Probate Lead Data Accuracy: What to Verify Before You Buy

Every probate lead vendor says their data is accurate. None of them say the opposite, which means the claim carries almost no information on its own. Probate lead data accuracy is not one property — it is at least five separate things that can each be right or wrong independently, and a provider can be scrupulous about one while being quietly indifferent to the rest.

That matters because the cost of a wrong record is not evenly distributed. A duplicate costs a few minutes. A mis-attributed death costs a firm its dignity, because someone on your staff sends a letter about a person who is not dead, or addresses a grieving family by the name of someone else entirely. This piece breaks the word “accurate” into its parts, explains how probate records decay, and gives you a set of questions and a small audit you can run before you sign anything.

What probate lead data accuracy actually means

When a vendor quotes an accuracy figure, the first question is always: accuracy of what? These are the distinct properties hiding inside the word, roughly in order of how badly it hurts when they fail.

Identity. Is this a real death, correctly attributed to a real person? Name collisions are the common failure. Two people share a name in the same metro area, an obituary is matched to the wrong public record, and a firm ends up writing to a living person about their own estate. This is the failure with genuine human cost, and it is the one worth the most scrutiny.

Eligibility. Is this death likely to produce a probate matter at all? Many estates never open a probate case — assets held in trust, joint tenancy with right of survivorship, beneficiary designations, and small-estate procedures all route around it. A file of every recorded death in a county is not a probate lead list; it is a death list, and the difference is most of the file. Our post on why most decedent lists are wasted covers this filtering problem in detail.

Contactability. Is there a working address or phone, and does it belong to a person who is still there? Public records frequently yield the decedent’s own last-known address, which is precisely the address least likely to reach anyone.

Relationship. Is the named contact the person with authority or interest — a surviving spouse, an adult child, a named personal representative — or a cousin the matching algorithm found because the surname matched? Reaching the wrong relative is not just wasted postage; it is an awkward call for everyone.

Timeliness. How old is the record when it reaches you? Probate work has a short window of receptivity, and a technically correct record delivered eight weeks late is a record someone else already worked. We wrote about that clock in speed to lead in probate.

A provider can be at ninety-something percent on identity and near zero on relationship. Any single headline number is concealing that spread.

How probate records go stale

Death is a fixed event, which makes it tempting to assume the record around it is stable too. It is not. Almost everything attached to that record moves after the date of death, and the direction of movement is always away from usefulness.

The estate progresses. Within weeks, a personal representative may be appointed and counsel may be retained. The lead is still factually accurate — the person did die, the estate does exist — but the opportunity has closed. Accuracy and availability are different things, and vendors are rarely measured on the second.

Households change. Surviving spouses move in with family. Homes are listed and sold. Phone numbers attached to the deceased are disconnected. An address verified in March is an assumption by September.

The file is a snapshot, not a feed. This is the structural issue. If a provider assembles a file quarterly, then the median record you receive is already weeks old before it leaves their system, and the oldest records approach the full refresh interval. A vendor can describe that file as ninety-eight percent accurate at the moment of assembly and be telling the truth, while what lands in your inbox is materially older. The distinction between a periodically rebuilt list and a continuously updated one is the subject of real-time versus static lead lists.

Resale erodes exclusivity, not accuracy. Worth separating clearly, because vendors sometimes blur it. A record sold to nine firms is not less accurate. It is less valuable, and no accuracy statistic will show you that. Ask about exclusivity as its own question.

Seven questions that test an accuracy claim

These are ordered so that the early ones are hard to deflect. A provider who answers all seven concretely is being straight with you, more or less regardless of what the numbers turn out to be.

1. What is your source of record? Court filings, published obituaries, funeral home notices, and purchased third-party files have very different reliability profiles. Ask which one is primary and which are supplementary. A vendor who will not describe their sources is asking you to trust an output with no visible input.

2. How often is the file refreshed, and what is the median age of a record when I receive it? The second half is the part that matters and the part rarely volunteered. “Daily” refresh with a weekly delivery batch still produces records that are days old on arrival.

3. What proportion of raw records do you discard, and on what basis? This is the most diagnostic question on the list. A provider who discards essentially nothing is not filtering for probate eligibility — they are reselling a death list. A provider who discards a large share should be able to explain the criteria.

4. How do you establish that a case is probate-eligible? Listen for concrete signals: property ownership records, absence of a trust indicator, estate value thresholds, court filing status. Listen for vagueness like “proprietary scoring” offered with no description of the inputs.

5. Who is the named contact, and how was that relationship determined? Ask whether the contact is verified against a source or inferred from a surname and address match. Inference is not illegitimate, but you should know which you are buying.

6. Are your quoted rates measured or estimated? If measured, ask when, on what sample size, and by whom. A vendor who has genuinely measured their match rate can tell you the sample. One who has not will change the subject to testimonials.

7. Will you give me a sample I can verify independently? The single best test. A provider confident in their data will hand you fifty records and let you check them against the county record yourself. Reluctance here tells you more than any of the previous six answers.

How to run your own accuracy audit

You do not need a data team for this. You need a sample, a spreadsheet, and about two hours of a paralegal’s time. The point is not to catch a vendor out; it is to replace a marketing claim with a number you generated yourself.

Take a real sample. Ask for fifty records, and ask that they be drawn at random rather than selected. A hand-picked sample measures the vendor’s best work, not their typical work.

Score each record on the five properties separately. For each one, mark yes or no: identity confirmed against a public record; probate case open or plausibly eligible; contact information reachable; named contact holds a real relationship to the estate; record age acceptable for your practice. Resist the urge to collapse this into a single pass or fail — the whole value of the exercise is seeing which axis fails.

Verify identity against the court, not the vendor. Most counties expose probate filings through an online portal or a clerk’s office that will confirm whether a case exists. That is the authoritative check.

Convert to a working cost. Here the arithmetic is worth doing explicitly, and the numbers below are illustrative only — substitute your own. Suppose you buy at a given price per record, and your audit finds that roughly half the sample clears every axis. Your effective cost per usable record is then double the sticker price. Run that same calculation against a second vendor whose sticker price is higher but whose clearance rate is better, and the ranking often reverses. Cost per usable record is the only comparison that means anything, and it is the one no vendor puts on a pricing page. Our guide to evaluating a probate lead platform works through the broader vendor comparison.

Re-run it in ninety days. One audit measures a moment. Two audits measure whether quality holds, which is the thing you actually care about after you have signed.

What a trustworthy answer sounds like

The most reliable signal is not a high number. It is a specific one, offered with its own limitations attached.

A provider worth trusting will tell you which axis they are weakest on. They will distinguish between what they verify and what they infer. They will explain what happens to a record they cannot confirm — discarded, flagged, or shipped with a confidence marker. They will describe their refresh cycle in terms of record age at delivery rather than internal process frequency. And when you ask for a verifiable sample, the answer will be yes.

Conversely, treat unqualified perfection as a warning. Probate data is assembled from county systems that vary enormously in quality, timeliness, and format. Anyone claiming near-total accuracy across all of them is either measuring something very narrow or has not looked closely. The honest position is that this data is imperfect, that the imperfections are known and bounded, and that the provider can describe them. If you want the mechanics of how raw records become usable ones, our post on data enrichment for probate leads covers what enrichment can and cannot repair.

The conclusion

Accuracy in probate lead data is a compound claim, and the aggregate number a vendor quotes is usually the least informative part of it. Break it into identity, eligibility, contactability, relationship, and timeliness, and ask about each one separately. Ask what gets discarded and why. Ask for a sample you can check yourself.

Then do the small audit. Two hours of verification against county records will tell you more about a provider than any sales conversation, and it gives you a cost-per-usable-record figure you can compare honestly across vendors.

There is a reason to be careful here beyond the economics. These records describe people who recently died and the families now sorting through what they left. Getting the data right is partly a matter of not wasting your firm’s money, and partly a matter of not intruding on the wrong household at the worst possible moment. Both arguments point the same direction.

Frequently asked questions

How often should probate lead data be updated? Ask about record age at delivery rather than refresh frequency, because the two can differ substantially. A file refreshed continuously but delivered weekly still produces records that are days old on arrival. What counts as acceptable depends on your practice, but the number you want from a vendor is the median age of a record when it reaches you.

Which probate lead database is the most accurate? No independent audit ranks providers on this, and any vendor claiming a definitive ranking is quoting their own marketing. The practical answer is to run the fifty-record audit above against your two or three shortlisted providers and compare cost per usable record. That produces a ranking for your counties and your practice, which is the only one that applies to you.

Is a cheaper list with lower accuracy ever the better buy? Sometimes, and the audit is what tells you. If a low-priced file clears your criteria often enough, its effective cost can beat a premium file. What makes cheap lists genuinely expensive is usually not the error rate but the absence of eligibility filtering, which means your staff performs the filtering instead.

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Probate Helper verifies eligibility before a lead reaches your firm, and delivers it while the matter is still open. See how it works in your county.