ClawScore · Director Checks

How to Check Director Disqualification and Litigation (2026)

Updated for 2026 · Claw Editorial

Director disqualification and director litigation are two different checks that a careful buyer runs together. Disqualification is a status under the Companies Act that bars a person from being a director, usually because a company they ran failed to file its returns or defaulted. Litigation exposure is the set of court and tribunal cases the person is caught up in as an individual. One is a yes or no on the Ministry of Corporate Affairs record; the other is a search across many forums. This guide explains how to run both, and how to read a clean result. Last verified October 2026.

01The short answer

To check if a director is disqualified, look up their Director Identification Number (DIN) status on the Ministry of Corporate Affairs portal and check the MCA list of disqualified directors, which names people barred under Section 164(2) of the Companies Act, 2013. To check their litigation, search the person across the case systems: eCourts for district courts, the High Court and Supreme Court portals, the NCLT and the DRTs, including criminal and cheque bounce matters, because those attach to the individual.

Confirm the exact name and DIN first, so you are checking the right person and not a namesake, and treat any similar-name hit as something to verify rather than as proof.

02What director disqualification means

Under Section 164(2) of the Companies Act, 2013, a person can be disqualified from being a director for five years if a company they were a director of failed to file its financial statements or annual returns for three continuous years, or defaulted on certain deposits, debentures or dividends. There are also personal grounds under Section 164(1), such as being of unsound mind, an undischarged insolvent, or convicted of certain offences.

When a director is disqualified, Section 167 causes the office to be vacated. The practical effect is that the person cannot sit on boards, and a disqualification tied to one failed company follows them to the others. For the statute in detail, see Section 164 director disqualification.

03How to check disqualification

Disqualification is a status, so the check is a lookup rather than a search:

• Check the DIN status on the MCA portal at mca.gov.in. A DIN can be shown as active, deactivated or associated with a disqualification.
• Check the disqualified-director lists that the MCA and the Registrars of Companies publish, which name people barred under Section 164(2).
• Read the company filings of the companies the person is linked to, because the three-year non-filing default that triggers disqualification shows up there.

Confirm the name and DIN carefully, because a disqualification published against one individual says nothing about a different person who happens to share the name.

04How to check director litigation

Litigation against a director is a different exercise, because cases are spread across forums and indexed mostly by party name:

• eCourts at services.ecourts.gov.in, for civil suits, criminal cases and cheque bounce complaints naming the director.
• High Court and Supreme Court portals, for appeals, writs, quashing and bail matters.
• The NCLT, for company petitions and personal guarantor insolvency the director is party to.
• The DRTs, for bank recovery and enforcement against guarantees the director gave.

Run the search for the person and for the companies they are linked to. For the full individual method, see how to search cases against a company director.

05Reading the two together

The two checks answer different questions, and both matter:

A director can be clean on disqualification but heavily litigated, or disqualified over a filing default with no serious litigation at all. A buyer wants both pictures: the legal bar, and the pattern of disputes and criminal exposure behind it.

06What a clean result actually means

A clean disqualification status means the person is not on the lists you checked, on the date you checked, under the DIN and name you used. A clean litigation search means no matter was found in the registries you searched, on the date you searched, under the names you searched. Neither rules out a case under a different spelling, a former name, a forum you did not reach, an undigitised record, or a matter that arises later.

Match every hit to your person using the DIN and the linked company before you treat it as a finding, record what you covered, and re-check before a board appointment or a credit decision. This is research to inform a decision, not legal advice.

07Where Claw fits

Claw is an all-in-one legaltech platform for Indian advocates, law firms, and corporate legal teams, combining AI-based case search, an AI legal assistant (Legal GPT), case management, and compliance automation across all Indian courts and tribunals.

ClawScore, at clawscore.clawlaw.in, is Claw's litigation and criminal-risk service for the litigation half of this check. You give it a director's name and it searches every matter across 9,102 courts, benches and forums and returns one scored Excel workbook: a Summary tab with a ClawScore risk band (Clean, Low, Moderate or High), a Matters tab, a Related parties tab that pulls in the person's other directorships, guarantees and group entities, and a Coverage tab recording what was searched. Every finding carries a MATCH CONFIDENCE, so a namesake is flagged for you to verify rather than treated as the same person, which matters most when you are checking a common name. Its Constant Monitoring runs daily, weekly or monthly scans on a watched list and reports what is New, Changed or Closed, so a director who is clean when appointed stays watched. It draws on 30 crore+ judgments, with Supreme Court decisions from 1950 and High Court decisions from 1990, and returns results in under 5 seconds. Claw does not train its AI models on your documents. You still confirm the formal disqualification status on the MCA itself.

Create a FREE Claw account to check a director's litigation and set up monitoring, and use case search across Indian courts to surface matters against the person and their directorships.

08Sources and further reading

• Ministry of Corporate Affairs (DIN status and disqualified-director lists): mca.gov.in
• India Code (Companies Act, 2013, bare text): indiacode.nic.in
• eCourts Services (district and subordinate courts): services.ecourts.gov.in
• National Judicial Data Grid (pendency data): njdg.ecourts.gov.in
• Claw: clawlaw.in

Government portals are the authoritative record. This guide is general information, not legal advice; confirm disqualification on the MCA and match any case to your person before acting.

09Frequently asked questions