Editorial Standards & Review Process

Recording Law publishes legal information that people rely on to understand their rights. This page explains exactly how our guides are researched, written, verified, and corrected, including the role AI plays in our newsroom, the verification level shown on our articles, and the change log at the bottom of every updated guide.

Who We Are

RecordingLaw.com began as a focused guide to recording-consent laws and has grown into a broader legal-information resource covering US states and more than 80 countries. We are a legal-information publisher, not a law firm. We research and report on the law; we do not represent clients or give legal advice. When a question turns on your specific facts, we point you to the official source and recommend a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction.

How Our Guides Are Made

We use AI, and we say so. Our guides are produced by an AI-assisted editorial pipeline that our team designs, supervises, and holds to the standards on this page:

  • Research opens the primary source. Before anything is written, research agents locate and open the governing statutes, regulations, court decisions, and official guidance. A source that could not actually be opened is treated as unverified, never as confirmation.
  • AI drafts from that research. Drafts are written from the collected primary-source material, with every legal claim tied to a specific citation, and are checked against that material before publication.
  • Independent adversarial fact-checks. For audited articles, a separate reviewer (independent from whatever wrote the draft) re-opens the cited sources and actively tries to prove the draft wrong: holdings, dates, penalties, section numbers, quotes. Articles that fail are fixed and re-checked, or not published.
  • Humans set the rules and approve publication. Our editorial team defines these standards, reviews flagged and high-stakes content, approves what goes live, and handles reader corrections.

AI systems make mistakes, including confident ones. That is precisely why our process is built around independent verification rather than trust in any single writer, human or AI, and why we label each article with the level of checking it has actually survived rather than asking you to take our word for it.

Verification Levels

Articles carry colored badges near the byline showing how far through our verification ladder that specific page has progressed. The badges describe the checking a page has survived, not who wrote it, and they are computed from our internal verification log; nobody can hand-set a level. A page wears one badge for each step it has earned, so a fully verified page shows all three of the upper badges side by side, and each badge links back to its definition here.

AI-assisted, source-checked

Written by our AI pipeline from primary sources that were opened during research, and self-checked against them before publication.

Independently fact-checked

An independent reviewer re-opened every cited source and tried to falsify the article's claims. The article passed, or was corrected and re-checked.

Editor-reviewed

Shown alongside the fact-checked badge: the article was additionally reviewed and approved by a human editor.

Law current as of [date]

Our highest standard, shown alongside both badges above: the article was independently fact-checked, reviewed by an editor, and the governing law itself was re-checked for recent changes on the stated date. This claim expires: if we have not re-checked the law within 12 months, this badge automatically drops off and the article keeps only the two badges above. A dated currency claim we stopped verifying is a claim we stop making.

No badge yet? A page without a badge has not yet been independently re-verified under this system. We are working through our archive; unverified pages gain their badge as they pass through the pipeline, and this label is intentionally withheld rather than assumed.

Change Logs on Every Article

When a guide changes in a way that matters (a law changed, a court ruled, we corrected an error, we added significant new material), the change is recorded in the Updates section at the bottom of that article, with the date and what changed. Minor wording and formatting fixes are not logged. Corrections are logged as corrections; we do not quietly rewrite mistakes.

How We Research

  • Government sources first. Official legislature databases, .gov and .gc.ca sites, agency regulations, and published court opinions take priority over secondary commentary.
  • Specific statutes cited. Where we state a rule, we cite the exact statute, regulation, or case by section number so you can read the law yourself.
  • Current law, not stale summaries. We check the live text of a statute as of our review date rather than relying on older write-ups.
  • Sources listed on the page. Most guides end with a Sources section linking the authorities we relied on.

What “Last Reviewed” Means

Many guides display a “Reviewed” date near the title. That date reflects the most recent time the page's content was meaningfully checked or updated against current primary sources; it is not an automatic system timestamp, and we do not bump it for verification passes that changed nothing.

Corrections

If you spot an error, an out-of-date statute, or a citation that no longer resolves, please tell us through our contact page. Corrections from readers and practitioners are among the most valuable inputs we get. Confirmed corrections are fixed against the primary source and logged in the article's Updates section.

Editorial Independence

Recording Law is supported by display advertising. Advertising is managed by a third-party partner and has no influence on our research, our legal conclusions, or which sources we cite. Advertisers do not review content before publication. How we handle data is described in our Privacy Policy.

The information on RecordingLaw.com is provided for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. A verification badge describes the process an article has been through; it is not a guarantee of accuracy or a promise about your specific situation. Laws change frequently, and how they apply varies with the facts. Always consult a qualified attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.