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Editorial Standards

How we decide what to publish, what we don’t do, and the safeguards that protect our editorial independence.

Content updated: August 2026Learn about our content maintenance methodology

Source hierarchy

When we describe a workplace right, deadline, or procedure, we prefer sources in this order:

  1. Primary statutes and regulations. The federal and state code itself, and the corresponding Code of Federal Regulations or state administrative code provisions.
  2. Case law. Published opinions from federal Courts of Appeals, the U.S. Supreme Court, and state appellate courts. Trial-court opinions are used only when no appellate authority is on point and are clearly flagged as such.
  3. Government agency guidance. EEOC compliance manuals, Department of Labor opinion letters, state agency procedural rules, and similar agency-issued interpretive material.
  4. Academic and treatise material. Law review articles, employment-law treatises, and Cornell LII explanatory pages — used to confirm a reading of primary sources, not to substitute for them.
  5. News reporting. Used only for current events (e.g. a new statute being signed) and always replaced by primary-source citations once the underlying document is available.

When sources conflict, primary statute text governs over agency interpretation, and binding case law in the relevant jurisdiction governs over general guidance.

What we don’t do

These are not capability limits — they are deliberate editorial choices:

  • We don’t give specific legal advice. We describe how the law generally works. We do not tell any individual reader what to do in their specific situation. That requires a licensed attorney in the relevant jurisdiction.
  • We don’t recommend specific attorneys for specific cases. Our directory lists employment lawyers; it does not match, rank, or vouch for any individual attorney’s fit for any reader’s situation. Selecting representation is the reader’s decision.
  • We don’t accept payment to alter ruling display, ranking, or removal. Court rulings appear based on relevance and recency. No attorney, firm, employer, or other party can pay to suppress, promote, or change how a ruling is presented.
  • We don’t accept payment to alter the law-summary content. Statute summaries and rights pages follow the source and publication controls described in our methodology, not commercial relationships.

Corrections process

We handle errors transparently. If you spot a misclassified ruling outcome, an outdated statute citation, a wrong filing deadline, an incorrectly attributed party, or any other factual error, please submit a correction at /corrections.

Correction submissions are evaluated individually. Verified fixes override the affected record and persist through subsequent re-ingest cycles.

Conflicts of interest + editorial firewall

Worker-facing features are free and require no credit card. Attorneys do not pay to be listed, we do not sell sponsored placement, and no listed party can influence ruling display, ranking, correction, or removal.

Concretely, the firewall means:

  • Commercial relationships are not an input to ruling display, law-summary updates, or correction decisions.
  • Partner or operator requests cannot result in changes to ruling display, statute summaries, or any other editorial content.
  • The attorney directory does not sell sponsored placement or accept referral fees for matches.
  • Removal requests for accurately reported court rulings are not granted regardless of who submits them.

For the research and publication-control process behind our content, see our methodology. For the full legal disclaimer, see /disclaimer.