Asset and identity searches for New Zealand law firms

Advising a client to sue is a costs decision as much as a legal one. Before a statement of claim is drafted, the firm needs to know whether the defendant holds anything worth enforcing against, whether that asset is already encumbered, and whether the defendant can be located and served. Those three questions sit across property records, security interest registrations, company filings, credit reporting data and insolvency events. Answering them piecemeal takes days and leaves the file with a scattered trail of PDFs and no clear record of who looked at what.

intelID returns those elements from one enquiry. Registered property and title data show ownership and interests. PPSR data shows what is already secured and to whom. Companies Office data shows directorships, shareholdings, the registered office and the address for service. Insolvency data shows whether the party is already in bankruptcy, a no-asset procedure or a debt repayment order, which is often the answer that avoids a proceeding that was never going to recover anything. Credit reporting data is available where the firm has a lawful authorised purpose for it under the Credit Reporting Privacy Code 2020.

The same enquiry supports service. A current address confirmed from several licensed sources before an agent is instructed is cheaper than three failed attempts and an application for substituted service. Where the party is a company, the registered office and address for service come from the same result.

A firm carries responsibility for searches conducted in its name. That responsibility sits with the firm as an agency, not only with the individual who ran the query, and the supervising partner is the person who has to answer for it. intelID is built so that answer is available on demand.

Every account belongs to a named, verified individual. Every search requires an authorised-purpose declaration before results are returned, and the declaration is recorded with the user, the timestamp and the sources queried. Role-based access lets a firm limit which sources junior staff can reach. Nothing in the log can be altered by the person who created it, so a supervising partner reviewing a matter six months later sees what was actually done.

No subject data is used for marketing, resold, or exposed to public indexing. Hosting, encryption and incident handling are set out on the security page, and the statutory position is covered in full on the compliance page.

Reports are for the firm’s own internal business purposes and the purpose declared when the search was run. They may be disclosed to your client, or to a court, tribunal or regulator, in connection with the matter the search was run for. Wider distribution needs our prior written consent. The position is set out in clause 7.1 of our terms and conditions.

The enquiry sequence follows how an instruction is actually worked rather than how a database is organised. Every integrated source and its legal basis is listed on the data sources page. Pricing is a monthly subscription plus a per-search fee, set out on the pricing page, which means a firm carrying occasional enquiry work is not paying enterprise seat costs to keep the capability available.