How We Verify These Guides
This site publishes compliance guidance for licensed professionals across 51 jurisdictions. That is the kind of writing where being confidently wrong does real damage — so here is exactly how it is produced, what the method cannot do, and what happens when we get something wrong.
The standard every state page is held to
Primary sources only
Every legal claim comes from the state’s own administrative code, its statutes, the regulator’s own website, or the state register. Aggregators like Cornell LII and Justia are never treated as authority — they appear on these pages only as examples of what circulates wrongly, which in this series they frequently did: stale text, undated text, whole chapters off by one, and in one case a rule served as current law a year after it was repealed.
We do not tell the researcher what the citation is
This one was learned the hard way. Early in the series we supplied the rule number to start from, and our own citations were wrong eight times in the first thirty-five states. From New Mexico onward we supplied none, and required the citation to be located on the official site and confirmed as the live version. The error rate fell immediately.
The two-fact test
A state only gets a page if the research produces at least two facts that are not true of its neighbours — verified by reading those neighbours’ rulebooks, not by failing to find something. Obvious candidates get tested first and discarded if they turn out to be regional norms. Mississippi’s two most striking rules turned out to be shared with Tennessee and Alabama; North Dakota’s size rule is near-identical to Nebraska’s. Both pages say so, because a guide that sells a regional norm as a local peculiarity is wrong about the neighbours.
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These accumulated as we hit them. Withdrawn and never-adopted rules still circulating. Repealed rules quoted as current. Regulator guidance contradicting the regulator’s own rules — which we found in 27 of 51 jurisdictions. Licence-number duties belonging to a different board, or to a filing rather than a display. Broken cross-references inside adopted text. Law-versus-regulation conflicts. Time-boxed suspensions and expiry dates. Rules gutted to a pointer. Regulators publishing nothing at all. A rescinded resolution whose announcing memo now returns a 404 — which is why we read meeting minutes, not just rules. Wholesale renumbering that kills every citation online. And an amendments-only document that skips a rule and reads exactly like a repeal.
When sources disagree, we fetch the document
Twice this changed a published page. Two researchers disagreed about whether West Virginia’s team memo was still online; we requested the URL ourselves and settled it. Alaska’s advertising guidance appeared to have been withdrawn because its address returned a 404; fetching the relocated address showed it was live, and a different document was the one genuinely missing. A dead link on a regulator’s site tells you nothing on its own — Kentucky’s meant a rule really had been withdrawn, Alaska’s meant a folder had moved.
We publish our corrections
Every correction to a page that was already public is recorded, dated, and described — including what we said, what is actually true, and how the error came to light. Several also carry a visible note on the page itself. The corrections log is the honest measure of this method, and it is short by design rather than by omission.
What this method cannot do
Three limits worth stating plainly, because a compliance guide that pretends to more certainty than it has is worse than none.
- We read published law, not enforcement practice. Regulators rarely publish reasoned decisions, so where the plain text and the enforced reading might differ, we say so rather than resolve it. Kansas, Montana and Alaska each carry an explicit note of this kind.
- Rules change, and several of these have dates on them. Kentucky’s advertising rule expires in December 2026. New Hampshire’s runs on a ten-year clock and is being renumbered. Alaska is adding a team-size rule. North Dakota has discussed deleting the duty its page is built on. Every page with a live date says so, and the comparison table lists them together.
- None of this is legal advice. It is a careful reading of published rules, with the citation on every claim so you can check it against your own broker’s policy and your own regulator.
Who writes this
These guides are researched and published by Genesis One, which makes Autograph, a macOS email signature app. That is a commercial interest and you should weigh it: we sell a product that builds email signatures, and these pages describe the rules those signatures have to satisfy.
What we have tried to do about it is make the pages useless as marketing if they are not accurate first. The most commercially convenient thing to write would be that every state demands an elaborate signature. What the research actually found is that only two of fifty-one jurisdictions require a licence number, that most require far less than the templates suggest, and that in Montana the brokerage does not have to be named at all. Those findings are on the pages because they are true.
Found an error?
Tell us and we will check it, fix it, and log it — hello@autographs.app. If you are a regulator or a state association and something on your jurisdiction’s page is wrong, that is the fastest way to have it corrected. Several pages in this series document errors in regulators’ own published guidance; we would rather be told about ours the same way.
Built to satisfy these rules
Autograph builds the signature on your Mac and installs it into Apple Mail in one click — images hosted at permanent URLs, real width and height attributes, inline styles, and a table-based layout, which is what the rules on these pages and the clients that render them both require.
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Is this legal advice?
No. It is a reading of published statutes and regulations, with a citation attached to every claim so you can verify it. Advertising rules interact with your brokerage’s own policy and with your regulator’s enforcement practice, neither of which we can see. Use these pages to know what the rule says and where to find it, then check the specifics with your broker.
Why don’t you cite Cornell or Justia?
Because in this series they were repeatedly wrong. We found a rule served as current a year after it was repealed, entire chapters off by one after a renumbering, per-section histories that were a single blanket note copied everywhere, and text with no effective date at all. They are useful for finding your way to a rule; they are not evidence of what the rule says. We cite the state’s own published code, and where an aggregator is accurate we say so explicitly — because by then it is worth noting.
How often is this re-checked?
Pages carrying a known future change say so on the page and in the comparison table — expiry dates, pending amendments, scheduled reviews. Those are re-checked before the date in question. Everything else carries the month it was last verified in its header, so you can see for yourself how fresh it is rather than trusting an undated page.
You sell signature software. Doesn’t that bias this?
It is a real conflict and worth naming. The test we would apply is whether the findings are commercially convenient, and mostly they are not: only two jurisdictions require a licence number, most require far less than signature templates add, and one state does not require the brokerage to be named at all. Those are on the pages because the research found them.
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