to search the Colorado courts for a minimal fee.) I have gotten lucky several times with this search. In this situation, you are looking to see if the person has gotten a recent ticket or was involved in some other form of litigation that was filed very recently. If you find an active court case, the docket will show you when the next court appearance is or you can get the names of the attorneys involved and contact them to get more information. If they have an active criminal sentence, call their probation officer. They will often tell you when their next appointment or court appearance is. I recently found a defendant we had been trying to serve with this method. The court records showed that he had first degree murder charges pending against him and that he was awaiting trial in the county jail. I paid $5.00 to do the court search and would have paid my process server $60.00 to $100.00 to do a skip trace.
- Search the database of the state licensing boards in your state. In Colorado, the primary one is the Division of Registrations.
- Search the Secretary of State website for any states the person has a relationship with. See if they are a registered business owner or registered agent. This is a link to a listing of Secretary of State web sites.
- Search all local residential phone directories, both the book and the online versions. It’s simple, but sometimes works.
Some other places to start searching are listed below:
Skip Ease - Free public records skip trace site. Also has numerous links to other resources.
ZoomInfo - ZoomInfo.com is a free people search, finder and locator based on employment. The ZoomInfo.com free people search contains over 26 million people search summaries.
Wink - Wink is a free people search engine that allows users to search over 170,000,000 people profiles on social networks like MySpace, LinkedIn and Friendster all with one search.
Google People Search - Free Google people search for current students, alumni, faculty and staff at major universities with this university-specific Google people finder, locator search.
AutoTrack XP - AutoTrack XP is a paid service, but I am told that it is one of the most comprehensive databases around. You have to fill out an application and be approved to get an account, so if you think this is something you might use at a future date, get signed up for an account now.
The following sites are good resources with numerous links of interest:
PI Mall
ECSI
Obviously this is just a list to get you started. There are literally thousands of sites that have public records searches available. Just search for "free online public records" on any search engine and you will get thousands of results. If you come across anything you find especially interesting or useful, feel free to share
Good luck on your investigating!!
Melanie Stuckey
Paralegal to Jennifer L. Donaldson
www.donaldsonlaw.com - A Denver Personal Injury Attorney
