Part 5 in a series on the fundamentals of legal entity identity data. After fifteen years of working with company register data from over 140 jurisdictions, processing data on more than 200 million legal entities, we can say with some authority: the local company registration number, despite coming from the right source, is fundamentally limited as a basis for systematic, cross-jurisdictional identification.
Part 4 in a series on the fundamentals of legal entity identity data. You might think your company has an identifier. It probably has several. But do any of them identify the legal entity itself?
Part 3 in a series on the fundamentals of legal entity identity data. In the previous post, we saw how a legal entity comes into being: through an act of registration that doesn't merely record the entity but creates it. We saw that the register is the authoritative source – the thing that makes a legal entity real. But if the register is the source of truth, how do you prove that truth to someone else? For centuries, the answer was simple: a certificate of incorporation. That answer is now dangerously inadequate.
Part 2 in a series on the fundamentals of legal entity identity data. In the previous post, we explored what a legal entity is: a construct so foundational to modern commerce that we rarely stop to examine what it actually is. We looked at the key features that make legal entities so powerful – distinct legal personality, universal recognition, chainability, and limited liability. Now we turn to a different question: how does a legal entity actually come into being?