Legal review policy

01What has to be reviewed

Not everything on this site is legal content, and the rule is applied to the things that are.

• Legal guides and explanations — anything describing how a kind of claim works, what affects it, or what someone should consider.
• Anything attributed to an attorney — a reviewer line, a profile, a quotation.
• Reported case outcomes — every figure, with the source that published it.

Practical material that states no legal rule — what to photograph after an incident, which documents to keep, how to describe symptoms to a clinician — is written and checked editorially. It is still held to the same sourcing rules, and it still may not state law.

02Who may review

A reviewing attorney must hold a current licence, and we verify that licence against the issuing state bar before their name appears anywhere on this site. The bar number and a link to verify it are shown with their name, so you can check it yourself rather than taking ours.

The reviewer named on a page is the attorney who actually reviewed it. We do not use an attorney’s name, photograph or bar number as decoration, and we do not attribute a page to someone who did not read it.

Reviewing attorneys are independent practitioners. Find A Tough Lawyer Media LLC is not a law firm, employs no attorneys to practise law, and nothing reviewed here becomes legal advice by having been reviewed.

The attorneys who review our content

03The rule is enforced, not encouraged

Approval is not a step someone can forget. The publishing system refuses to publish content that has not met the rule, saves it as a draft instead, and records why. These are the refusals it issues:

• An attorney has not approved this content.
• A reviewing attorney must be named.
• The named reviewer is not a verified attorney record.
• The named author is not a verified attorney record.
• This record is not verified, or no verification source was given.
• For a reported outcome: the amount must be recorded exactly as the source states it, with a named source, its link, and the date it was reported.

A member of staff cannot override these by editing harder. The check runs on the attempt to publish, every time, for everyone.

04Legal facts carry their source

A statement of law is held as a record of its own, with the source it came from, the date it was checked and the person who verified it. A page may only state a legal fact that exists as one of those records. Where no approved record exists, the page says nothing rather than paraphrasing a search result.

This is why pages here explain which facts decide a case rather than quoting deadlines or rules at you. Those are the statements most likely to be wrong, most likely to differ by state, and most damaging when relied on.

Figures from reported cases follow the same rule and are published only with the source that reported them, the date, and a note of what they do and do not show. Every figure we hold, with its source.

05Every decision leaves a record

Review status, verification status, publication and every refusal are written to an append-only log with what changed, what it changed from and to, who did it and why. The log has no edit path and no delete path: entries can be added and read, and that is all.

If you need to know whether a page was reviewed, by whom and when, that question has an answer rather than an assurance.

06What this policy does not yet cover

Two things are honest to state plainly.

No reviewing attorney has been appointed yet. The rules above are enforced today, which is precisely why no legal guide is published on this site: the system is refusing to publish it. When a licensed reviewer is appointed, content moves through review and appears with their name on it. It does not appear before that.

This page has not itself been approved by counsel. It describes our process accurately, and a lawyer has not yet read it. The same is true of our privacy notice and terms, and all three are marked for review.

07If you think something is wrong

Tell us. We would rather hear it from you than leave it standing.

How reports are handled, and what we do when something turns out to be wrong, is set out in our corrections policy. The wider picture is in our editorial standards.