Our Methodology

Litmus draws from publicly available legal records to build a comprehensive picture of any land parcel's legal standing. Our primary sources are Environment and Land Court (ELC) judgments and rulings, Kenya Gazette publications, and publicly accessible registry information.

We do not access private records, and we do not conduct official land searches on behalf of clients. Our intelligence supplements — but does not replace — the formal due diligence process.

Court judgments and gazette notices are unstructured documents. Our extraction pipeline parses these documents to identify key entities: parcel identifiers (LR numbers, IR numbers, title references, block/plot numbers), party names, case numbers, dates, and legal outcomes.

We use a combination of automated pattern recognition and structured review to ensure accuracy. Every extracted data point is linked back to its source document, preserving the chain of evidence.

Once extracted, the data is cross-referenced across sources. A parcel submitted for verification is checked against our court case database, gazette notice archive, and identity validation rules. We look for direct matches, related party connections, and proximity signals.

Risk scoring is based on the presence, severity, and recency of findings. A parcel with an active court case carries a different risk profile than one with a resolved historical dispute. Our scoring framework is structured and consistent, applied uniformly across all verifications.

Every verification produces a structured report. Reports include a summary of findings, detailed evidence for each check performed, risk assessment, and recommended next steps. All findings are sourced — the report identifies which court case, gazette notice, or record produced each data point.

We aim for clarity over complexity. Reports are designed to be readable by non-specialists while containing sufficient detail for legal professionals. Where our analysis is inconclusive, we say so explicitly rather than speculating.

Our methodology evolves as we process more records, identify new patterns, and incorporate feedback from clients and legal professionals. We regularly review our extraction accuracy, expand our source coverage, and refine our risk scoring framework. Transparency about how we work — including our limitations — is fundamental to maintaining trust.