Legal Question in Business Law in California

Re: business law suits

Pending - Go to the court house

Decided - Go to the law library.

Re: business law suits

Do you mean a particular business, or business in general?

Assuming you want to learn about various litigation that a particular business is now, or in the past has been, involved in as either a plaintiff or defendant, there are two general methods you might use. The first is to go to the courthouse in one or more counties where the business is located or conducts a lot of its activities, and therefore is likely to have sued or been sued there. This method won't catch everything, and each county has different ways of indexing its civil cases. Some have convenient computerized data bases which you can quickly search at the courthouse, or perhaps even on line. Other counties have more cumbersome case indexing methods.

Appellate cases, both pending and decided, can be searched by party name via the California Courts Web site.

Another possibility for publicly-traded companies is to check their quarterly and annual filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. They are required to report significant litigation.

In some large communities, there are legal newspapers, published weekly or even daily, many of which list lawsuit filings and/or decisions. The usefulness and availability vary by community. Ask about them at the county law library.

Searching the Web via Google or some other search engine will sometimes yield information about a company's litigation history, especially with respect to matters that have been heard by an appellate court.

Ultimately, it is very difficult to root out all litigation affecting a particular business unless the business is willing to tell you. The reasons are that only appellate-level cases are reported, and not all of them; and also pending litigation may be in a state or federal court practically anywhere.

If it is very important to find out as much as possible, as, for example, if you are planning to buy a business and you need to find out about skeletons in its corporate closet, you should retain an attorney who has good computer search skills, a reasonable hourly rate, and a desire to assist you.

Re: business law suits

And how you get to Carnegie Hall, practice in practice. First of all the term business is so open-ended pitcher question is meaningless. If you want local matters, the Superior Court of the county in which you where. If you want appellate matters could any law library and read the cases in the Court of Appeal volumes. If you want Supreme Court of the state of California matters, again go to the law library and read the Supreme Court cases. But even doing that does not answer your question. Because your question again is meaningless. For what purpose you wish to read these. I would normally give you might telephone number and say consult the lead in this case I know what consultation you could really need. Rather than reject your question I think you should rethink the question and asked it with specificity. If you tell us what you really want and why you can get a real answer to this question.