How we verify
Methodology
Verification tiers
Every statute citation is tagged with one of four tiers:
- Tier A — Primary verified
- The primary state-statute page (state legislature or law.cornell.edu mirror) was fetched and the verbatim text was matched to the citation. The verification date records when the URL was last confirmed.
- Tier B — Secondary only
- The citation is widely confirmed across multiple law-firm analyses (Pillsbury, Morgan Lewis, Crowell & Moring, Faegre Drinker, Sheppard Mullin, etc.) but the primary statute URL was not retrievable from our research session (firewalls, 403s, timeouts). The citation is almost certainly correct but verbatim text was not re-verified.
- Tier C — Estimate (annually indexed)
- The value (e.g., Colorado's highly-compensated threshold, Washington's salary cutoff, Maine's 400% federal poverty level) is updated annually by a state agency. We record the most recent year's value with a clear estimate flag. Quarterly review re-verifies against state DOL / L&I / DLLR annual notices.
- Placeholder
- The state is not yet in the canonical dataset. The decoder returns indeterminate and recommends consulting an attorney rather than guessing. We never fabricate a citation.
Attorney review (Gate 4 — pending)
Until an employment-law attorney with verifiable bar credentials signs off on a state record, every state page renders the “research-tier — not attorney-verified” chip. Reviewer attribution is non-optional for production publishing — and the attribution will surface a real bar number, real state of admission, and real LinkedIn or firm bio.
Why so strict? Because fabricated reviewers are disqualifying for Google AdSense E-E-A-T compliance, ethically wrong on a legal-help site, and damaging to the audience this site serves: workers in a high-anxiety negotiation moment who cannot afford to be misled.
Quarterly review cycle
State non-compete law moves fast — new bills and amendments land every legislative session, as ongoing trackers like Epstein Becker Green's 50-State Noncompete Survey document. We commit to a quarterly review cycle (vs. an annual cycle) so that:
- Annually-indexed thresholds (CO HCE, WA salary, ME/RI FPL multipliers) get re-verified against the controlling state agency's annual update.
- New legislation (e.g., Pennsylvania Act 74 of 2024, Indiana's 2025 hospital amendment) gets added to the data layer in the quarter it passes.
- Repealed or amended statutes get pulled or updated. We never leave stale citations in place.
What we will not do
- Fabricate a statute citation, a case-law anchor, or a threshold value to fill a row in the matrix. Indeterminate / unverified beats fabricated, every time.
- Promote a Tier C value to Tier A without re-fetching the primary annual-update page.
- Show a real attorney's name on a state page they have not actually reviewed.
- Render dollar amounts on the home page or comparison surface that have not been verified for the current year.