We checked 4,744 legal citations against the law. Here is what was wrong.
Every quarter we re-verify every statute cited on this site against the current text of the law. This is the report for the cycle that closed on October 18, 2026. It is written for readers who want to know how much to trust a free legal guide, and for anyone who publishes one.
The short version
- 4,744 distinct citations across 4,719 state guides were checked against the current statutory text at their source.
- 3,648 (76.9%) held. The page’s claims about the provision were consistent with what the law says today. Those citations carry a “Verified” date on the site.
- The rest did not, or could not be proven. Rather than leave an unproven number or an unproven citation on the page, we changed 1,560 of the 4,719 pages: about 700 citations were removed from sentences they could not be shown to support, 220 specific figures and deadlines were replaced with cautious wording, 14 claims were deleted outright, and 60 sentences were corrected and then independently re-verified.
- Nothing was “fixed” on a model’s word alone. Every corrected citation and every corrected figure went back through the verifier before it could show a date. Corrections that did not pass fell back to softer wording.
Why the misses matter more than the hits
Free legal information sites, including this one until this cycle, tend to be written once and left alone. Statutes do not stay still: fee schedules change, sections are renumbered, limitation periods are amended, and a link that still resolves can point at a section that no longer says what the page claims. A reader cannot tell the difference between a figure that was checked last month and one that was typed three years ago.
Our rule, written into our editorial policy, is that when we cannot prove a statement against the law itself, we say less. A dollar amount we cannot verify becomes “a filing fee applies; confirm the current amount with the court.” A citation we cannot connect to the sentence it sits under is removed, and the sentence stands or falls on its own. A “Verified” date appears only when the latest check passed. We would rather show nothing than show a stamp we cannot stand behind.
What the checks found
| Outcome on the page | Citations or sentences | What a reader sees now |
|---|---|---|
| Citation removed from the sentence | ≈ 700 | The sentence stands; the § link and its authority card are gone until a source can be proven. |
| Figure or deadline hedged | 220 | Cautious wording in place of a number the text could not confirm, with a prompt to confirm the current figure. |
| Claim deleted | 14 | The sentence or card is gone; no authority supports it. |
| Citation re-pointed to the right section | 36 drafted → 27 proven | Same sentence, now linked to the section whose text actually supports it. The 9 that could not be proven lost their citation instead. |
| Wording corrected and re-verified | 33 | Corrected text, proven accurate against today's statute. |
| Pending correction confirmed | 26 | A previously drafted correction judged right and now proven. |
| Shared template wording softened | 30 sentences, 13 templates | Overstatements in wording shared across states made cautious for the states where the check failed. |
| Kept as written | 4 | The reviewer found the page right and the earlier flag wrong. |
In total 1,655 flagged items were resolved, 873 of which were open at the start of the final day of the cycle.
How a decision was made
Each flagged citation reached one of two paths. Items with no factual dispute, only a citation the verifier could not connect to the claim, were handled by rule: remove the citation; for deadline and money claims, soften the figure too. Items that required judgment, 544 of them, went to an independent reviewing model that had not drafted the proposed change. It received the page’s current claims, the proposed edit rendered before and after, the stored diagnosis, the latest verifier verdict, and the statutory text fetched that day.
Its verdicts: 338 soften, 153 correct (of which 84 cleared our confidence gate; the rest were softened instead), 44 confirm an existing draft, 8 keep as written, 1 delete. Below-gate verdicts, and any “keep” on a deadline or money claim, were demoted to “soften” by rule. The reviewer could only ever make the page say less; the only path to a stronger claim was a corrected citation that then passed the verifier.
Of 82 corrected citations sent back through the verifier, 67 were proven accurate. The rest were softened. A before-and-after render of every page was scanned for broken sentences and stray punctuation before publication.
What we could not fix yet
About 210 flagged sentences live in wording shared across many states, where a specific figure is filled in from a data field. We removed the citations from those sentences, so they no longer claim verification, but softening the figure for one state requires a structural change to the template, which is scheduled for the next cycle. Twelve items remain on the editorial desk for hand review. Several official state legislature sites block automated retrieval for days at a time; where no official source could be read, the citation was removed rather than left unproven.
The data
The full ledger behind this report, every citation with its latest verdict, date and source, is published as an open dataset under CC BY 4.0 at /data/verification-ledger. As of the current ledger it holds 7,033 citation rows, 82.7% of them accurate on the latest check. The numbers above describe the Q3 cycle; the dataset page always shows the current state.
Corrections, questions and requests to reuse the method: support@casereliefnow.com.