About Us- BankruptcyObserver.com

Our mission is to be the very best provider of bankruptcy data.

Our journey to building this website and providing bankruptcy information started as an effort to satisfy our own needs. We were active users of a system called PACER, and we found that we wanted to know more than PACER’s limited query options allowed. (The data is there! Why can’t I get to it?!)

For those who don’t know, all bankruptcy data in the United States comes from the same source, PACER. PACER debuted in 2001. While it is a tremendous resource (literally changing the way information in federal court filings is disseminated), its structure and limited query options make it difficult to use directly.

We have been using PACER since the beginning. If you want to see what is happening right now in a specific case that you already know and you have been authorized to access the service, then PACER is all you need.

But, let's say you want to know something else, like:

• What new bankruptcies were filed in the northeast United States with assets of more than $1 million?
• I’m monitoring 100 bankruptcy cases; how can I easily see if new docket items were added over the past day? How can I highlight just important docket items?
• Has Regions Bank been listed as a creditor in any recent bankruptcy filings?
• What real estate bankruptcies are nearing the deadline for a sale of the real estate?

The answer that we devised was to create our own database. We would pull the essential information from PACER, then query that database. (Our MVP for this product was actually an analyst named Jerry who spent all day long querying PACER, writing the results of his queries on a yellow legal pad, then trying to get someone’s attention. He could only cover 3 states doing this, and we quickly ran out of legal pads!)

So, that’s it. We started out with a site called TrollerBk.com because back in 2005 it was cool to come up with an odd name, and a few years later we added BankruptcyObserver.com. Troller now operates as the tool for more complicated query needs, while BankruptcyObserver is for users who have less complicated needs.