Vendor Due Diligence in India: Corporate Records vs Court Records

Vendor Due Diligence · Explainer

Updated for 2026 · Claw Editorial

Before you onboard a vendor, a supplier, or a business partner in India, someone on your team usually runs a quick check: is this company real, and is it in trouble. The problem is that one search rarely answers both halves of that question. Corporate records tell you whether a company legally exists and files its paperwork. Court records tell you whether it is being sued, or has already lost. This page explains what each type of record shows, what it misses, and how to combine both so your vendor due diligence is not accidentally checking only half the picture.

01Why one search is not enough for vendor due diligence

Vendor due diligence in India usually means answering two very different questions, and each question is answered by a different set of records.

A company can look clean on paper and still carry litigation risk

A vendor can be a validly incorporated company, current on its annual filings, with no red flags on its registration record, and still be a defendant in half a dozen commercial disputes, or sitting on an unpaid judgment against it. None of that shows up in a company registration search. It only shows up if you separately check court records.

A company can be in active litigation and still be a live, compliant entity

The reverse is also true. A company can have a pending case, even a serious one, and still be fully active on its registration record, current on filings, with no strike-off or liquidation flag. A litigation hit is not automatically a registration problem, and a clean registration record is not automatically proof the company has no disputes.

Corporate records answer whether a company legally exists and keeps its paperwork current. Court records answer whether it is being sued, or has already lost. A vendor check that uses only one of these answers only half the question.

Teams that skip one half usually do it for a practical reason: the two searches sit on different government systems, use different identifiers, and do not talk to each other. That is worth understanding before you build a due diligence checklist.

02What corporate records show

Corporate records are the official registration data the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) holds for every company and LLP incorporated in India, searchable free of cost on the MCA portal.

• Legal identity and status: the Corporate Identification Number (CIN), date of incorporation, registered office address, and whether the company is active, dormant, struck off, or under liquidation.
• Ownership and management: the names and Director Identification Numbers (DIN) of current directors, and their other directorships.
• Capital structure: authorised and paid-up share capital.
• Charges on assets: whether the company has pledged assets against secured borrowing, which matters if you are extending credit to the vendor.
• Filing compliance: whether annual returns and financial statements have actually been filed on time, a useful proxy for how well-run the company is administratively.

What corporate records do not show is just as important: they say nothing about pending court cases, past judgments, arbitration awards, or disputes with customers, employees, or regulators. A struck-off or under-liquidation flag can hint that something is wrong, but it will not tell you what, or who sued whom.

For a closer, more technical look at how an MCA search differs from a litigation search in practice, see the difference between MCA search and litigation search.

03What court records show

Court records are the case-level data held by the judiciary itself: pending matters, hearing history, orders, and final judgments, across the Supreme Court, the High Courts, district courts, and tribunals such as the NCLT, consumer forums, and arbitration bodies.

• Pending litigation: whether the vendor, or its directors, are currently a party to a case, as plaintiff or defendant, and at what stage it stands.
• Past judgments and orders: whether the company has already lost a case, has an unpaid decree against it, or has a pattern of disputes.
• Insolvency and tribunal proceedings: whether the company is or has been before the NCLT or another tribunal, which is a materially different signal from a routine commercial suit.

Court records in India sit across several separate systems rather than one. District and many lower-court cases are searchable through the eCourts services portal and the National Judicial Data Grid; the Supreme Court and each High Court run their own case-status search; tribunals like the NCLT publish their own case lists. Each uses a slightly different interface, and none of them is unified with the others.

That fragmentation creates a second, quieter problem: name matching. Company names are rarely written the same way twice, "Private Limited" becomes "Pvt Ltd" or is dropped entirely, and a common promoter or director name can belong to dozens of unrelated people. A litigation search that matches only on exact spelling will miss real hits and surface false ones.

Court records also say nothing about the company’s legal structure, ownership, or filing compliance. A company can have zero pending cases and still be dormant, under-capitalised, or behind on its annual filings. For a deeper look at running a background check specifically through court records, see company background verification using court records.

04Corporate records vs court records, at a glance

05How to run the check properly

A vendor due diligence check that covers both halves does not need to be complicated, but it does need both steps done in order.

Start with the corporate record. Search the vendor by CIN or company name on the MCA portal. Confirm the company is active, note its registered office and directors, and check whether any charges are registered against its assets. A struck-off, dormant, or under-liquidation status is a reason to stop and ask questions before going further.

Then run the litigation check, on more than one name. Search the company’s exact registered name, common short forms of it, and the names of its key directors, since a promoter’s litigation history often matters as much as the company’s own. Check across the Supreme Court, the relevant High Court, and district or tribunal records where the vendor operates.

Cross-check anything unusual. If a director appears on several other companies, or if the litigation search turns up a case that does not obviously match the vendor, verify before treating it as a hit or dismissing it.

For occasional, low-volume checks, doing this manually across the MCA portal and the relevant court portals is workable. For teams running vendor due diligence at scale, such as procurement, credit, or onboarding teams checking many vendors a month, manually hopping between portals and matching names by eye does not hold up, and this is where dedicated litigation due diligence software earns its keep. See our guide to the best litigation due diligence software in India for how the main options compare.

06Where 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.

Claw does not replace the corporate-records half of a vendor check, that is MCA data and stays a separate lookup. What Claw is built for is the court-records half. Its case search covers the Supreme Court (1950 to 2026) and all 25 High Courts (1980 to 2026), so a name-based litigation search across the courts most likely to carry a vendor’s significant commercial disputes and appeals returns verified, court-ready citations in seconds, with name-tolerant matching that helps with the spelling and short-form problem described above. Once a specific matter is identified, whether at a High Court, a district court, or a tribunal, Claw’s case tracking follows it across 8,200-plus courts, including tribunals and district courts, with automatic updates, so a vendor risk you flag today does not need to be re-checked by hand every month.

07Sources and further reading

Official sources for the records discussed on this page:

• Ministry of Corporate Affairs (company/LLP master data): mca.gov.in
• eCourts Services (case status, district and select High Court cases): services.ecourts.gov.in
• National Judicial Data Grid (via eCourts): ecourts.gov.in
• Claw: clawlaw.in

Always confirm a company’s current status and any live case details directly on the relevant official portal before relying on them for a decision.

08Frequently asked questions