Researching a Company's Legal Proceedings: Legal Action and Litigation

• News
• Court Documents
• Class Action Securities Fraud Cases
• Competition and Consumer Protection Cases
• Cases

Factiva

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Factiva has a good interface for searching for articles about a company that are related to a specific topic such as legal action.  To locate articles about legal action related to a company:

1. Open Factiva.  Search for the company in the main search bar.
2. Notice the top fields at the top of the results which may include News, Signals, Reports, Financials and Regulatory Filings if applicable.  Click on each tab to open the corresponding information.
3. To find legal related action, use the Filter and under Subjects select Crime/Legal Action.

LexisNexis Academic

LexisNexis Academic contains a different set of news sources than Factiva and is useful for gaining additional insight.  To find articles on legal action involving a company:

1. Open LexisNexis Academic. Click on Search by Subject or Topic, then click on Dossier(Company, Executive, and Industry) under Companies.
2. Search for the company you're researching.
3. Once on the company's profile page, click on In the News.
4. To look at articles on legal issues, click on Topic and then Legal.

Bloomberg

Per the reference librarians at the UVA Law Library, Bloomberg Law is the preferred source for finding dockets from various types of legal proceedings as it pulls directly from the US Court's Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) service.  We have limited access to Bloomberg Law through our Bloomberg terminals in the Capital Markets room.

1. Sign on to one of the Bloomberg terminals and open the Bloomberg application.
2. In the command line, enter BLAW
3. Bloomberg Law opens in a browser window
4. For Court Opinions go to Litigation: Court Opinions and select the Courts you wish to search. Enter the company name in the Party field.
5. For Dockets go to Litigation: Dockets Search and select the Courts you wish to search.  Enter the company name in the Party field.

Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER)

PACER is a service provided by the US Court system to allow public access to court records.  Anyone is able to make an account and search for and view dockets, though there are small fees associated with using the service.  More information about the service can be found in the PACER Frequently Asked Questions.

Before using PACER, however, check if the case you're interested in is covered by one of the sources below.

Securities Class Action Clearinghouse (Stanford Law School)

The Stanford Law School Securities Class Action Clearinghouse provides information about ongoing and past securities fraud class action lawsuits as well as data on the overall landscape of securities class action lawsuits.

For each case, the SCAC provides, at minimum, a summary of the case and the original complaint that was filed.  It may also include any orders issued in the case, a docket that lists the documents filed in relation to the case, and other documents.  As with Bloomberg, even if you can't get the document(s) you need through SCAC, it is still an excellent resource to identify what documents you may need to pull from PACER.

The US Federal Trade Commission's website has a page in its Enforcement section that lists current and past FTC cases and proceedings.  These cases are related to consumer protection or competition (including mergers and acquisitions involving anti-competitive practices).  The complaint, orders issued by the court, and some press releases are available for each case.

You can search for a case by using the Filters form on the Cases and Proceedings page.  All cases can be searched for by name and date and many can be searched for by mission (consumer protection or competition).  Clicking on Advanced Search allows you to search using additional parameters such as industry or specific topics within consumer protection or competition.

LexisNexis Academic

LexisNexis Academic/Nexis Uni has cases available to search.  From the main page, select Legal.  Then under Content Type select Cases. Use the search form to search for a company name.

In many cases, it may be helpful to contact the Law Library for more in-depth legal research guidance.

Contact Law Library reference

refdesk@law.virginia.edu
(434) 924-7465

The Darden reference librarians are also willing to contact the Law Library on your behalf.