How we verify our legal content

Most pages that rank for legal questions are written from other pages that rank for legal questions. The result is a citation chain with nothing at the end of it: a penalty figure gets copied, the statute is amended, and the wrong number propagates for years because nobody ever opened the statute.

These are the rules we write under, published so you can hold us to them.

1. The statute is the source. Everything else is commentary.

Every penalty, threshold, deadline and definition on this site is taken from the text of the statute or regulation itself, retrieved from the official state legislature or agency website. We quote the operative language rather than paraphrasing it, and we link to the official page so you can read the section around the quote.

Where a rule comes from a published court decision instead of a statute, we name the case and the year. Where it comes from an agency practice that is not written down anywhere public, we say that explicitly instead of presenting it as law.

1a. When the state’s own site cannot be read, we say whose copy we used

Rule 1 is the standard and it is not always reachable. State legislature sites go down, sit behind a filter, or publish the code only through a commercial container that cannot be linked section by section. When that happens we do not quietly use somebody else’s reproduction and cite the state. We read the reproduction, cite the section, link the document we actually opened, and link the state’s own publication next to it so the two can be compared.

As of the date at the top of this page that applies to two states, and the difference between them matters:

• Colorado. Every request to the Colorado General Assembly’s own statute PDFs was refused from our build host. The Colorado figures were read from a full-text reproduction, and each one links the state’s own publication as well.
• Georgia. The Georgia Code is published free through a commercial container that cannot be linked per section, and neither the General Assembly’s site nor the Department of Driver Services resolved from our build host at all. The Georgia figures were read from a reproduction that states it is current as of 28 March 2024. That is the weakest sourcing on this site, every Georgia figure is dated to that reproduction rather than to today, and the Georgia page says so in its own sources list.

We would rather publish six states with the provenance visible than fifty with it hidden.

2. Statistics come from the body that produced them

Case-volume and arrest figures come from the court system, prosecutor’s office, state police agency or transportation department that publishes them, and we give the reporting year alongside the number. We do not use figures from other commercial websites, and we do not use figures whose original source we cannot locate.

If we cannot find an official number for something a page needs, the page says so rather than substituting an estimate. An honest gap is more useful than a confident invention.

3. Every page carries three dates

Published, last reviewed, and “law current as of.” The third is the one that matters. It means a person opened the cited statutes on that date and confirmed the quoted text still reads the way this page says it reads. A page that has not been rechecked since a legislative session closed is a page you should treat with suspicion, which is why we print the date instead of writing “updated regularly.”

4. What we will not publish

• Attorney rankings or scores. We have no defensible methodology for ranking lawyers, so we do not pretend to have one.
• Reviews, star ratings or testimonials. We have not collected any, and inventing them would be both dishonest and, in structured data, a violation of search engine policy.
• Case results. We are not a law firm and have no results to report.
• Superlatives. No “best,” “top” or “#1” anywhere on this site. Those are comparative claims about lawyers that we cannot substantiate, and legal advertising rules treat unsubstantiated comparison as misleading.
• Generated statistics. If a figure did not come from a named source, it does not go on the page.

5. Corrections

If something here is wrong, write to contact@duistatelaws.com with the page and the source that contradicts it. Corrections to a legal figure are made as soon as we can verify them, and the “last reviewed” date on the page moves when they are.

6. What we are not

We are a publisher that also sells advertising to attorneys. We are not a law firm, we do not give legal advice, and we do not vet the attorneys who advertise here. The disclaimer and advertising notice sets out the arrangement in full, including how attorneys pay us and why the payment is a fixed amount rather than a share of any legal fee.