Legal Commentary

How to find information about potential jurors and others ? including info about their political contributions

By A.J. Levy

Do you want to find information about potential jurors and others? Here?s where at no cost you can search multiple sites with one search: Kim Komando (that?s really her name — her site is Komando.com) has listed sites in which you can search social networking sites simultaneously. The sites include Pipl,  Wink, PeekYou  and Cvgadget.

How to search the “Deep Web” with “pipl“

She wrote this about pipl  in her article Find personal information in the deep Web :

[Google and Yahoo] can help you find information on specific people. But search engines don?t index some of the juiciest information. For that you need to go a little deeper.

pipl only searches by first and last name, city, state and country. But it searches the deep Web. These are the pages search engines often overlook.

It will search through public records, online store profiles, member directories, publications, etc. It will return the best results from multiple categories.

I tried all four sites and pipl seemed best to me. It even included the amounts and recipients of federal political contributions that some of the people I searched had given. Fascinating information if you?re trying to get info on a juror or anyone else.

Two of her other articles, Tools for finding long lost friends and Employers can find personal information online, give further details on cybersleuthing.

How to find both federal and state political contributions

You can also go to OpenSecrets.org, a site that collects lots of data on political contributions for federal offices, including the names of donors and the recipients and dates of the donations. (If you search OpenSecrets, make sure you put the potential donor’s last name first, followed by a comma and then the donor’s first name.)

For information about contributions to state candidates, you can go to the Institute on Money in State Politics, whose url is appropiately named  www.followthemoney.org.

 4/22/09 For a later post regarding more sites for finding info on jurors, lawyers, and others, click here.

Full post as published by Out of the Box Lawyering on March 21, 2009 (boomark / email).