Editorial Standards

Legal information is only useful if it is accurate, current, and honest about its limits. These standards govern every guide published on Accord Legal Review.

Source selection

We research from primary and authoritative sources first: statutes and regulations, court opinions, and the official websites of the agencies that administer the law — USCIS, the Department of State, the Department of Labor, the EEOC, the IRS, the SEC, the CFPB, FinCEN, the FTC, the USPTO, the U.S. Copyright Office, federal and state courts, and official state agencies. Secondary sources — bar association materials, university legal resources, established legal publishers — are used to add context, never to replace a primary source that is available.

Every guide ends with a visible Sources section linking to the materials we relied on, so readers can verify our work. We do not cite sources we have not reviewed, and we do not invent statutes, form numbers, fees, deadlines, or case holdings. If we could not verify a claim, we either omit it or state the uncertainty openly.

Accuracy and dating

Time-sensitive facts — filing fees, tax thresholds, processing times, the status of contested rules — are dated in the text ("as of August 2026") or replaced with a link to the official source that maintains the current figure. We do not backdate content or present anything as newer than it is.

Federal law vs. state law

Where an area of law is controlled by the states, our guides say so, explain the major approaches, and direct readers to check their jurisdiction. Representative state examples are used only when we could source them. A nationwide generalization is never presented as the rule in every state.

Bylines and authorship

Content is credited to the Accord Legal Review Editorial Team — an editorial organization. We do not invent author personas, fictional attorneys, or credentials, and we do not describe content as attorney-reviewed unless a named, licensed attorney has actually reviewed it, which is not currently part of our process.

Hypothetical examples

Guides sometimes use short scenarios to make rules concrete. These are always labeled as hypothetical, describe no real person, and imply no real outcome. We publish no case studies, testimonials, or success claims.

Corrections

When we get something wrong, we fix it and date the fix. The process — including how to report an error — is described in our corrections policy.

The limits of general education

Our guides describe how the law generally works; they cannot analyze the facts of any individual situation, and small factual differences frequently change legal outcomes. That is why every guide carries the same notice: this is general legal information, not legal advice, and no attorney–client relationship is created by reading it. See the full disclaimer.

Independence and external links

We link to external resources — official agencies, courts, and occasionally law firms with substantive practice-area pages — when they genuinely help the reader. External links are editorial choices, not endorsements of everything on the destination site, and no destination controls our content.