The Case of the Missing Divorce Files, the Second Source, and the Specter of Unknown Knowns
I’ve already confessed I’m an AI convert. Since my confession back in March, I’ve become more enamored with my assistant. However — and this is important — using AI to do background research works. Using AI as your background research does not work.
You may have heard this about 10,000 times by now, but you must know what questions to ask AI. And more importantly, you must know enough to know when AI screws up. It does. In a recent matter, it kept on insisting a company had federal contracts when more detailed searching showed otherwise.
If you are a background researcher, use AI. If you need background research, do not use AI instead. In fact, the following tale of teaching old dogs new tricks is a good example of why you cannot rely on AI.
Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, etc.
I may have mentioned previously that I have been doing research for a long time. Enough deep academic research to earn a master’s degree; legal research at a time when Lexis and Westlaw existed but many practitioners did not trust them. Started a career in public record searches before there was much online, when the Internet existed but was not called that. Doing thousands (at least) of research projects; knowing how it was done back then, and experiencing how it is being done today, has made me a good and successful researcher.
But doing it for 30+ years doesn’t mean I know all the answers.
Court Records Online
One of the biggest improvements in public record research, which has shortened the time it takes to check someone out, and has also substantially lowered research costs, is the availability of civil and criminal litigation records via web-based searching. Federal civil and criminal records, including most case documents, can be accessed through the PACER system. For state civil and criminal records, nearly every jurisdiction is now accessible online.
Some states like Indiana and Connecticut allow statewide searches. Other places require it to be done county-by-county. So Southeast Florida searches would necessitate going one at a time to the Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach County websites.
Some counties (and PACER) charge for searches, and some don’t, although they charge for documents. Numerous counties require you to set up an account even though they don’t charge for searches.
Keeping up with all this is not hard. When in doubt, google the county, “Bexar County court records” or “Orleans Parish court records,” and you’ll usually get directly to the right place to do the searches. Yes, it can often take a few minutes to putz around a website to find where you actually click to start the search. You end up achieving in a few minutes of searching what used to take weeks and cost much more.
Georgia On My Mind
In those 30+ years of public record research, one part of the country I’ve always had somewhat of a love-hate relationship with is the Atlanta area. On the plus side, these counties were some of the earliest to put their litigation records online. On the other hand, the metro Atlanta region contains around 98 counties, each of which must be searched individually.
Georgia now has a statewide system, PeachCourt, which covers a lot (but of course not all) counties. It did cover the county I wanted, Cobb, and I did find what I was looking for: a divorce case.
Oh, That Website
After I found the divorce matter, I couldn’t access documents that otherwise appeared to be online. Now, more and more places are shutting down access to divorce records for the very reason that people like me go poking through them. Just because you got divorced, should your financial records be accessible by the public?
But my client pushed back on my assumption that the records were private, so I went off to see if I was right. I soon heard an answer from my internal voice, sounding exactly like Marisa Tomei on the stand in “My Cousin Vinny”: “The defense is wrong!”
A few minutes on the phone with Cobb County directed me to another website where the same court records were, but this time, with access (granted for a fee) to the case documents.
You’re Never Too Old
As someone comfortably into my sixth decade on the planet, I often remind myself that I’m not too old to learn, to do better. To realize I did not have the answer when it came to finding a divorce file. I’m still learning things, like about a second website in Cobb County, the one with the documents, Would AI have discovered the second website? Maybe. But its Achilles heel is that it’s not very good at realizing it does not have the answer. It wants to have the answer, and if it doesn’t, it’ll tell you that it does. If you rely on AI to search comprehensively, the result may be that you’ll never know you both missed the second Cobb County site.
There’s a tendency to follow the shiny object. These days, in research, in everything, the shiny object is artificial intelligence. AI can do wondrous things. But it’s a shameless know-it-all; it struggles to acknowledge the potential existence of unknown knowns. And if you presume AI will admit that it doesn’t know all the answers (it probably won’t admit this), you will make huge mistakes together.
Intellectual humility is a human capacity, and a vital one in our profession.
This article first appeared at Robert Gardner’s Manage Risks blog and was reposted with permission of the author.
About the author:
Robert Gardner likes to think he has been performing research so long, credit reports came on stone tablets. Over a long career, Robert has worked with private investigators, forensic accountants, fraud auditors, litigators and others who need vital information to make decisions and react to unforeseen problems. Robert works in all aspects of business research including due diligence, litigation support, fraud investigations, asset searching, and competitive intelligence. He has made inquiries in nearly every part of the world. Well versed in a variety of data collection methods, especially online and Internet searching, he has transformed public record findings into reports, charts, schedules, timelines, and databases to assist in many situations.