Editorial Policy

This page sets out the standards every article on CollectiveClaim.us is held to. It is written so it can be checked against the published articles rather than taken on trust.

1. What we publish

General legal information for a United States audience: what a regulator, court, legislature or settlement administrator has done, how a procedural rule operates, and what remains undecided in a live dispute. We do not publish individualised advice, and no article is written as if the reader’s facts were known to us.

2. Sources

• Primary sources are the default. Agency actions and communications (FDA, CPSC, EPA, FTC, DOJ), court dockets and opinions, Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation orders and statistics, statutes and bill text, official bankruptcy filings, and court-appointed settlement administration sites.
• Secondary sources are context only and are labelled as secondary in the article’s Sources section (for example reporting from a wire service, or a company’s own press release, which we treat as a company statement rather than an independent finding).
• A source must support the sentence it sits next to. Where a document states an allegation, the article says alleged; where it records a finding, the article says so and names the body that made it.
• We do not invent citations, quotations, case names, docket numbers, dates or figures. If something cannot be verified from a retrievable document, it is either attributed to whoever asserted it or left out.

3. Labelling the legal status of statements

Every material statement carries one of these statuses, in plain words:

Aggregate reporting is not substituted for this discipline. “Thousands of lawsuits” is a phrase we use only where a court, the JPML or a defendant’s own disclosure supports the number.

4. Fact-checking and review

1. Drafts are produced with AI assistance against a written brief that names the sources to be used.
2. Every cited source is fetched during drafting and re-checked before publication.
3. The editorial desk edits for accuracy of legal status, clarity and tone, and removes any claim it cannot tie to a document.
4. Articles on sensitive subject matter, including child sexual abuse and deaths, are written without graphic detail and without identifying non-public individuals.
5. We do not state that an article was reviewed by a lawyer, doctor or other expert unless that review has occurred; when it has, the reviewer is named on the article with their qualifications.

5. Naming individuals

Institutions, corporate defendants, regulators, judges, court-appointed officials and settlement trustees are named: they act in a public capacity and appear in the public record.

Private individuals are treated differently.

• People who say they were harmed are named only where they have themselves identified publicly, and then the source in which they did so is cited on the article. Where a court permits a case to proceed under a pseudonym we use the court’s own designation (“Jane Doe”, “John Doe 1”) and do not attempt to establish who that is, and we do not publish partial identifiers - a first name with an initial, a workplace, a street, a photograph - that would let a reader complete the identification.
• People accused of wrongdoing are named where the allegation appears in a retrievable official document - an indictment, a court filing, a regulator’s report, a licensing action, or an institution’s own published disclosure list - or where they have been convicted. The article uses the word the document uses: charged, indicted, convicted, named in a regulatory report. We do not name a private individual on the strength of another website’s claim, a social media post or a rumour.
• A name is never added to attract search traffic. It goes in when the record supports it and the name is material to understanding the litigation.

The reason is specific to the material we cover: court records in the child sexual abuse and passenger assault proceedings on this site are pseudonymous by design, and complainants in them have asked not to be identified. Publishing those identities, or enough detail to work them out, would cause a harm this publication will not cause, and would also misrepresent how the courts themselves treat the record. Where a survivor has chosen to speak under their own name, we report that choice as theirs and cite where they made it.

6. AI-assisted content

AI tools may be used for research, drafting and editing. They are not a source. An AI-generated statement that cannot be traced to a retrievable document is removed. The corrections policy applies to AI-assisted errors exactly as it does to any other error, and the correction is published.

7. Corrections and updates

Substantive corrections are logged on the article (with the date and what changed) and summarised on the corrections policy page. Articles are re-dated only when a substantive change is made.

8. Independence, sponsorship and conflicts

• We do not accept payment for coverage, and we do not publish sponsored articles.
• We do not sell editorial placement: no advertiser, and no law firm that receives an inquiry, has any say in what an article says.
• The site earns revenue two ways, both disclosed on the pages concerned: display advertising served by Google AdSense, and passing reader inquiries to law firms that may pay for them.
• If a material connection to a subject exists, it is disclosed on the article.
• We have no financial interest in the outcome of any litigation we cover.

9. Advertising and tracking

Advertising is served on this site by Google AdSense, and advertising cookies may be set: the cookie policy and the advertising policy describe it. There is no analytics, no tag manager and no social embed. If advertising is introduced, the privacy policy and the terms of use are updated before any ad code is deployed, ad units are always labelled as advertising and kept visually distinct from editorial content, and no advertiser has any say in what this publication covers. See the privacy policy for what the web server records and why.

10. Enforcement

If you believe a published article breaks any of the rules above, email editorial@collectiveclaim.us with the article, the statement and the document that contradicts it. We will either correct the article or explain, on the record, why the statement stands.