First speaker up was Arthur West, Product Development Manager for Companies House, to tell us a little about his organisation and what it does.

Companies House began life along with the limited liability company in 1844. The three functions that Companies House performs are: the incorporation, re-registration and striking-off of companies; the registration of documents that must be filed under company, insolvency and related legislation; and the provision of company information to the public. Obviously this latter function was the one of most interest to the gathered attendees.

The key documents gathered by Companies House were respectfully noted: the incorporation documents (memoranda and articles); details of director changes (appointment (288a), termination (288b) and change of particulars (288c)); details of the registered office (287); particulars of mortgages or charges (395); and filings made on the anniversary of incorporation (annual returns (363s)).

Companies House works tirelessly to make sure that the truckload (literally) of these documents that arrives every day is processed and made publicly available as quickly as possible. This includes finding new ways of making the submission and filing process more streamlined and convenient for the submitting companies. One such method has been to make it possible for companies to file their annual returns electronically, a move which in theory at least should make the filing process easier for all parties concerned. The technical aspects of getting companies to file their returns has not historically been the greatest hurdle, however, and Companies House has other tools at its disposal in persuading companies to file documents in a timely fashion. The accounts of private companies must be filed within ten months of the end of their financial year, and this period drops to seven months for public companies. In the past, a surprising percentage of companies failed to meet these deadlines, but thanks to the introduction of a more rigorous system of late filing penalties, 96% of accounts were filed on time during 2002.

Those in the remaining small percentage are presumably the ones that you desperately need to get hold of yesterday in preparation for a pitch.

Arthur went on to look at the information available from the Companies House website, and their online subscription service Companies House Direct. I think most of us are familiar with what’s available from the free part of the website. It is possible to search through an alphabetical list of all live companies, and Arthur highlighted the use of this as a validation list. He also mentioned the human filtering process that goes on at Companies House for potentially contentious company names, and its occasional fallibility (as an example pulling Norfolk & Chance out from the list).

From this list of companies it is possible to obtain basic company details such as the registered address and nature of business. There is also the option to order further details on a given company, providing you have a credit card handy. The other list freely available on the site is the Disqualified Directors Index, which provides names and dates, and also reasons for disqualification.

The Companies House Direct subscription service provides a much greater wealth of information. As well as being able to search out companies and directors, you are able to drill further down into results, for example taking a director of a company and looking to see which other companies he or she has directorship appointments with.

Of course, Companies House Direct also has the advantage of giving you instant access to any of the scanned filings made by a company. A monitoring service allows you to keep an eye on the activities of a company by sending specified documents to you as soon as they are filed.

Arthur finished by pointing out some of the other materials freely available on the website, including guidance booklets and FAQs (these being guides to companies making filings rather than company research guides for information professionals(!)), and the modifiable PDF versions of the most commonly filed Companies House forms.

The second speaker on the podium was David Ralph, Training and Account Manager for Perfect Information.

David proceeded to give us a run down of his product, Perfect Information (PI). PI content includes company filings from all over the globe, as well as a live feed from the Regulatory News Service (RNS) and shareholder filings that are often invaluable to corporate lawyers as precedents.

There are, broadly speaking, three main sources of company information: company websites; Companies House; and vendors such as PI and RM Group. I can almost imagine the number of times David must have been asked why anyone should pay for a service such as PI when much of the information that could be found within was freely available elsewhere, and he volunteered the answer without prompting: convenience. PI gathers company information from a wide selection of sources, the information is timely, significant archives are available, and the functionality within the service allows the data to be scoured in a variety of different ways. For example, the usual company name, document type etc. searches can be performed, but it is also possible to search for materials by their assigned classifications, from acquisitions to white knight offers. This latter method of searching, when combined with some of the other options available, is an invaluable method of searching out precedents. Five minutes on a service such as PI could retrieve more comprehensive and accurate results than an hour’s worth of time trawling through free sites and other sources: therein lies the value. Like Companies House Direct, there is also the option of a monitoring service. PI also has a team of research staff to help out with the things that you can’t find. From experience, I would also add that if you take advantage of some of the product training available, PI is a service that you could happily push out to end users (and for extra incentive, fee earners get CPD points for attending training sessions).

The third and final speaker for the evening was Manny Cohen, Managing Director of RM Group.

I must confess I was half expecting a product push, but after a brief mention of aRMadillo, and RM Group’s impressive databases of company, trade mark and domain name registration information, Manny launched off into quite a refreshing presentation.

The angle of Manny’s entertaining talk was to look at various filed company information from the viewpoint of the company owners. With the aid of a bumper pack of company documents we walked through the birth of a company, starting with the memoranda and articles, which only ever get reviewed “when things go wrong”. We were also shown the registration pack issued by Companies House, complete with rubber stamp and the frame in which a company director could proudly exhibit his or her certificate of incorporation. A battered old company register was waved in the air: a record of various company happenings, from minutes of meetings to records of share transfers, this had such a familiar worn look to it that it immediately instilled the sense of being part of someone’s life, instead of merely a source of information.

We were given an appreciation of the wealth of company information openly available to us in the UK when Manny finished by looking at the difficulty of obtaining information from offshore and certain foreign countries, where even verifying the existence of a company could be difficult without that company director’s permission. His point ultimately being that little information comes for free, and that trustworthy information can be expected to be downright expensive.

Overall, I had mixed feelings about the event. I’m not sure what I expected, perhaps going along with some unfair expectation that the session would give me an insight that would transform me into a company information super-searcher. I think on the evening I was more entertained than informed. At library school I missed the trip to Companies House, so Arthur’s talk was new to me, giving an idea of what happens behind the scenes of a familiar establishment. I already use Perfect Information, so there was little new for me in David’s talk, but if I didn’t I think it would have grasped my attention much more firmly. Manny’s presentation was upbeat and entertaining, and offered a slant on company information that I had never really stopped to think about before. If the event didn’t teach me a great deal, however, it was very useful in helping me crystallise what I already knew about company information, and more importantly what I didn’t know, and the speakers were available to grill during the post-talk refreshments. From this point of view, I was quite happy to blow the mothballs from my wallet, and I will look forward to the more in-depth follow up session coming from CLIG next year.