The following is msg I sent to the Houston area law lib list on 10/8/98.
I wanted to get further clarification from Westlaw before submitting it
nationally and to date have heard nothing from them in the way of an
explanation. I know that the complaint has been heard because I
mentioned to more than one Westlaw person in Minneapolis during the
advisory board meeting in oct.
I wanted to pass this warning along to the rest of you. I do not want
anyone to get burned if your state records on Westlaw are as
incomplete and inaccurate as Texas's appear to be.
Msg was:
Last week did 2 dba's on Westlaw. One on company and one on owner.
Found nothing, zippo, none. Reported same to requestor. He was
perplexed and asked me to double check.
I did using Lexis. to my great horror and surprise I found 19 records
under owner, 18 of them were my guy. Found 31 similar names of
which 5 were exact and 24 had first 2 words. So now I had even more
than bargained for.
Atty was delighted. I was upset. It was big deal because it could have
gotten me, the atty and possibly the firm in a mess.
I double checked on Westlaw and found nothing. Double checked on
Info Am and found nothing. Called Westlaw ref atty and he found
nothing. He tried couple of other databases like TX-corp and business
finder etc and still did not find any.
I turned this over to my excellent Westlaw rep who forwarded stuff to
HQ and have been told it has rapidly moved up the ladder.
I wanted to warn you guys about this, but was too mad to do so last
week. I do not plan to use Westlaw as my database of first choice again
when doing ANY public records searches. I may even have to forgive
CDB and resubscribe. I cannot believe that I was paying over $6 a
minute for an obviously corrupted and incomplete database and worse
trusted its negative results and believed they were accurate. It was a
big enough deal to my atty for him to question me and ask me if there
was anything else I could check. was lucky this time because I did
double check.
Unfortunately, I did not have any other examples to check and see if this
was just a fluke. If anyone else does would be interested in hearing
about it.
Charles Gibson
Liddell Sapp
600 Travis, Ste 2500
Houston, TX 77002
713-226-1442, fax = 713-223-3717
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