CRIV CONNECTION

I recently had an interesting convergence of my personal and professional lives involving risk management records. First, some caveats: while my examples both involve LexisNexis Risk Solutions, I am sure that my observations would not be unique to one vendor. This short post is not meant to be a comprehensive look at public records or a market survey; it is simply a glimpse into market segmentation and its impact on the legal sector. I have access to (fairly) comprehensive public records through several commercial services; in this case, my focus is on two types of records that fall outside of the typical law library public records products.

An attorney asked me to obtain a police report on a motor vehicle accident (MVA), thinking I could pull that from a public records database. That was not possible, so I explored several other routes. (We already had a copy of the police report, but we wanted to use the situation as a test for acquiring reports in the future and comparing data across sources.) Clearly, we could make a public records request from the local or state law enforcement department or get a copy from an insurance company if we were involved in insurance defense work. But what is available in commercial services?

Our sample source document was from LexisNexis Risk Solutions so I started there. (You may know of other approaches, and results may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.) BuyCrash.com is a LexisNexis Risk Solutions resource. It is straightforward and can be used on a transactional basis or via a monthly account. Unfortunately, just one police department in my state currently reports MVAs to BuyCrash. The coverage list for other jurisdictions is more robust. Next, I contacted LexisNexis Risk Solutions and spoke with several representatives. In the end, it was confirmed that the LexisNexis® Police Records I was seeking are not sold to the legal sector; that is a service for insurance companies. You can see the markets listed here under Choose Your Industry. We are typically able to access the reports we need through the relevant law enforcement agency directly or through an insurance company if appropriate, much as an individual might request records. A local police department and a state motor vehicles department will await authorization before releasing a complete report. A partnering insurance company may be able to acquire more detailed information, including color photographs.

While I have had occasion to gather MVA reports for personal reasons, (it’s simple if you are an involved party), my most recent request for driving and accident data was prompted by news about some car manufacturers providing consumers’ driving information to automobile insurance companies. Verisk and LexisNexis Risk Solutions are two companies named in news stories that report driving safety data. My car is one of the makes that is enrolled in a data collection program, so I requested consumer disclosure reports from each company out of curiosity. As a legal information professional who conducts public records research, it’s fascinating to see the scope and depth of information in my reports, apart from the question of why some automobile manufacturers are collecting the data and sharing it, sometimes without the drivers’ knowledge. There is the typical inaccurate information—email addresses I have never had, a misreported birth date, the omission of any mention of one of my previous last names. Experienced public records researchers know there are usually reasonable explanations for inconsistencies. My history of insurance claims is there, along with my coverage details. I am listed as a safe driver, not a habitual offender. No driving data appears in the LexisNexis Risk Solutions report. I am waiting for my consumer disclosure report from the other vendor. My day-in, day-out work with public records, as well as this recent deep dive into my own information, is a good reminder that we should periodically access our consumer disclosure reports, whether from ChexSystems, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, TransUnion, Experian, or other sources.

Much like LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Thomson Reuters Risk & Fraud Solutions has resources for particular sectors like CLEAR for law enforcement and Fraud Detect for regulatory agencies. The same goes for Verisk solutions for the insurance industry, government agencies, construction, and other markets. We know that states’ consumer rights protections, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and other laws strictly regulate what types of data are accessible by legal information professionals and others. It’s important to keep in mind that, in addition to the regulatory environment and just partly because of it, information vendors package and sell different solutions to different markets. Law librarians work at the intersection of many disciplines—law and insurance or medicine or manufacturing, for example, and will sometimes find themselves without a specific commercial resource to address a need.