A new counterparty lands on a matter. A company you have not litigated against. A director whose name means nothing to you. A firm on the other side of a transaction. Before you write a word you want to know who they are — and the usual way of finding out is three browser tabs, a search engine, and a Word note you hope is complete. Thirty to sixty minutes, and at the end you are still not sure you saw everything.

So we built the module that assembles that picture in one call.

What the card contains

You type the counterparty's name. The assistant queries the public registers that matter for an England and Wales matter and returns a structured intel card:

  • Companies House — the company record, its officers, its filing history.
  • The SRA register — where the counterparty, or the firm on the other side, is a regulated legal entity.
  • OFSI and AML sources — sanctions and financial-crime checks that a careful firm runs anyway and too often runs late.

It is a card, not a paragraph. The facts are laid out in a structure you can scan, not buried in prose you have to trust.

Every fact links to its source

This is the part we would not compromise on. Each line on the intel card carries a back-reference to the register entry it came from — the Companies House filing number, the SRA register entry, the sanctions listing. If the card says a director was appointed in 2019, you click through to the filing that says so.

We did this because an intel card that cannot be checked is a rumour with good formatting. A solicitor cannot act on "the tool said so" — you need to be able to stand behind every fact, which means being able to see where it came from. The back-reference turns the card from a summary you hope is right into evidence you can verify. If a line is ever wrong or stale, the source is one click away and you catch it before it costs you.

UK sources only

The intel is drawn from UK public registers, for UK matters. We did not stitch in foreign databases to pad the card, and we did not blur jurisdictions to look more comprehensive. An England and Wales matter is researched against England and Wales sources. That discipline is deliberate — a fact from the wrong register is worse than no fact, because it looks authoritative and is not.

Public record, on your terms

The registers this queries are public. The sensitive part is not the data — it is your matter, the fact that you are looking into this counterparty for this client. That context stays on your machine. The lookup gives you the public-record card; it does not broadcast why you asked for it.

What it replaces

Before: you open Companies House, then the SRA register, then a search engine, then the sanctions lists — copying findings into a note, hoping the picture is complete. Thirty to sixty minutes per counterparty, and the AML check often slips because it is the boring last step.

After: the module returns the structured card from the public registers in one call, each fact linked to its source, and you review it and go deeper where the matter warrants.

The point is not only the time. It is that the check you were meant to run, and might have deferred, has already run — and you can prove it did, line by line, if anyone ever asks. Today this runs on demand, one counterparty at a time.

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