Is it OK to use these records to find work?

Are these records public?

• WARN notices. Federal law makes an employer with 100 or more employees give written notice 60 days before a plant closing that puts 50 or more people at one site out of work, to the state as well as to the workers (29 U.S.C. 2101(a) and 2102(a)). California's own law (Cal-WARN) reaches further. It covers a site that has had 75 or more employees, part-time included, in the past 12 months, and requires the same 60 days' notice for any closure of that site, however few people it affects, and for a layoff of 50 or more there within 30 days (Cal. Lab. Code 1400.5, 1401(a); EDD). That is why EDD's list includes closures with a single employee affected. California EDD and Pennsylvania L&I publish a list of the notices they receive, for anyone to read.
• Bankruptcy petitions. The 14 courts we poll publish an RSS feed of new docket entries, with no login. Some courts publish none, such as the Middle District of Pennsylvania and the Southern District of Texas. What we don't cover.
• OSHA and EPA records. Published by the agencies for anyone to download. Works of the U.S. government carry no copyright (17 U.S.C. 105).

Where the data comes from lists each source and what it does not prove.

Businesses only, not individual debtors or workers

• We drop individual (personal) bankruptcy cases from everything we show and send. Only business debtors reach a list.
• The WARN lists EDD and PA publish give a count of employees affected. They never name the workers, and neither do we.
• The people a row can name are the ones the record names in their job, such as a Chapter 7 trustee on the docket. A business's legal name can include a person's name, such as a dental practice named for its dentist.
• To be exact: we keep the raw court feeds so we can check a row against what the court published, and those still contain individual cases. They are never shown or sent.

A closure notice, no bankruptcy. Whom do I talk to?

• The company. It still owns the equipment and decides how to sell it, unless one of the cases below applies. Ask for its operations or finance lead, and quote the notice.
• A lender with a lien. After a default, a lender with a security interest in the equipment may sell it itself, in a commercially reasonable way (UCC 9-610; in California, Com. Code 9610). Lenders usually file a public notice of the lien (a UCC financing statement), which you can look up, for example in the California Secretary of State's UCC search.
• An assignee or a receiver. Some wind-downs run outside bankruptcy, through an assignment for the benefit of creditors (in California, Code Civ. Proc. 493.010) or a receiver a court appoints (Code Civ. Proc. 564). Then you deal with the assignee or the receiver. If the company files for bankruptcy later, the rules below apply.

A company filed for bankruptcy. Whom do I talk to?

• Nothing around the case. Once a petition is filed, any act to take possession of estate property or to exercise control over it is stayed (11 U.S.C. 362(a)(3)). A sale outside the ordinary course of business needs notice to creditors and a chance to object; if nobody asks for a hearing in time, it can go ahead without one (11 U.S.C. 363(b)(1), 102(1)). A transfer that neither the Bankruptcy Code nor the court authorized can be undone (11 U.S.C. 549(a)). Don't arrange a purchase or a pickup outside the case.
• Chapter 7: the trustee, not the owner. The trustee's duty is to collect the property and turn it into money (11 U.S.C. 704(a)(1)). The trustee can hire an auctioneer only with the court's approval (11 U.S.C. 327(a)), on an application filed with the court (Bankruptcy Rule 2014). Chapter 7 rows name the trustee when the docket shows one.
• Chapter 11: usually the company, through its bankruptcy lawyer. The company usually stays in charge as "debtor in possession", with a trustee's powers (11 U.S.C. 1107(a)). Pitch the debtor's bankruptcy lawyer; the docket names them. That holds in a small-business (Subchapter V) case too: its trustee oversees the case, but the company still runs the business (11 U.S.C. 1183, 1184). Hiring an auctioneer still needs the court's approval (327(a), which applies to a debtor in possession through 1107(a)). Sales in the ordinary course of business need no hearing unless the court orders otherwise (11 U.S.C. 363(c)(1)); other sales follow the notice rule above. We never call a Chapter 11 a sale.
• Check that you can be hired. The estate can hire only a "disinterested person", and a creditor is not one (11 U.S.C. 101(14), with 327(a)). If the business owes your company money, for example on a lease, for parts or for a repair bill, ask your lawyer before you pitch. In a Subchapter V case, a claim from before the filing of less than ten thousand dollars does not by itself disqualify you (11 U.S.C. 1195).
• Buying, not auctioning. A dealer can buy from a Chapter 7 trustee or a Chapter 11 debtor in possession: make the offer to the trustee or to the debtor's bankruptcy lawyer. A sale outside the ordinary course follows the notice rule above. The disinterested-person rule covers people the estate hires, not buyers.
• A Chapter 7 case with a "No Asset" notice, where the trustee expects nothing to distribute to creditors, is left off your list.

Reaching out to a business

• Email. CAN-SPAM covers commercial email to businesses too. Each message needs a working way to opt out, you must honor an opt-out within 10 business days, and the message must give your valid physical postal address (15 U.S.C. 7704(a)(3) to (5)).
• Phone. Calls to a cell phone made with an autodialer or a prerecorded or artificial voice need the called person's prior express consent (47 U.S.C. 227(b)(1)(A)(iii)). We give no phone numbers.
• Quote the record, not a conclusion. "Your WARN notice of Oct 9 lists a planned effective date of Dec 15" is what a record says. "You're closing in December and selling the line" is not: a notice says nothing about what is inside, who owns it, or how it will be sold, and its date can move. We don't say it either.

What if a row is wrong and I look bad in front of an owner?

• Each row quotes its record and links to it, so you can check it before you call. See one row traced to its records.
• Sites we can't confirm in OSHA or EPA records are marked not confirmed, and the row says why.
• On Nov 6, 2026, a separate check, written without the pipeline's code, re-derived 15 random rows from the live government sources: 15 of 15 matched. Its link check covered all 87 rows those 15 were drawn from: 206 of 206 unique cited links resolved, so every link the 15 rows cite did too. An earlier check the same day matched 30 of 30. Read the check report.
• Records can be wrong at the source. Press Wrong record? on the row, in your feed or in Check my area results; it stores your note with the row in our review queue. If the button doesn't work for you, email hello@closurelead.com.

Will a competitor get the same list?

Possibly. Anyone can read these records. What you pay for is the time saved: one list filtered to your radius, each site checked against OSHA and EPA records, and each row linked to its record. We don't sell exclusive territories.

Who is behind this?

Helios One Oy, 3075 Clay St, San Francisco, CA 94115. Questions go to Touko Ursin, co-founder, at hello@closurelead.com. See About, or ask for a call.