Editorial Policy

1. How listings are built

Every listing starts from a state bar's public roster: name, bar number, admission year, and standing. Population and geography figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau and the SimpleMaps U.S. cities dataset. Attorneys add the rest themselves by claiming their profile. Nothing on a listing is invented, and we never write a field in the attorney's voice.

2. How listings are ordered

Organic listings are ordered by a stated, mechanical rule (years licensed first), applied the same way to every attorney. Payment cannot change the organic order. Sponsored placements are separate slots and always labeled; the Advertising Disclosure covers them.

3. Verification cadence

Bar status is checked against the public roster when a listing is first published, and each state's roster is re-imported on a rolling basis, at least yearly. Every profile shows when its record was last verified. Between imports, the state bar's own site is always the current source, and every profile says so.

4. Guides and legal content

Guides answer the question in the first paragraph, cite primary sources (statutes, court rules, official fee schedules) for anything non-obvious, show published and updated dates, and route readers to a licensed attorney rather than giving advice. We are not lawyers and no guide pretends otherwise. When a statute or fee a guide depends on changes, the guide gets updated and its date gets bumped.

5. What we never do

• Scrape or republish attorney photos. Ever.
• Sell a position in the organic listing order.
• Publish a rating or superlative the data cannot back.
• Run undisclosed advertising.
• Publish templated filler pages; a page ships only when it has real data behind it.

6. Corrections

Factual errors get fixed within days of a verified report, and affected pages show an updated date. The correction path for listings is the Listing and Removal Policy; for everything else, the contact page.