About
This site exists so you can check the court record before you pay a contractor.
Businesses operating under the Yoakum name around Cleveland, Missouri have had twenty-three court matters filed against them across three states. Three unpaid judgments totalling $32,426 name JS Yoakum Excavation and Construction, LLCor its operator. None of it comes up in an ordinary search. So it is collected here — and carefully sorted, because more than one business and more than one man share this name.
If you are about to write a deposit check, read the record first — and check the exact legal entity name on your own paperwork, because that is what decides which of these records applies to you. If you already paid and it went badly, you are not the first, and there are places to report it that actually have teeth. Those are listed here.
What we tried to do
Court records are public but they are not easy. They sit behind clunky state portals, split across counties, indexed by case number rather than by name. Someone deciding whether to hire a contractor is never going to find them. The point of this site is to put them in one place.
Working through it, we tried to hold to a few things:
- Tie every statement to something you can pull up yourself — a case number, a state database, a document we have posted.
- Keep what a judge decided separate from what somebody merely claimed. Those get different labels and they are not blurred together.
- Say when a judgment came by default. It is real and enforceable, and it also means the defendant never showed up to argue. Both things are true.
- Quote the documents rather than characterise them. The court's own words hit harder anyway.
- Say so when a claim checks out. The Missouri and Kansas drilling licences held by the well drilling sole proprietorship are genuinely active, and that is on the site as plainly as anything else.
- Never let a pronoun span two men. Every case, judgment and docket entry states which business the filing names. More on that below.
We will not have got all of it perfect. Some records were behind portals that would not open. Where something could not be confirmed, the site says so instead of filling the gap.
Which Yoakum is which
Across the filings you will find Jesse Yoakum, Jesse Alan Yoakum, Jesse Yoakum, Jr. and Jesse Silas Yoakum, attached to three different businesses. Getting this wrong is easy. This site got it wrong, and was taken offline in July 2026 to fix it — so the correction is described here rather than quietly buried.
Two Cass County petitions settle the main question. Both the McCorkell petition (25CA-CC00095) and the General Casualty declaratory action (25CA-CC00364) name Jesse Alan Yoakum, individually and doing business as Jesse Yoakum Well Drilling and Jesse Yoakum, Jr. as separate defendants at separate addresses. Two unrelated law firms drafted those captions and both drew the same line. The federal USDOT record for number 1187767 independently lists legal name Jesse Alan Yoakum with the DBA Jesse Yoakum Well Drilling.
So: Jesse Yoakum Well Drillingis a sole proprietorship — not a company — owned by Jesse Alan Yoakum. It holds Missouri DNR permit 002231 and Kansas licence 595, both active. JS Yoakum Excavation and Construction, LLC is a separate Missouri LLC formed in 2007, run by the man the Missouri filings call Jesse Yoakum, Jr. A 2018 Ector County, Texas docket names Jesse Silas Yoakum, individually and d/b/a JS Yoakum Excavation and Construction, LLC— the initials of the LLC.
This site distinguishes them by business entity, not by middle name.The entity is stated in every filing; the middle name usually is not. Publishing a middle name to tell two living men apart is exactly the move that goes wrong, and it is the one the site is not going to make. Where a filing says only “Jesse Yoakum” with no business attached — and several do — it is reported, labelled as unassigned, and left out of every total attributed to either business.
One more fact worth stating plainly, because it cuts against the rest of this site: the trade name “Jesse Yoakum Well Drilling” has had no active Missouri fictitious-name registration since 2017, though the website is still up and the DNR permit is still issued under it. That is a registration lapse, not a judgment, and it belongs to the business with no money judgment against it.
If you are a Yoakum and you think you have been mixed up with someone else here, send a correction. The last one was acted on the same day.
Three businesses, one surname
JS Yoakum Excavation and Construction, LLC — a Missouri LLC formed in 2007. Jesse Yoakum Well Drilling — a sole proprietorship, not a company, owned by a different man. Yoakum Well Drilling, LLC — a third company run by a third man.
They are separate legal entities, they are owned by different people, and the court filings treat them separately. Every case, judgment and docket entry on this site is labelled with which one it names. If a filing does not say, this site says that instead of guessing.
Which one this site is mostly about
JS Yoakum Excavation and Construction, LLC, and the man who operates it. Missouri filings name him “Jesse Yoakum, Jr.”
Three of the four entered money judgments name the LLC, its operator, or both. This is the business that took a $6,450 deposit to plug a well and did not do the work, and the business a Clay County court found had made knowingly false representations. If you are checking out a contractor before hiring, this is the entity to look up.
The well drilling sole proprietorship is a different business
Jesse Yoakum Well Drilling is owned by Jesse Alan Yoakum. It holds Missouri DNR permit 002231 and Kansas licence 595, both active, and USDOT number 1187767.
It is named in two Cass County matters — the McCorkell petition and the General Casualty declaratory action — and both are still pending. Neither has been decided. It is named in one Dean Machinery suit from 2012 and three State of Missouri tax and employment matters between 1999 and 2011. It is NOT named in any of the four entered money judgments, and the owner has stated he has never contracted with the owner of this site, never received money from him, and does not sub work to the LLC. Nothing here says otherwise.
Matthew Yoakum is a third person, and nothing here is about him
Matthew Yoakum, who also goes by Matty, runs Yoakum Well Drilling, LLC and holds his own Kansas water well contractor licence, number 1008 — not licence 595.
He is the plaintiff in the Cass County family matter listed here: he was the one trying to enforce a settlement, not the one accused of breaking it. If you are looking at a Yoakum and want to know whether this site concerns them, check the licence number and the exact legal business name. None of the judgments, complaints or allegations here involve him.
Why the names alone will not tell you apart
Different filings use “Jesse Yoakum”, “Jesse Alan Yoakum”, “Jesse Yoakum, Jr.” and “Jesse Silas Yoakum”. Several use only “Jesse Yoakum”, with no middle name, suffix or business at all.
Two men in this record answer to “Jesse Yoakum”. Where a filing names only that, this site reports it and assigns it to nobody — and leaves it out of every total attributed to a business. The reliable discriminator is the entity: a sole proprietorship and an LLC are different legal persons, and every filing names one, the other, or both.
Where they operate
Cleveland, Missouri (Cass County). Advertised service area: western Missouri and eastern Kansas.
Court records place related litigation in Texas and Nevada as well. Google's business listing for the well drilling sole proprietorship carries a street address that court filings assign to the LLC's operator, which is one documented source of the confusion.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to know. Use the form below. There is no deadline promise attached to it — this is not anybody's job — but submissions get read and anything genuinely wrong gets fixed, with the change logged on this page.
That goes for Jesse Yoakum too. If a judgment was satisfied, a case was dismissed, work was finished, or money was refunded, send the paperwork and it goes up here. If you want any of this to read differently, the fastest route is to make it right and show us.
Correction log
July 28, 2026 — identity attribution corrected, site withdrawn and rebuilt. The owner of Jesse Yoakum Well Drilling contacted the publisher to say he had been confused with a relative who operates a different business, had never contracted with the publisher, and had never received money from him. He was right on all three points.
An earlier version of the home page placed a screenshot of that sole proprietorship’s website under the heading “What he advertises” beside the statement that four judgments had been entered “against him and his company,” and headlined a combined judgment total under the same framing. In fact no entered money judgment names that business or its owner. The two matters that do name it are both still pending and undecided.
The site was taken offline the same day. Every case, judgment and docket entry now states which business the filing names; totals are computed per business rather than combined; the claims checked against the well drilling website are now drawn only from matters naming that business; and filings that say only “Jesse Yoakum” are assigned to nobody.
The usual disclaimers
Nothing here is legal advice and nobody involved is a lawyer. If you have a claim, talk to one.
This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Jesse Yoakum Well Drilling or JS Yoakum Excavation and Construction, LLC. Nothing is sold here, there is no advertising, and no money is collected.
Filings a judge has not ruled on are allegations, and they are unproven. They are labelled that way throughout.
Last reviewed 2026-07-28.