Lien Search

Introduction

This guide explains how to use the API endpoints for searching liens. A lien is a legal claim or right against a property, typically used as security for a debt or obligation. Filing a lien allows a creditor to secure their interest in a debtor's property.

You can visit Lien Filing for more information on how to use Baselayer for filing liens.

Initial Lien Search Request

Users can now use the business_id of any business to initiate a search for liens using our API.

To start a lien search, simply make a POST request to /lien_searches using the business's UUID. If the field search_states is set to null, the liens search will exclusively target the domestic state of the business. A domestic state refers to the state within which the business has filed its articles of incorporation, and is recognized as its home state for legal and tax purposes. You can also override the search and look for liens in specific states by adding the two-letter abbreviations for the states you desire.

Example payload:

{  
  "search_states": [  
    "AK",  
    "AZ",  
    "AR"  
  ],  
  "business_id": "f7688172-2e5f-400b-9e3f-8d2f93eabd79"  
}
  

We will search for and return all the liens of closely-named businesses within the domestic or the selected states.

After initializing the search, we emit a LiensSearch.submitted webhook event to indicate that a lien search has commenced. Upon completion, we emit a LiensSearch.completed webhook event.

In addition to the webhooks, one can also retrieve all liens through a variety of other methods:

Retrieving Lien Details

After the initial lien search request is retrieved, in order to obtain the details for all the liens identified, you must make a GET request. This can be done using the liens_search_request_id that was returned as part of the response to your POST request, and ordering the details with GET /lien_searches/{liens_search_request_id}.

Liens sometimes include documents which may or may not be available for download. If the field document_filename is not null, the document is available for download.

Retrieve Lien Filing Documents

In order to retrieve the PDF document associated with a specific lien filing record, you need to make a GET request with the previously-used liens_search_request_id, and the filing_id specific to the lien filing.

The endpoint /lien_searches/{liens_search_request_id}/filings/{filing_id} will download the lien documents as a combined PDF file.