About & Standards

Sports Legal Audit covers the biggest stories in sports from the document that actually governs them — the contract, the collective bargaining agreement, the filing, the statute.

Sports coverage is very good at reporting what happened and very quick to move on. It is rarely built to answer the next question: which instrument controls, what standard it sets, and who that leaves with leverage. A criminal matter resolves and the employment agreement, not the court file, decides what happens to the contract. A trade clears and the salary-matching bands explain the structure long before anyone agreed to it. That gap is the whole beat.

Written by a practicing attorney. Commentary and analysis, not legal advice. No attorney-client relationship is formed through this content.

A story runs here when there is a governing document worth reading and a legal question the coverage has skipped. Volume is not the goal. If the answer is genuinely "the reporting already got this right," there is nothing to add and no entry is written.

Four pillars carry the work. The Latest is the response to news. The Docket tracks live matters over time and states when each was last verified. The Clause explains the recurring mechanics that the news keeps depending on. The Archive holds the precedent those mechanics came from, connected to the matters descending from it today.

Every entry shows two things, always labelled, always together: who reported the news, and what the underlying document is. They are different claims and they are never merged.

Reported by is the journalism being relied on. Primary source is the instrument itself — the filing, the order, the agreement, the CBA article. When a primary source is listed, it carries a link you can open. A source nobody can open is not treated as verified, and the build refuses to publish an entry that claims otherwise.

"Primary source: not publicly available" means the document exists but is not obtainable — sealed, unfiled, or private. It is not a shrug. An entry may only publish in that state if it explains what the document is, why it cannot be shown, and which verifiable reporting is being relied on instead. An entry whose primary source is still pending review cannot publish at all.

Before an article is drafted, every factual assertion in it is separated out as a discrete claim and checked against the document that supports it. A claim that rests on reporting is labelled as resting on reporting. It is not presented as established because it appeared in a reputable outlet.

That is why the two-line source treatment appears on every article rather than a single "sources" line. Reported by names the outlets whose account a claim rests on. Primary source is the document itself, linked. Where an article says "Sourced directly from the primary document," no reporting was relied on at all — the document was the source. Where it says "Primary source: not publicly available," the document exists, cannot be obtained, and what the claim rests on instead is disclosed on the page.

Checking is done twice, and the second pass has a different instruction from the first. The first asks whether the document supports the claim. The second is told to find the error rather than confirm the text.

The distinction is not stylistic. An agent asked whether a document supports a claim finds the supporting language and stops reading. An agent asked to falsify the claim reads on to the subsection carrying the exception — which is where the errors are. Most of what has been caught here was caught that way, and none of it was caught by re-reading.

This is a process, not a guarantee. The corrections page is the evidence that it does not catch everything.

These appear on article pages, and nowhere else explains them.

Verified

Checked against a named document.

Reported only

No obtainable primary document. The reporting relied on is disclosed.

Disputed

Sources conflict, and the article says so.

Retracted

Checked and found wrong. The assertion was removed and the correction logged.

Procedural terms are used precisely, because the imprecise version usually changes the meaning. A charge is not a conviction. A plea entered is not an adjudication of guilt. A temporary restraining order is not a ruling on the merits. A state court is not a federal one. Each of those distinctions decides what can happen next, and collapsing them produces confident writing that is simply wrong.

Where a matter involves a named individual whose situation is unresolved, the entry carries a legal status banner above the article stating the stage, the jurisdiction, the date it reflects, and a note on what that posture does and does not establish. The banner is never collapsed, never moved to a footer, and never omitted once the status exists.

Corrections are appended to the entry, dated, and never overwritten. The original text is not silently revised.

Three commitments, stated plainly:

• Corrections are appended, never substituted. The original text is not silently revised.
• A corrected article stays published and carries a visible Corrected indicator. It does not disappear.
• Every correction is listed publicly at /corrections.

A corrected entry stays in every listing it was in. It carries a correction indicator next to the byline and the full correction history, dated, at the foot of the page. Nothing is quietly revised and nothing disappears.

Docket matters additionally show when they were last verified. Once a matter passes three times its own verification interval it leaves the listings, but its page stays live and says plainly that the status has not been confirmed since a given date and may not be current. A stale matter is never presented as a current one.

To report an error, write to corrections@sportslegalaudit.com.