Empty litigation searches must be kept separate from unmeasured ones

A litigation search table with no case rows can reflect a completed empty search, a failed request, a partial jurisdiction response, or a missing field, and collapsing these into "no litigation" hides what analysts most need to know. The Company Litigation Coverage Dossier organizes supplied observations for an explicit company query, recording cases, jurisdictions, contradictions, and evidence without running a new court search or assigning a legal risk score. Cases are deduplicated by jurisdiction plus exact source URL or court and case number rather than by title or date, and the query text is treated as a search identity rather than a verified legal entity. The guidance stresses that a completed search with an explicit empty list counts as a measured zero, while errors or absent lists do not, and that a full-text mention is not evidence of party status. Integration testing is recommended across four fixtures, covering an empty success, an error, a partial result, and duplicate observations, with outputs checked against source records.