# Editorial policy > How Otto's reference layer is sourced, reviewed and corrected: primary sources only, attorney review and a review date before publication, why we do not name the reviewer, and what happens when something is wrong. - Source: https://ottoforfirms.com/editorial-policy/ - Publisher: Otto — https://ottoforfirms.com - Updated: 2026-07-26 Last updated 26 July 2026. This policy governs the reference layer — the statute-of-limitations tables, the compliance references, the glossary, and anything else published as fact rather than as a description of our product. Marketing copy is not covered here and should not be confused with it. It exists because the reference layer's only asset is being right. A collections attorney checking a limitations period against our page is making a decision with a deadline attached to it. A wrong number there is not a content problem. --- ## 1. What we publish, and what we will not We publish what can be sourced to a primary authority and verified by a person who read it. We do not publish a legal fact we have not checked. In practice this means parts of the reference are visibly empty. As of 26 July 2026, **50 of 51 jurisdictions** have published limitations periods; Mississippi has none, because the research did not resolve a written-contract period with a citation you can open, and both long-form reference pages are still marked in review. The empty cells are the policy working, not the policy failing. We would rather show a blank cell than a number somebody acts on. --- ## 2. Sourcing ### 2.1 Primary sources only Every legal assertion cites a primary source, meaning: - The **state's own code**, from the official legislative or state-published site - The **Code of Federal Regulations** via eCFR, and the **United States Code** - The **Federal Register**, for rule text, preambles and effective dates - **Published guidance from the issuing agency** — CFPB, OCC, Federal Reserve, FDIC, NCUA, FTC — from the agency's own site - **Consent orders and enforcement actions**, from the issuing agency - **Court opinions**, from the court or an official reporter ### 2.2 Summary sites are never cited Not in a citation, not in a footnote, not as "see also". Specifically excluded: debt-advice content farms, credit-bureau blogs, legal-marketing sites, law-firm blog posts, "statute of limitations by state" aggregator tables, competitors' content, Wikipedia, and the output of any AI system. This is the rule most likely to be bent under time pressure, and it is the one that matters most, because the aggregator tables are frequently wrong in the same place — they collapse open account into written contract, and they omit tolling. Citing them propagates the error and inherits it. A summary site may be used to **find** a primary source. It is then closed, the primary source is opened and read, and the primary source is what gets cited. If the primary source does not say what the summary said, the summary was wrong. ### 2.3 Citation form - Verbatim, in the jurisdiction's own citation form — `Fla. Stat. § 95.11(2)(b)`, not "Florida Statute 95.11". - Paired with a `citationUrl` to the official source. - If there is no stable official URL — some state codes have none — the citation stands **without a link**. We do not link a mirror or a commercial database to fill the gap. - Links are checked when the page is reviewed. A dead official link is a review trigger, not a licence to substitute a secondary one. ### 2.4 Dates and versions Regulations change. Every reference records the date it was reviewed and, where the source has one, the version or effective date of the text relied on. "Current as of" with no date is not a date. --- ## 3. Who writes and who reviews Three roles, and the same person may not hold the first two on the same page. | Role | Does | Recorded as | |---|---|---| | **Author** | Drafts, gathers sources, writes the citation | Author-registry key | | **Reviewing attorney** | Opens every cited source, verifies every assertion, signs off | `reviewedBy` + `lastReviewedAt` | | **Editor** | Structure, clarity, consistency of citation form. No authority over legal substance | — | The reviewing attorney is a licensed attorney. **`lastReviewedAt` is set by the reviewing attorney, not by a developer and not by a build script.** A date written by anyone else is a false record of review. ### We do not name the reviewer on the page Every published page carries the date it was last reviewed. It does not carry the name of the person who reviewed it. This is a deliberate choice and it costs us something, so it is worth saying plainly what the trade is. A named, checkable expert is the strongest signal a reference page can carry — to a reader deciding whether to trust a number, and to a search or answer engine deciding the same thing. We have given that up. What we will not do is put a name on a page that cannot be checked. A byline is a claim about a specific licensed person standing behind a specific statement of law, and a bar number is a public record anyone can verify in about thirty seconds. An unverifiable name is not a weaker version of that claim — it is a false one, and it is worse than no name at all. If we ever publish a reviewer's name here, it will come with their bar admission and a link to the licensing authority's own lookup, because that is the only form of the claim worth making. So: the date is the record, the citation is the evidence, and the primary source is one click away so you can check the number yourself rather than taking our word for it. That is a weaker warrant than a named expert and we are not going to dress it up as an equivalent one. --- ## 4. The publication gate The gate is mechanical, not editorial discretion, and there is exactly one of it. - **Data.** A jurisdiction publishes only when `lastReviewedAt`, `written` and `citation` are all set. One test gates both the page and the underlying dataset, so the two cannot disagree. Until then the page renders an honest "in attorney review" notice, is served `noindex`, and is excluded from `sitemap.xml`. - **Not the byline.** `reviewedBy` is not part of that test, because no page renders it — see §3. Requiring it would have meant writing a name into the author registry for the sole purpose of opening a gate, which is the exact failure the registry is built to prevent. It remains optional, and it is still validated against the registry whenever it is set. - **Prose.** A reference page carries `status`. Anything other than `published` renders in full so it can be read and reviewed, and is `noindex` and out of the sitemap. - **Unfinished work is visible, not hidden.** Any `TODO: verify` left in a draft renders as highlighted text on the page. A placeholder that looks like finished prose is how an unverified claim ships by accident. There is no override, no "publish anyway" flag, and none should be added. If a deadline and the gate disagree, the deadline moves. --- ## 5. Re-review Published is not permanent. A page returns to the queue when any of these happens, whichever comes first: - The statute is amended, repealed or renumbered - Reg F or the FDCPA is amended, or the CFPB issues an interpretive rule or advisory opinion bearing on the point - A controlling appellate decision changes the reading - A consent order or enforcement action changes what the practice should be - **Twelve months** since `lastReviewedAt` At twelve months the page enters the re-review queue and stays published. At **eighteen months** without re-review it is unpublished — reverted to the in-review state, `noindex`, out of the sitemap — until an attorney has looked at it again. Stale legal content that still looks current is a worse failure than missing content, and the only reliable way to prevent it is to make the passage of time do the unpublishing rather than a person remembering to. --- ## 6. Corrections ### 6.1 How to report one Email **corrections@** the site's domain, or use the contact form, with the URL and what is wrong. Anyone may report; no account, no relationship, no form gymnastics. Reports from people who disagree with us are still reports. We acknowledge within **two business days**. ### 6.2 Triage | Level | What it is | What happens | |---|---|---| | **1** | A legal fact is wrong — a period, a citation, an accrual or tolling rule | The page is reverted to in-review within **one business day**, which removes it from search and the sitemap. Then it is corrected and re-reviewed. | | **2** | Framing that misleads, a stale citation, an outdated effective date | Corrected within **five business days**, with a dated correction note | | **3** | Typo, broken link, formatting | Next build | These are our targets. They are not a guarantee, and they are not a promise about any outcome for anyone relying on the page. ### 6.3 How corrections appear - A dated correction note stays on the page. We do not silently edit a legal fact and let the old version disappear. - The note says what was wrong and what it now says. "Updated for accuracy" is not a correction note. - **A page is never deleted to make an error go away.** If it is wrong it goes back to in-review with the note attached, which is the same mechanism used for anything unverified. - If a correction changes what a reader might reasonably have acted on, the note says so plainly rather than burying it in a changelog. --- ## 7. AI-assisted drafting We use AI tools in this work and we would rather say so than be found out. **What they may do:** propose structure, draft prose from sources a person has already gathered and read, summarise a document the author is reading, tighten wording, find inconsistencies across pages. **What they may never do:** supply a citation, a statute number, a limitations period, a date, a case name, or a rule reference that a human has not opened and read at the primary source. Not as a starting point, not "to be checked later." Model-generated citations are frequently well-formed and wrong, which is the worst possible failure mode for this content, and the only defence is that a person opened the source. Every citation on this site has been opened by a person. That is the claim, and the review record is what backs it. --- ## 8. Independence - **No sponsored placement, ever, in the reference layer.** Nothing here can be bought. - No affiliate links, no paid links, no link exchanges, no reciprocal-linking arrangements. - Competitors are described from their own public documentation, quoted and dated, never from inference or from what a customer said in a sales call. If we cannot source a claim about a competitor's product to their published material, we do not make it. - The reference content is not written to make our product look necessary. Where a problem has a manual solution that works, the page says so — see the "what enforcement cannot do" section on `/manual-vs-enforced/`, which stays in. --- ## 9. What this content is not It is an informational reference. It is **not legal advice**, using it creates no attorney-client relationship, and it cannot account for the facts that determine the answer in a real matter — which state's law governs, the contract type, when the claim accrued, and whether anything tolled or revived it. Nothing in the reference layer states or implies that using it, or using our product, produces a compliance outcome. Our terms disclaim compliance outcomes and this content holds the same line: we describe controls, not results. --- ## 10. Licence and reuse The statute-of-limitations dataset is published under **CC BY 4.0** and is declared as such in the page's `Dataset` schema. Reuse it, including commercially. We ask for attribution to the page you took it from, and we ask that you carry the review date with the number, because a limitations period without a date is the thing this whole policy exists to prevent. If you find an error in reused data, report it here as well as fixing it there. --- ## 11. Contact Corrections: **corrections@** the site's domain. Anything else about this policy: the contact form. This policy is versioned in the repository at `content/reference/editorial-policy.md`. Changes to it are commits, with dates. --- This is a statement of our own practice, published so it can be checked against what we actually do. It is not legal advice and asserts nothing about anyone else's obligations. Where it is wrong or out of date, it is a defect in this document — tell us and it gets corrected here rather than quietly fixed.