How we verify the law

Every statement of law on this site is confirmed against the actual statute or opinion before it is published — never from memory, and never from another article.

The process

1. Retrieve the source first. The statute is pulled from the Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes, or the opinion from the court that issued it, before the sentence that relies on it is written.
2. Quote it verbatim. Statutory language appears in a block quote, so you can always tell our words from the legislature's.
3. Verify independently. A second pass re-retrieves every citation and confirms three separate things: that the authority exists, that it says what it is cited for, and that any quotation matches the source word for word. Getting the first two right and the third wrong is the failure mode that matters most.
4. Link and date it. Each guide lists its sources and the date they were last checked. If that date is old, treat the guide as old.

Why this is not standard

Because trust content goes stale quietly. Nothing on the page changes when the legislature amends a statute — the article just becomes wrong while continuing to look authoritative.

The clearest current example: Minnesota's limit on how long a trust may last changed from 90 years to 500 years, effective August 1, 2025. A great deal of published Minnesota trust advice still says 90 years, including material written by people who knew it was 90 when they wrote it. It was true. It is not true now. No page announces that.

What verification is not

Confirming that a statute says what we say it says is not the same as knowing whether it applies to you. It usually turns on facts — what you own, how it is titled, who your beneficiaries are, what your family looks like — that this site has no way to know. Accurate general law and advice about your situation are different things, and only the first one is here.