Louisiana Secretary of State Business Search

The state of Louisiana makes it relatively simple to look up business information through the website of the Secretary of State. Below we'll walk through the steps for doing this, and show you some additional resources you might not know about.

There are any number of reasons you might need this information. It's absolutely critical when performing due diligence and for Know Your Client (KYC) purposes. If you're only performing these kinds of searches occasionally, Missouri's search portal allows you to find the information you're looking for quickly and easily. If you're searching records like these in high numbers, there are some tools you'll want to know about, but we'll come back to that in just a moment.

You can find the search page for Louisiana Business Filings linked above. The landing page looks like this:

The search interface is very basic. Beyond entering your search term (choosing either company name, one of the identifying numbers, or the Registered Agent), there is no way to limit search results.

There's a captcha as well, and most of the time (about 75% of the searches I tried), it requires you to select pictures before clicking to search.

When you perform the search, you'll be directed to the results page, which looks like this:

The results are sorted by company name in alphabetical order. You cannot reverse the default order, or sort by another field. A search will only allow 250 results to be returned; if there are more, there's a prompt to refine your search with more of the business name.

On the results page, you'll see very limited information: the company name (in bold for companies that remain active), the type of business (its legal structure), and the city in which it's located.

Clicking on the 'Details' button for any of the records will bring you to the details page for that business. Those pages look like this:

(Fans of Looney Tunes cartoons will understand why I chose this example.)

There's a bit more information here about the business, including names and contact information for Officers and Registered Agents, and important dates such as their initial filing date and that of their last filing.

The only additional option here is to click one of the three very small buttons at the top of the business details page.

You can order certified copies of the business documents (fees range between $15 and $25), and you can subscribe to notifications for the business record, in which case an email will be sent to you whenever there's an update to the record (this is free of charge and doesn't require an account). The 'Print Detailed Record' button just generates a print version of what you see on the details screen.

Louisiana offers a limited amount of business information at no cost, but their search interface makes it cumbersome due to a lack of search filters. If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, this would quickly consume a lot of time. Furthermore, Secretary of State data is different from one state to another, so combining and integrating data from multiple states is complex.