Editorial policy

Review cadence

Every published guide is reviewed on a bimonthly cycle. The cadence is sitewide and uniform. It does not vary by topic, by traffic or by the age of the page.

Uniform rather than tiered is a deliberate choice. A single rule can be followed and checked by someone who does not work on the site, and a schedule that assigns different intervals to different pages is a schedule that stops being followed without anyone noticing which pages fell out of it.

Authorship and responsibility

Every guide carries a named attorney author. The byline resolves to that lawyer's page on this site, which states their Roll of Attorneys number and their Integrated Bar of the Philippines chapter, so the person responsible for a page can be identified and verified against the public roll. The lawyers of the firm are listed on theattorneys page.

The attribution is enforced rather than assumed. A build check fails when a page names an author the site cannot show, so a guide cannot publish under a byline that does not resolve to a real attorney.

Who writes and who reviews

Aaron Zara, Head of Technology, writes the structure of a guide and does the underlying research. He is not a lawyer and does not practise law.

A named attorney reviews the result and owns the legal judgment in it. The attorney whose name appears on a guide is the person responsible for what it says.

The authorities a page rests on

Every guide declares the primary authorities it depends on: the statutes, executive orders, rules, circulars and decisions its statements rest on. Those authorities are held in a registry rather than named only in the prose of the page.

Each entry in that registry carries a link to the primary source, the date the authority took effect where that date is recorded, and a status of current, superseded or repealed. When an authority changes status, every page that declares it surfaces for review. That is what connects a change in the law to the specific pages affected by it, rather than to a general intention to keep the site up to date.

How the dates are calculated

Two dates are recorded for every guide and they are kept separate. One is the date of the last substantive change, meaning a change to what the page says. The other is the date the page was last reviewed, which moves on every review whether or not anything changed.

The modified date shown to a reader, and the one published in the page's structured data, derives only from the first. A review that confirmed the page was still correct does not move the public date. A date that moved on every review would say nothing, and would say it in a field that readers and search engines both read as a claim that the page changed.

Scope

This policy covers material published on JLBAR Law Firm's own site. Material published here is general information about Philippine law. It is not legal advice for a specific matter, and reading it creates no attorney-client relationship. Theterms of use set that out in full.