This page describes how content on the US Legal Forms blog is produced, sourced, reviewed, dated and corrected. It is written to be checkable: every promise here is one you can hold us to on any individual article.
What this blog is, and what it is not
We publish plain-language explanations of common legal paperwork: wills, powers of attorney, deeds, leases, evictions, small-business filings and the procedures around them. The goal is that a reader can understand what a document does and what the process demands before deciding how to proceed.
We do not publish legal advice. US Legal Forms is not a law firm, no article creates an attorney-client relationship, and nothing here is a substitute for a licensed attorney who knows the facts of your case and the law of your state.
Who writes, and who reviews
Drafts are produced by the US Legal Forms editorial team: content specialists and product staff who build and document the form library and work daily with the documents they write about. Every article carries a byline that links to the author’s profile.
Attorney review is per-article, not blanket. Where a licensed attorney has reviewed an article, that reviewer is named on the page along with the date of review. Where no such line appears, the article has not been through attorney review. We publish the distinction rather than a general assurance, because a review claim is only worth something if it is specific.
Review means the reviewer checked the article’s legal statements for accuracy and for missing caveats as of the review date. It does not mean the reviewer has examined your situation, and it does not make the reviewer your attorney.
Source standards
We work from a hierarchy, and we prefer the highest available rung:
- Statutes, court rules, and the forms and instructions published by the court or agency that will receive the document.
- Federal and state agency data and guidance, including the originating agency’s own publication rather than a summary of it.
- Named primary research: the survey, dataset or study itself, with its sample size and field dates, not a press release about it.
- Established secondary sources, cited as secondary and only where no primary source exists.
Where an article states a number, a deadline or a filing requirement, we link to the source that binds it. We avoid citing other content sites for facts they themselves borrowed. Statistics we compute ourselves are published with the arithmetic shown and, where the underlying data allows it, a downloadable dataset and a methodology section, so anyone can reproduce or dispute the result.
We also correct the record when a widely repeated figure turns out to be unsupported. If a commonly cited statistic cannot be traced to a primary source, we say so in the article instead of repeating it.
Fact-checking
Editing and fact-checking are separate steps. Before a data-led article is published, every figure in it is re-verified against its primary source, and the date of that verification is recorded in the article. Procedural articles are checked against the current official form and instructions for the jurisdictions they name.
Dates, updates and re-review
Every article shows its publication date, and shows an update date when it has been substantively revised. We do not refresh dates to make a page look new. An update date changes when the content changed.
An article is queued for re-review when any of the following happens: the statute or court rule it describes changes; the official form or its instructions are reissued; a tracker or agency publishes a new wave of the data we cited; or a reader reports something that no longer matches reality.
Older articles predate these standards. We are working through the archive rather than claiming retroactive compliance, and an article’s byline and review line always reflect what has actually been done to that specific page.
Corrections
To report an error, use the US Legal Forms support portal and include the article URL and what you believe is wrong.
When a factual error affects the substance of an article, we fix it, update the revision date, and add a short note at the point of the correction saying what changed. Typos and broken links are fixed silently. We do not quietly delete a claim that turned out to be wrong; if it mattered enough to publish, it matters enough to correct visibly.
Independence and our commercial interest
The company that publishes this blog sells the documents these articles discuss. That is the conflict, stated plainly, and the following rules exist because of it:
- Where a free or cheaper route exists, the article names it, including free forms published by courts and agencies, and including doing nothing.
- Where a situation genuinely needs an attorney rather than a template, the article says so plainly. Blended families, contested estates, business ownership, tax planning and special-needs beneficiaries are examples we routinely flag.
- Prices and cost comparisons cite their sources, and our own pricing is labelled as ours.
- No article is written to order for a sales target, and product links never change the substance of what an article recommends.
If a page here reads as a sales pitch rather than an explanation, treat that as a defect and report it.
How we use AI
We use AI tools in production: for research assistance, for drafting, for summarising source documents and for editorial checks such as finding unsupported claims or inconsistent figures.
Two limits apply without exception. First, model output is treated as unverified raw material: no figure, citation, statute reference or legal statement reaches publication on the strength of a model having produced it, and every such claim is checked against the primary source by a person. Second, a named human is accountable for every published article, and where attorney review applies, a licensed attorney signs off on it.
We do not publish AI-generated author identities, AI-generated photographs of people, or fabricated quotes and case examples.
Known limits
Law is jurisdictional and moving. An article that is accurate for one state may be wrong for the next one, and an article that was accurate on its review date may be out of date by the time you read it. Where an article’s conclusions depend on a specific state’s rules, it says which state. Where a number is a national range rather than a certainty, it is published as a range. When we do not know something, we prefer to say so.