Editorial standards
These are the rules we work to. They are published so a reader can hold us to them.
Primary sources or nothing
Every report is built from statutes, regulations, agency guidance and court decisions, not from other people's articles. Each report lists the sources it relies on, with a note explaining what each one supports. If a claim cannot be traced to a source we are willing to print, it does not go in.
We link to the official version of a rule wherever one exists. Where a government host blocks automated checking, the link still points at the official page rather than at a mirror.
Federal and state are labeled, never blurred
American legal writing goes wrong most often by presenting one state's rule as the national one. Every report carries a jurisdiction label, and inside the text, a rule that varies by state is introduced as varying by state. Where we describe a common pattern across states, we say that it is a pattern and that your state may differ.
No invented people
We publish under the publication's name. We do not invent author names, photographs, credentials, review credits or biographies, and we do not imply that a licensed attorney has checked a page. No page carries a fabricated statistic, testimonial, rating or case result.
No publication dates
Reports do not carry publication or review dates. A date on a legal page invites a reader to treat an old page as current or a new page as authoritative, and it tells them nothing about whether the underlying rule has changed. Instead, where a rule is volatile — a fee, a threshold, a program with an expiry — the report dates that specific fact in the text and names the page where the current figure is published.
This is a deliberate editorial choice, applied to every report, and it is the reason the meta line under a headline shows the desk, the reading time and the jurisdiction rather than a date.
No advice, no intake, no advertising dressed as reporting
We do not give legal advice and we do not sell placement inside our reporting. Where a report links outward to a law firm or another site, that link exists because it is genuinely useful to a reader at that point in the page, and it is marked as an external link. No report is written to create an opportunity to link.
Plain language, and the honest answer
We write for someone holding a notice they did not expect. That means the short answer first, the procedure second, and the exceptions where they belong rather than hidden at the end. Where the answer is genuinely uncertain, we say so and explain what the uncertainty turns on. We do not pad a page to reach a length.
Images
Every photograph is used under a public domain dedication, a public domain mark, or a Creative Commons Attribution license, and every one is credited on the image credits page with a link to its source. We do not use ShareAlike or NonCommercial material. Photographs are cropped and color-graded for the page; nothing is generated, composited or altered in a way that changes what the photograph shows.
Corrections
When we get something wrong, we fix it and say so. See corrections for how to report an error and what we do with it.