Editorial Standards: Real Statutes, Plain Language

Nothing on this site is legal advice. That sentence appears on our guides because it is true, not because a compliance checklist put it there, and the distinction it draws is the foundation of everything else on this page. Our guides are legal information: what a statute says, how a process generally works, what a service typically costs, which deadlines exist. Legal advice is the application of the law to your specific facts, and only a lawyer you have retained can give you that. We aim to make you an informed client, not to replace the professional you may need to hire.

We read the law itself

The defining habit of our guides is that they are built on primary sources: the current text of statutes and regulations, court and agency rules, and official government publications, in preference to summaries, aggregators, and secondhand accounts. That habit has consequences we hold ourselves to.

We verify against the law as currently amended. An official-looking agency handout can lag years behind the statute it summarizes; when the two disagree, the current statutory text decides, and that is the version we cite.

We read the section, not just its number. A citation that loads is not a citation that supports the claim: sections get repealed with nothing in the citation's shape to show it, and a statute with enumerated subsections may state different rules for different claim types a paragraph apart. Before a legal rule enters a guide, we read the surrounding text and confirm the subsection actually governs the situation we are describing.

When we state a deadline, a dollar threshold, or a filing requirement, the guide cites where it comes from, so you or your lawyer can check it against the same authority we used.

Jurisdiction honesty

In the United States, most of the law our readers ask about is state law, and the differences between states are not rounding errors: limitation periods, filing deadlines, fee rules, and consumer protections genuinely diverge. Our guides handle this one way only. State-specific statements cover the states we verified against each state's own authority, and those states are named. Where we have not verified a state, the guide says the general rule and shows you how to find your state's controlling source, rather than filling the map with guesses. A guide that covers thirteen states honestly is worth more than one that covers fifty by extrapolation.

What legal help costs

Fee anxiety keeps people from calling a lawyer at all, so our guides treat cost as a first-class topic. Figures are ranges, dated with the year they refer to, and attributed: where a figure comes from a fee survey or an industry source rather than a primary authority, the guide names that source in the text. We explain fee structures in plain terms, hourly, flat, and contingency, and what each one means for your bill. We do not promise what your case will cost, because no honest page can.

Review before publication

Every guide is independently fact-checked before it is published. That review, separate from the writing, re-opens the cited statutes and sources and verifies every citation, number, date, and name against them. When we later find an error anyway, we correct it in the guide itself with a dated note. Each guide carries a dated "last verified" line, and its updated date changes only when the law or the facts changed, never for cosmetics.

The lines we do not cross

We do not predict the outcome of your case or anyone's. We do not invent client stories, fabricate quotes from attorneys, or cite experts who do not exist; our guides are produced and reviewed by our editorial team, which is precisely why every legal claim must trace to an authority you can check. We do not accuse named firms or individuals of wrongdoing. We define every legal term at first use, because a guide you cannot understand protects no one. And when the honest answer is "this is the point where you need a lawyer," the guide says exactly that.

To report an error, use the site's contact page and identify the guide and the claim. We will check it against the primary sources, and a confirmed error gets a dated correction.