How we verify the law

Every legal statement here is checked against the source that actually says it, before it is written. Each page shows you the date that happened.

Why this page exists

Because this firm once filed a brief that cited a real Minnesota case for a proposition the case does not contain. The citation was correctly formatted. The case existed. The reporter volume and page were right. It simply did not say the thing it was cited for, and a review that checked the form of the citation rather than its substance passed it through.

Nothing about that is unusual, which is the point. It is the ordinary failure mode of legal writing, it predates anyone using software to help, and the only reliable defence is to go back to the source and read it. So that is what happens here, and the dates on each page are how you can tell.

The rules we write under

1. Nothing is stated from memory. Not a statute number, not a deadline, not a dollar threshold, not a rule. If it is going on the page it gets retrieved first.
2. The primary source, not a summary of it. Minnesota statutes come from the Office of the Revisor of Statutes; court rules and appellate opinions from the Minnesota Judicial Branch; federal material from the government's own publications. Secondary sources are read, and they are not what gets cited.
3. Quotations are verbatim, from the retrieved text. Not reconstructed, not tidied, not paraphrased into quotation marks. Where a statute is quoted, the page links the section so you can read the rest of it.
4. A citation is checked for what it says, not how it looks. The question is whether the authority stands for the proposition it is attached to. That is a separate pass, done against the retrieved source, after the article is drafted.
5. Amendments are checked, not assumed. A published statute page can lag a recent session law, and a rule can be abrogated with its content moved somewhere else while the old number keeps circulating for years. Both have to be looked for on purpose.
6. What could not be verified is not published. There is no house style for hedging around an unchecked claim.

What the dates on each page mean

Sources checked is the day someone last retrieved every source the article relies on and confirmed it still says what the article says it says.

Citations independently verified is the day a separate pass confirmed that each authority exists and stands for the proposition it is cited for. Not every page carries this line; a page with statutory or case citations does not publish without it, and the build fails if it tries.

Neither date is a promise that the law has not changed since. Follow the links. That is what they are for.

When we are wrong

Tell us and we will fix the page and re-date it. There is an option on the contact form specifically for reporting an error, and it goes to a person at Madgett Law, LLC rather than into a queue. A correction that arrives from a reader is worth more than one found in review, because it means the page was being relied on.