How to Check Taiwan Court Records: Due Diligence Before Doing Business With a Taiwanese Company

When we built Card2Gold's "company background check" feature, we wired in the Judicial Yuan's judgment search too — scan a card, and the system automatically looks up whether the company has related court judgments and summarizes them. The biggest thing we took away from doing this at scale: court judgments are one of the few risk signals in Taiwan that are free, public and genuinely useful — yet nine out of ten salespeople have never checked them. This guide lays out how to search, how to read the results, and the pitfalls we hit along the way. If you're a foreign company doing due diligence on a Taiwanese partner or supplier, this is a check worth knowing.

Why check whether the other party has litigation before you do business?

Before signing, beyond financials and company size, "does the counterparty or its owner have active litigation" is an important — but often overlooked — risk indicator:

* Bad-debt risk — if the counterparty is frequently pursued over unpaid bills or purchase payments, its cash flow may be shaky, and collecting from them could become a problem for you too.
* Performance risk — a company with a long record of contract disputes is more likely to default or renege on you as well.
* Reputation and legal exposure — dealing with a party that has fraud or infringement records can taint your brand and even drag you into a dispute.

The point isn't "any litigation means you can't work together" — it's that knowing in advance lets you assess the risk.

Searching the Judicial Yuan judgment system: step by step

Taiwan's court judgments are public by law. The search portal is the Judicial Yuan's judgment search system — free, no registration required.

• Open the search system — go to judgment.judicial.gov.tw.
• Enter a name as your keyword — in the full-text search, enter the company name or the owner's name. For a company, the full name works fine; for an individual, common names produce a lot of noise, so add other conditions to narrow it down.
• Use the filters — you can filter by court, case type (civil / criminal / administrative) and date range. Start by looking at just the last 3–5 years.
• Determine plaintiff vs. defendant — open a judgment and check the parties first. If the counterparty is the "defendant" and the case is about unpaid debt or fraud, that's a bigger red flag; if they're the "plaintiff," they may simply be pursuing a claim, which means something different.
• Read the right sections — judgments are long. Start with the "holding" (the ruling) to get the direction, then read the "facts and reasoning" to understand what was in dispute. You don't need to read every word.

3 things we learned reading judgments at scale

After turning judgment search into an automated feature and running it across a large number of companies, these are the points newcomers most often get wrong:

* "Has judgments" doesn't mean "has problems." Plenty of large companies naturally have a stack of judgments — traffic, labor and small consumer disputes make up a big share. Don't panic at a high case count; look at the case type and the amounts, and don't treat trivial cases as landmines.
* The "role" matters more than the mere existence. For the same company, being a defendant repeatedly pursued over debts is the opposite of being a plaintiff actively protecting its receivables or intellectual property — the risk implications are completely reversed.
* Name collisions are the biggest trap. This is especially severe for individuals: a common name like "Wang Chih-ming" can match a pile of unrelated people. Always cross-check with the company tax ID, address or job title so you don't pin someone else's lawsuit on your customer.

Beyond judgments: 3 free risk-check channels

Judgments are only one side of risk. Use these alongside them for a fuller picture:

* Full-text judgments — the Judicial Yuan judgment search system, the primary source described above.
* Statutes and interpretations — Lawbank; when a judgment's wording is dense, this helps you look up the relevant statutes and interpretations.
* Registration and operating status — the Ministry of Economic Affairs' business registration public search; confirm the company still exists and who the responsible person is, then cross-reference against the parties in a judgment.

5 questions to ask when reading a judgment

Here's the whole read distilled into a single checklist. When you find a judgment, ask yourself:

* ☐ Is the counterparty the plaintiff or the defendant?
* ☐ What is the case about? (Sale of goods / negotiable instruments / labor / infringement / fraud…)
* ☐ How large is the amount involved?
* ☐ Is it a recent case or something from long ago?
* ☐ Is the case final, or still under appeal?

Answer those five, and you'll have a clear sense of whether this litigation is something to worry about.

Automating the whole process

Honestly, manually searching the Judicial Yuan company by company and then reading judgments one at a time is time-consuming, and the legal language isn't friendly to non-lawyers. That's exactly why we built judgment search into Card2Gold — after you scan a card, the system automatically searches for related judgments, summarizes the key points, and pulls it together with business registration, website and news on a single card detail page. If you'd rather do it yourself, this guide gives you the full method; if you'd rather save time, let a tool run the first pass of filtering for you.