How these guides are researched, written, and reviewed
Custody documentation is a subject where a confident wrong answer costs a parent something real. This page explains where our information comes from, the limits we hold ourselves to, and who checks the work.
Research methods
Every guide starts from primary sources rather than from other people’s articles. In practice that means:
- We work from the rules themselves. Questions about whether a record will be accepted are grounded in the Federal Rules of Evidence, principally the hearsay exceptions at Rule 803, the authentication requirements at Rules 901 and 902, and the balancing test at Rule 403.
- We read the statutes and the case law when a guide touches something settled at the national level, such as the contempt standards from Gompers and Hicks v. Feiock, or the right to represent yourself under 28 U.S.C. § 1654.
- We cite what we used. Each guide ends with a References section naming the specific rules and sources behind it, so you can check our reasoning instead of taking our word for it.
- We verify vendor claims against the vendor. Pricing and feature comparisons are checked against each company’s own published material, and the page carries the date we checked.
- We date everything. Every guide shows when it was published and when it was last revised.
Why our guides are not state-specific
Custody law varies by state, and a great deal of what circulates online is one state’s rule presented as though it were universal. A parent in Ohio reading a Florida procedure as general law can act on it and be wrong.
So we deliberately write to the national layer: evidentiary principles, documentation practice, and the questions worth asking, all of which travel. Where an answer genuinely depends on your jurisdiction, we say so and point you to an attorney licensed in your state or to your court’s self-help center. We would rather give you a smaller, correct answer than a larger one you cannot rely on.
Editorial review
Guides that touch evidence, procedure, or anything a parent might bring into a courtroom are reviewed by people who practice in the field. Reviewers check the legal substance: whether a rule is stated correctly, whether a claim is stronger than the source supports, and whether anything reads as advice we are not in a position to give.
Our reviewer panel is being added to this page. Reviewers are listed here by name, role, and the jurisdiction they practice in, so you can weigh their qualifications yourself.
If you are a family law attorney, mediator, or parenting coordinator interested in reviewing, write to hello@documented.co.
What we do not do
- We do not give legal advice. Documented is not a law firm and no article here creates an attorney-client relationship.
- We do not promise outcomes. No app, ours included, can make a judge rule a particular way, and we do not describe our records as guaranteed to be accepted.
- We do not overstate what the product does. Our records are tamper-evident, meaning an alteration would be detectable. They are not tamper-proof, and we will not call them that. The distinction has its own guide.
- We do not tell you what to think of your co-parent. Our guidance is consistently to record facts and leave conclusions to the court.
- We do not offer therapy or counseling, and we say so on the pages that come closest to that territory.
Corrections
If you find something inaccurate, incomplete, or out of date, tell us at hello@documented.co. Corrections to substance are made to the page itself and the revision date is updated, so the change is visible rather than silent.
Start with the guides index, or the glossary for plain-language definitions of the terms used across them.