How we write these guides

What this site is not

The most useful thing we can tell you first is the limitation, because it should change how you read everything else.

No guide on this site is written or reviewed by a licensed attorney. There is no legal team here and we are not going to imply one by putting a stock byline on a page. What there is instead is a research standard, a citation requirement and an automated quality gate, all described below — and a hard rule that we would rather publish four hundred honest words than pad a thin topic to fifteen hundred.

That makes these guides a good way to understand a document before you sign it, work out which questions matter, and know what to check. It does not make them a substitute for advice on your specific situation. Where a matter is high-value, cross-border or regulated, the guide will say so and tell you to take it to someone licensed. That instruction is not boilerplate.

Every factual claim is verified, not remembered

Any claim about law, tax or procedure has to be something checked against a primary source at the time of writing. Claims about live law — a statute, a threshold, a case, an agency position — must carry a citation to a URL that was actually retrieved.

68 of the 79 guides carry a source list for that reason. The remaining 11 are explainers and checklists that turn on how a document is structured rather than on what a statute currently says, so there is no live-law claim in them to cite. The rule is that a citation appears wherever one is owed — not that every page carries a reference list for appearance's sake.

We cite primary sources rather than other people's summaries. In practice that means Cornell's Legal Information Institute, the relevant state legislature, and the agency that actually administers the rule — the USPTO, the FTC, the IRS, the Copyright Office, GOV.UK. Those citations are printed at the foot of the guide, so you can check our reading against the source rather than taking it on trust.

Four things we will not publish

• Invented specifics. No statistic, case name, section number or dollar figure appears in a guide unless it was verified. A fabricated citation is worse than no citation, because it survives being checked casually.
• Numbers that rot. Rates and fees that change monthly or annually are deliberately left out. We explain the mechanism and tell you where to get the current figure, rather than printing a number that will be quietly wrong in eight months.
• Manufactured alarm. When a clause is normal, the guide says it is normal. Legal content is easy to write frighteningly and much of it is written that way, because fear converts. It also makes people worse at spotting the clauses that genuinely matter.
• Padding. If a topic has four hundred words of substance, it gets four hundred words. Restating the obvious in a confident voice is what search engines classify as scaled content abuse, and it is a fair classification.

Where the answer depends on where you are, we say so

A great deal of what people want a single answer to — whether a non-compete binds, how much notice a landlord owes, whether a liability waiver survives — genuinely varies by jurisdiction. The standard here is to say that plainly and tell you what to check, rather than picking one state's rule and letting it read as universal. Naming the failure mode is usually the most useful paragraph on the page, so it is the one we spend the most time on.

The checks that run before a guide publishes

Some of the standard is enforced by a script rather than by good intentions. A guide does not reach the site if it fails any of these:

• An internal link points at a page that does not exist.
• It is too thin to be worth publishing.
• It claims a search query another guide already answers. Two pages competing for one question is worse for both than one page would have been, so each query belongs to exactly one guide.
• It carries how-to structured data without a real ordered procedure behind it. Steps that narrate history, or list factors a court weighs, are not a procedure, and marking them up as one is a false statement about the page.
• Its diagrams are decorative rather than carrying information the prose no longer repeats.

Corrections and dates

Every guide shows when it was published and, where it has been revised, when it was last updated. Those dates are real content dates — they change when the words change, and never because the site was rebuilt. If you find something on this site that is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and re-date the page.

How the templates differ

The document templates are held to a different and simpler standard than the guides. They are general-purpose starting points covering the clauses a document of that kind normally contains. They are not drafted for your jurisdiction or your facts, and filling one in is not the same as having it reviewed. The PDF tools make no legal claims at all — they run entirely in your browser and never upload the file.