Any effort to challenge a proposed subsidy deal for a specific company will be greatly aided by research into that company itself. In this section we explain how to gather basic information about a company and how to assess the firm's social responsibility record, which can be raised as an issue when the company is being awarded a subsidy. We also give tips on researching key individuals associated with a company.

Basic Company Information
Preliminary Research

Step 1: Find out the company's full legal name
If there is a question about the company's formal name, you can check it by looking at various public documents that the firm must file with local or state agencies. At the local level the key agencies to check are the Tax Assessor and Recorder of Deeds; at the state level it is the office of the Secretary of State (see below). When you look at these documents take down the names of any individuals that appear, in case you want to get more information about them later.

If the company name you have does not show up in these places, it may be a fictitious name that differs from the legal name. Most counties have a Fictitious Business Names Index at the Recorder of Deeds office, which lists the companies that are "doing business as" (DBA) another name in the county. Many counties also require that business licenses include both the legal and DBA name.

The W-2 tax-reporting forms that employees get include the employer's Federal Taxpayer ID Number (also called the Employer Identification Number) which is also useful to have.

Step 2: Find out if the company is public or private
When researching a company, one of the first things to find out is whether it is publicly traded, since this significantly affects the amount of information you will be able to obtain. Public companies (those whose shares are bought and sold by the public on stock exchanges) must divulge a lot more information about their activities than private companies (those owned by a small number of people). See below for more information on researching private companies.

To find out if a company is public, search for its name on one of the following resources:

Hoover's Online offers short profiles of thousands of companies. In addition to indicating whether a firm is publicly or privately held, Hoover's provides a brief sketch of the company's operations, the names of its top officers, and contact information such as address, phone number and website.

If the company is not covered by Hoover's, check the EDGAR database of Securities and Exchange Commission filings that publicly traded companies must submit to the SEC and which then become public documents. (For more on SEC filings, see below.) Plug in the company name. If nothing turns up, the company is not publicly traded.

Also try the firm's website. If there is a section called Investor Relations, then the company is publicly traded.

The Directory of Companies Filing Annual Reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission, available at many libraries, lists the name of every company required to file reports with the SEC.

If your company is not listed in these sources, it may be a subsidiary of a public company. See Step 4 below.

Step 3: Find out the names of people associated with the company
Your Secretary of State's office has business registration documents for corporations based in your state and for foreign (out-of-state) corporations doing business in your state. In some states, these filings include the names and addresses of the key people in the company, such as the officers and directors. In other states, the only name listed may be that of the registered agent. This is the person who can be served with legal papers if the company is sued. Note that registered agents are often outside services that have no direct relationship to the operation of the company.

You can also find out names of corporate executives from the company's website or from directories such as the Standard & Poor's Register, which is available on Lexis-Nexis, or in hard-copy form in reference libraries. See below for more on researching individuals.

Step 4: Find out if the company is a subsidiary or has facilities in other locations
If a company doesn't show up in Hoover's or EDGAR or have its own website, the reason may be that it is a subsidiary of another corporation. One way to check if this is the case is to search under the company name in the Directory of Corporate Affiliations (DCA), which is available in hard-copy form in larger libraries (which may also have it on CD-ROM) or online via Lexis-Nexis. If the company is a subsidiary, DCA will tell you the name of its parent. You can also plug in the name of a parent company and get a list of its subsidiaries. DCA covers both public and larger private companies.

If you want a list of subsidiaries of a publicly traded company, look at its 10-K filing to the SEC (described in more detail below). Some companies also include complete lists of facilities and their locations in the 10-K, though larger companies with many facilities may provide summaries only.

Step 5: Read the company's website, annual report, and 10-K
To find the company's website, first try connecting to www.[insert the company's name].com. If that doesn't work, try a search engine such as Google.

Once you've reached the website, there are other things to look for besides an Investor Relations section. There is usually a brief company profile and contact information. Many companies include an archive of press releases, which often include information that did not make it into the press. The bigger public companies usually put their entire annual report online, usually in PDF format. Some firms include biographies of top executives, product descriptions, and other information. Although much of the content of these websites is essentially corporate public relations, within that is a great deal of useful information for research purposes.

If the annual report is not available on the website, you can request a printed copy from the company's investor relations department. In most cases, all of the financial information in the glossy annual report is also found in the 10-K (described below). If not, the 10-K will refer to sections of the annual report.

Privately-Held Corporations
Private companies are corporations in which the stock is held by fewer than 500 people, often many fewer. Private companies themselves are not necessarily small; there are some huge private companies in the U.S., such as Cargill and Koch Industries. Private companies tend to be more stingy with the amount of information they put on the Web, and only the larger ones are profiled by Hoover's.

The most valuable source of information on most private companies -- from the billion-dollar giants down to mom-and-pop operations -- is Dun & Bradstreet. The primary business of D&B is to formulate credit ratings for companies by finding out how promptly they pay their bills. In the course of doing this, D&B also collects basic data on millions of firms.

At one time, the only way to gain access to D&B's descriptive information was to subscribe to its credit rating service. D&B's website now sells access to what it calls Business Background Reports. These reports, which cost about $40 each, payable by credit card, include a brief company history; whether the company is public or private; basic financial data (usually an estimate of annual revenues and net worth); the names of directors and top officers, with some biographical information; a description of the company's operations, including an indication of how many customers it has and the geographical scope of its markets; the number of employees; and a summary of recent developments.

One caveat about D&B information: it is not as reliable as the information a public company puts in its SEC filings. It is against the law to deceive the SEC; there is no legal penalty for embellishing the truth when filling out a D&B questionnaire. Companies will not lie with abandon, since they don't want to damage their credibility, yet it is always worth taking D&B data with a grain of salt.

D&B also publishes directories with limited information on private as well as public companies. These works, which may be found at major libraries, include the Million Dollar Directory and CD-ROMs such as the D&B Business Locator and the D&B Million Dollar Disc Plus.

Key Sources

1. State Corporation Records from the Secretary of State's Office
Every U.S. corporation, whether public or private, must be chartered at the state level. Being incorporated requires the firm to provide state officials with basic information about the corporation. These requirements vary from state to state, but at a minimum you should find the precise name of the company and its address. In some states corporations have to report the names of their officers and directors, the number of shares of stock which have been issued, the date of original incorporation, and possibly the Federal Tax ID number. U.S. subsidiaries of foreign corporations must also file.

These filings are available to the public and can usually be obtained from the state's Secretary of State office. Some states have begun to put the information on free websites. For a list of links to such websites, see the BRB Publications list. Otherwise, the information is available electronically via expensive database services such as Lexis-Nexis. Another option is to use a website called KnowX. Once you open an account on KnowX (which is free, but you have to provide credit card information), you can search corporate records by company name or officer's name. In most cases the online corporate information is not as extensive of which you get when you order documents directly from the Secretary of State.

2. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Documents
All companies that are publicly traded (i.e., whose shares trade on stock exchanges) must file financial reports with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). These documents are then made public at no cost through an electronic distribution system called EDGAR (short for Electronic Data Gathering Analysis and Retrieval). The system can be found on the SEC website or at various commercial sites.

Note: If your target company is not publicly traded, do not assume that SEC documents will not be available. Some companies whose shares are not traded publicly are still required to file certain reports with the SEC (particularly the 10-K) if their bonds or other debt securities trade publicly. Unless the company is a mom-and-pop operation, it is worth plugging its name into one of the websites containing the EDGAR database to see if anything appears.

Main SEC Documents
10-K report: annual report on the company's activities. Includes full legal name, headquarters address, total market value of stock, total number of shares outstanding, products and/or services, principal markets, significant competitors, number of employees, number of unionized employees and information about upcoming contract negotiations (sometimes), large customers, list of company locations, names of officers, major lawsuits that could affect the company's financial conditions, and three years of detailed financial statements. The list of exhibits is important to read, because it may mention documents like employment contracts for company executives, major loan agreements, and stock option plans.

10-Q reports: quarterly updates of the company's financial condition. 8-K reports are filed shortly after any major event that could affect the value of stock (for example, changes in control of the company, acquisition or sale of assets, changes in directors, etc.).

Proxy statement (also known as Schedule DEF 14A): sent to all stockholders prior to the company's annual meeting, giving a run-down on the meeting agenda, and providing information on executive compensation and other data on officers and directors. It includes a fairly complete run-down on the Board of Directors, including each director's professional background, other affiliations, compensation, and ownership of the company's stock. It also has information on the compensation paid to the five highest-paid executives, including stock options, pensions, insurance policies, etc. The proxy statement also discloses information about transactions between officers or directors and the company. For example, a company president owns buildings he is leasing to the company.

Prospectus (or Registration) statements: these are issued when a company goes public for the first time (called the Initial Public Offering or IPO) or sells new stock to the public; they contain information similar to that in a 10-K.

Forms 3, 4, and 5: these detail stock transactions involving directors and executives (known as insiders). Form 3 is filed after the initial transaction; Form 4 reflects changes in the holdings; and Form 5 is an annual summary.

Summary of key information that public companies must disclose

3. Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) Filings
UCC filings are documents that are filed by companies when they borrow money and use equipment as collateral. The UCCs, which are usually available via the Recorder of Deeds officer or online via a service such as KnowX or Lexis-Nexis, provide clues as to which banks a company is doing business with. They may also give a clue as to a company's expansion plans, since the lenders listed are often equipment suppliers extending credit.

4. Land Records at the Tax Assessor's Office and the Recorder of Deeds
Go to the county where the headquarters of the target company is located, or where your target facility is located. You want to determine all the land in the county which is owned by the company and by company officials individually. The Tax Assessor can show you who is paying the taxes on the property, which is only an indication of ownership.

Most Tax Assessor offices have computerized indexes, which you can search for company names and people. If you cannot find the company name in the index, search for the address of the location. The records will include the full name of the owner, the parcel number of the property, the exact address of the property, a legal property description, the address to which the tax bill is mailed, the date the property was purchased, the amount of the yearly tax and whether it was paid, and the assessed value of the property, which is usually divided between the land and improvements. Land records are increasingly being put online.

The Recorder of Deeds office (other names: County Recorder, Registrar of Deeds, County Registrar) possesses key documents associated with the ownership of land, such as mortgages, deeds, and tax liens. Information about mortgages and deeds can also illustrate relationships between the company and banks that lend it money.

Land records are increasingly being put online.

5. Media Coverage
It is always worth checking media coverage to see what has been reported about a company and its practices. The fact that the full texts of thousands of newspapers, newswires, magazines, trade publications, and broadcast transcripts are available online makes it possible to search through a large portion of the published material on a company in a matter of minutes. Some, but far from all, of these sources can be found on the free Internet and can be retrieved using search engines such as Google.

It is much more efficient to search fee-based information services such as Lexis-Nexis or Factiva. A subscription to these services may be too expensive for smaller organizations, but you can try to gain access through a university library or a larger public library. Both Lexis-Nexis and Factiva allow you to simultaneously search thousands of publications using a company name or other keywords. In addition to published materials, they include the text of company press releases. Although these releases are, strictly speaking, corporate public relations, they often turn out to be the best source of information on aspects of the company that the media did not consider newsworthy but which tell you what you need to know.

Since smaller publications may not turn up on Lexis-Nexis or Factiva, it is worth looking through the archives of a local paper on the web or at a local library. You can also ask the newspaper if you can use its "morgue," the term for the files where the back clippings are kept.

To find the local papers in your target area, go to American Journalism Review NewsLink, which links to local newspapers grouped by state, and national and major metro papers. To determine where the archives of a particular publication may be available online, consult a reference book called Fulltext Sources Online (published by Information Today Inc.), which should be available in larger libraries.

Social Responsibility Record

If you are organizing around a particular deal or company, it's useful to know about the company's general reputation and track record. If the company has a history of violating environmental regulations, mistreating workers or otherwise operating contrary to the public interest, those may be relevant issues in a subsidy debate.

Step 1: Do a news search on the company
For any aspect of a company's social responsibility record, it is always useful to start with an online news search of the type described above. Search under the name of the parent company as well as the subsidiary. This will provide leads on legal problems, labor issues, environmental controversies, etc. that can then be investigated in more depth.

Step 2: Interview activists in cities where the company has other facilities
If the news search identifies organizations--such as community groups or unions -- that have had a conflict with the company, find their phone number, and call them. If the news reports do not cite any specific critics, you will need to make some exploratory calls.

Depending on the issues you are researching, you may need labor organizations such as:

• Jobs with Justice (labor-community coalitions). To see if the city has a chapter, go to http://www.jwj.org/LocalCoal/contact.htm.
  
  
• Central Labor Councils (CLCs are metro/regional labor federations). Check for a website at http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/unioncities/.
  
  
• Labor Educators. Go to www.uale.org for a directory of the United Association of Labor Educators.

Or environmental organizations, such as:

• Environmental Background Information Center
• Environmental Support Center
• Environmental Research Foundation
• Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University
• Center for Health, Environment and Justice
• Citizens Coal Council
• Friends of the Earth
• Greenpeace USA
• Sierra Club

Step 3: Check out the company's legal record
When a company -- whether publicly-traded or privately-held -- gets embroiled in a lawsuit, it often has to disclose documents that would otherwise never see the light of day. Moreover, the existence of multiple lawsuits in an area such as racial discrimination is by itself a clue about corporate culture. For this reason, you should check court dockets for significant cases. All civil court records are public unless they have been officially sealed by a judge. Civil court records include cases involving contract disputes, wrongful discharge cases, failure to pay, personal injury, property rights, divorces, and probating of wills, etc.

The traditional way to check for cases is to go to the relevant county courthouse and look through the paper or electronic index. This is fine for a small, local company, but it is impractical for a major corporation that has far-flung operations and may thus be involved in litigation in many different jurisdictions.

The solution, at least as far as federal courts are concerned, is a system called PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) that was established by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to provide online access to the dockets of individual federal district and bankruptcy courts. All bankruptcy courts and nearly all district courts participate. By setting up an account with the PACER office, you can tap into the various court dockets using a more or less standardized interface, and your modest online costs are combined into one bill. One attractive feature is the U.S. Party/Case Index, which allows you to search nearly all the available dockets at once. 

Once your docket search has turned up an interesting case, the way to find out more about the matter is to look at the actual documents that have been filed by the parties. These would include things such as the original complaint (in a civil matter) or indictment (in a criminal matter), briefs, motions, depositions, and transcripts of court proceedings. In the past, these documents were available only in hard-copy form at the clerk's office of the court in which the case was filed. The federal courts, however, have been developing an extension of PACER that allows subscribers to view images of court filings online. The list of links to court sites on the PACER website indicates which ones have begun to post document images.

State courts have been somewhat slower in putting their dockets online, but they are catching up. For a list of which courts are available electronically, check www.llrx.com/courtrules.

If you do a lot of legal research, it may be worth subscribing to a website called Legal Dockets Online that provides handy links to all available court dockets on the web, including those that are available for free as well as those that require a PACER subscription.

Also keep in mind that publicly-traded companies are required to report on any pending lawsuits that might have a "material effect" on the firm's finances. See the section of the 10-K (Item 3) entitled Legal Proceedings.

If you have access to a full-service legal database such as Lexis or Westlaw, you can also search for the full text of written court rulings involving a particular company.

Step 4: Check out the company's labor record
Unfortunately, the SEC does not require public companies to disclose very much about their labor practices. In the 10-K section titled Employees, companies often report nothing more than their head count. Companies with a significant level of unionization will often indicate the percentage of the workforce covered by collective bargaining agreements. Only when there is a major labor dispute that is having an impact on the company's finances will there be more details on labor relations.

To find out more about a company's labor record, check the archives of specialized labor publications, particularly BNA's Daily Labor Report or Labor Relations Week, which are available on a subscription basis (see www.bna.com). The price is high, but many unions subscribe to these publications in paper or electronic form.

To learn more about a company's compliance record with regard to employment laws, the most convenient source is a CD-ROM compiled by the Food and Allied Service Trades (FAST) Department of the AFL-CIO (see www.fastaflcio.org). FAST has assembled federal government databases on union representation elections, unfair labor practices, EEOC employment discrimination cases, workers dislocated by imports receiving Trade Adjustment Assistance (e.g., NAFTA) and compliance with laws covering overtime, child labor, and family medical leave. All of the databases on the CD-ROM can be searched by company name.

Information about a company's occupational safety and health record can be found on the website of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration .This site includes the results of all workplace inspections conducted by OSHA since the agency was created, including information on all violations and fines.

To learn more about the employee benefit plans offered by a publicly-traded or privately-held company (whether it is defined benefit or defined contribution, etc.), obtain a copy of IRS Form 5500, which each plan sponsor must file annually with the U.S. Department of Labor. Complete copies of the 5500s can only be obtained from the Labor Department, but a website called Free ERISA provides summaries of the key information in the forms.

Step 5: Check out the company's environmental record
The single best source for information on a company's environmental record is the  U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, whose website has a wealth of information.
Start at the Envirofacts page, which allows you to search a variety of EPA databases at once for data on a particular geographic location. If you enter the zip code of a facility of your target company, Envirofacts will give you information such as the following:

• data on your target facility and others located in the same zip code that produce air pollution (from the Aerometric Information Retrieval System)

• data on toxics (from the Toxics Release Inventory)

• data on hazardous waste (from the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act database and from the Superfund list of the worst hazardous waste sites)

• data on water quality (from the National Drinking Water Contaminant Occurrence Database and the Permit Compliance System)

  Envirofacts also has a feature that maps much of this information. Environmental Defense has a valuable site called Scorecard that combines data from the Envirofacts databases and other sources to give a comprehensive profile of the environmental condition of a given location.

  One database that had long been missing from the EPA website was the agency's Civil Enforcement Docket, which lists cases that have been brought against individuals and companies for violating environmental laws and regulations. In 2002 the EPA made a major advance in disclosure with the launch of a website containing enforcement data on regulated facilities nationwide. The service, called Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO), contains information relating to Clean Air Act stationary sources, Clean Water Act facilities with direct discharge permits (under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System), and generators/handlers of hazardous waste regulated under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. It also provides information on state enforcement data.

  Step 6: Check out government contracts the company has received
  Government subsidies can become even more controversial when the recipient company is also the beneficiary of government contracts. At the federal level, the General Services Administration (GSA) assembles information on every procurement contract above $2,500 in a database called the Federal Procurement Data System.

  You can also determine whether an individual or company has been barred from doing business with the federal government by searching the GSA's Excluded Parties List.
  
  Step 7: Check out a company's campaign contributions and its lobbying activities
  In many instances campaign contributions may be the quid pro quo (or trade-off) for subsidies -- they are what a company pays to get tax breaks and other incentives. Thanks to federal and state disclosure laws, it is more difficult to hide what some observers have called legal bribery.
  
  At the federal level, campaign contributions by corporate executives and their company's political action committee may be tracked using a database compiled by the Federal Election Commission. This database is available via the FEC itself, but several private groups have enhanced the information in very useful ways. See, especially, the websites of the Center for Responsive Politics and Political MoneyLine/FEC Info. These sites have current and past information on both hard money and now abolished soft money (non-candidate-specific) contributions.

  State campaign contribution data is now easily available on the web thanks to the  National Institute on Money in State Politics. The Institute's website allows for searching by individual or corporate name. Keep in mind that some states, unlike the federal government, allow corporations to contribute directly to candidates.

  Federal lobbyists have to submit semi-annual reports with the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House identifying their clients and the amount of income they receive. Companies have to report their overall lobbying expenditures and the names of any lobbyists employed as part of an in-house lobbying effort. The Senate has put its filings online in a database that allows you to search by the name of the client. Many states have online directories of lobbyists and their clients.

  For lists of which lobbyists represent a given company, you can also consult the print volumes Washington Representatives (which is published by Columbia Books and is also available through a pay website) and the Government Affairs Yellow Book (which is published by Leadership Directories and is also available along with other directories on a CD-ROM or a subscription website).

  Step 8: Check out the compensation paid to the company's top executives
  The outrageously inflated compensation paid to top executives of large companies is a familiar story, but it is an issue still worth raising in any corporate-related campaign. For publicly-held companies, documenting this aspect of corporate greed is made easy by the extensive disclosure requirements imposed by the SEC. There is no public source for information on executive compensation in private companies.

  A detailed account of pay and benefits to a company's top executives can be found in the proxy statement (also known as Schedule DEF 14A) that is issued in preparation for each annual stockholder's meeting and that is available on the EDGAR database (see above). The proxy includes a summary compensation table listing salary, bonus, other forms of incentive pay and other types of compensation that were given to the five highest-paid executives. Following that are tables showing the number of stock options (the right to purchase shares at an advantageous price) awarded to executives and the value realized by executives in the exercise of previously awarded options. The proxy statement also lists the number of shares owned by each officer and director.

  We also recommend the following Web sites:

• Executive Pay Watch has some background information on executive pay and the role it plays in campaigns.

• United for a Fair Economy for popular education on executive pay and the rising gaps in both income and wealth.

  Step 9: Check out these additional resources
  The website of the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First has an extensive guide to corporate research and an archive of back issues of its Corporate Research E-Letter.
  
  The Food and Allied Services Trades (FAST) department of the AFL-CIO has a comprehensive guide to corporate research on its website, available for a modest fee to unions and community groups. FAST also produces the multi-database CD-rom (as described above).
  
  Organizations that work on investor/shareholder activism also have useful information. See, for example, the websites of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, As You Sow, and the Social Investment Forum Advocacy & Policy Program.

Researching Key Individuals
While doing your analysis of company, you will likely identify a few key individuals -- such as top executives or members of the board of directors -- who merit closer scrutiny. Here are some tips on how to conduct that investigation.

General Biographical Information
If your person is sufficiently prominent, he or she may be included in Who's Who in America or one of the regional or industry-specific Who's Who volumes. Check out the reference section of a good library. Much of the Who's Who information is also available online via services such as Lexis-Nexis or Dialog. Who's Who entries will generally include business affiliations as well as links to charities and other non-profit organizations. Club memberships are often included as well. Also check the D&B Reference Book of Corporate Management.

If the person you are investigating is socially prominent or quite wealthy, you should also check the Social Register or the Forbes 400, the annual listing of the super rich by Forbes magazine. Articles about well-known business people would be indexed in the Wilson Biographical Index, found in most libraries. Also look for records in your state through the website of BRB Publications or KnowX. For some states, you can search online records concerning births, marriages, divorces, deaths, and property ownership.

Publicly-Traded Companies
To determine whether someone is an officer or director of a publicly-traded company (i.e. one whose shares trade in a stock market) you can search EDGAR, the online archive of filings submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, as described above.

The proxy statement (also called DEF 14A) contains biographical information about directors and data on the compensation and stock ownership of top executives as well as directors. The proxy also describes business relationships between directors and the company.

You can also consult biographical directories such as the Standard & Poor's Register of Corporations, Directors and Executives, which is available in print form at many libraries or in electronic form on Lexis-Nexis. In a good business library you will also find specialized volumes such as Who's Who in Canadian Business or the Directory of Directors in the City of New York.

Privately-Held Companies
The Standard & Poor's Register includes larger privately-held companies, but to do a thorough search, the best approach is to consult the database of Dun & Bradstreet, which collects information on millions of companies, even very small ones. D&B information is available via direct online subscriptions with the company or via vendors such as Lexis-Nexis. Also see the D&B Business Background Reports described above.

State corporate records
As noted above, every corporation -- public or private, for-profit or non-profit -- must be chartered by a state government, and some states require companies to disclose the names of their officers and directors (and sometimes their home address). Services such as Lexis-Nexis collect this information and put it in one big database that can be searched for the names of individuals.

Non-profit affiliations
Philanthropic and other non-profit affiliations can be found in a person's Who's Who entry or sometimes in the biographical information provided on directors in the proxy statements of publicly-traded companies. If these sources aren't available for the person you are investigating, you can try the index of the Nonprofit Sector Yellow Book published by Leadership Directories Inc., which lists the names of trustees of larger foundations, universities, hospitals, and cultural institutions.

Legal Records
If you want to know whether an individual has had legal problems of one sort or another, check the sources for court records described above. Note that the coverage of the PACER system includes criminal and personal bankruptcy cases.

Finding out if someone has a state or local criminal record is a bit more complicated. If you're just interested in your local jurisdiction you can go to the courthouse and check the criminal index. If you want a wider search, you may have to pay a public records search service. A small number of jurisdictions have put their court dockets on the Internet. To find a list of links to those dockets (and other public records on the web), go to the BRB website.

When searching local court records, also keep an eye out for divorce cases. During these proceedings, valuable information is often made public about a person's business dealings.
To find out if someone is on the list of parties barred from doing business with the federal government, check the Excluded Parties List.

It's also worth doing a general news search on an online service such as Factiva or Lexis-Nexis to look for articles that might mention a person's brushes with the law or other useful information.