Founder and Editor, ClearLegalTips
I built ClearLegalTips, and I am the person responsible for what it publishes.
What I am not
I am not an attorney. I am not licensed to practice law in any U.S. state, and nothing on this site is legal advice. If you need someone to tell you what to do about your own situation, you need a lawyer, and I will keep saying so on every page where it matters.
What I bring instead
I spent twelve years in public service, in roles built on legal research and fraud investigation. My formal education took eight years, and the university half of it followed a curriculum built parallel to a law faculty’s, including obligations and contract law. That combination left me with two habits that turned out to matter here.
The first is reading a rule the way it is actually written rather than the way people assume it works, and following it up the hierarchy until I reach the source that genuinely binds. The second is declining to accept a claim without a document behind it. In my old work, an unverified assumption had consequences. The habit stuck.
None of that makes me an expert in United States law, and I will not pretend otherwise. What it makes me is someone trained to find the binding source and check it, working on a body of law whose primary sources are entirely public and entirely in English.
How an article here actually gets made
I choose the topic and set the research question myself. I run a broad scan to see the shape of the subject, then narrow it and go find the primary sources: the statute, the court’s own fee schedule, the Secretary of State’s filing page, the IRS instruction. I read those sources. Then I order them, build the structure of the article around what they actually say, and write it.
AI tools help me with the scanning and the drafting. They do not decide what is true. Every fee, dollar limit, deadline, and filing requirement is checked against its official source before publication, and when I cannot verify a figure, it does not go in. The full method is documented in our Editorial Standards.
Why articles say ‘ClearLegalTips’ and not my name
Because that describes it honestly. Putting one person’s byline on a hundred long articles written over a few months would imply something about how they were made that is not accurate. The publication is the author. I am the editor accountable for it, and my name appears on every article I have reviewed.
Tell me when I get it wrong
Fees change, statutes get amended, and I miss things. A correction from a reader is the fastest way this site improves, and I would rather hear it from you than leave a wrong number in front of the next person who needs it. Write to me at [email protected]. I will fix it and date the change.