Editorial Standards

Content types

Every article is labelled as one of three things, and the label is accurate:

• Explainer — what a rule, process, or document is, and how it operates.
• Guide — the practical sequence: what to do, in what order, with what evidence.
• Analysis — where the law is unsettled, contested, or moving, and what the competing positions are.

We do not label evergreen material as breaking news. If we ever publish genuine news, it will be sourced and identified as such.

Accuracy rules

These are absolute, and an article that cannot satisfy them does not run:

• No invented laws, cases, form numbers, deadlines, standards, statistics, quotations, agency positions, or outcomes.
• No stated dollar figure for anything that changes — filing fees, benefit amounts, tax exclusions, wage thresholds. We link to the agency page that carries the current number instead, because a number baked into an article is wrong the moment it changes.
• No processing times. They vary by office and month, and the agency publishes its own.
• Federal and state law are distinguished explicitly, every time.
• Cases are described — name, year, holding — not quoted at length.
• Hypotheticals are labelled as hypotheticals. We never imply that an example is a client or a real matter.

What we will not do

We do not give personalized legal advice, tell a reader whether they qualify for something, predict how a case will come out, or recommend a particular lawyer or firm in exchange for anything. We do not publish content written to rank rather than to inform, and we do not run articles that exist only to carry a link.

Updating

Law moves. When a rule described in an article changes, we revise the article rather than leaving it standing and publishing a competing one. When a change is significant enough that a reader acting on the old version could be harmed, the article carries a visible note in the text describing what changed and when it takes effect.

Because we publish no dates, "recently updated" is not a signal this site offers. The signal we do offer is the in-text dating of volatile facts and the source links beside them.

Conflicts and commercial relationships

Some articles contain a link to an outside law firm. Those links are placed only where the firm's practice area is genuinely relevant to the article's subject, never in navigation, footers, or boilerplate, and never more than once in an article. A commercial relationship behind such a link is disclosed rather than hidden, and the presence of a link never changes what an article says. No advertiser reviews, approves, or sees Beacon content before publication, and no outside party writes it.

Beacon runs no advertising network, no affiliate program, no sponsored posts, and no paid placements in its rankings or listings — it has no rankings or listings to sell.

Use of automated tools

Drafting and editing tools are used in production. They do not replace source verification: every legal proposition in an article is checked against the primary source cited beside it, and anything that cannot be verified is removed rather than softened.

Corrections

Errors are corrected promptly and, where material, marked. See the corrections policy.