MATERIAL LITIGATION Disclosed by Public Corporations

Search SEC filings -Quarterly and Annual Filings (10Qs or 10K for U.S. based publicly-traded companies.

DECIDED CASES 

Lexis Academic; Westlaw ; Google Scholar.

Q. How can I find out if a company has been sued? 

A.  It may not be possible to find all ongoing lawsuits filed against a company.  There is no one comprehensive database of filed lawsuits, and some disputes are resolved by private settlement.  Federal and state court records can be searched as noted below.   The sued company should be searched as the "defendant."    

Federal Cases

Federal dockets (the record of a case as it proceeds through litigation)  are loaded on PACER,  the Federal Court filings database, but the Baruch library does not subscribe to this service.  Justia is a free service for federal court filings (users need to set up an account).   Some court filings retrieved from PACER are available in Recap on Court Listener.  

New York Cases

New York State case dockets can be search on the E-Courts web 

                   NY Civil filings                     New York State criminal filings

Administrative complaints

Check the websites of the individual agencies for ongoing legal proceedings.

Other places to search:  

• News databases such as Factiva, Nexis Uni, and the New York Times (useful search terms include "lawsuit," "sued," "legal action," "litigation," etc).
• Stanford Class Action Reporter
• State court websites
• Company Dossier search on Lexis Academic (under "Get Companies Info"). Go to the "legal" section of the Snapshot report for recent federal cases involving the company. (Some non-U.S. cases are available.)
• Run a company search on Audit Analytics; see "litigation" section.