How I check out a company in the time it takes to make coffee

I got burned once by a vendor that looked fine on the website and turned out to
be in the middle of a lawsuit and registered in a completely different name than
the one on the contract. After that I started checking companies before I signed
anything or got on a first call. The problem was doing it properly takes an hour
of opening the same six websites, so I mostly skipped it, which is exactly how
you get burned again.

Then I collapsed the whole check into one call, and now I run it on everyone.

What the check actually covers

Proper due diligence means the legal entity (is this a real registered company,
and which one), the filings, any litigation, whether they take government money,
and their reputation. Those live on SEC EDGAR, the GLEIF registry, state business
registries, CourtListener and USAspending. Five sites, five different search
boxes.

Here is the single call I run instead:

// tools/call → full_diligence_report
{ "company_name": "Palantir Technologies", "ticker": "PLTR" }

For Palantir that came back in about 50 seconds. The part that stopped me was the
entity section: alongside the US parent it returned the India subsidiary,
Palantir Shakti Technologies. Nobody types that name into a search box, because
nobody knows it exists. It shows up because the legal-entity lookup returns the
whole corporate family from the one name you asked about.

The rest came with it: the SEC identity (CIK 0001321655), the ten most recent
filings, ten court cases including one at the Delaware Supreme Court, and ten
federal contracts topped by a single Army task order worth $442,883,216.67.

How I use it

1. Run it on the name before the first call. By the time I am on the call I
   know their real corporate structure, whether they are in litigation, and how
   much of their revenue is government contracts. That changes what questions I
   ask.

2. Read the court and contract sections first. Those are the two that
   actually change a decision and the two that take longest to find by hand. A
   company with heavy government revenue concentration is a different risk than
   one without, and you want to know that before you are dependent on them.

3. Watch the entity section for surprises. Subsidiaries, a registered agent
   that does not match, a formation state that makes no sense. The structure
   tells you things the marketing site never will.

Why this works

Every piece of this is a public record that a company is required to file. The
information was always there. The only thing stopping people from using it is
that it is spread across five government databases with bad search. Put them
behind one call and a proper check costs less than the coffee you make while it
runs.

Honest limits

It reads public records, so it is only as good as the public record. A private
company in a state with thin disclosure returns less than a public one. The
court search covers US federal and state opinions in CourtListener, not every
county filing. If the answer is not in a public database, it tells you it found
nothing rather than guessing, which is the point.

The tool is the Company Diligence MCP
from The Mine Works, on Apify with your own account. It bills only when a section
returns something, so a clean company with no litigation costs nothing for the
empty court check.