Editorial Standards

Law Leaderboard publishes data-backed comparison pages. The editorial standard is simple: every important claim should be traceable, scoped correctly, and phrased to match what the site actually measures.

Evidence Hierarchy

  1. Structured facts from the current dataset.
  2. Public source documents and official citations.
  3. Generated narrative that restates stored facts without extending them.

Count And Metric Discipline

The site must distinguish between public Google review counts, retrieved review records, and text reviews analyzed. A page should not collapse those counts into a single number when they mean different things.

Review-derived signals such as communication mentions, recommendation rate, or case-type mentions describe what appears in the current sample. They do not independently prove specialization, likely case value, or attorney quality in a complete sense.

Legal Content Standard

State-law content is for orientation. Official statutes, rules, and current case law remain the controlling sources. Legal summaries should be linked to primary sources wherever practical and should avoid confident claims when source coverage is weak.

The platform should be authoritative for review-based law-firm market intelligence and useful for legal orientation. It should not present itself as the ultimate authority on substantive law without source-backed legal coverage.

AI Usage Standard

  • Allowed: classification, extraction, summarization from stored facts, comparison generation, and readability rewrites.
  • Not allowed: invented legal guidance, invented firm strengths, unsupported specialization claims, or confident prose from thin data.
  • Generated sections should remain subordinate to visible facts, citations, freshness signals, and limitations.

Publishing Threshold

  • A page should have a direct answer block, source-backed metrics, freshness signals, and limitations.
  • A page should not publish if provenance is missing or core counts conflict.
  • FAQ schema should not be used for weak, generic, or non-responsive answers.