How does a potential plaintiff determine whether you have enough money to make you an attractive lawsuit target? Well, thanks to the Internet, an attorney can find out everything he needs to know. The rapid advances in both computer and Internet technology now allow unprecedented access to your most sensitive personal and financial information. Very detailed information describing all of your real estate and business interests, the names of your banks and brokerage firms, your account balances, and your transaction history can be accessed and assembled without your knowledge or permission. Today, anyone can find out what you own and your net worth.

These capabilities are fairly new. Until quite recently, separate bits and pieces of information about your life lay about in file cabinets and county records around the country. Your birth certificate, driving records, insurance file, marriage licenses, and loan applications were maintained in written files, record books, or possibly in the computer in the records department. None of this information could be accessed from outside the office where the records were kept.

So, let’s say you desired information from your birth certificate, you had to go down to the records office in the county where you were born and peruse through the records index. If an investigator was searching about to gather information about you, he physically had to search through library archives and public records. Doing so was both very laborious and expensive.

This has all changed. The scraps of paper and the written records are now converted into an electronic form that can be stored and searched by a computer. And both the computers and databases are connected through the Internet so that information in any one computer can be accessed and searched from another. So, if somebody wants to gather any information about you, a single question hunts through billions of documents stored on thousands of interconnected databases to produce a very thorough profile of your life.

If you would like more information regarding asset protection, trusts, family limited partnerships or the subject of this article please call or email our office.