Why this page exists
You are reading a site about money and law. The advice-adjacent corner of the internet that covers these topics is, to put it gently, not always written in the reader’s interest — because the keywords are worth a great deal to advertisers and lead brokers, and because nobody checks.
So we published our method. Hold us to it.
1. Our sourcing hierarchy
We build every guide from the top of this list down. A claim is only as good as the best source we could find for it.
| Tier | Source type | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Primary law | Statutes, codified regulations, published court opinions, agency rulemakings |
| 2 | Government and regulator data | BLS, CDC/NIOSH, NHTSA, FMCSA, OSHA, IRS, CFTC, FCA, state departments of insurance and labor |
| 3 | Peer-reviewed and institutional research | NCI, NIH, IIHS, academic journals, actuarial bodies |
| 4 | Industry and professional bodies | Bar associations, NAIC, NASP, FINRA |
| 5 | Reported journalism | Named outlets with editorial standards, used for context, never for legal propositions |
We do not source legal propositions from other blogs, from law firm marketing pages, or from AI summaries. If we cannot trace a statement to Tier 1 or Tier 2, we either drop it or label it explicitly as an estimate or a general pattern.
2. Jurisdiction is always stated
Nearly every wrong statement about American injury law online is wrong for the same reason: it is a true statement about one state, published as if it were true everywhere.
Filing deadlines, comparative fault rules, damage caps, workers’ compensation settlement procedure and even who counts as an employer vary state by state. We therefore commit to naming the jurisdiction for every legal rule we describe, and to linking the specific code section wherever one exists.
If you find an unattributed “the law says” on this site, that is a defect. Report it.
3. Numbers we will not publish
We do not publish invented or unsourced “average settlement” figures.
Those numbers are everywhere in this niche and they are close to meaningless. Settlement outcomes are driven by liability strength, available insurance limits, documented medical specials, jurisdiction, and the defendant’s solvency — five variables that swamp any average. Worse, a published “average” anchors readers into rejecting fair offers or accepting bad ones.
Where credible aggregate data exists from a regulator, court system or academic study, we cite it and name its limits. Where it does not, we explain the drivers of value instead of inventing a figure. That is less satisfying to read and considerably more useful.
4. Review and update cycle
- Every guide is checked against its primary sources before publication.
- Legal and regulatory content is reviewed on a rolling 12-month cycle, and immediately when we become aware of a statutory change, a significant appellate decision, or a regulator’s action that affects it.
- Pages carry a visible published or updated date. We do not refresh dates cosmetically to game freshness signals.
5. Corrections
When we get something wrong, we fix it in public.
- Report the error to admin@ethicalfounder.com with the URL and the source you believe is correct.
- We verify against primary sources.
- If the error is substantive, we correct the text and add a dated correction note to the page explaining what changed.
- Trivial fixes (typography, broken links) are made silently.
We do not delete an article to make a mistake disappear.
6. Use of AI, and what that does not change
We use AI tools in research, drafting and editing. We are telling you this because you deserve to know how the thing you are reading was made.
What that does not change:
- Every legal or factual claim is verified by a human against a primary source before publication.
- Every external citation is checked to confirm it exists and says what we claim it says.
- No article is published unread by a human editor.
- Responsibility for every word on this site is ours, not a model’s.
An AI tool cannot be held accountable for an error. We can, and we accept that responsibility.
7. Independence and conflicts of interest
- We do not sell leads. We do not operate case-intake forms and we do not transfer reader information to law firms, claim buyers, factoring companies or brokers.
- We do not sell editorial conclusions. Advertising and affiliate arrangements, where they exist, are disclosed on the Advertising & Affiliate Disclosure page and never determine what we conclude.
- We name commercial interests when we describe an industry. In coverage of the structured settlement factoring market and the retail trading industry, the business model of the counterparty is part of the story, and we say so.
8. Competence boundaries
Our writers and editors are researchers, not licensed attorneys, and we state that openly rather than implying credentials we do not hold. That boundary shapes what we publish: we explain how a system works, and we consistently refuse to tell any individual reader what to do about their own case. See our Disclaimer.
If you are a licensed professional willing to review our work in your field, we would genuinely welcome it — write to us.
9. Reader-first formatting
We write long because these topics are genuinely complicated and the short version is usually the wrong version. But we commit to: answering the core question in the opening section, using tables where a table is clearer than prose, avoiding padding written for search engines, and never hiding the answer beneath a wall of preamble.
Questions about this policy: admin@ethicalfounder.com. More about the publisher on our About page.