Case studies / Reclaiming your life after a federal case
Reclaiming your life after a federal case.
A judge handed down 48 months. Google handed down a life sentence. Someone who had paid their debt in full was still being introduced, by a search engine, as the worst day of their life. This is the work we are proudest of.
The problem
A judge handed down 48 months. Google handed down a life sentence.
The federal case ended. Every condition was met, the supervision finished, the debt paid in exactly the way the system says a debt gets paid. The search results kept issuing their own sentence, and that one came with no end date. Court-record aggregators, a wave of local news coverage, and a couple of mugshot-style listings owned the first page of their name.
That is not an abstraction, and it is not vanity. It is a rental application that goes quiet after the landlord runs a name. It is a hiring manager who was enthusiastic on the phone and unreachable by the end of the week. It is a bank, a licensing board, a background check for a volunteer shift at a kid's school, a new neighbor who looked before saying hello. Nobody ever says the search result was the reason, because nobody has to. The case was closed. Google had not gotten the memo.
The solution
The legal-listing sites that republish filings, Justia, CourtListener, UniCourt, Trellis, and the rest, respond to direct takedown and de-indexing requests. We filed them and cleared every listing that was eligible.
The local outlets that ran the story will not delete it, and we would never ask anyone to fake the record. Real news does not come down. The only honest way to move it is to outrank it, so we pushed the local coverage off page one with stronger, more relevant results.
We gave the search engines something more interesting, more accurate, and more current than a years-old court story. We built a new personal website and a wiki presence, a proper biography, and authoritative profile pages across the platforms that actually rank, LinkedIn, professional directories, and reputable bio sites. Substantive, true, and built to climb to the top of the name. New pages normally take time to earn a search engine's trust, so we use a proprietary mix of authority signals that helps search engines trust new profiles, pages, and directories faster.
As the new pages gained authority, the aggregator remnants and the local news slid off page one. We monitor it on a recurring schedule, because suppression is something you maintain, not something you do once.
- Justia Removed
- CourtListener Removed
- UniCourt Removed
- Trellis Removed
- PacerMonitor De-indexed
- DocketBird Suppressed
- Casemine Suppressed
- News coverage Suppressed
The court-record aggregators are third-party sites that republish filings, so most respond to direct takedown and de-indexing requests. Coverage on real news outlets cannot be removed, so we outrank it instead. We tell you which bucket each result falls into on day one.
Six months, month by month
- Month 0 Nine negative results on page one Aggregators, local news, and mugshot-style listings owned the name. The case was over; the search results were not.
- Month 2 Down to six The first aggregator removals landed. The owned properties were built and starting to be indexed.
- Month 4 Down to two The personal site and profiles climbed past the remaining coverage. Removals continued on schedule.
- Month 6 Zero Page one was accurate, current, and mostly properties the person controls. Monitoring keeps it that way.
The results
Representative results. Down is the win. Client specifics under NDA.
Key takeaway
A sentence has an end date. A search result does not, unless somebody goes and gives it one. People who have done their time deserve a real shot at the next job, the next apartment, and the next introduction, and reclaiming the first page of their name is one of the most concrete ways to make that shot real. We are a proud second-chance employer, and this is why.
Ready to move forward?
Every conversation is confidential. Tell us what shows up when someone searches you, and we will tell you straight what is possible.
Start the conversation →Prefer email? Write to us directly.