Editorial Standards

Summarizing a law is easy. Being right about it is the work, and so is admitting where a confident-sounding answer would be a guess. These are the rules we hold ourselves to. They are published so you can check whether we followed them.

Where our claims come from

Every statement about the law on this site traces back to an official government source: the statute as the legislature publishes it, the rule in the official administrative code, the agency's own guidance, or the text of the decision. Free sources, too. If you can't open it and check us, it doesn't support a claim.

Commercial legal sites and law-firm blogs don't count as proof here, however well written they are. They're secondary accounts, they go stale quietly, and copying from them is exactly how an amended statute keeps circulating in its old form for years.

We also read the amendment history instead of stopping at the section number. Citing the right section of a superseded version still gets you the wrong answer, and it is the most common way legal writing rots without anyone noticing.

Numbers we leave out on purpose

Some figures are guaranteed to be wrong by the time you read them, so we point you at whoever sets them instead of printing a number that decays into misinformation.

State dollar amounts are the main category: filing fees, court costs, benefit maximums, and anything else the fifty states revise on fifty different schedules. Annually indexed figures are the other, unless we've committed to maintaining them. The federal Social Security and IRS amounts we do publish live in one file that gets reviewed every January when the cost-of-living adjustments land, so a change is made once and propagates everywhere it appears.

Figures fixed in the statute itself are different. When Congress wrote a dollar amount into the law and it doesn't float with inflation, we state it and cite where it comes from.

The same caution applies to coverage. We don't claim fifty states when we've verified twelve. Where a topic is only partly covered, the page tells you which states we checked.

How drafts get checked

Our guides are produced with AI assistance, and none of them go live as drafted. Every draft goes to a separate adversarial pass whose entire job is to break it: check each legal claim against the primary source, flag anything asserted without support, and refuse the draft when a claim can't be confirmed. Guides that fail get rewritten or held back. They don't get patched and pushed.

That step exists because of one specific failure mode. Fluent, confident, completely invented law reads exactly like the real thing. A filing deadline stated as absolute when the statute actually contains an excuse for missing it. A protection described as though it applies everywhere when eleven states have it. Neat round numbers that turn out to trace back to a model act no legislature adopted word for word.

Two errors get the hardest scrutiny. One is inventing a right you don't have. The other is telling you a right you do have doesn't exist, which is worse, because a reader who believes they have no remedy stops looking for one. Editorial responsibility for everything published here sits with Glenn Lyvers.

Independence

Nobody pays us to describe the law a particular way. No advertiser, sponsor, or affiliate partner sees a guide before it publishes or gets to influence what it says. Sponsored links and paid ads are labeled where they appear and tagged accordingly in the page code; our advertising and privacy policy covers exactly how that works, including what data is and isn't involved.

Keeping up with changes

A guide that was accurate in March is not automatically accurate in November. When a statute gets amended or a decision changes the answer, we revise what it affected and record that the guide was updated.

Discontinued resources get the same treatment. When a government database or program we recommended shuts down, we pull the recommendation. A dead link to a service that no longer exists is its own kind of wrong answer, and the reader following it has no way to tell.

What this site can't do

Observed.org publishes general legal information, not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Laws differ between states and change over time, and the answer to almost any real legal question depends on facts a general guide can't know about your situation.

For advice you can actually rely on, talk to an attorney licensed in your state. What we can do is make sure you walk into that conversation already knowing what the law says and where to read it.

Corrections

If you think something here is wrong, tell us and we'll check it against the source. Write to info@observed.org. A citation, or even a rough description of what the law actually says, gets us there faster.

Real errors get fixed at the root rather than quietly painted over. We correct the claim, re-check the surrounding guidance that leaned on it, and mark the guide as updated. If an error was bad enough that readers may have acted on it, we say what changed.