By now we are all aware of what the standard background check components are including criminal conviction checks, driving histories, credit reports, referencing, drug testing and more. Yet there exists a little-used component begging to be understood - the efficacy of civil litigation histories for employment screening purposes.

Civil litigation histories are typically misunderstood. Unlike criminal conviction records, driver's license checks, or employment credit reports, civil litigation histories are comprised of civil lawsuits that may involve a candidate, but are extremely hard to identify because of the lack of normal identifiers contained in other available modules such as date of birth, address, social security number as well as physical description.

What is a Civil Lawsuit?

A civil lawsuit is basically a matter between two parties wherein one party alleges wrongdoing against another party. These matters can take the form of anything you can think of from dog bites, to car accidents or evictions, to recovery of money loaned to and individual party as well as wrongful death claims.

Unfortunately a civil lawsuit is typically between parties who know each other and thus no platform has been established to delineate one party from another to anyone looking in. Often a civil lawsuit becomes a dispute resolution technique when other methods are unsuccessful.

Since civil disputes are between specific parties and not actually matters involving or effecting public policy (except class-action lawsuits), these disputes are kept only between the interested parties even though they are matters of public record. It is up to the decision maker looking into these filings to discern whether or not any civil lawsuit(s) discovered are potentially of interest within the hiring process.

A Condensed History of Civil Litigation Checks

In the past the decision to investigate civil litigation histories originated with banking institutions who wanted to determine if a party that they intended to lend money to was litigious and thus exposed their loans to potential risk by attachment of funds by an opposing party to the borrower.

At just about the same time in history, the legal community determined that this research was very important to attorneys who sought to determine the "litigation posture" of either a prospective client or an opponent. The concept has evolved into being a very effective tool in the performance of Due Diligence studies across the spectrum of business-related matters, including acquisition, sale of a business, public-debt financing, taking an entity public, as well as the screening of employment candidates and/or those who would be otherwise associated with

Since the beginning, 'suit searches' as they are referred to in the public record research industry, the problem of subject identification has been a researcher's greatest challenge to try to explain to a client why it cannot be determined that a particular lawsuit attributes to their subject.

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