Where are companies getting their probate leads?

[Joshua McGinnis]

I'm a big advocate of marketing to probate leads. Most anyone can stroll into their local courthouse and comb through the public records to find which probate cases involve real estate and market to those individuals.

However, there are also at least three companies I know of that sell probate leads for every county in the US so that we don't have to do that leg work ourselves. I've only used one company, but whenever I approach any of these companies about how they get access to their probate records, they clam up and don't want to divulge the info. One company claimed it was a "trade secret" he learned from his days as a mortgage broker.

It seems unlikely to me that each of these companies has hired individuals in the 3K+ counties in the U.S. to manually transcribe this information into their own proprietary databases.

Furthermore, many counties don't provide a means to access full probate case files online, even if you were willing to pay. This rules out the ability to scrape the info systematically into their respective databases.

All that said, I can't figure out how these companies are aggregating probate information across the country. 

Does anyone have any insight into this business and how these probate lead providers can provide access to such a large repository of probate deals?