This page sets out how Docket Journal decides what to publish, how we handle sources, and where editorial stops and commercial begins. It is written to be held to.
What we publish
We cover the business of running a law firm: practice management, legal operations, legal technology and firm economics. The test for an article is whether a managing partner, a practice manager or a legal ops lead could do something differently on Monday because they read it. Comprehensiveness is not the goal; usefulness is.
Accuracy and sourcing
- Billing rates, realisation figures, market sizes and survey findings are linked to whoever produced them, not to a secondary article about them.
- Every number carries a date and an author. A rate benchmark from three years ago is a different fact from the same benchmark today, and we say which one we mean.
- Where a rule differs by jurisdiction — and in this field it usually does — we say which jurisdiction we are describing.
- Where we could not confirm something, the article says so plainly instead of hedging its way past it.
- We do not publish invented quotes, composite clients presented as real ones, or testimonials in the voice of people who do not exist.
Independence
This publication is funded commercially, partly by paid partner content. Those arrangements do not reach the editorial desk. A partner cannot see an article before it runs, cannot commission favourable coverage, and cannot have coverage they dislike taken down. If that is the arrangement someone wants, this is the wrong publication.
Paid work is a separate product with its own labelling: a Partner content mark, a disclosure panel, exclusion from the editorial feed, and outbound links marked rel="sponsored". We turn down paid work that is off-topic or that we think would leave a reader worse informed.
Use of AI
We use software, AI included, for research and production. We do not publish output nobody has read. A person edits every article and this publication carries the responsibility for what it says, whatever produced the first draft.
Updates
Articles are updated when the facts underneath them change, and a substantive update carries a visible date. We do not re-stamp unchanged articles to make them look fresh.
Questions about any of this: editor@docketjournal.com.