Sources & methodology

Research methodology

We treat the following as primary sources, in order of preference:

1. The state legislature's official codified statutes server (e.g., leginfo.legislature.ca.gov, public.leginfo.state.ny.us, statutes.capitol.texas.gov). This is the document the law actually is — revisions, amendments, session laws.
2. The state agency that administers workers' compensation (e.g., the California DIR/DWC, the New York Workers' Compensation Board, the Florida Division of Workers' Compensation). Used when the legislature's server timed out or returned a non-textual format, and to capture how the agency currently interprets the statute.
3. Court rulings that materially altered statutory interpretation, cited only where the case name, citation, and holding are all traceable to the published opinion.

We treat the following as useful for cross-check, not authoritative: Justia, FindLaw, Nolo, law-firm marketing pages, and aggregator sites. These are sometimes years out of date and we do not cite them.

Where any sub-element of a state entry (a tolling provision, a leading case, a notice exception) could not be confirmed against a primary source within the research budget, that sub-element is marked [PLACEHOLDER: needs verification] instead of invented.

Statute language vs. how courts apply it

What the statute says and how courts apply it often diverge. A state may have a clean two-year filing rule on its face but a decade of case law layering tolling, equitable extensions, and interpretive nuance. We surface representative jurisprudence per state where the case name, citation, and doctrinal hold are all confirmable from the published opinion. Where any of those three is uncertain, we omit the citation rather than approximate it.

Read the statute citation as the floor of what your state requires, not the ceiling of what your case may turn on. A licensed workers' compensation attorney in your state can tell you how local commissioners and appellate panels actually apply it.

Correction process

If you find an error — a wrong citation, a stale rule, an interpretation that a recent appellate decision has overruled — write to us at /contact. Use the subject line Correction: {state} statute and include either a primary source link or a citation we can verify ourselves. We update within five business days of a verified correction and credit the source.

We do not correct without verification, and we do not silently backdate — the lastReviewed field on each state page advances when a correction lands.