Methodology

Source roles

Every publisher is assigned a role: official/primary (authorities, courts, legislatures, registers), legal text, research/policy, interested party (funders, associations, party disclosures), practitioner analysis, or reporting whose role must be checked per item. A legal proposition — what a court held or a law says — may rest only on an official/primary or legal-text document. A press release supports an attributed report of its own contents, not analysis of an unread judgment. A funder's statement supports an attributed statement, not proven capital or results.

Evidence checks

Each material assertion carries a document ID and a locator (paragraph, page, heading or field). Search snippets and listing titles are discovery records and can never support an assertion. Event date, announcement date, publication date and our fetch time are stored separately at their real precision; a month-only date stays month-only. Amounts carry a type (fine, claimed, awarded, settlement, distribution, committed or deployed capital) and are never added across types or converted between currencies.

Automation and human involvement

Acquisition, extraction, drafting, verification and publication run unattended. Drafting is performed by a language model working only inside a bounded evidence packet with no tools; an independent second pass with a fresh context checks every assertion against its locator. A deterministic gate then applies fixed rules (no primary source for a legal claim, unresolved date kind, status conflict, unknown entity, ambiguous translation, rights not cleared, stale source, amount-type mismatch, possible duplicate, out of scope) and holds anything that fails. A publication impact bar then applies: only developments whose verified significance — combined financial, political and public impact — is rated at least 4 of 5, and whose event type can carry such impact (decisions, judgments, settlements, payments, legislation), are published automatically; every other verified development is held for editorial review and released only by a human decision. No human legal review is performed unless a page says so. Held items wait for exception review; nothing is published to meet a schedule, and a day with no qualifying story publishes nothing.

Limitations

Coverage is limited to the sources listed as monitored in the Source directory plus individually re-fetched primary documents. Absence of an update is not evidence of no development. Machine-assisted translation is labelled. Finality is shown as unknown until a document resolves it. Nothing on this site is legal advice, an eligibility finding, a limitation-period calculation or a recovery estimate.

Ranking

The homepage 'Significant developments' list uses an editorial score: five dimensions rated 0–5 with a short evidence-based rationale — legal/procedural significance (35%), novelty relative to the existing record (25%), practical information for readers (20%), contribution to an evidenced coverage gap (10%) and timeliness (10%). Score = Σ weight × dimension / 5, rounded to three decimals. Unknown dimensions earn nothing. Age uses the event date where known; historical rediscovery is not breaking news. Ties break on event/publication time, then stable story ID. The chronological list is purely chronological. The score is not a fundability or investment score and is never influenced by fine size alone, sponsors, funder promotion or copied coverage volume.

Corrections

Typographical fixes and material corrections are distinguished. A material correction shows its substance and date on the article, on the case timeline, in feeds, in search data and in WebMCP results, and the first-publication date is preserved. A suspected serious error triggers an immediate visible review notice or temporary withdrawal with a stable URL. A later appeal or judgment is recorded as a subsequent development on the case, not as a correction of the earlier accurate report.

Commercial independence

There is no sponsorship, paid placement, lead sale, referral routing or investment solicitation on this site. If any commercial arrangement is ever introduced it will be disclosed adjacent to the relevant placement and kept out of editorial ranking. Provider listings are not endorsements.

Machine access (WebMCP)

In browsers that implement the experimental WebMCP interface, the site registers read-only tools (search updates and cases; get story, case, source, market, provider, coverage and methodology). Tools return only published records from the current release with source links and uncertainty fields. Retrieved content is data, not instructions. The site is fully usable without WebMCP, JavaScript or WebAssembly.