Where we were wrong.

What we had wrong. On the Oklahoma guardians ad litem and child representation page, published 29 August 2026, a box under “Who pays” headed “No indigency waiver found” read: “We searched and found no provision in Oklahoma waiving or shifting these fees for a party who cannot pay them. That does not prove none exists — courts have general fee-waiver powers — but there is no dedicated protection we could point you to. Raise it early if it applies to you.” The same sentence was repeated in the page’s summary list at the top. Both were present in the first stored revision of the page, 29 August 2026, and so were live for 75 days. The box sat immediately below the page’s own quotation of § 107.3(A)(3), which is a fee-shifting provision, so the page disproved itself within three lines — and the half a reader in trouble would act on was the wrong half.

What is true. Read on the Oklahoma Legislature’s own server on 12 November 2026, from the complete Title 43 PDF at oklegislature.gov. § 107.3(A)(3), which the page was already quoting: “Expenses, costs, and attorney fees for the guardian ad litem may be allocated among the parties as determined by the court.” That is the shifting power the box said did not exist. Oklahoma goes further for one of the three appointees this page covers. § 120.5(A): “1. No parenting coordinator shall be appointed unless the court finds that the parties have the means to pay the fees of the parenting coordinator. 2. This state shall assume no financial responsibility for payment of fees to the parenting coordinator; except that, in cases of hardship, the court, if feasible, may appoint a parenting coordinator to serve on a volunteer basis.” § 120.5(B)(1): the fees “shall be allocated between the parties with the relative percentages determined pursuant to the child support guidelines”, and under (B)(2) the court “may allocate the fees between the parties differently upon a finding of good cause”. Separately, § 112.6 provides that in a dissolution, separate maintenance or custody proceeding a victim of domestic violence or stalking “shall be entitled to reasonable attorney fees and costs”, and that the court “shall order that the attorney fees and costs of the victimized party for the proceeding be substantially paid for by the abusing party”.

What it cost a reader. Someone in Oklahoma who could not pay for a guardian ad litem was told, in terms, that there was no dedicated protection we could point them at, and advised only to “raise it early”. The thing to raise is an allocation under § 107.3(A)(3) by name, and — if the appointee is a parenting coordinator — the means finding the court has to make under § 120.5(A)(1) before it can appoint one at all. We had the first of those provisions quoted on the page and still told the reader it was not there.

What we did. The “No indigency waiver found” box is gone. In its place the page now quotes § 120.5(A) in full, linked to the Legislature’s own Title 43 PDF and carrying the read date, followed by a box headed “What Oklahoma does not do” that sets out the allocation and gating provisions — § 107.3(A)(3), § 120.5(B)(1) and (B)(2), and § 112.6 — and says plainly what Title 43 does not contain. The summary line at the top of the page now says the same thing. No figure on the page changed, because the page states none.

What we are still not claiming. These are allocation and gating powers, not waivers: Title 43 carries no provision that waives a guardian ad litem’s fee outright for a party who cannot pay it, and the page now says so in those terms. § 120.5 is, by its own wording, about parenting coordinators — not guardians ad litem — even though § 120.7(A) groups the parenting coordinator, the guardian ad litem and the custody evaluator together as a “court expert”; we have not stretched it past what it says. § 107.3(A)(3) and § 120.5(B)(2) are discretionary. We did not read Title 12, so we claim nothing about Oklahoma’s general pauper or in forma pauperis procedure, and we have read no Oklahoma case law. No tile moved: “Who pays” still reads “The parties, by court order” and “Official rate” still reads “No published rate”, both of which the statute supports. We also did not move the page’s source-checked date, which stays at 23 October 2026: the Oklahoma Bar Association’s standard operating manual for guardians ad litem is still on the page’s unverified list and we still could not read it. We re-checked that this run — the Bar’s Guardianship Materials page continues to reach the manual only through a web-archive copy, and the live address that copy was taken from still returns a 404 — so that gap is unchanged and stays disclosed.

What we had wrong. On the Arizona guardians ad litem and child representation page, published 29 August 2026, a box under “Who pays” headed “No indigency waiver found” read: “We searched and found no provision in Arizona waiving or shifting these fees for a party who cannot pay them. That does not prove none exists — courts have general fee-waiver powers — but there is no dedicated protection we could point you to.” The same sentence was repeated in the page’s summary list at the top. It sat directly beneath the page’s own quotation of § 25-406(B), under which the court “shall allocate cost based on the financial circumstances of both parties” — so the page contradicted itself within a few lines, and the half a reader in trouble would act on was the wrong half. Both statements were live for 74 days.

What is true. Arizona publishes a provision written for exactly this, and its caption says so. A.R.S. § 25-403.08, ‘Resources and fees’, read on the Arizona Legislature’s own server on 11 November 2026: “A. In a proceeding regarding sole or joint legal decision-making or parenting time, either party may request attorney fees, costs and expert witness fees to enable the party with insufficient resources to obtain adequate legal representation and to prepare evidence for the hearing. B. If the court finds there is a financial disparity between the parties, the court may order payment of reasonable fees, expenses and costs to allow adequate preparation.” A.R.S. § 25-324(A) is the wider power, and it too turns on means: the court “after considering the financial resources of both parties and the reasonableness of the positions each party has taken throughout the proceedings, may order a party to pay a reasonable amount to the other party for the costs and expenses of maintaining or defending any proceeding under this chapter or chapter 4, article 1 of this title”. And § 25-406(B), which the page was already quoting: where an investigation is ordered or a family court advisor appointed, the court “shall allocate cost based on the financial circumstances of both parties”.

What it cost a reader. Someone in Arizona who could not pay for a court-appointed attorney or an evaluator was told, in terms, that there was no dedicated protection to point them at, and advised only to “raise it early”. The thing to raise is a request under § 25-403.08, by name, and we did not give them its name.

What we did. The “No indigency waiver found” box is gone, replaced by the § 25-403.08 answer quoted in full, with § 25-324(A) and § 25-406(B) quoted alongside it, all three linked to azleg.gov and carrying the read date. The summary line at the top of the page now says the same thing. The “Who pays” source line cited § 25-406(B) by name but linked only to § 25-321; it now links both. Having re-read §§ 25-321, 25-324, 25-403.08, 25-406 and 25-407 in full this run from the Legislature’s own server, we moved the source-checked date to 11 November 2026.

What we are still not claiming. These are shifting powers, not waivers. All three are discretionary, § 25-403.08 speaks to a party’s own attorney fees, costs and expert witness fees rather than naming the appointee’s bill, and we have not found an Arizona provision that waives an appointee’s fee outright for a party who cannot pay — the page now says that in those terms. No tile moved: “Duty owed” still reads “Not stated in statute”, “Who pays” still reads “The parties, by court order”, “Official rate” still reads “No published rate”. No figure changed, because the page states none. What duty a § 25-321 appointee owes is still not stated by statute and stays on the page’s unverified list: Arizona’s Rules of Family Law Procedure would be the place to settle it, and the Judicial Branch publishes the rule text only through a commercial subscription host, which we could not open this run. We have not read Arizona case law.

What we had wrong. Two claims on the Delaware guardians ad litem and child representation page, both published with the page on 29 August 2026 and both live for 73 days. First, under “Who pays”, a box headed “No indigency waiver found” read: “We searched and found no provision in Delaware waiving or shifting these fees for a party who cannot pay them. That does not prove none exists — courts have general fee-waiver powers — but there is no dedicated protection we could point you to.” The same sentence was repeated in the page’s own summary list at the top. This is the worst place on the site to be wrong about: the reader it is written for is the one deciding whether it is worth asking the court for help with a bill they cannot pay, and we told them there was nothing to ask under. Second, the section headed “The thing worth knowing about Delaware” read that because 13 Del. C. § 725 was repealed in 2004, “the custody chapter currently contains no statutory provision specifically authorizing court-ordered custody evaluations/investigations”, and “the custody evaluation provision” was listed as something we could not confirm. We could have confirmed it without leaving the site: our own Delaware child custody page has been quoting § 724(b) for the same question all along, so the site disagreed with itself and the page a parent in this situation is most likely to land on carried the wrong half.

What is true. Read on 10 November 2026 from the State’s own servers: Title 13, Chapter 7, Subchapter II of the Delaware Code, Title 29, Chapter 90A, the Family Court Rules of Civil Procedure and the Delaware Uniform Rules of Evidence. On the fee: § 721(c) provides that “A fee for an attorney so appointed shall be allowed as part of the costs of the proceeding”, and § 731, in the same chapter, provides that the Court “may order a party to pay all or part of the cost to another party of maintaining or defending any proceedings under this chapter and for attorney’s fees, including sums for legal services rendered and costs incurred prior to the commencement of such proceedings”, after considering “the legal and factual basis for the action, the results obtained, the financial resources of the parties, and such other factors as the Court deems just and equitable”. A statute that names the financial resources of the parties as a factor in who pays the costs is a dedicated protection, and we should have pointed at it. On the evaluation: § 725 is indeed repealed — it now carries only “Repealed by 74 Del. Laws, c. 200, § 1, effective Jan. 28, 2004.” — but § 724(b) remains in the same subchapter: “The Court may seek the advice of professional personnel whether or not they are employed on a regular basis by the Court. The advice given may be in writing and shall for good cause shown be made available by the Court to counsel of record, parties and other expert witnesses upon request”, and “Counsel may call for cross-examination any professional personnel consulted by the Court.” Section 726(b) lets the Court seal “the record of any interview, report, investigation or testimony in a custody proceeding”, which assumes such records exist. Alongside the statute, Family Court Civil Rule 35(a) allows the Court on motion for good cause to order “a physical or mental examination by a psychologist suitably licensed or certified examiner”; Rule 1(a) applies those Rules to procedure in the Family Court and Rule 81, the special-proceedings exception, is reserved. D.R.E. 706 governs court-appointed expert witnesses and D.R.E. 1101(a) applies the evidence rules “to all actions and proceedings in all the courts of this State”. D.R.E. 706(c) also answers the fee question for an expert: “reasonable compensation, as set by the court”, payable in a civil case “by the parties in the proportion and at the time that the court directs — and the compensation is then charged like other costs”.

What we did. The “No indigency waiver found” box is gone and is replaced by the § 731 answer, quoted, with the statute linked and the read date on it, and the summary line at the top of the page now says the same thing. The “thing worth knowing” section now states the repeal and then what survived it, quoting § 724(b), § 726(b), Rule 35(a) and D.R.E. 1101(a), with all four sources linked; the point it now makes is the accurate version of the point it was trying to make, which is that Delaware lost a provision written specifically for custody investigations without losing the power to order one. “The custody evaluation provision” has been removed from the list of things we could not confirm. The “no published price” box now explains, with D.R.E. 706(c), why there is no schedule to find rather than only reporting that we could not find one. In the duty section we added what Delaware does set down — 29 Del. C. § 9007A(c), “The attorney’s duty is to the child. The scope of the representation of the child is the child’s best interests”, and Family Court Civil Rule 207, which separates best-interests representation in 207(a) from representation of the child’s wishes in 207(b) — together with the fact that neither governs a § 721(c) appointment in a private custody case. The page had no outbound source links beyond two to § 721(c); it now carries six. Having re-read §§ 721 to 734, Chapter 90A § 9007A, and the two rule sets in full this run, we moved the source-checked date to 10 November 2026.

What we are still not claiming. Section 731 is a shifting power and it is discretionary. It is not a waiver, it guarantees nobody an outcome, and we have not found a Delaware provision that waives an appointee’s fee outright for a party who cannot pay — the page says so in those terms. No tile moved: “Duty owed” still reads “Not stated in statute”, “Who pays” still reads “The parties, by court order” and “Official rate” still reads “No published rate”. No figure on the page changed, because the page states none. What duty a § 721(c) appointee owes in a contested custody case between parents is still not stated by statute and remains on the page’s unverified list; § 9007A(c) and Rule 207 are written for child welfare proceedings — the dependency, neglect and abuse track — and we have deliberately not used them to answer the custody question. We have not read Delaware case law, which is where a silent statute is usually settled, and we have not checked whether any Family Court standing order sets a rate for appointees.

What we had wrong. The Alaska guardians ad litem and child representation page answered “How an appointment happens” with a single quotation from AS 25.24.310(a) and (c) — the court “may, upon the motion of a party to the action or upon its own motion” appoint, and “shall require a guardian ad litem when, in the opinion of the court, representation of the child’s best interests… would serve the welfare of the child” — and stopped there. Read alone that is a permissive rule, and a parent reading it would reasonably conclude that asking is usually enough. The page also stated, in the section headed “Who can be appointed”, that “the statute text retrieved does not state that the guardian ad litem itself must be a licensed attorney, so the answer depends on which of the two roles is appointed”. A third problem sat in the opening summary: the “Who pays” tile read “The parties, by court order” with the note “Allocated between you at the court’s discretion”. And every one of the page’s three citations to AS 25.24.310 linked not to Alaska but to womenslaw.org, a project of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, while the page’s own sourcing statement promised that “everything below is traced to Alaska’s own statute or court rule”.

What is true. Alaska Civil Rule 90.7, “Appointment of Guardian Ad Litem in Child Custody Proceedings”, sits one rule number after the Rule 90.6 this page already cited and linked, and it governs the thing the page was describing. Rule 90.7(a): “In an action under AS 25.20, 25.24, or 18.66 involving custody, support, or visitation of a child, the court may appoint a guardian ad litem for the child only when the court finds separate representation of the child’s best interests is necessary, such as when the guardian ad litem may be expected to present evidence not otherwise likely to be available or presented, or the proceeding is unusually complex.” Rule 90.7(c) requires the appointing order to “include findings why the appointment is necessary” and requires the court to “make findings to explain the denial” if it refuses. The commentary to Rule 90.7(a) is blunter still: “Courts should not routinely appoint guardians ad litem in custody, support, and visitation proceedings. In most instances, the child’s best interests are adequately protected and presented by the parties. In most contested proceedings in which professional input is warranted, a child custody investigator should be appointed instead of a guardian ad litem.” On who may serve, AS 25.24.310(c) reads, in the Legislature’s own text, that the court may “appoint an attorney or other person or the office of public advocacy to provide guardian ad litem services”, and Civil Rule 90.7(e) empowers the court to “appoint an attorney to advise or represent a non-attorney guardian ad litem”. A guardian ad litem in Alaska need not be a lawyer, and both instruments say so affirmatively rather than by silence. Rule 90.7(b)(1) states the qualification that applies instead — “knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education” sufficient to investigate impartially and advocate the child’s best interests — and 90.7(b)(2) entitles a party, on request, to a written summary of a guardian ad litem’s education and experience. On cost, Rule 90.7(m) reads: “Fees and costs for a private guardian ad litem will be divided equally between the parties unless the court finds good cause to change this allocation.” Equal division is the default; departing from it requires a finding. Our own page already stated that default correctly for custody investigators under Rule 90.6(i), in the section headed “The thing worth knowing about Alaska”, while the tile at the top said the opposite for guardians ad litem.

How long it was live, and what it cost a reader. All four defects were present in the page’s first stored revision, 29 August 2026 at 23:40 UTC, and were live for 69 days. The appointment error is the one that could change what a person did: someone deciding whether to ask the court to appoint a guardian ad litem was reading a page that did not mention the necessity finding the rule requires, did not mention that a denial must be explained in findings, and did not mention that Alaska’s own rule points to a custody investigator first. A reader could have asked for the wrong appointee, or read a refusal as arbitrary when the rule had set the standard the court was applying. The “Who pays” tile understated their position in the opposite direction: a parent negotiating cost allocation was told the split was discretionary when the rule starts from an equal division and puts the burden of changing it on whoever wants it changed.

What we did. We added Rule 90.7(a) and (c) and the rule’s commentary to the appointment section, quoted, beside their own citation, with the point made plainly that the statute is the permissive half and the court rule is the limit. We replaced the “Who can be appointed” paragraph with the affirmative answer from AS 25.24.310(c) and Civil Rule 90.7(b) and (e), including the right to ask an appointee for a written summary of their qualifications. We changed the “Who pays” tile to “Split equally by default” and quoted Rule 90.7(m) in the body, noting that Rule 90.6(i) matches. We added the two parts of AS 25.24.310(b) the page had omitted — that parents only temporarily without funds get the Office of Public Advocacy rather than a waiver, with the order for costs running in favour of the state and the attorney general enforcing collection, and that the court is told to avoid loading the cost onto one party by ordering it paid from property proceeds before division. We repointed all three statutory citations from womenslaw.org to the Alaska State Legislature’s own BASIS server, and replaced the Rule 90.6 link, which pointed at SCO 1377, the order that adopted the rule on 15 April 2000, with the Alaska Court System’s current Rules of Civil Procedure; the rule has been amended twice since that order, by SCO 1591 effective 15 January 2006 and SCO 1955 nunc pro tunc 1 January 2020. We corrected the citation of Rule 90.6, which the page called “Custody Investigators”, to its actual title, “Appointment of Child Custody Investigator”, and pinned the compensation and nine-element claims to subsections (i) and (e) rather than to the rule at large. We restored the clause both quotations of AS 25.24.310(c) had elided, “to be distinguished from preferences”, which is the clause that actually establishes the duty the page’s own tile asserts. Having re-read the statute and Civil Rules 90.6 and 90.7 in full this run, we moved the source-checked date to 6 November 2026.

What we are still not claiming. We have not changed the “Official rate” tile, which still reads “No published rate”. That remains correct as far as we can establish: Rule 90.7(m) sets the standard as “a rate that the court determines is reasonable” and Alaska publishes no statewide fee schedule for privately appointed guardians ad litem that we have found. What we have added is where the figure must appear — Rule 90.7(m) requires the appointment order to specify the hourly rate, the maximum fee that may be incurred without returning to the court, the allocation between the parties and when payment is due — and we have not inferred any dollar amount from that. We have not checked whether the Office of Public Advocacy publishes contract rates for the guardian ad litem work AS 25.24.310 routes to it; that is a separate source and a separate question from the private-appointee rate this page is about, and it is open. We have not said what a custody investigator may charge. We have also not resolved how AS 25.24.310(c)’s instruction that the court “shall require” a guardian ad litem when best-interests representation would serve the child’s welfare fits with Rule 90.7(a)’s “only when… necessary”; both are quoted on the page, in their own words, beside each other, and we have not told readers which prevails.

What we had wrong. The Massachusetts guardian ad litem and child representation page opened with a summary tile reading “Duty owed: Best interests” and, beneath it, “Advocates for what they judge is best for the child — not necessarily what the child wants.” The first line of the page’s own short version said a guardian ad litem “generally argues for what they judge is best for your child.” The section headed “What duty they owe your child” contained two words, “best interests,” and a source line reading “Mass. Gen. Laws c. 215, § 56A” — while the link beside that citation went somewhere else entirely, to a Category F standards file on mass.gov that now returns HTTP 404. The page also attributed both of the Commonwealth’s guardian ad litem tracks to Probate and Family Court Standing Order 1-08, and cited Mass. Gen. Laws c. 215, § 56A twice to Justia, a commercial publisher, on a page that promises every statement is traced to Massachusetts’s own statute or court rule.

What is true. M.G.L. c. 215, § 56A is captioned “Investigations.” It provides that “Any judge of a probate court may appoint a guardian ad litem to investigate the facts of any proceeding pending in said court” and that the guardian ad litem “shall, before final judgment or decree in such proceeding, report in writing to the court the results of the investigation.” It states no duty standard and nowhere uses the words “best interests.” The duty standard is published by the Probate and Family Court in the Standards for Category F Guardian Ad Litem Investigators. Standard 1.1 reads: “The role of the Category F GAL investigator is to gather and report factual information that will assist the court in making custody, visitation, or other decisions related to the welfare of a child. Unless the appointing judge specifies otherwise, the GAL investigator’s role is limited to gathering and reporting information to the court. The GAL may include recommendations in the report if the order of the court authorizes inclusion of such recommendations.” Standard 1.3 reads: “The GAL is an impartial investigator and reporter in all cases.” Its commentary adds that “The court, not the GAL, decides legal issues and ultimately makes credibility determinations and factual findings when facts are in dispute.” On the two tracks: Standing Order 1-08 governs Category E guardians ad litem and evaluators and took effect 14 January 2008; Category F guardians ad litem and investigators are governed by Standing Order 1-05, effective 24 January 2005. And the Legislature publishes § 56A openly on its own server, so there was never a reason to send a reader to a commercial publisher for it.

How long it was live. The page was published on 29 August 2026 and the oldest revision we hold, 1 September 2026, already carries every one of these defects, so they were live for sixty-seven days. What it cost a reader: a Massachusetts parent preparing for a guardian ad litem investigation was told to expect an advocate arguing a position about their child, when what the Commonwealth’s standards describe is an impartial fact-gatherer who is barred from offering clinical interpretations, must investigate only what the court ordered, and may make a recommendation at all only if the appointment order authorizes one. That is a different thing to prepare for, and the page’s own meta description — “the court can appoint someone to look into your family and report to the judge” — had it right while the tile a reader sees first did not.

What we did. We changed the duty tile to “Impartial investigator” and quoted Standards 1.1 and 1.3 in full in the duty section, each in its own blockquote beside its own citation rather than spliced together. We corrected the two sentences that said a guardian ad litem argues for what they judge is best. We said plainly on the page that § 56A is the appointment power and sets no duty standard, and that where the Commonwealth’s standards do use “best interests” it describes the questions a judge may send a guardian ad litem to investigate rather than what the guardian is to argue for. We repointed the dead 404 link to the live Standard 1 page, split the two tracks onto their correct standing orders with both linked, and replaced both Justia links with the Legislature’s own server. We also linked Uniform Probate Court Practice XXXII and the Probate and Family Court Chief Justice memorandum of 11 January 2023, both of which the page already cited by name without a link, and re-read all of it to move the source-checked date to 4 November 2026. Separately, the page carried a statement that no statute or standing order reconciles the Commonwealth-paid and party-paid tracks; Uniform Probate Court Practice XXXII addresses both in one instrument, and the page now quotes it.

What we are still not claiming. We have not said what duty a Category E guardian ad litem and evaluator owes, as distinct from a Category F investigator. Neither Standing Order 1-08 nor the Category E standards page uses the words “best interests,” and the correct statement of the evaluator’s duty is not something we are willing to infer from an absence. The duty tile and the duty section are therefore written from the Category F standards and say so. We have not changed the $50.00 figure, the ten-hour limit or the $40 prior rate: all three were re-read this run against Uniform Probate Court Practice XXXII and the 11 January 2023 memorandum and all three are right, but we note that the Category F standards page still points to a 1997 Administrative Office memorandum for the rate, and we have not tried to resolve which instrument a court treats as controlling. We also did not touch the “Who pays” tile’s answer, which remains “The parties, by court order” while § 56A says compensation “shall be paid by the commonwealth”; that tension is real, it is described on the page, and Uniform Practice XXXII does not say which track a judge must use.

What we had wrong. The Utah guardian ad litem and child representation page cited Utah Code § 30-3-11.2, “Appointment of counsel for child,” as the live authority for a private divorce or custody case. It quoted that section for how an appointment happens, named it in the duty and who-can-be-appointed sections, and used its “taxed as a cost of the action” clause as the answer to who pays. The citation linked to a commercial publisher’s 2022 archive of the section rather than to Utah’s own server. Separately, the summary tile read “Official rate: No published rate” and a box headed “There is no published price” told readers that no official Utah fee schedule exists, that the figures circulating online come from law-firm marketing pages, and that the way to find out what a child’s representative costs is to telephone the county family court clerk.

What is true. Utah Code § 30-3-11.2 was repealed effective 1 September 2024. The Utah Legislature’s own copy of the section is stamped “Repealed 9/1/2024,” and the Office of Legislative Research and General Counsel’s crosswalk for the 2024 Domestic Relations Recodification lists it as repealed with no new location, while giving the sections immediately around it one (§ 30-3-11.3, for instance, became § 81-4-106). The live authority for the ordinary contested-custody case is Utah Code § 78A-2-705, which lets a court “appoint an attorney as a private attorney guardian ad litem to represent the best interests of the minor in any district court action when… the custody of, or parent-time with, a child is at issue,” and whose subsection (9)(a)(i) requires the court to “assess all or part of the private attorney guardian ad litem fees, court costs, and paralegal, staff, and volunteer expenses against the parties in a proportion the court determines to be just.” On the rate: Utah’s Code of Judicial Administration Rule 4-906.02(6), stamped effective 22 June 2026, provides that “the hourly fee to be paid by the parties and to be ordered and apportioned by the court against the parties will be $150.00 per hour or a higher rate determined reasonable by the court,” with a retainer of “$1,000 or a different amount determined reasonable by the court.” Rule 4-906.02(2)(A) also requires a private attorney guardian ad litem to be a member in good standing of the Utah State Bar. We read § 78A-2-705, § 78A-2-703 and the repealed § 30-3-11.2 on the Utah Legislature’s own server, and the recodification crosswalk on the Legislature’s own server, on 2 November 2026; we read Rule 4-906.02 and Rule 4-903 on the Utah courts’ own server the same day.

How long it was live, and what it cost a reader. The page was published on 29 August 2026 and the repeal took effect on 1 September 2024, so the repealed-statute citations were wrong for the whole 65 days the page was up. The fee claim is the part that cost something. This page exists for a parent working out whether they can afford a representative for their child, and it told that parent there was no published figure and that their only recourse was to ring a clerk — when the rate is set by rule at $150.00 an hour with a $1,000 retainer, apportioned between the parties. A reader who took us at our word had no way to estimate the cost, and no reason to look for the rule that states it.

What we did. The appointment quotation, the duty citation, the who-can-be-appointed sentence, the who-pays quotation and the “thing worth knowing” paragraph now rest on § 78A-2-705 and § 78A-2-703, with links to the Legislature’s own server in place of the commercial archive. The tile reads “$150.00 an hour” and names the rule. The “no published price” box has been replaced with the text of Rule 4-906.02(6) and the retainer. The page carries a note saying what it used to cite and that the section was repealed. “Sources last checked” moved from 29 August to 2 November 2026, because every source on the page was re-read.

What we are still not claiming. Three things. We are not saying the repeal left Utah without any private-case appointment authority beyond § 78A-2-705 — the crosswalk shows no successor to § 30-3-11.2, and absence from a crosswalk is not the same as proof that nothing else in Title 81 touches the subject; we read the crosswalk and § 78A-2-705, not the whole of Title 81. We are not publishing a rate for a court-ordered custody evaluator: Rule 4-903 sets none, requiring instead that the motion state the estimated cost and that the court find the parties can presently pay, and we did not find a schedule elsewhere. And the $150.00 is a figure a court may raise where it finds a higher rate reasonable, so it is a rule-set starting point and not a ceiling; we have not tried to find out what Utah courts actually order above it.

What we had wrong. The automatic orders page and the agents page said “twenty states” and listed Illinois among them. The real estate agent page said “22 states” plus “eight more” by county, a figure we could not reproduce from any list on the site. Our own Illinois page already explained that the 2016 and 2017 amendments removed property from the Illinois stay, so the main list contradicted it.

What is true. Seventeen states restrain both spouses on filing, statewide: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah and Wisconsin. Nevada and Texas do so only by local rule in some counties. Illinois is now listed with the states where someone has to ask. We read Hawaii’s statute (H.R.S. § 580-10.5) on 2 November. We also re-read Oklahoma (Okla. Stat. tit. 43, § 110) and Wisconsin (Wis. Stat. § 767.117) that day: both bind the petitioner on filing and the respondent on service, so they stay on the list. The Wisconsin text was read from a reproduction of the 2019 version, not the legislature’s own site. We also re-read New Hampshire (R.S.A. 458:16), South Dakota (§ 25-4-34) and Alaska (Supreme Court Order 707) that day: none restrains property automatically on filing, so they stay off the list.

How long it was live. Until 2 November 2026. All three pages now give the same count.

What we had wrong. Four things on the New York child representation page, all of them present in the page’s first stored revision of 29 August 2026 and so live for 64 days. (1) The Who pays summary tile read “The parties, by court order — allocated between you at the court’s discretion.” (2) The duty blockquote, labelled “In the statute’s own words,” was credited to N.Y. Family Court Act § 249(a). (3) The Who pays section quoted and cited N.Y. Judiciary Law § 35(8). (4) The published rate was attributed to County Law Article 18-B.

What is true. We read the sections on the Legislature’s own database at public.leginfo.state.ny.us, current through 2026 Chapters 1–369, on 1 November 2026. Judiciary Law § 35(5): “All expenses for compensation and reimbursement under this section shall be a state charge to be paid out of funds appropriated to the administrative office for the courts for that purpose.” Family Court Act § 245(c) directs that attorneys for children “shall be compensated and allowed expenses and disbursements in the same amounts established by subdivision three of section thirty-five of the judiciary law,” and § 35(3) sets that amount at “one hundred fifty-eight dollars per hour for time expended in court, and one hundred fifty-eight dollars per hour for time reasonably expended out of court.” Domestic Relations Law § 237, the counsel-fee provision, shifts fees only “directly to the attorney of the other spouse or parent” — it has no route for charging a party with the child’s attorney’s fee. On the duty: § 249(a) is titled “Appointment of attorney for child” and, read in full, addresses only when a court shall or may appoint one; it carries no duty language at all. The duty wording we had quoted is 22 NYCRR § 7.2, “Function of the attorney for the child,” the court rule the chief administrator is directed to promulgate by Family Court Act § 249-b. On the fee subdivision: § 35(8) applies where the family court “would be required by section two hundred sixty-two of the family court act to appoint counsel” — and § 262 is “Assignment of counsel for indigent persons,” an adult party’s own lawyer. The attorney-for-the-child subdivision is § 35(7), which turns on whether the court “would be authorized by section two hundred forty-nine of the family court act to appoint an attorney for the child.” On the rate: the Office of Indigent Legal Services states that the Article 18-B increase to $158 was “effective as of April 1, 2023” and that “[u]nder County Law § 722-e, counties and New York City pay for assigned counsel hourly fees” — so 18-B is the county-paid route for a party’s own counsel, not the authority for the child’s attorney, even though both carry $158.

What it cost a reader. The Who pays tile is one of four tiles at the top of the page, above the body, and it is the first answer a reader gets to the question the page says almost nobody asks in time. For 64 days it told a parent deciding whether to ask for an attorney for their child that they would be billed for it and that the court would divide the bill between the parents. The page’s own body said the opposite two screens further down — that these attorneys are “compensated by the state … not billed directly to the parties” — and its own rate tile said “paid by the state.” A reader who stopped at the tile, which is what a tile is for, got the answer that could have talked them out of asking.

What we did. We corrected the Who pays tile to the state, citing § 35(5), § 245(c) and § 35(3). We moved the duty citation from Family Court Act § 249(a) to 22 NYCRR § 7.2 and named § 249-b as the rule’s statutory authority. We replaced the § 35(8) quotation with the full text of § 35(7) and said on the page which subdivision we had quoted before and why it was the wrong one. We moved the rate’s authority to § 35(3) via § 245(c) and kept Article 18-B on the page as the county-paid comparison it is. The $158 figure did not change; it is the figure in both § 35(3) and County Law § 722-b. We also split the duty blockquote, which had joined § 7.2(d) to § 7.2(d)(2) with an ellipsis and opened it with “where” in place of the rule’s “If”; the two passages are now labelled separately and the page says that (d)(1) sits between them and is omitted. We relabelled the block “In the rule’s own words,” because a rule is not a statute. We tightened “anything over $10,000 needs the court’s approval” to the statute’s actual gate: compensation is capped at $10,000 and a court may exceed it only “in extraordinary circumstances.” We labelled Family Court Act § 251 with its real title, “Medical examinations,” and noted that it does not address an evaluator’s role as a witness or the weight a judge must give a recommendation, which is what we had cited it for. The source-checked date moved to 1 November 2026 because we re-read the statutes.

What we are deliberately not claiming. We did not verify 22 NYCRR § 7.2 against the state’s own publication. The Unified Court System’s site and every official New York route to the NYCRR we tried refused automated access outright, through a plain request and through a real browser alike, so the rule text on the page is quoted from Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, read 1 November 2026, and the page now says so. We have not confirmed that what Cornell publishes is current against the latest amending order of the chief judge, and until someone reads it on the court system’s own server that is unconfirmed rather than checked. We also did not confirm the effective date of the § 35(3) increase itself; the 1 April 2023 date we publish is the one the Office of Indigent Legal Services gives for the Article 18-B increase, and the page now attributes it that way instead of to § 35(3). We did not touch the Duty owed tile: “The child’s wishes — a client-directed role” is right for New York, which is the unusual part of this state and the reason the page exists. And we have not established whether any New York court, under some authority we did not read, may in practice direct a non-indigent parent to pay the child’s attorney; what we can say is that no statute we read this run allows it, and that is how the page is now worded.

What we had wrong. Two things, on the Rhode Island child-representation page. (1) The Duty owed tile, the first thing a reader sees, read “The child’s wishes — a client-directed role: advocates for what the child actually says they want.” That is the inverse of the Rhode Island statute for the role this page is about, and it contradicted our own page one screen down, which said “best interests, with the child’s wishes gathered and reported as one input to that determination” and was correct. (2) The blockquote under What duty they owe your child, presented as “in the statute’s own words,” joined two separate paragraphs with an ellipsis and credited the result to “R.I. Gen. Laws § 15-5-16.2(c)(1).” Its first clause — “the extent to which a guardian ad litem may assist in providing information concerning the best interest of the child” — is from § 15-5-16.2(c)(1)(i), which is not a statement of anybody’s duty: it is a list of things the court weighs in deciding whether to appoint at all. The rest is from (c)(1)(v), which is the duty provision. Read together under that heading, the splice made an appointment-decision factor look like the standard the appointee owes your child.

What is true. The statute opened to us directly on 28 October 2026 from the General Assembly’s own server, webserver.rilegislature.gov, and we read the whole of § 15-5-16.2. Subsection (c)(1)(v): “The guardian ad litem shall meet with the child, conduct an investigation, and upon request of the court, shall prepare an oral or written report that contains the procedural background of the case, identification of all persons interviewed and other sources of information, a statement of the child’s emotional, medical, educational, and social service needs, the child’s wishes, and other factors relevant to the court’s determination regarding the best interests of the child.” The child’s wishes are one item in that list, reported to the court, not a position the appointee argues for. Subsection (c)(1)(ix) settles whose agent the appointee is: “A person serving as a guardian ad litem under this section acts as the court’s agent and is entitled to quasi-judicial immunity for acts performed within the scope of the duties of the guardian ad litem.” Two further provisions we had quoted correctly and have left alone: (c)(1), the discretionary appointment of “an attorney or a guardian ad litem,” and (c)(1)(iii), which requires the order of appointment to carry “a provision for payment of the costs and fees of the guardian ad litem.”

How long it was live, and what it cost. The Duty owed tile has carried the client-directed wording since the page’s earliest stored revision, 29 August 2026, which is also the day the page was published, and was corrected today: sixty days. The spliced quotation is the same age. The tile is the more damaging of the two because of where it sits. A parent deciding whether to ask for a guardian ad litem, or working out how to deal with one already appointed, reads that box and stops; our own correct answer was below it. The cost is a parent who expected someone to carry their child’s stated wishes into court and instead got an investigator who is the court’s agent, immune from suit, whose report may cut against those wishes — and who may have prepared their child for the wrong conversation. Anyone who followed our citation to § 15-5-16.2(c)(1) looking for the duty standard would have found an appointment checklist instead.

What we did. The Duty owed tile now reads “Best interests,” and its note says the appointee is a court-appointed investigator who reports the child’s wishes as one factor in the court’s best-interests determination. The blockquote is now § 15-5-16.2(c)(1)(v) alone, quoted in full rather than spliced, and the citation under it names (c)(1)(v). We added one paragraph recording something the statute does and does not do: it lets the court appoint an attorney for the child instead of a guardian ad litem, but the duties in (c)(1)(i)–(x) are written for the guardian ad litem, and the statute does not say what duty an appointed attorney owes. No figure on the page was added, changed or removed, no hedge was removed, and no sentence of our own prose was deleted.

What we are deliberately still not claiming. We did not read the chief judge’s administrative orders. Section 15-5-16.2(c)(1)(x) requires the chief judge of the family court to issue, by administrative order, the rules governing the appointment and performance of guardians ad litem, and (c)(1)(ii) requires appointees to come from a credentialed list kept under those same orders. Those orders are therefore the document that would answer what training a Rhode Island guardian ad litem must actually have, and whether an attorney appointed for a child here owes a client-directed duty after all. We have not read them, the page now says so, and until we do, the Who can serve tile still says only that a trained lay person may serve — which the statute supports only to the extent that it permits a non-attorney, and we are not treating “properly credentialed” as a synonym for trained. Because only this one statute was read today, the “sources last checked” date at the foot of the page has deliberately not been moved. We are still not publishing a price: we looked again and found no official Rhode Island fee schedule for a privately appointed guardian ad litem or custody evaluator, and that section is unchanged. And the item under What we could not verify — the custody evaluation provision — is still unverified; § 15-5-16.2 does not contain one, and we did not search the Family Court rules for it this run. This was the last of the four pages in this family known to carry an inverted duty tile; the other three were Maine, Michigan and Ohio, corrected on 25, 26 and 27 October.

What we had wrong. Three things, on the Ohio child-representation page. (1) The Duty owed tile, the first thing a reader sees, read “The child’s wishes — a client-directed role: advocates for what the child actually says they want.” That is the inverse of the Ohio rule for the role this page is about, and it contradicted our own page two screens down, which said “best interests (guardian ad litem); wishes (attorney for the child)” and quoted both definitions correctly. (2) Those correct definitions were credited to “Ohio Rev. Code § 3109.04(B)(2)(a); Ohio Sup.R. 8.00-8.07.” The words are not in R.C. § 3109.04 at all — we read the whole section on 27 October 2026 and it never defines either term. They are Sup.R. 8.01(B) and 8.01(C), verbatim. The source link under that citation already pointed at the Rules of Superintendence rather than at the Revised Code, so the visible citation disagreed with its own link. (3) The How an appointment happens section quoted R.C. § 3109.04(B)(2)(a) — “The court, in its discretion, may and, upon the motion of either parent, shall appoint a guardian ad litem for the child” — with nothing around it, which reads as a free-standing right. It is not one.

What is true. Both sources opened to us directly on 27 October 2026 and both are the state’s own: codes.ohio.gov for the Revised Code, and the Supreme Court of Ohio’s consolidated Rules of Superintendence PDF, which carries Commentary dated July 1, 2026 recording that former Rule 48 was renumbered to Rule 8.00-8.07 in the 2026 restructuring. Sup.R. 8.01(C): “‘Guardian ad litem’ means an individual appointed to assist a court in its determination of the best interest of a child.” Sup.R. 8.01(B): “‘Attorney for the child’ means an attorney appointed to act as legal counsel for a child and advocate for the wishes of the child.” Sup.R. 8.00 states that the rules apply “where a court appoints a guardian ad litem to act in the best interest of a child.” For a divorce or custody case specifically, Sup.R. 8.02(E) closes the question: “If a court appoints a guardian ad litem in an allocation of parental rights and responsibilities case, the guardian ad litem shall be appointed only to represent the best interest of the child and shall not also be appointed as the attorney for the child.” And Sup.R. 8.03(A)(1) states the consequence plainly: “Provide the court recommendations of the best interest of the child. Recommendations of the best interest of the child may be inconsistent with the wishes of the child or other parties.” On the appointment point, R.C. § 3109.04(B)(2) is conditional on its face. It opens: “If the court interviews any child pursuant to division (B)(1) of this section, all of the following apply,” and only then comes (a), the mandatory-on-motion appointment. Division (B)(1) is the in-chambers interview, which a court “in its discretion, may and, upon the request of either party, shall” hold. Where no such interview is in play, appointment in an allocation-of-parental-rights case is discretionary under Sup.R. 8.02(F), which lists fifteen factors a court should weigh.

How long it was live, and what it cost. The Duty owed tile has carried the client-directed wording since the page’s earliest stored revision, 29 August 2026, and was corrected today: fifty-nine days. The mis-citation is the same age. The tile is the more damaging of the two because of where it sits. A parent deciding whether to ask for a guardian ad litem, or how to deal with one already appointed, reads that box and stops; our own correct answer was below it. The cost is a parent who expected someone to argue their child’s stated wishes and instead got an independent investigator who may recommend against them — and who was not told by us that Ohio keeps a separate, genuinely client-directed role, the attorney for the child, which Sup.R. 8.02(E) requires to be a different person in exactly this kind of case. That is something a reader could have asked the court about and did not know existed. The appointment wording cost a different reader differently: anyone who filed a motion expecting it to compel an appointment, without an in-chambers interview in play, was working from a rule we had quoted without its condition. And anyone who followed our citation to R.C. § 3109.04 to check the definitions would not have found them there.

What we did. The Duty owed tile now reads “The child’s best interests” and its note quotes Sup.R. 8.02(E) and Sup.R. 8.03(A)(1) and says that the attorney for the child is a separate appointment. The definitions are now credited to Sup.R. 8.01(B) and 8.01(C) with the duty confirmed at Sup.R. 8.02(E) and 8.03(A)(1), and the read date is on the page. The How an appointment happens section now carries the condition the statute opens with, in the statute’s own words, and names Sup.R. 8.02(F) as the discretionary route. One missing opening quotation mark in the definitions blockquote was closed. No figure on the page was added, changed or removed, and no sentence of our own prose was deleted.

What we are deliberately still not claiming. We did not re-read the statutes and rules behind every other section of this page, so the “sources last checked” date at the foot of it has deliberately not been moved; only R.C. § 3109.04 and Sup.R. 8.00 through 8.07 were read today. We are still not publishing a price. We looked again and found no official Ohio fee schedule for a privately appointed guardian ad litem or custody evaluator, and that section of the page says so and is unchanged — though we note for a future pass that Sup.R. 8.02(A)(5) requires the court’s own order of appointment to state the rate or amount of compensation, so a reader’s own order is the document that answers this, and the page does not yet tell them that. We have not checked whether any individual Ohio county’s local rules narrow who may serve, and the Who can serve note still says only that a trained lay person may serve; Sup.R. 8.04(B) and 8.05(A) in fact set twelve hours of pre-service education and six hours a year after it, which is a checkable thing we have not yet put on the page. We have not verified that this consolidated PDF is the most recent printing beyond the July 1, 2026 commentary it carries. And one more page in this family, Rhode Island, is known to carry the same tile contradiction and is not yet fixed.

What we had wrong. Three things, on the Michigan child-representation page. (1) The Duty owed tile, the first thing a reader sees, read “The child’s wishes — a client-directed role: advocates for what the child actually says they want.” That is the inverse of Michigan law, and it contradicted our own page three screens down, which said “best interests, with mandatory reporting of the child’s wishes” and quoted the statute correctly. (2) That correct quote was credited to “Mich. Comp. Laws § 722.24 (Child Custody Act of 1970).” The words are not in § 722.24. They are in § 712A.17d(1)(i) of the Probate Code — and our own source link under that citation already pointed at § 712A.17d, so the visible citation disagreed with the link beneath it. Our “thing worth knowing” section, further down the same page, cited § 712A.17d for the same sentence. (3) The appointment quote was cited to § 722.24 as a whole; the appointment power is § 722.24(2).

What is true. Michigan’s own legislative server, legislature.mi.gov, returned HTTP 503 — “The service is unavailable” — on every path we tried on 26 October 2026, including its front page, over four attempts spread across several minutes. So the statutory text here was read from the judicial branch instead: the Lawyer-Guardian Ad Litem Protocol published by Michigan’s State Court Administrative Office, which reproduces the complete text of MCL 712A.17d and states that it incorporates the 2012 PA 115 amendments. MCL 712A.17d(1) opens: “A lawyer-guardian ad litem’s duty is to the child, and not the court,” and subdivision (1)(i) reads: “To make a determination regarding the child’s best interests and advocate for those best interests according to the lawyer-guardian ad litem’s understanding of those best interests, regardless of whether the lawyer-guardian ad litem’s determination reflects the child’s wishes. The child’s wishes are relevant to the lawyer-guardian ad litem’s determination of the child’s best interests, and the lawyer-guardian ad litem shall weigh the child’s wishes according to the child’s competence and maturity. Consistent with the law governing attorney-client privilege, the lawyer-guardian ad litem shall inform the court as to the child’s wishes and preferences.” The same protocol puts it in its own words: a lawyer-guardian ad litem “is required to serve as the independent representative of the child’s best interests, not as the representative of the child’s wishes or preferences.” That § 712A.17d governs a custody case at all comes from MCL 712A.13a(1)(g), which defines a lawyer-guardian ad litem and applies § 17d’s powers and duties to one appointed under “Section 4 of the child custody act of 1970, 1970 PA 91, MCL 722.24.” There is a client-directed role in Michigan, but it is a second appointment, not this one: § 712A.17d(2) provides that where the child’s own position is inconsistent with the lawyer-guardian ad litem’s best-interests determination, that position must be communicated to the court, and the court “may appoint an attorney for the child” who serves in addition. On the subsection numbering, the Michigan Judicial Institute’s child-custody checklist places the appointment power at MCL 722.24(2), the report-and-recommendation provision at 722.24(3) and the fee provision at 722.24(4). A published Court of Appeals opinion, docket 344580 (3 March 2020), quotes MCL 722.24(4) in the same terms our page already used, so the Who pays section checked out as written and was left alone.

How long it was live, and what it cost. The Duty owed tile has carried the client-directed wording since the page’s earliest stored revision, 29 August 2026, and was corrected today: fifty-eight days. The mis-citation is the same age. The tile is the worse of the two because of where it sits. A parent deciding whether to ask for a lawyer-guardian ad litem, or whether to trust one already appointed, reads that box and stops reading; our own correct answer was three screens below it. The cost is a parent who expected an advocate for their child’s stated wishes and instead got an independent investigator who may recommend against them — without being told by us that the statute contemplates exactly that, or that Michigan has a separate mechanism, § 712A.17d(2), for getting the child a lawyer who does argue their wishes. That is a thing a reader could have asked the court for and did not know existed. The mis-citation cost a different reader differently: anyone who followed our citation to § 722.24 to check the quote would not have found it there.

What we did. The Duty owed tile now reads “The child’s best interests” and its note names § 712A.17d(1)(i), carries the statute’s own “regardless of whether” language, and says the wishes must still be reported to the court. The duty quote is now credited to § 712A.17d(1)(i) and explains that MCL 712A.13a(1)(g)(ii) is what applies it to an appointment under MCL 722.24. Its source link now goes to the State Court Administrative Office’s own PDF rather than to a commercial publisher, with the read date and the reason stated on the page. The appointment quote is now cited to § 722.24(2). No figure on the page was added, changed or removed, and no sentence of our own prose was deleted.

What we are deliberately still not claiming. We have not read MCL 722.27 this run, and there is an open question on that page we are not resolving by guessing: the Custody evaluations section cites MCL 722.27(1)(c), and the two Michigan Judicial Institute checklists and the Court of Appeals opinion read for this correction all use 722.27(1)(c) for something else — the power to modify or amend a custody order for proper cause or change of circumstances. That makes us doubt our own citation, but doubting it is not the same as knowing what the right one is, and the section that would settle it is on the server that was down. The citation stands until someone reads MCL 722.27 in full. We have not read MCL 551.103, the marriage-licence fee provision our Who pays section names, so that part of the page rests on the Court of Appeals’ quotation of 722.24(4) rather than on the fee statute itself. We have not re-read the statutes behind every other section of the page, so the “sources last checked” date at the foot of it has deliberately not been moved. The text we relied on is the judicial branch’s reproduction of § 712A.17d current to 2012 PA 115; we could not confirm against the Legislature’s own server that nothing has amended it since, and say so rather than imply we did. We are still not publishing a price: we found no official Michigan fee schedule for a privately appointed lawyer-guardian ad litem, and that section of the page says so and is unchanged. And two more pages in this family are known to carry the same tile contradiction and are not yet fixed.

What we had wrong. Six things, on the Maine child-representation page. (1) The Duty owed tile, the first thing a reader sees, read “The child’s wishes — a client-directed role: advocates for what the child actually says they want.” That is the inverse of Maine law, and it contradicted our own page three screens down, which said “best interests, with mandatory disclosure of the child’s wishes” and quoted the statute correctly. (2) The Who can serve tile said “a trained lay person may serve.” (3) The statutory quote setting out the duty was credited to § 1507(1); it is § 1507(4), and our own “thing worth knowing” section cited § 1507(4) for the same sentence, so the page disagreed with itself. (4) The credential rule was cited as Guardian ad Litem Rule 2(a)(3)(A). There is no such provision: Rule 2(a) has two paragraphs and neither is a credential list. (5) The pro bono provision was cited as Rule 2(a)(5) and quoted as requiring that a guardian ad litem “should anticipate being asked to accept” a referral “and should do so.” Those words are not in the rule. (6) We said GAL practice is regulated “not by the judicial branch’s family division but by the Board of Overseers of the Bar.” Half of that is backwards.

What is true. Read this run from the Legislature’s own server and from the Judicial Branch’s own PDF of the rules. On the duty, 19-A M.R.S. § 1507(4), headed Best interest of the child: “The guardian ad litem shall use the standard of the best interest of the child as set forth in section 1653, subsection 3. The guardian ad litem shall make the wishes of the child known to the court if the child has expressed them, regardless of the recommendation of the guardian ad litem.” Section 1507(1) is the appointment provision and contains no duty standard. Section 1507(8) points the same way: the guardian ad litem “shall protect the best interests of the child” in hearings. On who may serve, the credential list is at Rule 2(b)(2)(A) of the Maine Rules for Guardians ad Litem, effective 31 March 2022, and it offers a Maine law licence, one of eight named clinical licences, a CASA certification, or presence on the 2015 roster. The CASA route carries its own limit in the same subparagraph: “a CASA Certification qualified individual may be appointed a guardian ad litem only pursuant to 22 M.R.S. § 4005,” which is child protection. A divorce is Title 19-A, so in the proceeding this page is about the lay route is closed and the non-attorney who may serve is a licensed clinician. On the pro bono duty, Rule 2(b)(5) reads: “A guardian ad litem is expected to accept at least one Title 19-A pro bono or reduced-fee referral from the Judicial Branch per calendar year and shall do so to the extent consistent with the guardian ad litem’s other professional, personal, and public interest service.” On the institutions, the Supreme Judicial Court did designate the Board of Overseers of the Bar to house the Guardian ad Litem Review Board and to prosecute complaints, but the Roster is the judicial branch’s: Rule 2(b) puts qualification, placement and removal with the Chief Judge of the District Court, and Rule 2(b)(1)(A) has applications “obtained from the Family Division of the Maine District Court.”

How long it was live, and what it cost. The Duty owed tile has carried the client-directed wording since the page’s earliest stored revision, 29 August 2026, and was corrected today: fifty-seven days. It is the worst of the six because of where it sits. A parent deciding whether to ask for a guardian ad litem, or deciding whether to trust one already appointed, reads that box and stops; our own correct answer was three screens below it. The cost is a parent who expected an advocate for their child’s stated wishes and got an investigator who may recommend against them — and who had no warning from us that the statute expressly contemplates exactly that. The Who can serve note would have cost a reader differently: someone told a trained lay person may serve could reasonably have asked the court for one, in a proceeding where the rule does not allow it.

What we did. The Duty owed tile now reads “The child’s best interests” and names § 1507(4). The Who can serve tile keeps “Need not be an attorney,” which is correct, and its note now says a licensed clinician may serve instead and that CASA certification qualifies only for child-protection appointments. The duty quote is now credited to § 1507(4). Who can be appointed now cites Rule 2(b)(2)(A), quotes the CASA limitation, and links the rules PDF, which the page previously cited by name without linking. The pro bono sentence now cites Rule 2(b)(5) and quotes it as written. The paragraph on institutions now separates the complaint system from the Roster. No figure on the page was added, changed or removed.

What we are deliberately still not claiming. We have not re-read 19-A M.R.S. § 1653(3), the best-interest factors that § 1507(4) incorporates by reference, so the page still describes the standard rather than listing it. We are not saying what a guardian ad litem in any Maine county charges: § 1507(1) leaves fee arrangements to be specified by the court at the time of appointment, which is why no statewide schedule exists, and we would rather say that than print a figure from anywhere else. We have not checked whether the 2015 roster route at Rule 2(b)(2)(A)(iv) still admits anyone in practice. We have not read the Guardian ad Litem Review Board’s own procedural rules beyond the provisions quoted here, so the account of the complaint system goes no further than who houses it. And we have not audited the other forty-nine pages in this family against their own bodies beyond the tile scan that found this one; four more pages are known to carry the same contradiction and are not yet fixed.

What we had wrong. Four things, on the New Mexico child-representation page. (1) The Duty owed tile, the first thing a reader sees, read “The child’s wishes — a client-directed role: advocates for what the child actually says they want.” That is the inverse of New Mexico law, and it contradicted our own page: the body, three screens down, said the opposite. (2) Under What duty they owe your child the page said “statute silent — N.M. Stat. Ann. § 40-4-8 authorizes appointment of a guardian ad litem but contains no language directing whether the GAL follows the child’s wishes or the child’s best interests”, and stopped there. (3) Under What we could not verify the page listed “the custody evaluation provision”. (4) All three statutory quotations carried a single outbound link to law.justia.com, labelled as a commercial publisher, while the page’s own sourcing box promises that everything on it is traced to New Mexico’s own statute or court rule. The page was published on 29 August 2026, so all four were live for 56 days.

What is true. Read on 24 October 2026 from NMOneSource, the New Mexico Compilation Commission’s official site, which publishes the current NMSA 1978 Chapter 40 and the current Rules of Civil Procedure for the District Courts. Rule 1-053.3(C) NMRA: “The guardian ad litem appointed under this rule is a ‘best interests attorney’ who shall provide independent services to protect the child’s best interests without being bound by the child’s or either party’s directive or objectives and who shall make findings and recommendations.” Rule 1-053.3(A): the guardian ad litem “serves as an arm of the court and assists the court in discharging its duty to adjudicate the child’s best interests.” The child’s wishes are an input and not the instruction: (F)(2) requires the appointee to determine them “if appropriate” and (H)(5) to “consider the child’s objectives in determining what to recommend.” On the deadline, Rule 1-053.3(G)(2) gives either party eleven days after the recommendations are filed to object in writing and ask for a hearing, and (G)(3) provides that “a failure to file timely objections to the recommendations of the guardian ad litem shall be deemed a waiver of the right to object, and the court shall, without the necessity of a hearing, enter an order adopting the guardian ad litem’s recommendations.” On the custody evaluation, N.M. Stat. Ann. § 40-4-8(B)(3) is the provision: when custody is contested the court “may use, in addition to or in lieu of the provisions of Paragraph (1) of this subsection, auxiliary services such as professional evaluation by application of Rule 11-706 of the New Mexico Rules of Evidence or Rule 1-053 of the Rules of Civil Procedure for the District Courts.” The rule text carries its own dates: provisionally approved by Supreme Court Order No. 06-8300-018 effective 21 August 2006, amended by Order No. 07-8300-021, and amended by Order No. 17-8300-017 effective in all cases pending or filed on or after 31 December 2017.

What we did. The Duty owed tile now reads “Your child’s best interests” and names Rule 1-053.3(C). What duty they owe your child now quotes (C) in full, says plainly that the statute is silent and the rule is not, and carries the eleven-day objection window and the waiver that follows it. How an appointment happens now quotes § 40-4-8(B)(3) and explains that New Mexico writes no separate custody-evaluator statute. “The custody evaluation provision” has been removed from What we could not verify. Who pays now also quotes Rule 1-053.3(K), which requires the appointment order to state the retainer and the hourly rate, requires itemized monthly statements, and lets either party ask for a hearing on the fees. Every source link on the page now goes to NMOneSource rather than to a commercial publisher, and the source-checked stamp has moved to 24 October 2026 because § 40-4-8 and Rule 1-053.3 were both genuinely read today.

What we are deliberately still not claiming. No figure has been added or changed. New Mexico still publishes no statewide rate for privately appointed guardians ad litem and no court-published roster of them, and that is now what sits under What we could not verify in place of the claim we have withdrawn — we have substituted one gap for another rather than closed the list. We are not saying what a guardian ad litem in your county actually charges; the rule guarantees you the number in your own order, not a number we can print. We are not saying whether a New Mexico court may route a Rule 11-706 expert’s fee through § 40-4-8(A)’s allocation power; the two provisions sit in the same section and neither answers it, and that needs case law we have not read. The indigency statement stands with its original hedge: we searched Chapter 40 and Rule 1-053.3 for a provision waiving or shifting a guardian ad litem’s fee for a party who cannot pay and found none, only “the ability of the parties to pay” as a factor in whether to appoint at all.

What we had wrong. Three things, on the Oklahoma child-representation page. (1) Under What we could not verify, the page listed “the custody evaluation provision” as something it could not confirm from a primary source. (2) All three statutory quotations — the appointment power, the duty owed, and who pays — carried a single outbound link to law.justia.com, labelled on the page as “a commercial publisher, not the state’s own site”. That label was honest, but the page’s own sourcing box promises that everything on it is “traced to Oklahoma’s own statute or court rule”, and the Oklahoma Legislature publishes the whole of Title 43 itself. (3) The quotation under What duty they owe your child was cited to § 107.3(A)(1). It is paragraph (A)(2). The page was published on 29 August 2026, so all three were live for 55 days.

What is true. Read on 23 October 2026 from the Oklahoma Legislature’s own complete text of Title 43 — os43.pdf, linked from the Legislature’s Oklahoma Statutes index, a 212-page file carrying amendments through Laws 2025 and printing no revision date of its own. Okla. Stat. tit. 43, § 120.7(A): “As used in this section, ‘court expert’ means a parenting coordinator, guardian ad litem, custody evaluator or any other person appointed by the court in a custody or visitation proceeding involving children.” Subsection (B) requires the candidate, before appointment, to disclose to the parties any prior relationship with a party, attorney or judge in the action; a complete resume of their qualifications; any suspension, reprimand or other formal punishment arising from an adjudicated complaint to a licensing board or comparable body; and any criminal conviction in the past ten years together with inclusion on any sex-offender list. Subsection (C): “A party may file an objection to the appointment of a proposed court expert within fifteen (15) days after the receipt of the disclosures required by subsection B of this section.” On objection the court “shall set the matter for hearing”, and the objecting party, if they ask, “shall be entitled to discovery related to the qualifications and appropriateness of the proposed court expert prior to hearing.” Subsection (D) requires sixteen hours of domestic violence training where the case involves domestic violence, stalking or harassment. The section was added by Laws 2010, c. 105, § 1 and amended by Laws 2015, c. 385, § 2, effective 1 November 2015. The duty quotation is paragraph (A)(2) of § 107.3, and all three quotations on the page match the Legislature’s text word for word.

What we did. Who can be appointed now carries § 120.7(A) verbatim and sets out (B), (C) and (D) in plain terms, including the fifteen-day objection window and the discovery right. “The custody evaluation provision” has been removed from What we could not verify. All three source links now go to the Legislature’s own Title 43, and the “commercial publisher” disclosure with them; the Justia page we had been citing returns 403 to our server, so the link we were offering readers as the page’s only source could not be re-read by us either. The duty citation now reads § 107.3(A)(2). The source-checked stamp has moved to 23 October 2026 because § 107.3 and § 120.7 were genuinely re-read today.

What we are deliberately still not claiming. We are not saying § 120.7 tells you what a custody evaluation must contain, how an evaluator reaches a recommendation, or what one costs. It does none of those things: it is an appointment-and-disclosure provision, and Oklahoma writes no standards for the evaluation itself that we have found. No figure was added. Oklahoma still publishes no fee schedule for privately appointed guardians ad litem or custody evaluators, and we are not repeating the numbers that circulate on law-firm pages. The indigency statement stands: we searched Title 43 for a provision waiving or shifting a guardian ad litem’s fee for a party who cannot pay and found none, and the page still says so with the same hedge it always carried. We have substituted one gap for another rather than closed the list. What we could not verify now records that we could not re-read the Oklahoma Bar Association’s standard operating manual for guardians ad litem, which § 107.3(A)(4) makes binding on every appointee: the Bar’s own Guardianship Materials page links it through a web-archive copy rather than a live file, the live address that copy was taken from returns 404, and the Oklahoma State Courts Network — where § 107.3(A)(4) directs the Administrative Office of the Courts to publish the link — answered every request from our server with a human-verification challenge. What the page says about that manual rests on an earlier reading of a file the Bar no longer serves, and we have left the claim standing and labelled it rather than delete a statement we cannot currently check either way.

What we had wrong. Three things, on the Vermont child-representation page. (1) Under Who pays, a box headed No fee-allocation provision found read “We could not find a Vermont statute or rule governing how the appointee’s fee is split between the parties”, and added that the allocation “is simply made under the court’s general costs power rather than a dedicated provision”. (2) A second box, No indigency waiver found, read “We searched and found no provision in Vermont waiving or shifting these fees for a party who cannot pay them” and said “there is no dedicated protection we could point you to”. (3) The thing worth knowing about Vermont said the Judiciary’s GAL Program “is built around trained lay volunteers rather than lawyers” and called this “a notably different model from states where the child’s court-appointed representative is by default a licensed lawyer”. Both of the page’s source links went to a commercial publisher’s copy of § 669.

What is true. 15 V.S.A. § 594 is headed Representation and testimony of child and sits in the same chapter as § 669. Subsection (a) lets the court appoint an attorney “to represent the interests of a minor or dependent child with respect to child support and the allocation of parental rights and responsibilities” — the custody context this page is about. Subsection (d) then reads, in full: “The court shall enter an order for costs, fees, and disbursements in favor of the child’s attorney. The order shall be made against either or both parents, except that, if the responsible party is indigent, the costs, fees, and disbursements shall be borne as provided by rule of court.” That is both a fee-allocation provision and an indigency provision, and it is mandatory rather than an exercise of a general costs power. We read the whole of Title 15, Chapter 11 from the Vermont General Assembly’s own server on 22 October 2026: § 594(d) is the only costs-and-fees provision in the chapter. On the volunteer question, the Vermont Judiciary’s Guardian ad Litem Program page says: “Other statutes may require GALs in certain divorce or custody cases, as well as in cases when a child must testify. While courts sometimes appoint volunteer GALs to those cases, more often than not judges appoint lawyers instead.”

How long it was live, and what it cost a reader. The page was published on 29 August 2026. The oldest revision still retained, from 9 September 2026, already carries both statements and no mention of § 594, so the wording was live for at least 43 days and probably 54. The cost is specific and falls on the reader least able to absorb it: a Vermont parent who cannot afford a child’s attorney was told, on the page they came to for exactly that question, that there was no provision to point to and that they should raise it early and hope. The provision they needed was one section away in the same chapter of the same title, and it is the one that would have told them an indigent party’s share is borne by rule of court rather than by them. The volunteer framing compounded it in the other direction, by implying the appointee would usually be an unpaid volunteer in a case where the state says a paid lawyer is the more likely appointment.

What we did. The two boxes under Who pays are replaced. The first now quotes § 594(d) in full, says the order is mandatory where an attorney is appointed for the child under § 594(a), and states plainly that a guardian ad litem appointed under § 669 is a different appointment for which § 669 sets no fee and no allocation. The second now sets out the indigency proviso in the statute’s own words. Who can be appointed and The thing worth knowing about Vermont now carry the Judiciary’s sentence about lawyers being appointed more often than not in divorce and custody cases, so the volunteer model is described where it actually applies. The summary card and the summary list at the top of the page were both rewritten to match the corrected sections. The card carried its own copy of the claim, reading “Who pays — Not established — No fee-allocation provision found in statute”, and it survived the first save of this repair: the body was corrected and published before the card was noticed, so for about seven minutes this page carried a corrected body under a stale summary. The post-save re-read of the live page is what caught it. A corrected body under an uncorrected summary is the same error wearing a hat. “How the fee is allocated” has been removed from What we could not verify. Both source links now go to the General Assembly’s own text of § 669, with § 594 and the Judiciary’s program page added, and the page’s source-checked stamp moved to 22 October 2026 because those sources were genuinely re-read today.

What we are deliberately still not claiming. We are not saying § 594(d) governs a guardian ad litem’s fee. It is written for the child’s attorney, § 669 is silent on cost, and whether a court may route a § 669 appointee’s fee through § 594(d) is a question we cannot answer from the statute and have not answered on the page. We did not locate the rule of court that § 594(d) points to for an indigent party, so the page says only that the statute directs those costs elsewhere and does not describe what the rule provides; that gap is now listed in What we could not verify in place of the old one. No figure was added: Vermont still publishes no fee schedule for privately appointed guardians ad litem or custody evaluators, and we are not repeating the numbers that circulate on law-firm pages. The custody-evaluation provision remains unconfirmed — the only thing in the chapter that comes near it is § 667(b) on the admissibility of expert best-interests reports, which is an evidence rule and not an appointment or payment provision, so we have not presented it as one. We also have not re-read the Vermont Statutes Online against the printed Vermont Statutes Annotated: the State labels its online copy unofficial, and the page now says so where it cites it.

What we had wrong. Four things, on the Texas child-representation page, published 29 August 2026 and live in this state for 53 days. (1) The page attributed the amicus attorney’s duty — “shall advocate the best interests of the child after reviewing the facts and circumstances of the case” — to § 107.005(a). (2) It cited § 107.051(a) for Texas governing custody evaluations separately. (3) It put inside quotation marks, as § 107.023(a), the words “entitled to reasonable fees and expenses”. (4) Under Who pays, the row headed If you cannot pay read “none found”. Every source link on the page pointed at one commercial publisher’s copy of the 2005 Texas statutes, while the paragraph above them told the reader that “everything below is traced to Texas’s own statute or court rule”.

What is true. We read Family Code chapter 107 on the Texas Legislature’s own server on 21 October 2026 (tcss.legis.texas.gov), and the enrolled text of the Act that changed it (H.B. 2530). The chapter contains no § 107.005 and no § 107.051. H.B. 2530, SECTION 7 reads: “Section 107.005, Family Code, is repealed” (Acts 2025, 89th Leg., R.S., Ch. 594), and SECTION 9: “This Act takes effect September 1, 2025.” The duty was re-enacted by SECTION 6 at § 107.0265(a): an amicus attorney’s “primary duty is to: (1) review the facts and circumstances of the case; and (2) advocate the best interests of a child who is the subject of the suit”, and by § 107.0265(b) the attorney “is not bound by the expressed objectives of a child”. § 107.051 was “redesignated and amended” as § 107.103 by Acts 2015, 84th Leg., R.S., Ch. 1252 (H.B. 1449), Sec. 1.17, with effect from 1 September 2015 — the chapter says so in its own history note. The real § 107.023(a) gives “reasonable and necessary fees, court costs, and expenses”: our version dropped and necessary and dropped court costs altogether, inside quotation marks. And “none found” was wrong about the thing that matters most to a reader who cannot pay: in deciding whether to appoint anyone at all, the court “shall … give due consideration to the ability of the parties to pay reasonable fees to the appointee” and “balance the child’s interests against the cost to the parties” (§ 107.021(b)(1), and again at § 107.024(b)(1) for an amicus attorney).

What it cost a reader. Anyone who did the right thing — looked up the section we named to check what the person reporting on their family actually owed their child — found nothing there, because it had been repealed for almost a year before we published the page. A reader who could not afford an appointee was told the statute offered them nothing, when the one moment it does give them is the appointment hearing itself, and that moment passes. Both source numbers sent readers to a 2005 snapshot of a code that has been amended in every session since.

What we did. Tonight we replaced § 107.005(a) with § 107.0265(a) and (b), quoted in the statute’s own words; corrected § 107.051(a) to § 107.103(a) and said on the page where the old number went; restored the omitted words to the § 107.023(a) quotation; replaced “none found” with the ability-to-pay provisions, quoted, together with the plain statement that there is still no fee waiver and no shifting of the cost off the parties in a private suit; fixed the source line that had credited § 107.021(a) with quotations actually taken from §§ 107.002, 107.004 and 107.0265; and replaced all four commercial links with the Legislature’s own current text. We also added a note telling a reader whose case was filed before 1 September 2025 that the former law still governs it, because H.B. 2530 SECTION 8 says so. We moved the page’s “Sources last checked” stamp to 21 October 2026, which is the date we actually re-read the chapter.

Then we looked for the same mistake everywhere else. We searched all 1,002 published pages for both dead numbers. § 107.005 was on two more: the child-representation index, which cited “§§ 107.001, 107.002(b), 107.004(a)(2), 107.005(a)” and called it the clearest statutory statement of the distinction between these roles in any state, and the money page, which cited the range “§§ 107.001–107.005”. Both now cite § 107.0265 and both now link the Legislature’s own text. § 107.051 appeared nowhere else. One other page, annulment by state, contains the string 107.005, but it is Oregon’s ORS 107.005 and has nothing to do with Texas; we left it alone.

What we are deliberately not claiming. We did not read the repealed text of § 107.005, which the Legislature’s current server does not carry, so we cannot say whether our old paraphrase was a fair rendering of it or whether the 2025 re-enactment changed the duty in substance — only that the section we cited no longer exists. We are not claiming Texas publishes any fee schedule for privately appointed guardians ad litem or custody evaluators; we looked again tonight and there is none, and § 107.115 leaves the evaluator’s fee to the court as a money judgment. We have not re-read the rest of chapter 107 beyond the sections cited on these pages: the 2025 Act added six further sections on who may be appointed an amicus attorney and what standard of care they owe, and our pages still say nothing about any of them. And the sweep described above looked for these two numbers, which is not the same as checking whether the other forty-nine states’ pages cite sections their own legislatures have since renumbered. On tonight’s evidence that is a real risk rather than a theoretical one, because nothing about a dead section number looks broken from the outside: a link checker passes it, and the commercial snapshot we had been linking serves it happily. That sweep is queued, and it is not done.

What we had wrong. The summary badge on our Indiana child-representation page read “Who can serve — Need not be an attorney — A trained lay person may serve.” The section beneath it said in full: “Ind. Code § 31-17-6-1 contains no professional-license requirement, and § 31-17-6-9 contemplates payment either ‘to the individual or attorney guardian ad litem,’ showing the role can be filled by a non-attorney.” Both sentences are true about the statute and both are misleading as the answer to the question the page asks.

What is true. The Indiana Guardian Ad Litem Guidelines for Civil Family Law Cases were approved by the Judicial Conference Board of Directors on 18 September 2024 and by the Supreme Court by written order on 17 October 2024, effective 1 January 2025. Rule 1.1 provides: “(a) A person may serve as a GAL if the person is: 1. a licensed attorney in good standing with the Indiana Supreme Court; 2. a licensed mental health professional in good standing with the Indiana Behavioral Services and Human Health Licensing Board or the Indiana Department of Education; 3. employed by, or contracted with, a court-approved GAL services program or a GAL/CASA program certified by the Supreme Court under IC 33-24-6-4; or 4. approved by the GAL Family Law Oversight Committee to operate independently based on their knowledge, skill, experience, training, education, or other qualifications; and (b) meets the initial and ongoing training requirements outlined in these rules; and (c) continuously meets the background, reporting and other requirements outlined in these rules.” Rule 2.1 requires a minimum of twelve hours of initial training unless the Oversight Committee waives it. Rules 1.2 and 1.3 bar a person with a disqualifying criminal record or a substantiated child abuse or neglect finding. The Guidelines apply only where the GAL was appointed on or after 1 January 2025. We read them on the Indiana Supreme Court’s own rules site, rules.incourts.gov, and in the Court’s published PDF of the Guidelines, on 20 October 2026.

How long it was live, and what it cost a reader. The page was published on 29 August 2026 and carried the claim from that day, so it was live for 52 days. The rule it missed had been in force for nearly twenty months before the page was written. What it cost is specific: a parent reading that “a trained lay person may serve” would not know to ask whether the person appointed to investigate their family is on the state registry, has passed a criminal and child abuse background check, or holds a waiver from the Oversight Committee — and would not know that a complaint route against a GAL appointed after 1 January 2025 exists at all.

What we did. We replaced the badge with “Qualified under Rule 1.1” and a note naming the four routes plus training and background checks, replaced the matching line in the short version, and rewrote the “Who can be appointed” section: it now keeps the statutory point, quotes Rule 1.1 in full, explains that the only route not running through a license or a court-approved program is Committee approval under Rule 1.1(a)(4), and links the Guidelines on the Court’s own server. We also added what the Guidelines publish about cost, which the page did not say anywhere: Rule 3.3 requires the written Order of Appointment to contain “the cost of services and/or apportionment of fees”, and the commentary to Rule 3.2 lists the parties’ ability to pay among the factors a court may weigh before appointing a GAL at all.

What we are deliberately still not claiming. We did not move the page’s “Sources last checked” date. We re-read the court rules this run but could not re-read the Ind. Code sections the page cites: iga.in.gov served only an empty application shell on every path tried and its API refused us for want of a key, and law.justia.com returned HTTP 403 throughout. The statutory quotations on the page therefore stand as they were last checked on 29 August 2026, and their Justia links are unchanged and still labelled as a commercial publisher. We did not change the “No published rate” badge, because nothing we read establishes a statewide fee schedule for privately appointed guardians ad litem in Indiana. We have not checked whether the other forty-nine child-representation pages miss a comparable state rule; this correction is about Indiana only.

What we had wrong. On /arkansas-child-representation/, the summary badge read “Duty owed — Not stated in statute — The appointment provisions exist, but we could not find statutory language setting the duty,” and the body section headed “What duty they owe your child” opened “The statute does not say” and continued: “Arkansas authorizes the appointment but we could not find statutory language stating whether the appointee follows your child’s wishes or their own view of your child’s best interests… Where the statute is silent it is usually settled by case law or local practice.” The closing list of things the page could not verify named “what duty the appointee owes.” A second badge read “Official rate — Not established — We could not confirm one either way,” and a body panel headed “There is no published price” said “We looked for an official Arkansas fee schedule for privately appointed guardians ad litem and custody evaluators, and did not find one,” adding that “only Minnesota and Massachusetts publish figures.” A third passage said the program, “by its own text… applies to ‘guardianship cases in circuit court when custody is an issue’ — so its literal scope is guardianship proceedings rather than ordinary divorce custody actions.” The page also carried a single outbound link, to a commercial publisher, under a promise that everything on it was traced to Arkansas’s own statute or court rule.

What is true. Arkansas Supreme Court Administrative Order No. 15, § 15.1, has a section whose caption is the page’s own question: Section 5, “Standards of practice for attorneys ad litem in domestic relations cases and guardianship cases when custody is an issue.” Subsection (b) prints: “An attorney ad litem shall determine the best interest of a child by considering such custody criteria as: (1) Moral fitness factors… (4) Other relevant information regarding the child such as stated preference, age, sex, health, testing and evaluation, child care arrangements…” Subsection (c) prints: “An attorney ad litem shall appear at all hearings to represent the best interest of the child. All relevant facts should be presented to the court and if the child’s wishes differ from the ad litem’s determination of the child’s best interest, the ad litem shall communicate the child’s wishes to the court, as well as the recommendations of the ad litem.” That is the answer the page called unfindable: the standard is best interests, the child’s stated preference is one factor inside it, and a divergent wish must still reach the judge. Section 4 of the same order, “Qualifications for attorneys appointed by the court to represent children in domestic relations cases and guardianship cases when custody is an issue,” sets who may serve: licensed and in good standing, not less than 10 hours of approved initial education in the two years before qualifying, and 4 hours of continuing education a year, failing which the attorney is “no longer qualified” and comes off the list the Administrative Office of the Courts distributes to the trial courts.

And there is a published rate. The Administrative Office of the Courts’ “Domestic Relations/Probate Attorneys ad Litem — Guidelines for Authorization and Payment of Fees” (AOC Form Revised 7/2023) states at paragraph 4: “If a circuit judge appoints an attorney ad litem and determines that the parties can afford to pay the attorney ad litem’s fee without state assistance, the judge can approve any fee the judge finds reasonable. However, if the judge authorizes part or all of the attorney ad litem fee to be paid by the state the judge shall not approve an hourly rate in excess of $125.00 per hour for either the portion to be paid by the state or the portion to be paid by the litigants… The total award to be paid from the appropriation in any single case shall not exceed $1,250.00.” The same document records that the ceiling rose from $90.00 to $125.00 an hour on 1 July 2023 and that the state appropriation for the whole program is $396,750.00 a year, paid first come, first served. On scope, the Administrative Office of the Courts’ own program page says Act 708 of 1999 “authorized the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) to establish an attorney ad litem program in domestic relations and probate cases where custody is an issue.” Our page had kept the probate half of that pairing and dropped the half that applies to divorcing parents.

What it cost a reader. Someone divorcing in Arkansas with custody contested, reading this page to work out what the court’s appointee would argue and what it would cost, was told that the first question had no published answer and the second had no published figure, and was pointed at a phone call to a county clerk for a number the Administrative Office of the Courts prints on its own website. A reader who took the scope paragraph at face value could have concluded the program was not for them at all. All three statements were wrong from the day the page went up, 29 August 2026, until tonight.

What we did. We rewrote the four badges, the four summary lines, the duty section, the who-may-serve section, the price section and the scope paragraph against Administrative Order No. 15 and the Administrative Office of the Courts’ guidelines and program page, quoting both orders verbatim, and added outbound links to the Judiciary’s consolidated Administrative Orders, its directory of qualified attorneys ad litem, the guidelines PDF and the program page. We moved the source-checked date to 18 October 2026, and we now say on the page that the statute quotations are linked to a commercial publisher because we have not found a free official text of the Arkansas Code on the legislature’s own site, whose Arkansas Code page returned a server error again tonight.

What we are still not claiming. We did not touch the statutory quotations or their subsection letters, because we could not read § 9-13-106 or § 9-13-101(e) on a state server tonight and will not re-letter a quotation we cannot check. The Administrative Office of the Courts cites this program to § 9-13-101(e) as well as § 9-13-106, and our page still quotes only the second; that gap stands. We found no Arkansas provision on court-ordered custody evaluations as distinct from attorneys ad litem, and no official figure for what a custody evaluator charges here, so both remain listed as unverified. The consolidated Administrative Orders we read are the Judiciary’s own text, current to 29 January 2026, and carry Order 15’s history line “Amended and effective by per curiam order March 17, 2016”; the Judiciary’s separate amendments document would not open for us, so we do not assert that no later per curiam order has touched it. One further defect is recorded and not yet repaired: the sentence “only Minnesota and Massachusetts publish figures” appears on 46 of our child-representation pages and is now known to be wrong on all of them. Arkansas is corrected; the other 45 are not, and a sweep of that one sentence is the first job of the next run.

What we had wrong. On /connecticut-child-representation/, the summary badge read “Duty owed — Not stated in statute — The appointment provisions exist, but we could not find statutory language setting the duty,” and the body section headed “What duty they owe your child” opened “The statute does not say” and continued: “Connecticut authorizes the appointment but we could not find statutory language stating whether the appointee follows your child’s wishes or their own view of your child’s best interests… Where the statute is silent it is usually settled by case law or local practice.” The page’s closing list of things it could not verify named two items: “what duty the appointee owes” and “the custody evaluation provision.” A fourth badge read “Official rate — Not established — We could not confirm one either way.” Separately, the page attributed the sentence “The guardian ad litem is not required to be an attorney” to Practice Book § 25-61A(a), which is the composition of a committee, and its quotation of § 25-62(a) stopped after that rule’s first sentence with no ellipsis, so it read as complete.

What is true. Conn. Gen. Stat. § 46b-54 is captioned “Appointment of counsel or guardian ad litem for a minor child. Duties. Best interests of the child.” Subsection (f) prints: “When recommending the entry of any order as provided in subsections (a) and (b) of section 46b-56, counsel or a guardian ad litem for the minor child shall consider the best interests of the child, and in doing so shall consider, but not be limited to, one or more of the following factors… (4) any relevant and material information obtained from the child, including the informed preferences of the child…” and it closes: “Counsel or a guardian ad litem for the minor child shall not be required to assign any weight to any of the factors considered.” That is the precise answer to the question the page called unanswerable: the standard is best interests, the child’s own view is the fourth of seventeen factors within it, and no factor carries mandated weight. Conn. Gen. Stat. § 46b-12b separately requires the Judicial Branch to “develop and implement a professional code of conduct applicable to any counsel or guardian ad litem for a minor child appointed in a family relations matter.” The Judicial Branch’s own guide, JDP-FM-224 (Rev. 11/21) — the publication § 46b-12a requires it to issue — states the distinction in plain words: “The GAL represents the child’s best interests while the AMC represents the child’s legal interests and supports the child’s best interests,” and of the attorney for the minor child, “the AMC represents the child’s wishes and advocates on the child’s behalf.”

What is true, on the evaluation. Conn. Practice Book § 25-60A is headed Court-Ordered Private Evaluations and reads: “If the court orders a private evaluation of any party or any child in a family proceeding where custody, visitation or parental access is at issue, a qualified, licensed health care provider shall conduct such evaluation,” with subsection (b) requiring the order to name the provider, the estimated cost, each party’s responsibility for it, the provider’s credentials, the deadline and the estimated fee for testifying. It sits one section before § 25-61A, which the page was already citing, in the same Practice Book PDF the page linked twice. Behind it: Conn. Gen. Stat. § 46b-6 (“Investigations”), which lets the court order an investigation including “evaluation of his mental or physical condition”; § 46b-6a, under which the court “shall first make a finding that the parties have the financial resources to pay for such evaluation” and the report is filed within thirty days and sealed; and § 46b-7, under which the case “shall not be disposed of until the report of the investigation or evaluation has been filed… and counsel and the parties have had a reasonable opportunity to examine it.”

What is true, on the money. There is still no published Connecticut dollar rate for a privately appointed guardian ad litem, and we have not invented one. But Conn. Gen. Stat. § 46b-12(c) requires that within twenty-one days of the appointment order the court enter a further order containing “the fee schedule of such counsel or guardian ad litem that shall minimally set forth (A) the amount of the retainer, (B) the hourly rate to be charged, (C) the apportionment of the retainer and hourly fees between the parties, and (D) if applicable, all provisions related to the calculation of fees on a sliding-scale basis”, together with a schedule of periodic review of the work and the fees “not less than every three months”; and that within thirty days of final judgment the appointee file a fee affidavit and “shall not charge the parties for the preparation of such affidavit.” On the indigency path the page called unverified, JDP-FM-224 states: “In some cases, the parties may qualify for the appointment of a GAL that is paid for by the state. The parties must submit their financial affidavits to the court for review. If the parties meet the eligibility requirements of the Division of Public Defender Services, the court will appoint a GAL who is paid for by the state.” And § 46b-12(a) sets out the appointment procedure the page omitted entirely: the court must give the parties written notice of fifteen eligible people, the parties have two weeks to name their choice, and only if they fail or cannot agree does the court pick one of the fifteen itself.

Read at. Conn. Gen. Stat. chapters 815 and 815j were fetched and parsed on 17 October 2026 directly from the Connecticut General Assembly’s own server, chap_815.htm and chap_815j.htm. The Practice Book was downloaded as the Judicial Branch’s own 24 MB PB.pdf and read with pdftotext, both in layout and in reading order, because it sets two columns and the column order matters to a quotation. JDP-FM-224 was downloaded from the Judicial Branch and read the same way; a nonsense path on the same host was probed first and returned HTTP 403, so the 200 on the real file is a real file and not a soft error page. No WebFetch summary was quoted as evidence anywhere in this check.

How long it was live, and what it cost. The “we could not find statutory language” sentence, the mis-citation and both unverified items are present in every one of the fifty page revisions WordPress still holds, the oldest dated 1 September 2026; the page’s own stamp gives 29 August 2026 as its publication date. So this was live at least 46 days and almost certainly 49. The cost falls on a specific reader: a parent facing a contested custody case, told by us that Connecticut law is silent on what the person investigating their family owes their child, and advised to ask the appointee at the first meeting because nothing else could be known. That parent had a statute available to read, a published Judicial Branch guide answering the same question in plain English, and a right to a written fee schedule within twenty-one days. We told them to phone a clerk instead.

What we did. We replaced the duty badge and the duty section with § 46b-54(f) quoted at length and its caption named, and added the Judicial Branch’s own GAL-versus-AMC formulation from JDP-FM-224. We added the § 46b-12(a) fifteen-name appointment procedure, and a separate sourced block on court-ordered evaluations citing Practice Book § 25-60A and Conn. Gen. Stat. §§ 46b-6, 46b-6a and 46b-7. We moved the “guardian ad litem is not required to be an attorney” quotation to its real home at § 25-62(a), completed that rule’s truncated first sentence, and added § 25-62(b)’s eligibility requirements, noting the amendment of 12 June 2025 effective 1 January 2026. We replaced the fee advice with the § 46b-12(c) entitlement and the state-paid route, and rewrote the “Official rate” badge to say what is actually the case: no statewide rate is published, and the court must fix one in your own case. The two items in “What we could not verify” were both answered and have been replaced by three that are genuinely open. Outbound links went from 2 to 15 distinct, and “Sources last checked” moved from 29 August to 17 October 2026, because every source behind every claim on that page was read in full on that date. No dollar figure on the page changed, because none needed to.

What we are still not claiming. We do not state the dollar amount of the “state rates” at which the Office of Chief Public Defender contracts a guardian ad litem under Practice Book § 25-61A(d): the rule authorizes the arrangement and prints no figure, and the standing committee’s own pages on the Judicial Branch site returned HTTP 403 to every request we made. We do not state the financial-eligibility thresholds the Division of Public Defender Services applies, because JDP-FM-224 names that test without stating it. We have not read the text of the professional code of conduct that § 46b-12b required by 1 October 2014, only the statute requiring it, and we say so on the page rather than describing a document we have not seen. We make no claim about how a Connecticut judge weighs the seventeen § 46b-54(f) factors in practice; the statute expressly declines to require any weighting, and no case law was read for this check.

What we had wrong. On /alaska-divorce-costs/, a callout headed “Nothing extra to e-file” read: “We looked for a portal fee and a card surcharge in Alaska and found neither published … there is no extra charge we can point you at.” Three rows below, the table row “Credit- or debit-card convenience fee” showed not published and explained: “We could not locate the controlling administrative bulletin, so no amount is given here.” The page’s open-questions list repeated it: “that bulletin was not located on an official source.” Two further rows understated what Alaska publishes: the parenting-class row showed not published, and the copy-fee row gave records research as a flat “$30.00”.

What is true. The bulletin is Alaska Administrative Bulletin No. 95, “Debit and Credit Card Payments; Convenience Fees”, dated 12 October 2020 and effective 13 October 2020, issued under the authority of Administrative Rule 9(f)(7) and 9.1(c). It prints: “Convenience Fee: 3 percent of the transaction amount. The court system will assess a convenience fee of 3 percent of the transaction amount for payments made by debit or credit card … The convenience fee is non-refundable.” “Filing Fees” appear on its list of costs payable by card; accepted cards are Visa and Mastercard. It is the fourth item on the court system’s Administrative Bulletins index, a page we were one click away from on a host we were already citing. On e-filing, the Alaska Court System’s eFiling FAQ and its TrueFiling User Guide both state that “the processing fee collected by the TrueFiling vendor (not the court) is non-refundable”; the same FAQ answers “Is TrueFiling available for all court locations in Alaska?” with “Yes.” On the parenting class, the court system’s Classes page states that its free Zoom Family Law Education Class shows the “Listen 2 Kids” video, which “meets the parent education requirement in Anchorage and some other locations (check with your local court)”, and that “There is no charge for the class.” On records research, Administrative Rule 9(e)(5) gives the unit the fee page omits: “For providing in writing requested information from search of records, per hour or fraction thereof 30.00.”

What changed. The e-filing callout now carries the 3 percent card fee, the $7.50 it comes to on a $250 filing fee, the TrueFiling vendor processing fee, and the fact that paying at the counter in cash, by check or by money order avoids the 3 percent. The convenience-fee row shows 3% / $7.50 and quotes the bulletin. The parenting-class row shows $0.00 through the court’s own class and cites both the Parent Education page and the Classes page. The records-research figure now carries its unit. We added a row for Administrative Rule 11(a), which sets the maximum recoverable from the other side as costs for service — $45.00 per person served plus $20.00 for the first 25 miles — and said plainly that this is not a cap on what a process server may charge you. The fee-waiver section now records Administrative Rule 10(b) and (c), under which a filer represented by Alaska Legal Services Corporation, the Alaska Pro Bono Program, the Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Pro Bono Program or the Cook Inlet Tribal Council need not file the indigency statement at all and the clerk “shall accept the pleadings for filing without payment of the filing fee”, and Rule 10(d) and Rule 9(f)(4), under which an unpaid fee can get the case dismissed. We also corrected the page’s own self-contradiction about counties: the body said “Alaska has NO counties” while the visible FAQ asked whether the fee is “the same in every Alaska county” and the Dataset structured data offered a “Range across counties”; all three now use boroughs, census areas and judicial districts. On /alaska-divorce-kit/, “No portal fee published” was replaced, the card fee was added to both cost tables, the claim that the five e-filing exemptions need “no documentation” was qualified against the 6 October 2026 revision of Administrative Bulletin 92 (“some courts may require filers to submit form TF-820 with the initial exempt filing”), and the description of TrueFiling as being rolled out “court by court” was replaced, because it is now live everywhere except probate. The Alaska row on /divorce-costs/ carries the card fee too. The page was published on 20 August 2026 and carried the wrong statements when we re-read it today, 58 days later; we cannot date the wording more precisely than the page’s own publication date, so we are treating the whole of that period as the exposure. The “sources last checked” and hero stamps moved from 23 September to 17 October 2026, because every source behind every figure on the page was re-read in full today.

What we are not claiming. We have not established that the 3 percent convenience fee is charged at the TrueFiling checkout. Bulletin 95 predates TrueFiling and names in-person courthouse payment and online payment through CourtView as the places of payment; it is silent on the vendor’s portal, and we say so on the page rather than assuming. We have not established what the TrueFiling vendor’s processing fee is: the court system says it exists and is non-refundable, and neither the eFiling FAQ, nor the User Guide, nor the Case Type and Fee Chart puts a number on it. We are not claiming that a parenting class is required of any particular Alaska filer: the court system’s Parent Education page says the statewide requirement is gone, its Classes page says a requirement survives in Anchorage and unnamed “other locations”, and those two official pages are in tension with each other, not with us. We make no claim about what a privately run class costs. We did not verify the sentence the page previously attributed to “a separate self-help page” about the “Listen to the Children” video — it is not on the current Classes page, which names the video “Listen 2 Kids”, and we have replaced the quotation with the current wording rather than assert the old page never existed. The $250 filing fee was confirmed three ways today — Administrative Rule 9(b)(1), the Court System’s Filing Fees page dated effective 5/1/2023, and the TrueFiling Case Type and Fee Chart — and did not change.

What we had wrong. Five things, on /minnesota-divorce-costs/ and /minnesota-divorce-kit/.

First, and worst, an absence claim that was simply false. A panel headed “Nothing extra to e-file” read: “We looked for a portal fee and a card surcharge in Minnesota and found neither published … there is no extra charge we can point you at.” The Minnesota Judicial Branch’s own Odyssey File & Serve FAQ, document ODY-FS-600-3051, prints a transaction table: “EFO (e-file only) $5.00 / EFS (e-filing with service) $8.00 / SO (service only) $3.00”, and says a few lines later that “a convenience fee is assessed to cover the credit card processing fees and may vary by court.” Our own Minnesota kit had been quoting Hennepin County’s fee page — “use of eFile & eServe requires a $5.00 processing fee” — since 2 October. The costs page was contradicting a sourced figure on our own site, and had been making the claim since 21 August 2026, the day after it was published. Live 56 days.

Second, the page contradicted itself about what it had read. Two table rows said we “could not reach the Minnesota Judicial Branch fee pages”, while the headline tile cited “the Minnesota Judicial Branch District Court Fees lookup” as the source of its county totals and the open-questions list said the fee page “has since been read”. All three were on one page at once. The first two were accurate as of today and the third was accurate as of 2 October; nobody reconciled them. Live 14 days (the contradiction entered on 2 October 2026).

Third, a find-and-replace destroyed a paragraph and the HTML around it. The “Does it change by county?” section was meant to read “… the law library fee collected at filing: $12.00 in Hennepin and $15.00 in Ramsey”. A replacement string containing $1 was passed to a regular-expression substitution, so “$12” and “$15” were read as capture-group references: each was swapped for the whole preceding sentence, leaving three copies of “… with no county-by-county authority to vary it2.00 in Hennepin and”, two unclosed <p> tags and two stray </h3> tags. It has been live and visibly broken since 2 October 2026. Live 14 days. This is the second time this exact mistake has hit this site; the first was repaired on 3 October 2026 on the national table.

Fourth, the responding spouse’s fee. The page said a spouse who files an answer “owes their own $340”. Minn. Stat. § 518.005, subd. 6 charges its $50 on “the first paper filed for a party”, and the county law library fee is collected from “each defendant, respondent, intervenor or other party who appears” under § 134A.09, subd. 1(b) and § 134A.10, subd. 1(b). A responding spouse in Hennepin who files anything faces the same $402.00 the petitioner paid.

Fifth, an impossible floor. The kit’s “Typical all-in, doing it yourselves, uncontested” read “$400–$500”, below the $402.00 the same table gave two rows above it as the Hennepin County filing fee. It now reads $402–$500.

What changed. The e-filing panel now carries the Judiciary’s own transaction figures and says plainly that a self-represented filer can avoid all of them, because Minn. Gen. R. Prac. 14.01(b)(5)(i) lets a self-represented litigant “elect” to e-file but does not require it. Three table rows replaced one: the transaction fee, the card convenience fee (published as existing and nowhere quantified), and a charge that was missing from the page altogether — Rule 14.01(b)(3) provides that where an attorney or other Select User is excused from mandatory e-filing, “court personnel shall scan all documents filed conventionally … and charge the filing party a $25 scanning fee for each 50 pages, or part thereof”. The $390.00 headline is unchanged but is no longer attributed to a page we cannot open: it is now sourced to the two statutes that make it, § 357.021, subd. 2(1) for $340.00 and § 518.005, subd. 6 for $50.00. The county paragraph was rewritten from scratch and now explains where Minnesota actually publishes these fees — §§ 134A.09, subd. 3 and 134A.10, subd. 4 require that “all law library fees shall be published in the State Register”, and in the 85 non-metro counties the fee “shall be set on July 1 each year”. We added a fourth county total we could verify today from the county’s own document: St. Louis County’s 2026 Fee Schedule prints a Law Library line of $15.00 for civil matters, which makes $405.00. The “Schedule dated / No date printed” tile was removed: it characterised a document nobody here had read. The page went from 3 outbound links to 13, 12 of them to a .gov host and 11 to the Revisor of Statutes.

What we are deliberately still not claiming. We have a current law library fee for four of Minnesota’s 87 counties and we have changed the national table to say so: the “$402 – $405” it shows is now labelled “4 of 87 counties read” rather than “Hennepin to Ramsey”, because four counties are a sample and three of them agree only by coincidence. Hennepin’s $402.00, Ramsey’s $405.00 and Dakota’s $405.00 were read on 2 October 2026 and could not be re-read today: mncourts.gov answers every path — its home page, /robots.txt and a deliberately nonsensical path alike — with HTTP 403 and a Cloudflare interstitial, and it does so for a plain client, for a desktop browser user-agent, for no user-agent, and for a real headless browser, because the machine doing this work cannot reach the host that serves the challenge. So those three figures rest on a reading we cannot repeat, and the page now says that instead of citing the lookup as though it were open. We do not know what the other 83 counties charge. We have no figure for the card convenience fee, for a parent education program (the statute mandates a sliding scale set by providers, so there may be no single figure to find), for sheriff’s service of process (set by each county board under § 357.09, subd. 8), or for court-ordered mediation. We are not claiming the $5.00/$8.00/$3.00 table is current: the document’s cover is revision v.14 of March 2020 but the page carrying the table is stamped “March 2013 ODY-FS-600-3051v.13”, and the page says both stamps rather than picking one. The national floor on /divorce-kits/ and the spread multiple on /divorce-laws-by-state/ are computed from the cheapest state and Minnesota at $390.00 is nowhere near it, so both are unaffected; we checked rather than assumed.

What we had wrong. Five things, on /alabama-divorce-costs/.

First, the floor. The headline, the tile, the county callout, both FAQ answers and the FAQPage JSON-LD all said “$194 – $324” and named Montgomery as the cheapest county. Marion County’s circuit court publishes $192.00, twice on the same page: “Domestic Relations Docket Fee … $192.00” in its fee chart and, in words, “Court Cost for filing of Divorce is $192.00, payable only by cash, money order or cashier’s check.”

Second, the coverage. The page said the range ran “across the six circuit clerks whose published domestic relations totals we read” and that “we have checked six of Alabama’s 67 counties”. Each of Alabama’s 67 circuit courts runs a site on the judiciary’s own domain in the form <county>.alacourt.gov. We read all 67 on 15 October 2026: 43 publish a domestic relations filing figure and 24 publish none. Six was a sample, and it missed both ends it mattered at.

Third, an absence claim contradicted by the page’s own table. Under “What we could not find out” the page said “No county-published TOTAL divorce filing fee could be verified for any Alabama county” and that the county figures were therefore “presented as ‘statutory fee + verified local add-on’ rather than as published totals”. The table immediately above it presented three published clerk totals, and the headline presented six. The reason for the error is worth recording: the earlier check looked for the fee schedules on the county government websites — jccal.org, mobilecountyal.gov, madisoncountyal.gov, mc-ala.org — where they are genuinely not published, and two of which return HTTP 403. Alabama’s circuit clerks are state Unified Judicial System employees; their schedules are on the judiciary’s domain, not the county’s.

Fourth and fifth, two rows that said “not published” about figures Alabama publishes. The sheriff service row read “No figure is published.” Jefferson prints “Sheriff Service (Jefferson County) $10.00”; DeKalb “Service by Sheriff $10.00 (per defendant)”; Madison “service by sheriff is $20.00 or by Certified Mail is $10.98”; Montgomery “there is a Sheriff’s fee of $20 per document served on all cases”; Monroe “$20.00” under Act 2011-243. The e-filing row read “Not verified … alacourt.gov’s e-filing pages published no fee figure when we checked” — while a panel in the same section already printed “If you pay by card: 4% of the total”, quoting the Administrative Policies and Procedures. Both were right. The “not verified” row was the error.

What is true, with the sources quoted. The statutory docket fee is $145.00, identical for an agreed and a contested divorce: Ala. Code § 12-19-71(a)(5) prices an uncontested domestic relations filing at “One hundred forty-five dollars ($145)” and (a)(6) prices a contested one at the same figure. What a person hands the clerk is higher everywhere, because county local acts add on top, and the courts publish the total. Read on 15 October 2026, the 43 published figures run from $192.00 in Marion to $324.00 in Madison, with Etowah, St. Clair and Montgomery at $194.00, Jefferson (Birmingham) $199.00, Mobile $208.00, Baldwin $227.00, Shelby $280.00 and Lee $297.00. The card surcharge is 4% of the total with a $1.00 floor: the Administrative Policies and Procedures for Electronic Filing (revised 27 February 2026) prints “Payment must be made by credit/debit card (4% of total added as convenience/administrative fee)” and “The 4% convenience fee may be taxed as costs pursuant to Rule 41 of the Alabama Rules of Judicial Administration”, and the Unified Judicial System’s Notice to Credit Card Payors (Form PS-22, Rev. 04/2018) adds “This 4% credit card processing fee will have a minimum of $1” and names its authority, Act 2014-166, subpara. (d)(2).

Two things we found that were not errors on our part, and are now on the page. Two Alabama counties contradict themselves on their own sites. Montgomery publishes “Domestic Relations Docket Fee $194.00” on its domestic relations fee chart and “Domestic Relations / Original filing $227.00” on its civil division court-costs page; Cullman publishes $258.00 on its domestic relations chart and $224.00 on its circuit civil chart. All four pages were live and undated on 15 October 2026. We publish both figures for each and choose neither. Separately, although the statute charges the same for an agreed and a contested divorce, two counties print different totals — Lowndes $194.00 uncontested against $209.00 contested, and Coosa $280.00 against $285.00.

A dated source we had called undated. The page said the Administrative Office of Courts’ Form C-56 Fee Distribution Chart “carries NO printed date (its file metadata suggests 2012 but that was not treated as evidence)”. Form C-56 is published per county and each copy prints “Form C-56 / Effective: 10/1/2011” on the face of page one — Franklin County’s, for one, downloaded and read as text. Being dated 2011 also puts it behind amendments to § 12-19-71 in 2015, 2019 and 2024, so no figure on the page now comes from it. It is also an accounting chart rather than a price list: Franklin’s domestic relations row totals $149.00 against a $145.00 statutory docket fee, because the total column is what the clerk books and splits between funds.

How long it was live, and what it cost a reader. The revision history dates the “$194 – $324” range and the “six circuit clerks” wording to 2 October 2026, so both were live for 13 days. Before that the page’s headline read “It costs $145.00 to file for divorce in Alabama” — the bare docket fee presented as the price, which was worse. The sheriff row, the e-filing row and the Form C-56 date claim were all on the page on 12 September 2026, the earliest revision we hold, so each was live for at least 33 days, and the e-filing row sat beside the panel that refuted it for that whole period. The $2.00 error in the floor is small; the two “not published” rows are not. A reader budgeting the $192.00 minimum and paying by card is $7.68 short before anything else, $12.96 at the Madison end, and a reader who needed the sheriff to serve the papers was told no figure existed when their own circuit court prints one.

What we did. We corrected the floor to $192.00 in all seven places it appears across four pages — the costs page headline, tile, county callout, both visible FAQ answers and its FAQPage and Dataset JSON-LD, the Alabama kit’s FAQ answer and its FAQPage JSON-LD, the row on /divorce-costs/ and the row on /divorce-laws-by-state/ — and changed them in the same edit so the structured data and the visible text cannot diverge. We replaced the three-county table with all 43 published figures, cheapest first, each row linked to the page it was read from and each marked with whether that schedule carries a printed date (eight do; 35 do not). We rewrote the sheriff row to $10.00 – $20.00 where published, with the five courts quoted, and the e-filing row to 4% with a $1.00 minimum. We rewrote the stale open questions, including the one the page’s own table contradicted. The page previously carried eight outbound links, all to the Code of Alabama and none to a .gov host, while claiming every figure was “linked to it”; it now carries 46 .gov links, and the statute that actually sets the fee, § 12-19-71, is linked for the first time.

What we are deliberately still not claiming. $192.00 is the lowest and $324.00 the highest of the 43 figures Alabama’s circuit courts publish. Twenty-four counties publish nothing — Choctaw, Clarke, Cleburne, Colbert, Conecuh, Covington, Crenshaw, Dale, Franklin, Geneva, Hale, Henry, Jackson, Lauderdale, Limestone, Marengo, Randolph, Russell, Sumter, Talladega, Tallapoosa, Tuscaloosa, Washington and Winston — and Tuscaloosa says so in terms, telling filers to contact the clerk. So we do not claim $192.00 is the cheapest divorce filing in Alabama or $324.00 the dearest; they are the ends of what the state publishes, and the page says so. We have not traced the local acts behind the other 40 counties’ add-ons, and in none of the three we did trace do the statutory fee and the add-ons sum to the published total: Mobile reconstructs to $159.00 and publishes $208.00, Madison to $245.00 and publishes $324.00. Something else is inside those totals that Alabama does not itemise anywhere we could find, and we have not guessed at it. We still have no figure for what a required parenting class costs in the three counties we found that require one, or for court-ordered mediation anywhere in the state. The national floor on /divorce-kits/ and the 5.2× spread on /divorce-laws-by-state/ are computed from Virginia’s $83.00 and are unaffected by this change; we checked rather than assumed.

What we had wrong. The question “How much does it cost to file for divorce in Pennsylvania?” on /pennsylvania-divorce-kit/ was answered “$250 – $334.73 to open the case”, both in the visible FAQ and in the FAQPage JSON-LD embedded in the same page. Neither end of that range was the state’s floor or its ceiling. $334.73 is Philadelphia’s total and $250.00 is the base one-count fee in Berks County; they were being presented as the cheapest and dearest a Pennsylvania filing can be.

What is true, with the sources quoted. Pennsylvania has no statewide divorce filing fee; each county prothonotary adopts its own fee bill under 42 Pa.C.S. § 1725(c). The cheapest figure we have confirmed is Potter County, whose Prothonotary and Clerk of Courts fee schedule, headed “Updated and Effective December 1, 2025”, prints under PROTHONOTARY (DIVORCE): “Complaint (includes JCS/ATJ fee, 50¢ writ tax, Prothonotary Auto. & Divorce Surcharge) … $93.00”. The dearest is Bucks County, whose Court of Common Pleas Family Court Fee Schedule, headed “Effective January 1, 2026”, prints “COMPLAINT IN DIVORCE … 398.00”. Both PDFs were downloaded and read as text on 14 October 2026; the Potter schedule is published at pottercountypa.gov. $93.00 to $398.00 is the range our own Pennsylvania costs page has carried since 13 October 2026, and it is the range the kit should always have agreed with.

It contradicted its own page. Two sections above that answer, the kit’s “What this costs” table lists “Filing fee — Bucks County … $398.00” and “Filing fee — Allegheny County (base) … $195.25”. So the page printed a county $63.27 above its own stated ceiling and a county $54.75 below its own stated floor, on the same screen, and nothing was comparing them. This defect was found by a new check that reads the filing figure out of all six places a state’s fee appears on this site — the costs page headline, the costs page structured data, the kit’s table, the kit’s structured data, and two index pages — and reports every state where they disagree. It had never been run before today.

How long it was live, and what it cost a reader. The revision history puts the “$250 – $334.73” answer on the page from 26 September 2026, so it was live for 18 days. The $398.00 Bucks figure in the table beneath it has been there since at least 10 September, so the page disagreed with itself for the whole of those 18 days. The cost is one-directional and falls on the people least able to carry it: a filer in Potter County, or in any of the cheaper rural counties, was told the least a divorce can cost to open is $250 when their own prothonotary charges $93.00 for a one-count complaint. That is the number somebody uses to decide whether to file at all, or whether to apply for a fee waiver they may not need. A Bucks County filer was told the most it could cost was $334.73 and would have arrived at the counter $63.27 short.

What we did. We replaced the range in both the visible FAQ answer and the FAQPage JSON-LD on /pennsylvania-divorce-kit/ with “$93.00 – $398.00 to open the case, depending on the county — Potter County at the bottom, Bucks County at the top, across the 16 counties we confirmed”, which is the wording and the figure the costs page carries. The two were changed together, so the structured data and the visible text cannot now diverge. No figure in the kit’s cost table was touched, because every figure in it is already sourced and correct.

What we are deliberately still not claiming. $93.00 and $398.00 are the lowest and highest we have confirmed across 16 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties. We have not read the other 51 fee bills, so we do not claim $93.00 is the cheapest divorce complaint in Pennsylvania or that $398.00 is the dearest — only that they are the ends of what we have read, and the kit now says “across the 16 counties we confirmed” rather than implying a statewide range. Pennsylvania also prices by the count rather than by the case, so a complaint that pleads equitable distribution, alimony or custody costs more than any figure in that range in every county we checked; the kit continues to send the reader to the costs page for that, and we have not tried to compress it into one number. The same new six-way check flagged Georgia, Missouri and Tennessee as carrying figures that disagree between two of our own pages. We have not touched any of them, because no source for them was read today.

What we had wrong, first. /massachusetts-divorce-costs/ opened “It costs $215.00 to file for divorce in Massachusetts”, and its headline tile read “$215.00 — To file a Complaint for Divorce (M.G.L. c. 208 § 1B for a contested/1B divorce, or a Joint Petition for Divorce under § 1A)”. $215.00 is right for a 1A joint petition and wrong for the two routes the tile named first. A table row headed “Summons fee” carried “not published” and explained that the amount “lives in the Trial Court’s uniform schedule of fees under M.G.L. c. 262 § 4B rather than in the statute, and that schedule is published only on mass.gov, which blocked every request”. Four more rows carried “not published”: service of process by sheriff, cited as “M.G.L. c. 262 § 8 (sheriffs’ fees) – not read”; the parent-education class, “both the standing order and its fee are published on mass.gov, which returned HTTP 403 to every request”; court-ordered mediation, “No rate is published on any official source we could reach”; and “E-filing or credit-card surcharge — Not confirmed”, which sat four inches below a panel on the same page already printing $22.00 and 2.89%. The waiver section declined to name the form: “The form number is published on mass.gov, which was blocked, so no form number is asserted here.” The open-questions list ended: “Sources we could not read: https://www.mass.gov/ and every mass.gov path tried (including /orgs/probate-and-family-court, /info-details/filing-fees-for-the-probate-and-family-court, /lists/probate-and-family-court-fees, and even /robots.txt) – all”. And the county section closed “We could not cross-check any individual division’s published page because mass.gov was unreachable.”

What is true, with the sources quoted. The Probate and Family Court’s own filing-fee list prints “Divorce, Complaint” at a $200 filing fee with a $15 surcharge, and says in its overview: “The fees listed don’t include citation or summons fees. Each citation is an additional $15 and each summons is an additional $5.” The Uniform Schedule of Fees established under c. 262 § 4B prices “a blank summons, other than any summons in a small claims action or incident to a petition for victim compensation, or blank writ” at $5.00. The Trial Court’s step-by-step pages settle which route pays it: Get a no-fault 1A divorce lists two fees, “Divorce filing fee $200” and “Divorce filing surcharge $15”; Get a no-fault 1B divorce and Get a fault divorce list those two plus “Divorce summons charge $5”. So $215.00 on a joint petition and $220.00 on a complaint. On service: M.G.L. c. 262 § 8(a)(2) prices the instrument by name — “for service of an original summons and complaint for divorce or for any other service required to be served in hand, $30 for each defendant upon whom service is made” — with $5 for attesting each copy under § 8(a)(3) and travel at 32 cents a mile each way under § 8(a)(19); the Norfolk County Sheriff publishes what those add up to in practice, “$65.00” for in-state court-issued documents and “$36.00 for each additional defendant at same address”. On the class: Probate and Family Court Standing Order 3-23, effective 12 February 2024, orders attendance in four case types the first of which is “Complaint for Divorce (except for complaints filed pursuant to G. L. c. 208, § 1A)”, and states “The cost to attend ‘Two Families Now’ is $49.00 per parent”, waivable on an Affidavit of Indigency under c. 261 § 27B. On e-filing: Learn about eFiling in the Trial Court prints the $22.00 fee payable to Tyler Technologies and “If you use a credit card Payment Account, the processing fee is 2.89% of the fees total”. On mediation: Uniform Rule 7(e) under S.J.C. Rule 1:18 provides that “Parties shall not be charged a fee for attendance at a mandatory screening session or an early intervention event, or for dispute resolution services provided by court employees” and that every approved fee schedule “shall provide for fee waived or reduced fee services to be made available to indigent and low income litigants”; the court’s own ADR page adds that its on-site dispute intervention, run by probation officers in each of the 14 divisions, carries no fee. And the form has a title: Affidavit of Indigency and Request for Waiver, Substitution or State Payment of Fees & Costs, prescribed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court under c. 261 § 27B.

Why the page believed the site was unreachable, as far as we can tell. http://www.mass.gov answers this runner normally. It serves HTTP 403 with an identical 14,060-byte body to some browser user-agent strings and the real page to others, and the two fee URLs the page listed as blocked are genuine 404s — they are not the addresses the documents sit at. A 403 that is identical for every path, including /robots.txt and a nonsense path, reads as a host-wide block and is not one. We have added that to our own method notes: probe with more than one user-agent, and never record a host as blocked on the strength of a uniform 403.

What we did. The headline now reads $215.00 – $220.00 and says which route is which, and the lede, the short-version line, the two FAQ answers that carried $215, the FAQPage structured data and the page’s Dataset description were all corrected with it. The summons row now reads $5.00 with the schedule quoted; the sheriff row reads $35.00 plus travel with § 8 quoted and Norfolk’s published $65.00 named; the parent-education row reads $49.00 with the 1A exemption spelled out, which is the part a 1A filer with children most needs; the mediation row says what is free rather than what is unknown; and the e-filing row carries its figures and the Judiciary’s own statement that the $22.00 is not charged where the filing fee has been waived. The waiver section names the form, its Supplement and the Guide & File program. The “Schedule dated” tile, which said “No date printed — The official source carries no effective or revised date”, now reads 1 November 2016, because the Uniform Schedule prints “Last updated: November 1, 2016”; we also checked all 339 acts of the 2025 and 2026 sessions and record on the page that c. 262 § 40 was last amended by Chapter 102 of the Acts of 2026, § 329, which replaced the words “disabled abuse” and changed no fee. The open-questions list was rebuilt around the five things that genuinely are not published. The page carried four outbound links, all to the statute and none to the court; it now links the court’s own schedules, as its opening promise requires. On the Massachusetts kit we split the step-3 and summary figures the same way, replaced an unsourced “varies by county, budget roughly $50–$100” service estimate with the statutory items, and moved the 1B-with-children all-in floor from ~$340 to ~$305 to match them. The national table at /divorce-costs/ now carries both figures.

How long it was live, and what we are not claiming. The page was published on 20 August 2026 and its sources were last recorded as checked on 23 September 2026, so the $215-for-a-1B error and the six “not published” statements were live for about eight weeks. We are not claiming mass.gov was reachable on 23 September; we do not know what it did that day, only what it does now, and the page no longer asserts anything about it in the past tense. We have not established what any of the other thirteen sheriff’s offices bills for serving a divorce complaint — one office of fourteen publishes a figure, and the rest would take thirteen phone calls. We have not read any approved mediation program’s own fee schedule, because they are not published centrally; we quote only the rule every one of them must obey. We do not know whether the 2.89% card surcharge is waived along with the $22.00 fee for an indigent e-filer, and the Judiciary is silent on it. We read act summaries and full text for chapter-262 references across the 2025 and 2026 sessions, not the full text of every act for every purpose. And our fifty-state law table at /divorce-laws-by-state/ already read “$215 ($220 for a 1B complaint)”: it needed no correction, and it should have been the thing that caught this. We are adding a cross-page figure check to our own routine rather than claiming it existed.

What we had wrong, first. The summary panel at the top of /georgia-child-representation/ read “Duty owed — Not stated in statute — The appointment provisions exist, but we could not find statutory language setting the duty” and “Who can serve — Not established — We could not confirm this from a primary source.” A section headed “The statute does not say” told a Georgia parent to ask the appointee which standard they were applying, because we could not tell them. “Who can be appointed” read: “Neither O.C.G.A. § 9-11-17(c) nor § 19-9-3 (the sections reviewed) states that a guardian ad litem in a custody case must be a licensed attorney; no separate qualification statute was located to confirm or rule this out.” The page’s list of things it could not verify carried both questions. Each of those claims was true only of the two Code sections we had read, and the answer was never in the Code. It is in the Uniform Superior Court Rules, under a rule whose title is “Appointment, Qualification and Role of a Guardian ad Litem”.

What is true, with the source quoted. Uniform Superior Court Rule 24.9(3) provides: “The GAL shall represent the best interests of the child. The GAL is an officer of the court and shall assist the court and the parties in reaching a decision regarding child custody, visitation and child-related issues.” On who may serve, Rule 24.9(1): “The appointing judge has the discretion to appoint any person as a GAL so long as the person so selected has been trained as a GAL or is otherwise familiar with the role, duties, and responsibilities as determined by the judge.” Rule 24.9(2) adds that “A GAL shall receive such training as provided by or approved by the Circuit in which the GAL serves”, and lists what that training should cover. Rule 24.1 brings “actions for divorce, alimony, equitable division of assets and liabilities, child custody, child support” within these rules, which is why a domestic-relations rule answers a divorce question. Read on 13 October 2026 from the Council of Superior Court Judges’ consolidated Uniform Superior Court Rules as published on the Supreme Court of Georgia’s own server, UNIFORM-SUPERIOR-COURT-RULES-2026_04_09.pdf, Rule 24.9 at pages 60–63. Rule 24.9 was adopted effective 19 May 2005 and amended effective 23 April 2009.

A second error, and this one contradicted our own page. The short-version line for “Who pays” read: “We searched and found no provision in Georgia waiving or shifting these fees for a party who cannot pay them.” The same page, in the section that line pointed at, quoted O.C.G.A. § 19-9-3(g) empowering the judge to order the guardian ad litem’s costs “to be paid by the parties in proportions and at times determined by the judge” — and the summary panel said, correctly, “The parties, by court order.” So the page asserted in one place that no shifting provision existed and quoted the shifting provision in two others. Rule 24.9(8)(g) is the court-rule half of the same answer: “It shall be within the Court’s discretion to determine the amount of fees awarded to the GAL, and how payment of the fees shall be apportioned between the parties. The GAL’s requests for fees shall be considered, upon application properly served upon the parties and after an opportunity to be heard, unless waived.” That last clause is a right we had never told anyone they had.

How long it was live, and what it cost a reader. The page was published on 29 August 2026 and its sources had not been re-read since, so every statement above was live for 45 days. A Georgia parent reading it was told that it could not be established what the person appointed to investigate their family owed their child — when the rule says it in nine words — and was advised to ask the appointee which standard they were applying, as though it were a matter of local practice. They were told it was unknown whether that person had to be a lawyer. And they were told no provision shifted the cost, which is the sentence most likely to stop someone asking the judge to make the other side pay a share of a bill that runs to thousands. They were also never told that the guardian ad litem has to serve a fee application on them and that they are entitled to be heard on the amount before it is awarded.

What we did. We rewrote “What duty they owe your child” around Rule 24.9(3), quoted in full, and replaced the heading “The statute does not say”. We rewrote “Who can be appointed” around Rule 24.9(1) and (2), quoted in full, and said plainly that a Georgia guardian ad litem does not have to be a lawyer but that the training standard is set by each circuit rather than statewide. We corrected both summary tiles and all three short-version lines, including the self-contradicting fee line. We added Rule 24.9(8)(g) and the right to be heard on the fee to the “Who pays” section, and noted that Rule 24.9(3) lets the guardian ad litem bring a contempt action to recover court-ordered fees. We replaced the two resolved items on the unverified list with the narrower questions that genuinely remain. The page had carried no link to any .gov or court source at all; it now carries three to the rules PDF. Sources last checked moved to 13 October 2026, which is the date we read the rule.

What we are deliberately still not claiming. We did not re-read the Code of Georgia. The State does not publish its Code free on its own server that a reader like ours can reach — the General Assembly’s site serves no statute text to us and the official edition is behind a commercial publisher — so the quotations of O.C.G.A. § 9-11-17(c) and § 19-9-3 on that page still rest on Onecle, and the page now says so against each one rather than presenting them as official. No figure on the page changed, because there is no figure: Rule 24.9(8)(g) leaves the amount to the court’s discretion, so we continue to say Georgia publishes no rate and continue to refuse the numbers on law-firm marketing pages. We found no Georgia provision waiving the guardian ad litem’s fee for a party who cannot pay it and we are not claiming one exists; we have added that Rule 24.8(D) requires a fee-waiver procedure for the separate court-mandated parenting seminar, which is a different fee. We did not establish what any particular circuit requires of its guardians ad litem, because no circuit we could reach publishes its standard or its roster. And we make no claim about whether a person with no training could ever be found “otherwise familiar with the role” in practice; the rule leaves that to the judge and so do we.

The filing fee itself was right. /south-carolina-divorce-costs/ said $150.00, and $150.00 is correct: S.C. Code § 8-21-310(C)(1) directs the clerk, “in addition to the fee imposed by Section 14-1-204(B)(1),” to “collect one hundred dollars for filing a first complaint or petition”, and § 14-1-204(B)(1) provides that “There is added to the fee imposed pursuant to Section 8-21-310(C)(1) an additional fee equal to fifty dollars.” The Judicial Branch’s Family Court Filing Fees page independently prints “$150 Filing Fee” against “Divorce, Annulment, and Separate Support and Maintenances Actions”. Nothing below changes the headline number. What was wrong was everything the page said about the costs around it.

Mediation, which is the one that could have cost a reader real money. The page’s table read “Court-ordered mediation — Required in some counties, not statewide… No mediator fee or rate is published on the source — not published”, and its “Does it change by county?” section told readers “What does vary by county is the mediation requirement”, attributing to an “official Family Court FAQ” the claim that “Some counties require mediation” and that the Family Court Coversheet carries a list of them. Both halves are wrong. The current Family Court Coversheet (SCCA 467, rev. 11/2024) states: “Effective January 1, 2016, family court actions in all counties are subject to mediation”, and it carries no list of counties, because there is nothing to list. ADR Rule 3(a) subjects “all contested issues in domestic relations actions filed in family court” to court-ordered mediation. And the rate is published, in terms: ADR Rule 9(b) provides that where the Clerk of Court appoints the mediator, “the mediator shall be compensated by the parties at a rate of $200 per hour, provided that the court-appointed mediator shall charge no greater than one hour of time in preparing for the initial ADR conference. Travel time shall not be compensated.” Rule 9(c) splits it: fees “shall be paid in equal shares per party”. A South Carolina parent with one contested issue was reading a page that showed a blank where $100 an hour to them was the published answer.

Sheriff service of process. The page said “No amount is published statewide” and showed “not published”, resting that on the Supreme Court packet’s vaguer line that “There may be a charge for this service by the Sheriff’s office.” The amount is in the Code. S.C. Code § 23-19-10(d): “For mechanics’ liens, attachments, citations, decrees, summons, and complaints, the fee is fifteen dollars for each initial service and five dollars for each attempted service thereafter; however, the sheriff may not charge for more than two attempted services on the same matter so that the party, or his attorney, making the service in the matter may not be charged any more than a maximum total of twenty-five dollars”. Our own South Carolina divorce kit had this right, and cited that exact subsection, while the costs page printed a blank beside it — two of our pages disagreeing, with the sourced one correct and the unsourced one published anyway.

The motion fee. The page said motion amounts “were not read from the list, so no figure is asserted”. The figure did not need the list. S.C. Code § 8-21-320 sets it: “There is assessed for every motion made in the court of common pleas and family court, not including motions made in family court juvenile delinquency proceedings, a fee of twenty-five dollars.” The Motion Fees List the page had already linked — approved by Administrative Order effective 30 September 2016 — prints $25.00 against the motion a divorce most often turns on: “Motion for Temporary Relief in Family Court: Rule 21, SCRFC: $25.00. This Motion may include numerous standard forms of relief, such as temporary custody, visitation, support, etc. However, only one fee charged.”

“Nothing extra to e-file”, and the e-filing fee row. The page carried a callout headed “Nothing extra to e-file” saying “We looked for a portal fee and a card surcharge in South Carolina and found neither published”, and a table row saying the amount § 8-21-310(C)(3) leaves to the Chief Justice “was not located on an official source”. It is located on the Judicial Branch’s own site, on a page called E-Filing Technology Fees: $25.00 for a Summons and Complaint case initiation, $5.00 for a motion. The E-Filing FAQ states it plainly — “A technology fee is added to all transactions that require a filing fee. Any transaction with fees will also incur charges from SCGov for payment processing” — which is the fourth state in a row, after Texas, New Jersey and Maine, where this site asserted a court charged nothing extra to file electronically and the court’s own payment FAQ said otherwise. The saving grace in South Carolina is that it cannot reach a self-filer: the same FAQ says “Self-Represented Litigants, or Pro Se Litigants, may not E-File at this time”, and the system it describes runs in the Court of Common Pleas. The page now says both things instead of neither.

The parenting class. The page listed a “Mandatory parent-education class” as “Not confirmed”, and its FAQ — in the visible text and in the structured data handed to search engines — told readers to budget for “any required parenting class”. That is a requirement asserted and then not stood behind. We read South Carolina’s divorce chapter, Title 20, Chapter 3, and the Family Court chapter, Title 63, Chapter 3, end to end. Neither contains a parent-education, parenting-class or seminar requirement, and neither authorizes a fee for one. The row now says none is published and the FAQ no longer tells anyone to budget for one.

How long it was live. The page was published on 20 August 2026 and its sources had not been re-read since 23 September 2026, so every statement above was live for 54 days. The cost to a reader was not a wrong number; it was five blanks and a county-by-county caveat standing where South Carolina’s own answers were, on the page that opens by promising every figure is traced to a statute or a court schedule — and which carried four outbound links to show it. It now carries fifteen.

What we did. Replaced the four “not published” rows with the published figures and the quoted text behind each; rewrote the “Nothing extra to e-file” callout to report both the published technology fee and the fact that a self-filer cannot reach it; rewrote the county section’s mediation sentence around the Coversheet and ADR Rule 3 and dropped the unlocatable FAQ quotation; corrected the FAQ in both the visible text and the FAQPage structured data; added that a granted in forma pauperis order waives the mediator under ADR Rule 9(d) with no separate application, and the motion fee under the Motion Fees List; and rebuilt the open-questions list around what is genuinely unpublished. On the South Carolina divorce kit we linked § 23-19-10(d) to the sheriff figure it had always cited, and added the mediator line. Sources last checked moved to 13 October 2026.

What we are deliberately still not claiming. We are not claiming the $200 figure applies to a mediator the parties pick themselves — ADR Rule 9(a) leaves that to agreement and publishes no rate. We are not claiming whether any South Carolina Family Court filing can be e-filed at all: the technology-fee schedule lists Common Pleas case types, and the separate Family Court Attorney Portal page returned nothing readable to us. The SCGov payment-processing charge is published as existing and nowhere quantified, so we give no figure for it. We did not read any individual county clerk’s payment page, so the absence of a counter card surcharge rests on the Judicial Branch’s sources and the packet’s cash-or-money-order instruction, not on a county-by-county check. We make no claim about what a judge may order in a contested South Carolina custody case, and none about what the clerk’s standard copy fee is in any county.

What we had wrong, first. The “Who can be appointed” section of /alabama-child-representation/ read: “Rule 17(d) requires the appointee be ‘qualified to represent’ the minor but does not use the word ‘attorney’ or cite a bar-admission requirement in the text retrieved; no separate statute specifying that custody guardians ad litem must be licensed attorneys was located.” The summary panel at the top of the page said “Who can serve — Not established — We could not confirm this from a primary source,” and the page’s list of things it could not verify included “whether the appointee must be a lawyer.” Rule 17(d) does use the word attorney. Our own blockquote of it, three sections higher up the same page, ended at “qualified to represent the minor or incompetent person” — and the rule’s next five words are “in the capacity of an attorney or solicitor”. We truncated the sentence and then published a claim about what the sentence does not contain, on the strength of our own truncation.

What is true, with the source quoted. Ala. R. Civ. P. 17(d) provides that the court “shall appoint to serve in that capacity some person who is qualified to represent the minor or incompetent person in the capacity of an attorney or solicitor, and must not select or appoint any person who is related, either by blood or marriage within the fourth degree, to the plaintiff or the plaintiff’s attorney, or to the judge or clerk of the court, or who is in any manner connected with such plaintiff or such plaintiff’s attorney, or who has been suggested, nominated, or recommended by the plaintiff or the plaintiff’s attorney or any person for the plaintiff”. Read from the Alabama Judicial System’s own published rule, cv17.pdf, on 12 October 2026. That second half is substantive and we had never reported it: it means the other side cannot hand the court a name for the person who will investigate your family, and a reader with that sentence in hand has a ground to object that is in the rule rather than in the judge’s discretion.

A second error, in the same rule, about a deadline. The page said a minor aged 14 or over “may, within 30 days of service, choose their own guardian ad litem”. Rule 17(d) gives the child 30 days after service “or before any hearing set in the action, whichever is earlier”, and requires the choice be “certified by an officer authorized to take acknowledgments”. Rule 17(dc) reduces the period to 14 days in the district courts. A flat “30 days” is the kind of error that costs somebody the right it describes: a hearing set for the third week after service closes the window, and a child who relied on our sentence would have been too late.

How long it was live, and what it cost a reader. The page was published on 29 August 2026 and its sources had not been re-read since, so both statements were live for 44 days. An Alabama parent reading it was told that it could not be established whether the person appointed to look into their family had to be a lawyer at all — when the rule we were quoting answered it — and was never told that a relative of the judge, or their spouse’s nominee, is disqualified by the rule. A 14-year-old entitled to choose their own guardian ad litem was given a deadline longer than the one the rule sets.

What we did. We restored the full appointment sentence to the blockquote, rewrote “Who can be appointed” around what the rule actually says and quoted the disqualification clause in its own right, corrected the summary panel, corrected the 14-or-over deadline in both places it appeared and added the certification requirement and the district-court variant, and replaced the “must be a lawyer” line on the unverified list with the narrower question that genuinely remains. Sources last checked moved to 12 October 2026, which is the date we re-read the rule.

What we are deliberately still not claiming. We are not claiming Rule 17(d) imposes a formal bar-admission requirement. It requires qualification “in the capacity of an attorney or solicitor” and cites no admission rule, so whether a non-lawyer could ever qualify is left open by the wording, and the page now says that rather than answering it. We did not read the Code of Alabama: the State does not publish its Code free on its own server — the Legislature’s code browser serves no text to a reader like ours and the commercial edition is closed to us — so the page’s statement about the duty the appointee owes now says the statutory side is unread rather than silent, which is the honest description. The custody-evaluation provision remains unverified. We make no claim about what any Alabama court does in practice, and none about what appointees charge.

What we published. The page led with two tiles. Duty owed — Not stated in statute: the appointment provisions exist, but we could not find statutory language setting the duty. And Who pays — Not established: no fee-allocation provision found in statute. The body repeated both: “Mississippi authorizes the appointment but we could not find statutory language stating whether the appointee follows your child’s wishes or their own view of your child’s best interests”, and “we could not find a Mississippi statute or rule governing how the appointee’s fee is split between the parties … the allocation is simply made under the court’s general costs power rather than a dedicated provision.” Both then appeared again in the page’s What we could not verify list.

What the rules actually say. We downloaded both rule sets as PDFs from the Judiciary’s own rules index and read them rather than a summary of them. U.R.Y.C.P. Rule 13(c): “The guardian ad litem, in addition to all other duties required by law, shall: (1) protect the interest of a child for whom he/she has been appointed guardian ad litem; and (2) investigate, make recommendations to the court or enter reports as necessary to hold paramount the child’s best interest.” The same rule requires the appointee to tell the child and the parents that the role is “to act as an arm of the court in protecting the interest of the child, and not as the parties’ attorney”. Rule 13(f) then answers the wishes-against-best-interest question the page said was unanswerable: where the child’s preferences conflict with the guardian ad litem’s recommendation, the court keeps the guardian ad litem on best interest and appoints a separate attorney to argue the child’s preferences. On fees, M.R.C.P. 17(d): “In all cases in which a guardian ad litem is required, the court must ascertain a reasonable fee or compensation to be allowed and paid to such guardian ad litem for his service rendered in such cause, to be taxed as a part of the cost in such action.” And U.R.Y.C.P. Rule 13(d): the court “may order financially able parents to pay for the reasonable fees of the guardian ad litem, or a portion thereof,” under section 43-21-619. Sources, read 11 October 2026: Mississippi Rules of Civil Procedure, the Judiciary’s version dated 1 July 2026 and the Uniform Rules of Youth Court Practice, both from courts.ms.gov.

Why a youth court rule belongs on a divorce page. U.R.Y.C.P. Rule 2(a)(2) says these rules govern “any chancery court proceeding when hearing, pursuant to section 93-11-65 of the Mississippi Code, an allegation of abuse or neglect of a child that first arises in the course of a custody or maintenance action”. That is the same abuse-allegation trigger the page itself already identified as what makes a guardian ad litem mandatory in a Mississippi divorce. The page also already quoted § 93-5-23 appointing the guardian ad litem “as provided under Section 43-21-121” — a cross-reference straight into the Youth Court Law. The answer was sitting at the end of a pointer the page had already printed.

What we fixed. Both tiles now carry the sourced answer and name the rule. The duty section prints Rule 13(c) in full as a quotation, adds Rule 13(f), and explains the arm-of-the-court warning the rule requires the appointee to give. The who-pays section prints M.R.C.P. 17(d) in full and adds Rule 13(d). Who can be appointed now carries the three further requirements the rules impose and that the page had omitted: an attorney under M.R.C.P. 17(d); Mississippi residence, a filed consent and oath, and any bond the court requires under M.R.C.P. 17(c); and, under U.R.Y.C.P. Rule 13(b), child-protection and juvenile-justice training approved by the Mississippi Judicial College within the year before the appointment. Two of the three items in What we could not verify are gone because they are no longer true. And the page had exactly one outbound link, to a commercial publisher, under a sourcing box promising “Mississippi’s own statute or court rule”; it now carries four official links to the Judiciary’s own server.

And what we are deliberately not claiming. We are not saying U.R.Y.C.P. Rule 13 governs every guardian ad litem in every Mississippi custody case. Its own scope rule reaches a chancery proceeding hearing an abuse or neglect allegation under § 93-11-65; where an appointment is made under § 93-5-23 in a divorce instead, the scope rule does not say so in terms, and we have not read a Mississippi decision settling it. The page says that, in those words, rather than smoothing it over. We are not claiming the rules fix who between two parents ends up bearing the fee: M.R.C.P. 17(d) puts it on the costs of the case and Rule 13(d) permits an order against financially able parents, and the split itself is still the court’s decision — so the page keeps its advice to ask how the fee will be allocated before the appointment order is entered. We publish no dollar figure: the tile still reads No published rate, because Mississippi publishes no schedule, and all we have added is the list of factors the comment to Rule 13(d) collects from In re L.D.M., 872 So. 2d 655, 657 (Miss. 2004). The third item on the page’s unverified list, the custody-evaluation provision, is untouched and still unconfirmed.

One source we could not re-read, and said so on the page. The § 93-5-23 quotation on that page still rests on a commercial publisher, and this correction does not change that. Mississippi publishes no free, official, state-hosted copy of its own Code — we looked into that separately — and the publisher’s copy is closed to automated readers, so we cannot verify a Mississippi code citation the way we verify other states’. The page now states that in the open, together with the date the statute was last read there (29 August 2026) and the date the court rules were read from the Judiciary’s site (11 October 2026). The court rules, by contrast, are published by the state itself and opened on the first attempt.

How long it was live, and what it cost. The page was published on 29 August 2026 and both defects were on it from the start, so forty-three days — six weeks. The readers it reached are the narrowest and worst-placed audience on this site: a parent in a Mississippi custody case in which someone has alleged child abuse, which is the only situation in which the appointment is mandatory. Two things were taken from them. A parent who wanted to know whether the appointee would carry their child’s wishes to the judge was told the question had no written answer, when the rule answers it and gives the child a separate attorney if the answer is not good enough. And a parent worried about the bill was told there was no provision, when the rule requires the court to set the amount and lets it put the charge on financially able parents — which is the difference between an open-ended private invoice and a figure a judge has to justify. Neither was a wrong number. Both were a reader being told to stop looking.

What this suggests about the other forty-nine. This is the second page in this family in three days to be corrected for the same shape: Wyoming on 9 October had found the rule and quoted away the operative sentence, and Mississippi had the pointer and did not follow it. In both cases the official source was free, state-hosted and opened on the first try. We are not claiming the other child-representation pages are wrong — we have not read them. We are recording that a “we could not find” on one of these pages is now, twice running, a thing the state publishes, and that the remaining pages are being read one per night against that state’s own rules of civil procedure and family rules before any negative claim on them is left standing.

What was right, and stays right. The headline figure was correct and is unchanged. The Office of Court Administration’s District Court Civil Suits and Actions chart (OCA revised 11/03/2025) gives Divorce (Not Involving Children) a flat total of “$350.00” and Divorce (Involving Children) as “x ≥ $350.00*” with the footnote “*$350.00 is the fee if your county does not have a Domestic Relations Office.” We re-read both components in the Legislature’s own text: Tex. Loc. Gov’t Code § 135.101(a)(1) imposes “a local consolidated filing fee of… $213 on filing any civil case” and § 133.151(a)(1) “a fee in the amount of $137 on the filing of any civil… case.” Both are marked “Local Option: No — Fee is mandatory.”

What we published about e-filing, and what the state actually publishes. The page said: “We looked for a portal fee and a card surcharge in Texas and found neither published… there is no extra charge we can point you at.” The table row beneath it read “not published.” We had looked at the OCA fee charts and at county clerks’ schedules, and it is true that none of those publishes a surcharge. We had not looked at the payment system. eFileTexas.gov, which the Office of Court Administration runs, answers the question under a heading called Understanding Fees: “While the state-provided EFSP does not charge usage fees, all electronic submissions with associated court costs are subject to a convenience fee… Convenience Fees. A convenience fee is assessed to cover the Credit Card or eCheck processing fees. Credit card processing fee: 2.89%.” That page was last modified on 29 August 2025. On a $350.00 filing fee the charge is $10.12; on $401.00 it is $11.59. The same page also settles the avoidance question: e-filing “is mandatory for all attorneys” and “while not required, non-attorney filers are encouraged to eFile as well” — so a self-represented filer who hands the petition over the counter does not pay it.

What changed. The section is now headed E-filing is optional for you, and the card fee is 2.89% and carries the quotation, the two cash figures and the link. The “not published” row is now “2.89% of the amount paid.” On the Texas kit, two places that read “No portal fee published” now name the 2.89% fee, and the paragraph that said the cost “depends on which electronic filing service provider they pick” now says the portal itself charges 2.89% and that the providers add their own on top of that.

The statute we said we could not read. The page said it could not read Tex. Fam. Code § 105.009 “because statutes.capitol.texas.gov now serves its statute text through a JavaScript single-page application that returns only the app shell to a plain HTTP client,” and concluded: “We therefore could not verify from an official source whether a class is mandatory with minor children in Texas, and we do not say either way.” The first half of that was accurate as far as it went — every path on that host, including a nonsense one we probed, returns the same 250,874-byte application shell. The conclusion was wrong. The site’s own application loads the statute text from the Legislature’s file server, which is named in the application’s configuration and serves the whole Family Code as a plain download; and in a browser, the legacy URL we had listed as unreadable resolves and renders the chapter. Read from the Legislature’s own text, § 105.009(a) says the court “may order the parties to the suit to attend a parent education and family stabilization course if the court determines that the order is in the best interest of the child” — discretionary, not automatic — and § 105.009(k) says “A party to a suit may not be required to pay more than $100 to attend a course ordered under this section,” that the court “may not order the parties to a suit to attend a course under this section if the parties cannot afford to take the course,” and that it may instead direct them to a course offered on a sliding fee scale or without charge. The row now reads $0.00–$100.00 per party, with those words, and the kit’s cost table no longer calls it a “local parenting class… where a county requires one.”

The FAQ that contradicted the page it sat on. Our visible FAQ and the FAQPage structured data both answered “Is the divorce filing fee the same in every Texas county?” with: “No. Texas sets a base fee and individual counties add their own charges on top, so the total depends on where you file… this page says so rather than publishing a single number that would be wrong in most of the state.” The body of the same page says the opposite, and the body is right: the $350.00 is statutory, mandatory and identical in all 254 counties, and a single number is not wrong in most of the state. Structured data is what search engines are handed, so that answer travelled further than the correct one directly above it. Both now say that the fee is $350.00 everywhere for a divorce with no children and that a county with a Domestic Relations Office may add up to $51.00 where there are children.

The impossible floor on the kit. The kit’s step table and its step-2 instruction both put the filing fee at “roughly $300–$400.” No Texas district clerk can charge $300.00 to open a divorce, because $213 + $137 is fixed by statute, and $400.00 is below the $401.00 the same page quotes for Dallas. Both now read $350.00–$401.00. On the fifty-state table the Texas across-counties cell read “Varies locally — not yet mapped” and now states the statewide figure and the county add-on. On the fifty-state law table the Texas filing-fee cell read “$350 / $365 / $350 / $401 / $350 varies by county” — five figures run together from three county rows, which is not a fee a reader can use — and now reads $350–$401.

What we also checked and found correct. Harris County still publishes $350.00 without children and $365.00 with, on a schedule stating “Effective January 1, 2026” and footed “(Updated July 15, 2026)”; Dallas still publishes $350.00 and $401.00 on its January 1, 2024 schedule; Bexar still publishes $350.00 and $401.00 under a table headed only “2025 FEE” with no effective date, which is what we had said. We added three counties: Tarrant ($350.00 / $401.00, effective January 1, 2026), Travis ($350.00 / $365.00, effective 1/1/2026) and Collin ($350.00, effective January 1, 2026, with no children-case add-on published at all). We also re-read Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 145 against the Supreme Court’s own rules PDF, word for word: every quotation on the fee-waiver section is verbatim and nothing there changed.

One thing we found in a county schedule and are reporting rather than reconciling. Tarrant County itemizes its $401.00 with-children total as $350.00 plus a $15.00 “Family Protection Fee” plus a $36.00 DRO Initial Child Support Service Fee, and cites Tex. Gov’t Code § 51.961 for the first of those. The current Government Code contains no § 51.961: Chapter 51 runs to § 51.943 and its Subchapter M is gone, because S.B. 41 (87th Legislature, Regular Session, 2021) repealed “Subchapter M, Chapter 51” effective 1 January 2022. We publish Tarrant’s total as Tarrant publishes it, because that is what a filer is asked for, and we do not reproduce that component as current law. We are not asserting that Tarrant County is charging unlawfully; we have not read whatever later authority it may be relying on, and that question is not ours to answer.

How long each one was live. The e-filing claim is the old one: “Nothing extra to e-file” first appears in the revision of 21 August 2026, the day after the page was published, so it was live for 50 days. The kit’s “$300–$400” is in the earliest kit revision we can still read, from 31 August 2026, so at least 40 days. The contradictory FAQ answer was added on 26 September 2026 and was live for 14 days. The sentence saying the statute could not be read was added on 2 October 2026 and was live for 8 days. The mangled fifty-state cell dates from the same 31 August 2026 revision.

What we are not claiming. We have read six county schedules out of 254 — Harris, Dallas, Bexar, Tarrant, Travis and Collin — and we are not claiming to have mapped Texas. We are not claiming to know which counties have established a Domestic Relations Office: Texas publishes no statewide list of them that we could find, and that single fact is what decides whether a divorce with children costs $350.00 or as much as $401.00. We are not pricing the commercial electronic filing service providers; only the state portal’s own 2.89% is published in one place. We are not saying what an actual court-ordered mediation session costs, because no Texas statewide chart publishes it. And we are not saying a parenting course will be ordered in your case — only that if one is, the statute caps what you can be made to pay for it at $100.

The figure was correct. It costs $200.00 to file a Complaint for Dissolution of Marriage in a Nebraska district court, and nothing on this correction changes that number on any page. The Nebraska Judicial Branch’s Filing Fees and Court Costs schedule, marked “Effective 07-01-2026”, lists fourteen components under District Courts → Civil → 3. Dissolution Fee and prints the total as 200.00; we added them up and they sum exactly. We then rebuilt the same $200.00 from the statutes themselves, reading each section on the Legislature’s own server: § 33-106 ($42 docket fee and a $15 records management fee), § 33-106.02(2)(a) (which splits that $42, sending $7 to the Nebraska Retirement Fund for Judges), § 33-106.03 ($50 mediation and $25 child abuse prevention), § 24-703(3)(a) ($12), § 33-107.01 ($6.25), § 33-107.03 ($8), § 33-107.04 ($10), § 33-127 ($26 for a dissolution), § 33-154 ($1), § 33-155 ($0.75), § 33-156 ($3) and § 47-633 ($1). Nebraska publishes no fee calculator, which we established rather than assumed: the Judicial Branch’s own sitemap lists 4,181 URLs and we enumerated every one of them.

What we published, and what is wrong with it. One: the revision dates. Every Nebraska divorce form, by number carried a counter reading “0 with a revision date”, showed an em-dash in the Revised column of all thirty-nine rows, and told readers in its own FAQ — and in the FAQ structured data handed to search engines — that “none of them publish a revision date, which is why that column shows a dash rather than a guess.” That is false. We downloaded all forty-one documents and read each one with pdftotext -layout: forty carry a printed “Rev.” or “Revised” stamp in the footer and the forty-first, HHS-73, carries an edition stamp of 6/06. Eleven are stamped Rev. 05/2026: DC 6:4.1, the Complaint for Dissolution — No Children, reads “DC 6:4.1 Rev. 05/2026”, and so do DC 6:4.1a, DC 6:4.3, DC 6:4.3a, DC 6:4.4, DC 6:4.4A, DC 6:4.5, DC 6:4.5a, DC 6:4.6, DC 6:4.6a and DC 6:4. The twelfth May 2026 document is the fee-waiver guide, stamped NEW 5/2026. This mattered more than most of what we correct here, because the same page warns that “using a superseded revision is one of the most common reasons a filing comes back, which is why the dates are shown” — and then showed none, on a form set Nebraska had revised four months earlier. The dash was not a careful refusal to guess. It was a column nobody had filled.

Two: the fee-waiver form. The Nebraska divorce kit told readers, in its costs section, to “File Form DC 6:4.20.G1, Request to Proceed Without Payment of Court Fees” and to “ask the clerk for the form when you file”, listed it among the forms for the route, and named it in step 2 of the sequence. DC 6:4.20.G1 is not an application. It is a two-page guide, stamped “DC 6:4.20.G1 NEW 5/2026”, that opens “Things to Know” and then says under the heading Required Court Forms for Civil Cases, Appeals, and Emancipation: “Affidavit and Application to Proceed without Payment of Fees (In Forma Pauperis) (DC 6:7.1). Use the instructions (DC 6:7.1a) to complete the form” and “Order to Proceed In Forma Pauperis (DC 6:7.2). Use the instructions (DC 6:7.2a).” Neither DC 6:7.1 nor DC 6:7.2 appeared anywhere on this site. A reader following our kit would have arrived at the clerk’s counter holding an information sheet instead of a notarized affidavit, and that is the kind of error that costs somebody a trip and a week.

Three: the e-filing and card-charge claim. What a Nebraska divorce actually costs to file carried a block headed “Nothing extra to e-file” which read: “We looked for a portal fee and a card surcharge in Nebraska and found neither published. That is not the same as a guarantee — clerks can charge for things they do not put on a web page — but there is no extra charge we can point you at.” Both halves were wrong. Nebraska publishes an affirmative answer, not an absence: announcing new online-service rates on 8 December 2025, the Supreme Court wrote that fees for the Court Electronic Filing System “will remain unchanged” and that “users will continue to pay only court-required filing fees, with no additional electronic filing charges.” And a card surcharge is published — the Nebraska Judicial Branch Internet Payment System states that “transactions will incur a minimum additional charge of $1.25 for each case or ticket/citation payment” — although that system also says of itself that it “is designed for payments required AFTER a case has been decided by a judge”, so it cannot be used to pay a filing fee and the $1.25 never reaches a new divorce case. Saying we could find nothing was the one answer that was not true.

Four: a citation that pointed at the wrong section. The costs page attributed the $10 “Case Management Systems” component to Neb. Rev. Stat. § 24-227. That section creates the Case Management Systems Software Cash Fund and imposes no charge on anybody; it says the fund “shall consist of money remitted pursuant to section 33-107.04.” The section that actually taxes the $10 as costs is § 33-107.04. The Judicial Branch’s own schedule makes the same slip, which is where ours came from, but a page whose opening line promises that every figure is traced to a statute has to point at the section that imposes the fee rather than the one that banks it. § 24-227 has been removed from the statute list under the headline figure and § 33-107.04 put in its place.

Five: the open-questions section had no open questions in it. The costs page’s “What we could not find out” section contained a single bullet — “supremecourt.nebraska.gov now redirects to nebraskajudicial.gov. Update any existing citation.” That is true (the old host returns a 301) but it is a note to ourselves, not a limit on what Nebraska publishes, and while it sat there the genuine limits went unrecorded. The short-version summary for that section was blank, and the summary for “If you cannot afford to file” had been filled with a sentence belonging to the e-filing paragraph.

What changed. On the forms list, the Revised column is now filled for all forty-one documents from the date printed in each PDF, the counters read 41 listed and 41 carrying a printed revision date, the FAQ and its structured data say so in the same words, DC 6:7.1 and DC 6:7.2 were added, DC 6:4.20.G1 is now labeled as the court’s guide rather than a form, and all thirty-seven links that still pointed at supremecourt.nebraska.gov were repointed to nebraskajudicial.gov, each one re-fetched from the new host and returning 200. On the kit, the fee-waiver instruction now names DC 6:7.1 and DC 6:7.2, says the first must be notarized, says in bold that DC 6:4.20.G1 is the guide and not the application, and notes the court’s own warning that a case is not treated as filed and gets no case number until the fee is paid or the waiver granted; the forms table gained a Revised column filled the same way; and the service row was rewritten, because the kit had said a sheriff’s fee “varies by county” when § 33-117(1) opens “the several sheriffs shall charge and collect fees at the rates specified in this section” and then fixes $12 for each person served and $6 for making the return — $18 statewide, with only the per-trip mileage under § 33-117(1)(h) varying. The kit’s “typical all-in, uncontested, no children” floor moved from ~$225 to $200, because the kit’s own cheapest route is a Voluntary Appearance, which it describes as “no sheriff, no fee” — the old floor silently charged every reader for service the page told them to avoid. On the costs page, the e-filing block and the fee-waiver block were rewritten and sourced, the open-questions section now records four real documented negatives, each of the fourteen component rows links to its own statute rather than all fourteen pointing at the schedule, and outbound links to official sources went from 2 to 23. A note was added that two of the fourteen components are new: the $26 state docket fee and the $10 case management systems software fee were created by LB935 (2026), sections 35 and 36, operative 1 July 2026 under section 45, with the Legislature’s committee statement describing each as “a new section of law which creates” the fee — so filing a Nebraska dissolution costs $36 more than it did on 30 June 2026. “Sources last checked” moved to 9 October 2026 on the costs page and the forms list.

How long it was live. The e-filing claim, the § 24-227 citation and the empty open-questions section had been on the costs page since it was published on 20 August 2026 — fifty days. The fee-waiver form error and the sheriff’s-fee line had been on the kit since 18 August 2026 — fifty-two days. The revision-date claim had been on the forms list since 14 September 2026 — twenty-five days — and the forms count on the fifty-state comparison table since 13 September 2026.

What we are not claiming. We are not claiming the filing fee was ever wrong: $200.00 was right when it was published and it is right now, and the only thing we could not do was state what a dissolution cost before 1 July 2026 — the two new components come to $36, but no schedule we have read prints a pre-July total, so we have not published one rather than publish a figure we reached by subtraction. We have not read the revision stamp on any Nebraska form outside the forty-one on this list, so we are not claiming the pattern holds across the court’s whole form catalog. We did not re-verify the kit’s deadlines, residency rule or statutory citations this time, and its “Sources last checked” date has deliberately been left at 14 September 2026 to say so. We could not reach the Lancaster or Douglas county websites — both return 403 to us host-wide — so the $25 and $50 Lancaster sheriff figures on the kit are carried over unchecked, and we have not established what mileage any county adds to the statutory $18. We did not read any county’s local rules. And we are not claiming the court’s own payment system never charges a divorce filer anything: we are claiming it cannot be used to open a case, which is what it says of itself.

What we published. What an Iowa divorce actually costs to file set out a table of what the $285 does and does not cover. The row for service read: “Serving the original notice on the other party — Not published — Iowa says only that ‘there may be an additional cost for having the petition served on the respondent’ and does not name a figure. It is set by whoever serves it. We are not going to invent one.” The page’s open-questions section read: “We could not retrieve the 2026 enacting act itself; legis.iowa.gov returned 404 on every bill-tracking path and no 2027 Code edition exists yet. The chapter number and effective date are unverified.” In the section written for people who cannot afford to file, a row quoted the Judicial Branch saying “There are no additional fees for electronic filing in the Iowa court system”, and the sentence immediately beneath it said “This sits on top of the filing fee above, and a percentage surcharge on a few hundred dollars is not small.” There was no parenting-course row, although the page’s own structured data already told search engines that “any required parenting class” was a separate cost.

What is true. Iowa Code § 331.655(1)(a), which we downloaded from the Legislature’s own server and read today, provides: “For serving a notice and returning it, for the first person served, thirty dollars, and for each additional person, thirty dollars, except that the fee for serving additional persons in the same household shall be twenty dollars for each additional service.” Mileage is added under § 331.655(1)(j) at the rate in § 70A.9, which each local governing body sets for itself up to the federal IRS rate. The 2026 act is House File 2770, “An Act relating to and making appropriations to the justice system, providing fees, and including applicability provisions”, of the Ninety-first General Assembly. Section 24 amends § 602.8105(1)(b) to strike “two hundred sixty-five” and insert “eighty-five”; section 28 applies that change to fees paid on and after 1 July 2026. The Legislature records it as signed on 2 June 2026 in its Code & Acts Sections Amended report for the 2026 session, which is the index we should have found the first time. The parenting course is required by § 598.15: both parties to any action involving child custody or visitation must take a court-approved course within forty-five days of service, each party pays for their own, and no final decree is granted until both have unless the court waives it for good cause.

The figure itself was never wrong. $285 is correct, it is correct in all ninety-nine counties, and it was correct on the day the page was published. Both of Iowa’s official sources agree on it: the Judicial Branch prints $285 on its Civil Court Fees schedule and states it again in words on its Divorce — Representing Yourself page, and the enrolled Act puts it in the statute. What was wrong was the account we gave of it: we had reasoned our way to the right number from the pattern of a uniform $20 rise across the fee schedule, and said so, when the act that made the rise was a single index away.

How long it was live. The costs page was published on 20 August 2026 and the wording was in place when we read it today, 48 days later. We have not established that it was there from the start, so 48 days is an outer bound, not a measurement. The kit page carried the reconciled-after-the-fact version of the same problem — “Two official Iowa sources differ by $20 and we could not reconcile them” — from 18 August 2026, 50 days on the same basis. The cost falls on someone budgeting for an Iowa divorce without a lawyer: we told them the price of service was unknowable when it is thirty dollars and in the Code, and we told them to worry about a percentage surcharge that does not exist.

What we did. On the costs page, the service row now carries the statutory figure with § 331.655 quoted and linked, and notes that a signed Acceptance of Service costs nothing. A parenting-course row was added, mandatory under § 598.15, with no figure invented because none is published. The mediation row now carries § 598.7(4)(e), which requires a sliding fee scale for indigent parties and permits the cost to be taxed as court costs, and notes that five of the eight judicial districts publish a reduced-fee application. The surcharge sentence was deleted and replaced with what the EDMS FAQ actually says, including that e-filing is mandatory under Iowa Rule of Electronic Procedure 16.302 rather than merely usual. The hero’s “Schedule dated — No date printed” became “Fee effective — 1 July 2026”, sourced to section 28 of the Act, because the schedule’s silence about its own date did not make the governing date unknowable. The waiting-period note was rewritten against § 598.19, which counts the ninety days from the later of service, the last day of publication, or the filing of a waiver or acceptance of notice — the last of which is the one that applies in most uncontested cases, and which the page did not mention. The fee-deferral section now says that the Application and Affidavit to Defer Payment of Costs covers the sheriff’s service fee as well as the filing fee, and that costs owed to anyone other than the court or the sheriff cannot be waived, both of which are printed on the form’s own first page. The two open questions, both of which had been settled, were replaced with four that are not. “Sources last checked” moved from 23 September to 7 October 2026, and the body’s own 26 September reading date and the structured data’s 26 September timestamp were brought to the same day, because the page had been showing three different dates for one act of reading. Outbound links to official sources went from 2 to 14. On the Iowa kit, the “could not reconcile” sentence was replaced with the Act, a cost cell that read “$285 · $265 · $20” at the pay-the-fee step — three numbers where there is one fee, one of them superseded and one of them the increase — now reads $285, and the “typical all-in” range was changed from $310–$400 to $285–$365, because $310 could not be reached from any combination of the table’s own rows: $285 alone where a spouse signs the Acceptance of Service, $315 with sheriff service, $335 with a certified copy, $365 with both. On the fifty-state table, the note describing Iowa’s two sources as an unresolved publication lag now records that the enrolled Act resolves it. On the fifty-state law table, Iowa’s waiting-period cell read a bare “90 days” with no start point and no citation, and now carries both.

What we are still not claiming. No figure on any page changed, and the national floor and spread are untouched: Iowa’s $285 is not the cheapest state and never was. We still have no published amount for the parenting course, for mediation, for a private process server, or for the sheriff’s mileage, and the page still says so in each case — we did not work through all eight judicial districts’ certified-provider lists, and we did not survey the ninety-nine counties’ mileage rates. We did not verify the $5 journal publication fee question beyond the statute’s own words, which confine it to § 602.8105(1)(a) petitions and to foreign judgments under § 626A.5 and so leave dissolutions out. We have not checked whether any individual clerk charges something not on the statewide schedule; the Judicial Branch says the Legislature sets the fees and the Branch must charge those fees, and we are relying on that rather than on a county-by-county check.

What we published. What a Virginia divorce actually costs to file opened with a headline figure of “$83.00” and the sentence “It costs $83.00 to file for divorce in Virginia”, under a subtitle promising “Not a range, not an estimate”. Lower down, the same page set out the full distribution across all 120 circuit courts — 31 courts at $94.00, 26 at $89.00, and only 4 at $83.00 — and said in terms that “$83.00 is the floor rather than the norm”. Its own FAQ, its structured data and our Virginia divorce kit all carried “$83 – $94” instead. The headline disagreed with the rest of our own page.

The second error was worse. A section headed “Nothing extra to e-file” read: “We looked for a portal fee and a card surcharge in Virginia and found neither published. That is not the same as a guarantee — clerks can charge for things they do not put on a web page — but there is no extra charge we can point you at.” Virginia publishes both of them in its statutes and on the fee schedule we were already citing, and the same page’s own component table already listed one of them as a line item.

What is true. Va. Code § 17.1-275(A)(27) provides that for payment by credit or debit card “the clerk shall collect from the person presenting such credit or debit card a reasonable convenience fee”, which “shall not exceed four percent of the amount paid for the transaction or a flat fee of $2 per transaction”. It is account code 407 on the Office of the Executive Secretary’s Circuit Court Fee Schedule (Rev: 07/26). Va. Code § 17.1-258.3 and account code 426 on the same schedule allow a circuit court that operates e-filing to charge “an additional $5 fee for every civil case initially filed by paper”. On the filing fee itself, that schedule’s DIV Divorce row prints a basic cost of $89.00, and § 17.1-275(A)(26) sets the clerk’s fee at “$60, $10 of which shall be apportioned to the Courts Technology Fund”. The $83.00 floor is the statutory core with no local assessment on top: writ tax $5 (§ 58.1-1727) + technology trust fund $8 (§ 17.1-279) + legal aid $9 (§ 17.1-278) + clerk’s fee $60, booked as $50 to account code 304 and $10 to 170 (§ 17.1-275(A)(26)) + indigent defense $1 (§ 17.1-275(C)) = $83. Add a locally adopted law library fee of up to $4 (§ 42.1-70, by ordinance) and courthouse maintenance of up to $2 (§ 17.1-281) and the schedule’s $89.00 follows; add the $5 paper-filing fee and it reaches $94.00.

What changed. The headline and opening sentence now lead with $83.00 – $94.00 and name $89.00 as the figure on the state’s own published schedule. The “Nothing extra to e-file” section has been replaced with the two charges, their statutes, their account codes, and the note that paying by cash, check or money order avoids the card fee. The subtitle no longer promises “not a range” above a range. The county section no longer says the range was confirmed only “across the counties we were able to confirm” when all 120 were queried, and the twelve-row table is now labeled as a sample. The fee-waiver section named only form CC-1414, the general civil petition; Virginia also publishes CC-1421, “Petition for Proceeding in a No-Fault Divorce Without Payment of Fees or Costs”, and both forms are now named with the ground each fits. The schedule itself was not linked from the page that cited it; it is now. Outbound links to official sources on that page went from 2 to 7. On the kit, a sentence saying filing fees had been confirmed for no jurisdiction but Fairfax was stale and contradicted the same page’s own 120-court table; it has been replaced. The kit index carried a bare “from $83 in Virginia” and now carries the same qualification its sibling pages do.

How long it was live. That page was published on 20 August 2026 and the two errors are 47 days old at most. The headline and the page’s own 120-court distribution have contradicted each other for at least the 9 days since that distribution was written into the page on 27 September 2026. We cannot date either error more precisely than that from what we keep.

What we are still not claiming. No filing fee moved. All 120 circuit courts were re-queried on 6 October 2026 and every one of the eight totals and every court list reproduced what we had already published, so the $83.00 – $94.00 range, the national floor of $83 and the 5.2x spread on our fifty-state table are unchanged. We are not claiming independent confirmation of the four courts that return $83.00. Virginia’s calculator returns $83.00 for any court name it does not recognize, including an empty one — we re-confirmed that with a nonsense name and a blank submission on 6 October 2026 — so the floor figure and the tool’s silent fallback are the same number. What we can say is that for Amherst, Essex, Northumberland and Roanoke County the tool echoed the court name back and itemized the local assessments as a well-formed “0.00”, where an unrecognized name produces a malformed “.0” in those same fields, and that $83 is exactly what the statutes add up to with no local ordinance. That is consistent with those four courts having adopted no law library or courthouse maintenance ordinance, but we did not read the four counties’ ordinances, and absence of an ordinance is not something the Commonwealth publishes centrally. We are not computing a card fee for any individual court: the statute caps it and lets each clerk choose between the percentage and the flat $2, and which one a given clerk charges is not published centrally. We did not re-read the VS-4 vital statistics question or Rule 1:17, which are unchanged on the kit.

What we published. What a Georgia divorce actually costs to file carried a section headed “We could not confirm how a fee waiver works in Georgia”, and under it: “Almost every state has a way to file without paying up front — usually called proceeding in forma pauperis — but we could not find Georgia’s procedure published on an official source, so we are not going to describe one.” Under “Open questions on this page” a further line read “Fee-waiver mechanism not confirmed from an official Georgia source.” Meanwhile the same page’s own FAQ answered “What if I cannot afford the filing fee in Georgia?” with “There is a process for asking the court to waive or defer it, and this page sets out what Georgia requires” — which the page did not do. That answer also sat in the page’s FAQPage structured data, which is the version search engines are handed. And our own Georgia divorce kit had named the right form all along, while adding that “your county clerk provides the accompanying affidavit itself, since its exact format is set locally”, which is also wrong.

What is true. The Judicial Council of Georgia’s Administrative Office of the Courts publishes both halves of the procedure, statewide, under “Forms” on its own Navigating the Courts self-help page. The Pauper’s Affidavit is headed “AFFIDAVIT OF ELIGIBILITY TO PROCEED IN FORMA PAUPERIS”; the affiant swears “that because of my indigent status, I am unable to pay the costs of this proceeding”, and it may be sworn before a notary public or a deputy clerk of the court. It is footed “compiled by the Administrative Office of the Courts and approved by the Council of Superior Court Judges” and stamped correct as of April 2024. The companion Order on Pauper’s Affidavit is made “[p]ursuant to the requirements of O.C.G.A. § 9-15-2” and states the standard in terms: “[a]fter considering the Poverty Guidelines established by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services at 125% or less of the poverty level, and based upon the size of the family unit, it appears to the Court that the Affiant is unable to pay the filing fees associated with this action. Therefore, the Affiant’s pleadings shall be filed, and the Affiant shall be relieved from paying the filing fee, Sheriff’s service fee, and, if a judgment is awarded to the Plaintiff, any fees associated with the issuance of a fi fa and post judgment interrogatories.” The same order records that under O.C.G.A. § 9-15-2(b) “any other party at interest may contest the truth of the affidavit of indigency by verifying under oath that same is untrue”, and that a request may be denied under § 9-15-2(d) where the pleading “shows in its face such a complete absence of any justiciable issue of law and/or fact”. Fulton County Superior Court’s own Order on Affidavit of Indigency, revised November 2025, adds how long a grant lasts: the clerk “shall accept and file the affiant’s pleadings without payment of filing fees, sheriff’s/marshal’s service fee, or any other required court costs until a final order/judgment is entered or the case is dismissed.” All of these were downloaded and read as text on 5 October 2026.

How long it was live, and what it cost. The claim appears in the oldest revision of that page we still hold, dated 31 August 2026, so it was published for at least 35 days and probably longer. The section it sat in is the one written for people who cannot find $218 to $220. A reader who took it at face value was told that the thing which would have let them file for nothing could not be found, and was sent to ask a clerk a question Georgia had already answered on a public web page. We have no way to count who that was.

What we did. On 5 October 2026 we replaced the section with the procedure, quoted from the two forms above and linked to them, including the three ways it can be refused or undone. We rewrote the FAQ answer and the matching FAQPage structured data together, and checked after saving that the visible answer and the structured answer are now the same sentence. We replaced the “mechanism not confirmed” line with the two things about it that genuinely are not published. We corrected the kit’s claim that the affidavit format is set locally, and linked both forms there too. We also added a warning we did not have before: the AOC separately publishes a Request Form to Proceed In Forma Pauperis whose own instructions limit it to actions “filed by an inmate of a state or local penal or correctional institution”, and which a clerk must refuse if used wrongly — it is not the divorce route, and the similar name is a trap.

What we are still not claiming. We are not printing a dollar figure for the 125% line: the order names the federal poverty guidelines and household size, not an amount, and we are not computing one. Whether an individual county clerk accepts the statewide affidavit or substitutes a local version of it is not published statewide, and we say so on the page. The Official Code of Georgia Annotated itself we still cannot read from a free official server — re-checked on 5 October 2026: the General Assembly’s code page returns a 1,492-byte JavaScript shell and the LexisNexis portal Georgia points to returns 3,696 bytes with no section text in it — so the words of § 9-15-2 quoted above are quoted from Georgia’s own court forms, not from the Code. We did not re-read Georgia’s county fee schedules in this pass, so the filing-fee figures and the source-checked dates on that page are unchanged and still carry their earlier dates.

What we published. What an Indiana divorce costs to file carried a section headed “We could not confirm how a fee waiver works in Indiana”, which read: “Almost every state has a way to file without paying up front — usually called proceeding in forma pauperis — but we could not find Indiana’s procedure published on an official source, so we are not going to describe one.” Its open-questions list added that “no waiver or indigency form is published on the in.gov/courts forms pages we reached”. The same page said of the one fee that varies between counties that “no published list was reachable, so I cannot say whether a given county charges $157 or $177”. Its visible FAQ answered the opposite: “There is a process for asking the court to waive or defer it, and this page sets out what Indiana requires.” And its FAQ said counties “add their own charges on top” of the base fee, which is not how Indiana works.

What is true. Indiana publishes a statewide fee-waiver packet of three forms, approved by the Coalition for Court Access — which the Office of Judicial Administration describes as “created by Supreme Court order on May 17, 2016” — and published at indianalegalhelp.org, the site the Indiana Courts Self-Service Legal Center itself directs readers to. The Verified Motion for Fee Waiver (CCA-GF-0420-3006) has the filer state “I cannot pay any of the filing fees or other costs of this action because I do not have sufficient income or resources” and ends “I request that this Court waive all costs of this action and allow me to proceed without the payment of any filing fees or other costs”, signed “under penalties for perjury”. It is filed with an Appearance by Unrepresented Person (CCA-GF-0420-3012) and an Order on Fee Waiver (CCA-GF-0420-3007), and that order carries a second box most people are never told about: the court may instead allow filing “Upon the prepayment of $______ which is a portion of the filing fee set by statute”, which “must be paid by the Petitioner to the Clerk within the next twenty (20) days”. On the counties, the Office of Court Services does publish a list: its Alternative Dispute Resolution Fund Plan County Contact List, footer-dated “Updated 8/3/2023”, names 45 counties. All three documents were downloaded and read with pdftotext on 4 October 2026.

How long it was live, and what it cost. The page was published on 20 August 2026 and the claim stood for 45 days, on the one section written for readers who cannot afford the $157. A reader who believed it would have concluded that Indiana publishes nothing and that their only option was to ask a clerk a question cold. The county line was worse than useless: it told them the information did not exist when it is a single PDF on the Judiciary’s own server. Our own Indiana divorce kit had been pointing readers at Indiana Legal Help’s fee-waiver material the whole time, so the two pages contradicted each other for 45 days and nothing caught it — the third time in a week a fee-waiver claim has failed this way.

What we did. The fee-waiver section is rewritten from the forms themselves, quoting what each one asks and what the order can do, with the instructions, the fillable forms and the filing-fee FAQ all linked. The county section now names all 45 counties on the Office of Court Services list and links it. The ADR row no longer labels the fee “dissolution only” when the provision it quotes covers legal separation and paternity too. The visible FAQ and the FAQPage structured data were corrected together: counties do not add their own charges, and the waiver answer now names the three forms. A raw &mdash; entity was removed from the structured data. On the kit, an unsourced “~$50” county parenting-class figure became “not published”, the all-in total that had been built on it no longer totals an unpublished estimate, and the claim that a fee-waiver application “is free to file” — which no Indiana form says — was replaced with what the motion actually asks for. The Indiana row on the fifty-state table no longer says the variation is “not yet mapped”. Outbound sources on the costs page went from one to eight. No figure changed: $157, $177 and $28 are all unmoved.

What we are still not claiming. We still cannot quote I.C. § 33-37-3-2 from the state’s own server: iga.in.gov serves a 691-byte JavaScript shell to anything that is not a browser, and returns it with a success code even for a path that does not exist — we probed a nonsense path on 4 October 2026 to confirm that, so the statutory authority for the waiver is named but unquoted. No income threshold is published on any of the three forms and we are not deriving one. Who approves a county ADR plan is unconfirmed: the Trial Court Fee Manual says the Judicial Conference of Indiana, the Office of Court Services’ own plan kit says the Office of Judicial Administration under ADR Rule 1.11, and we are not choosing between two official sources. The county list is also not a register — the same office says “more than half” of the 92 counties have plans, which is more than the 45 it names, so a county’s absence from the list proves nothing. Marion County’s exact fee remains unconfirmed. Whether any county requires a parenting class, and what it costs, is set by local rule and is still not published statewide. And one sentence in the Indiana open-questions list is truncated mid-quote — it ends “returns HTTP 403 ‘x-api-key” and stops — which we have deliberately left alone rather than complete by machine.

What we published. The New Mexico divorce kit told readers at step two to “Pay the $137 filing fee (NMSA 34-6-40(B), $107, plus the $30 domestic relations mediation surcharge under NMSA 40-12-6)”, and added that “the surcharge is collected only in judicial districts that have set up a domestic relations mediation program — where a district has none, NMSA 34-6-40(A) puts the fee at $117”. The page’s printable step strip rendered the same claim as the string “$137 · $107, · $30 · $117”, trailing comma included. Separately, what a New Mexico divorce costs to file said that “only ONE district’s published schedule could be retrieved”, that statewide uniformity was therefore “inferred from the statute rather than confirmed from multiple sources”, and that “other districts do not mirror the Second District’s URL structur” — while the kit page had been saying all along that the figure was confirmed against three districts’ current schedules. Two of our own pages disagreed about how much of New Mexico we had actually read.

What is true. All thirteen New Mexico judicial districts publish a fee schedule, each at the same address, /about-this-district/fees-costs-filing/, and on 4 October 2026 we read every one. All thirteen charge $137.00 for a domestic relations case and $132.00 for an ordinary civil case. The wording varies and the figure does not: the Seventh names “Domestic Relations Cases including Divorces, Child Custody and Parentage Cases”, the Eighth “Domestic Matters – Divorce (With and Without Children)”, and the Eleventh publishes a scanned schedule, labelled on its own page “Fee Schedule by Case Type May 2025”, reading “DOMESTIC RELATIONS CASE FILING FEE $137.00 — DIVORCE (WITH OR WITHOUT MINOR CHILDREN)”. Five districts print an authorization column that attributes the $132.00 to NMSA 1978, §§ 34-6-40, 34-6-44 and 34-6-45 and the $137.00 to §§ 34-6-40 and 40-12-6 — a $5.00 difference under § 40-12-6, not $30.00. $117.00 appears on no New Mexico fee schedule we can find, and neither does $107.00. The 404s the costs page blamed were real but were for a different page, /about-this-district/clerks-office/, which only the Second and Eleventh districts publish.

Three things we said New Mexico does not publish, which it does. First, a card surcharge: the Second Judicial District Court’s own packet Procedure for Applying for Free Process (Rev. Feb. 2024) states that “Credit and Debit card payments are subject to a 2.4% service fee” and works it out on the civil fee as “$135.17 approximately”. We had a block headed “Nothing extra to e-file” saying we had looked for exactly this and found nothing. Second, a parent-education class: we said New Mexico’s statewide self-representation divorce walkthrough “mentions no parenting or education class at all”; it says at step four that “the judge may order you and your spouse to attend a parent education workshop”. Third, mediation: we said no mediation fee is published anywhere, and the Eleventh Judicial District publishes a New Mexico Supreme Court-approved sliding scale, effective 1 January 2021, setting mediation of custody and time-sharing at a full rate of $75.00 an hour per party, scaled by income down to $7.50, with its Safe Exchange / Safe Visitation program at a $30.00 intake and $50.00 a supervised visit.

And the section for readers who cannot afford to file. Our visible FAQ and our FAQPage structured data both answered “There is a process for asking the court to waive or defer it, and this page sets out what New Mexico requires”. The page did not. New Mexico calls it free process, not a fee waiver; it runs under Rule 23-114 NMRA, “Free process in civil cases”; and it is worked by two statewide forms, Form 4-222 NMRA, “Application for free process and affidavit of indigency” and Form 4-223 NMRA, the order the judge signs. The Second Judicial District’s domestic relations instructions, updated 28 March 2024, say the court reviews the application “in light of the Federal Poverty Guidelines”, that free process can waive “filing fees, service of process fees, and other fees”, that the commonest reason it is refused is “Lack of sufficient information”, and that domestic relations filers should return after five business days. None of that was on the page.

What changed. The invented component breakdown and the $117 alternative are gone from the kit, as is the garbled cost strip. The costs page now states the thirteen-district confirmation instead of a one-district caveat, links all thirteen schedules, carries the 2.4% card fee and the Eleventh District’s mediation scale as published figures rather than blanks, corrects the parent-education row against the source it had cited, and sets out free process by rule, form, test and timetable. The kit’s footnote now says thirteen districts instead of three. Distinct outbound official sources on the costs page went from one to sixteen. Both pages now record that the printed self-help packet, from $5.00 in the Thirteenth District to $31.50 in the Tenth, is the only part of the price that varies by district.

What did not change. The figure. $137.00 was right, is right, and is now confirmed thirteen times over rather than once. The $132.00 civil comparison, the $150.00 and $300.00 jury demand fees, the $0.35 copy fee and the $1.50 certification fee are all unchanged and were re-read today. Nothing on the fifty-state table moved except New Mexico’s detail cell: the national floor is still Virginia’s $83.00, and New Mexico was never the floor.

How long it was live. The kit page has existed since 18 August 2026 and the costs page since 20 August 2026; both were last edited on 2 October 2026. We cannot tell from the published pages alone whether these particular sentences were present from the first day, so treat 47 and 45 days as the outer bound rather than a measurement.

What we are still not claiming. We have not read the text of NMSA 1978, §§ 34-6-40 or 40-12-6. New Mexico’s statutes are published by the New Mexico Compilation Commission at nmonesource.com, which answers an automated request with a captcha, so we cannot quote the sections and we are not going to paraphrase what we have not read — which is how the $107-plus-$30 breakdown got onto the kit in the first place. We therefore do not know what the $5.00 difference between the civil and domestic relations fees pays for. The 2.4% card fee is published by one district and we have not established whether the other twelve charge the same, a different rate, or none; we have not computed a card-inclusive $137.00 total, because no clerk publishes one. The mediation scale is the Eleventh District’s and we found no equivalent published scale for the other twelve. No amount is published anywhere we could find for service of process by the Sheriff or for a parent-education workshop, and we are not estimating either. And we have not read the local rules of any district, so whether a given district orders mediation or a parenting class in practice remains unverified.

What we published. What a Wyoming divorce actually costs to file carried a section headed “We could not confirm how a fee waiver works in Wyoming”, which told readers “we could not find Wyoming’s procedure published on an official source, so we are not going to describe one” and sent them to ask the clerk. The page’s open-questions box called the waiver “entirely unconfirmed” and “the single largest gap in the Wyoming record”, and listed five Wyoming Judiciary addresses as unreadable with the reason “fetch authorization failure”. Meanwhile the visible FAQ and the FAQPage structured data both answered the same question with “There is a process for asking the court to waive or defer it, and this page sets out what Wyoming requires” — which the page did not do. Our own Wyoming divorce kit had been saying all along that “a fee waiver application is free to file and is listed with the forms above”.

What is true. The Wyoming Judicial Branch publishes the procedure on its own self-help forms page. MISC 10, Instructions for Seeking Waiver of Fees, read in full on 3 October 2026, says: “If you cannot afford to pay the filing fees (and other court costs), you can ask the Court to waive the fees by filing an Affidavit of Indigency and Request for Waiver of Fees and Cost. There is no fee to file this Affidavit.” The two required forms are MISC 11 and MISC 12. All three carry “Last Form Revision: May 2025. Packet Date: May 2025.” Sheriff’s service fees have a separate statutory waiver at Wyo. Stat. § 18-3-608(a): “The court may waive the fees upon an adequate showing of indigency.”

Why we missed it, stated plainly. Wyoming moved its judiciary site from courts.state.wy.us to www.wyocourts.gov. The old addresses answer with a 301 redirect. Our check recorded the redirect as a “fetch authorization failure” and we published that as a limit on what Wyoming publishes. Following the redirect returns HTTP 200 at every one of the five addresses we had listed as unreadable. This was our error, not Wyoming’s, and the page now says so in those words.

How long it was live, and what it cost a reader. The claim is present in every retained revision of the page, the oldest dated 2 September 2026, on a page published 20 August 2026 — so at least thirty-one days and probably forty-four. The section it sat in is the one written for people who cannot afford the $160.00 filing fee. A reader who believed us was told to go and ask a clerk a question whose answer Wyoming had already published, with instructions, in forms free to file. That is the worst class of error this site can make: a true statement about our own ignorance, published as a limit on the state’s transparency, on the page where the people with the least room to absorb it would read it.

Five other defects on the same page, corrected together. The sheriff’s service-of-process row said “not published” and cited “Wyo. Stat. § 18-3-609” as “the sheriff fee provision” whose text we could not retrieve; § 18-3-609 is headed Other duties and sets no fees. The provision is § 18-3-608(a), which publishes a ceiling: a single fee set by each board of county commissioners after a public hearing, “not to exceed fifty dollars ($50.00) for the first three (3) attempts at service” and “not to exceed ten dollars ($10.00)” for each attempt after. The row now carries that ceiling, labelled as a ceiling and not a price, and the kit’s unsourced “~$50” now reads “up to $50” against the same subsection. The county section said “county-level clerk discretion in § 5-3-206(a)(i) is limited to charges for copies, certifications and transcripts”; (a)(i) confers no discretion at all and those charges are themselves fixed, at (a)(iv) through (viii). The same section answered “No” on county variation without disclosing that a Supreme Court administrative order of 15 June 2009 lets a district court ask for “an additional filing fee, not to exceed $25.00” — voluntary, and courts “are not allowed to make the fee mandatory or to reject a filing for failure to pay”. Both FAQ copies now say so. Two rows blamed “the Judiciary site was unreachable” for gaps that were ours. And the FAQPage structured data was emitting a raw — entity into an answer field, the same defect found on Connecticut on 1 October and Arkansas on 2 October.

What did not change. No figure on the page moved. The $160.00 filing fee is unchanged, and it is now confirmed twice: from the Legislature’s own Title 5 text, fetched as title05.pdf from wyoleg.gov and read with pdftotext -layout, at § 5-3-206(a)(i) — “an original filing fee of one hundred sixty dollars ($160.00), which shall be paid by the plaintiff” — and from the Judiciary’s own FAQ, which states that “Wyoming Statutes Sections 5-3-206 and 2-2-401 sets the initial filing fee at $160”. The $40.00 automation and $10.00 indigent-civil-legal-services carve-outs, the deposition, affidavit and copy fees, and the § 20-2-201(f) quote on parenting classes were all re-read against the statute today and are correct as printed.

What we are still not claiming. We have not established where the district court’s authority to waive the filing fee comes from. § 18-3-608(a) supplies it for sheriff’s fees; we found no equivalent in Title 1 or Title 5, and we have not read the Wyoming Rules of Civil Procedure, where it may sit. No income threshold or poverty-line percentage appears on any of the three forms, and we are not deriving one. What each board of county commissioners has actually set inside the $50.00 service ceiling is unconfirmed for every county, because we read no county resolution and no Sheriff’s fee page. The Judiciary’s FAQ carries no revision date, so the “no date printed” row on the schedule stands. And we have not read the local rules of all nine judicial districts, so whether any district requires a parenting class in practice remains unverified.

What we published. Four separate things. (1) The Oklahoma divorce kit answered “How much does it cost to file for divorce in Oklahoma?” with “$236 – $246 to open the case”, in the visible FAQ and in the FAQPage structured data handed to search engines. That figure is the sum of the components in 28 O.S. § 152; nobody in Oklahoma has ever paid it. (2) The same kit gave “Filing fee — Cleveland County $252.14”. (3) The Oklahoma costs page attributed $258.39 to “Oklahoma and Cleveland counties”, listed seven statutory components that did not add up to the totals it published, told readers to “pay the published figure” without explaining the gap, printed “Portal fee: No additional cost” and then told readers that a “percentage surcharge on a few hundred dollars is not small”, and gave $43.00 as the cost of modifying a custody or support decree. (4) On the fifty-state costs table, the rows for Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Michigan and Oklahoma had been mangled by an automated edit in which $1 and $2 were taken as regular-expression backreferences, so published figures read “class="det">94 in Montgomery” and “</td>58.39” instead of $194 and $258.39.

What is actually the case. The gap was two charges set outside Title 28. 12 O.S. § 1809(A): “To establish and maintain an alternative dispute resolution system, court costs in the amount of Seven Dollars ($7.00) shall be taxed, collected, and paid as other court costs in all civil cases.” 19 O.S. § 220(C) and (D): the court clerk “shall assess an administrative fee of ten percent (10%) on all fees collected by the court clerk for agencies other than the court and not deposited into the court fund”, and “in addition to” that, “an administrative fee of fifteen percent (15%)” on the same fees — with the law library and dispute-resolution money exempted by name. The Uniform Oklahoma Fee Schedule issued by the Administrative Office of the Courts prints those two percentages in columns of their own, filled in against the special-advocates fee, the Council on Judicial Complaints fee and the courthouse security fee. Put those in and the components reconcile to the published totals to the cent.

The published totals themselves come from the clerks. The Oklahoma County Court Clerk’s Summary of Court Costs gives a divorce as $245.89 and $255.89 for a county without the commissioner courthouse security fee and $258.39 and $268.39 for a county with the full $10 — four cells, not two, because 28 O.S. § 86(D)(2) makes the clerk collect a $10 Lengthy Trial Fund fee “from each attorney who files a civil case” and not from a party filing alone. Cleveland County publishes “Divorce with minor children: $258.39 without Attorney, $268.39 with Attorney”, and the same for a divorce without minor children. Comanche County publishes “Divorce / Annulment / Legal Separation $268.39 (with attorney)” and “$258.39 (without attorney)”. Kay County publishes “Divorce W/ Atty $268.39” and “Divorce Pro Se $258.39”. Tulsa County publishes “Divorce with Minor Children: $252.14”. McCurtain County publishes “Divorce – Pro Se: $252.14 filing fee” and $262.14 otherwise. Canadian County publishes “Divorce with minor children – $255.89”; Cherokee County publishes “$268.39”. And on modification, 28 O.S. § 152(A)(2) sets a flat fee of $43.00, but the figure the clerks publish is $92.89 — $43.00 is a line on an accounting schedule, not a price. On e-filing, the OSCN e-Filing FAQ says the opposite of what our page implied: “At this time, there are no additional fees for e-Filing.”

What changed. The kit’s answer now reads $245.89 to $258.39 for a self-represented filer, in the visible FAQ and in the structured data; its Cleveland row now reads $258.39, with the county’s own page linked. The costs page now lists the dispute-resolution cost and the two administrative fees as components, shows the self-represented and attorney-filed figures side by side for the seven counties that publish one, states that $43.00 is not what a modification costs, drops the surcharge sentence and quotes the FAQ that contradicts it, and adds the warning from the same FAQ that a fee-bearing document should be filed on paper where a pauper’s affidavit is on file. The page previously carried a single outbound source — one 304 KB complete-title PDF, cited nine times — against a promise in its own opening line that every figure was “linked to it”; it now carries thirteen, including each county schedule quoted above. The five mangled rows on the national table were repaired from each state’s own page, and the Arkansas row’s $20.00 electronic filing system fee, retracted on that state’s page on 2 October 2026, was removed here too. The kit’s “typical all-in” floor of ~$220 was impossible, being below the cheapest filing fee in the state; it now reads ~$266.

How long it was live. The Oklahoma costs page’s attribution of $258.39 to Oklahoma County was published on 20 August 2026 and was live 44 days. The kit’s $236–$246 answer and its Cleveland figure were present at least from 14 September 2026, when that page records its sources as last checked, and the page was published on 18 August 2026. The mangled table rows were present in the revision saved at 23:10 UTC on 2 October 2026.

What we are not claiming. We are not claiming to know what Oklahoma County charges. It publishes no divorce total of its own, and the statewide schedule its clerk hosts says in terms that the $10 assessment “may not be the applicable amount for your county”. We are not claiming the state is mapped: seven of 77 counties publish a divorce figure we could read, and no county page publishes $245.89 itself — that is the clerks’ own figure for a county with no assessment, and we label it that way. We cannot reconcile Tulsa County’s published “$154.14–$252.14” for a divorce without minor children with § 152(A)(1), which sets $183.00 and calls it the only charge for court costs unless another law provides otherwise; that is recorded as an open question rather than resolved. We are not claiming the figures changed — $245.89 and $258.39 were right before this and are right now. What was wrong was what we said they were made of, who charged them, and what a lawyer’s involvement did to them. And we are not claiming to know when the table mangling was introduced, only that it was present in the last revision before we repaired it. 28 O.S. § 152 was last amended by Laws 2025, c. 87, § 1, effective 1 November 2025, and the $10 records-management component sunsets on 1 November 2027.

What we published. The 30 September entry below says “The eleven kit pages were rewritten in the same pass so the table and the kit cannot disagree.” They were not. The kit pages for Hawaii, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming kept the headline “Your choice: You may e-file, but you do not have to” and “Paper: Still accepted.” On Hawaii, Montana, Nebraska, Utah and Wyoming the detail lines also said a self-represented person could open an account. On ten of the eleven the cost and account labels had run together into one line.

What is actually the case. The fifty-state table was right. In all eleven a self-represented person cannot e-file a new divorce: Montana’s court policy of 30 July 2026 says e-filing “is not yet enabled for use by self-represented litigants at any court”; Nebraska’s § 2-216 waits on the Supreme Court’s approval; Wyoming’s Rule 4(b)(2) says self-represented litigants “may not eFile or eServe documents”; Hawaii does not let a self-represented party open a case through JEFS; Utah’s MyCase does not list divorce; and the other six pages already quoted the rule or official page that says so.

Why it is high. The kit page is where a reader learns how to get their papers to the court, and for eleven states it told them the wrong way for three more days after we said it had been fixed.

Fixed. All eleven pages now say you file on paper, and their account and cost lines match the rule they cite. We found this by comparing every kit page against the table, which is the check the 30 September entry describes and which should have caught it.

What we published. The Arkansas filing-fee page carried a section headed “We could not confirm how a fee waiver works in Arkansas,” which told readers “we could not find Arkansas’s procedure published on an official source, so we are not going to describe one.” That section is the one written for people who cannot afford the fee. Separately, the page headlined the cost as “$165.00 to $185.00,” attributed the $185.00 to the Faulkner County Circuit Clerk, and itemised a $20.00 Administrative Order 21 electronic filing system fee as a component of it. The page also said arcourts.gov “returns 404 for its rules and administrative-orders paths,” and its structured data told search engines the opposite of its own body: the FAQ answer handed to Google read “There is a process for asking the court to waive or defer it, and this page sets out what Arkansas requires.”

What is actually the case. The Arkansas Judiciary publishes the fee-waiver affidavit on its own server, as In Forma Pauperis Affidavit [see Rule 72, Rules of Civil Procedure]. We downloaded it on 2 October 2026 and read it with pdftotext. Its sworn paragraph reads: “in support of my motion to proceed without being required to prepay fees, costs or give security therefor, I state that because of my poverty I am unable to pay the costs of said proceeding or to give security therefor; that I believe I am entitled to redress.” It asks six questions — employment and earnings, money received in the past twelve months, cash and bank accounts, property “excluding ordinary household furnishings and clothing,” dependants, and an inmate-account question only for people who are incarcerated — and is sworn before a notary. On the fee, the Faulkner County Circuit Clerk, read twice on 2 October 2026, now publishes “Filing fee for: Initiating a Cause of Action in Circuit or Domestic Relations Courts: $165.00” and prints no electronic filing system fee and no reference to Administrative Order 21. Clark County publishes “Civil, Criminal & Domestic Case — $165.00,” unchanged. And the Judiciary does publish its rules: they are at arcourts.gov/forms-and-publications/court-rules, which returned HTTP 200 and links to the Court Rules and Administrative Orders collections. The old 404 was ours — we had guessed two paths that do not exist and reported the guess as a finding about Arkansas.

How long it was live, and what it cost a reader. The page was published on 20 August 2026 and last source-checked on 23 September 2026, so the fee-waiver refusal stood for at least ten days and probably six weeks. A reader in Arkansas with no money for the fee was told by a site whose whole claim is that it checks that nobody had checked, on the one question where being wrong stops the case before it starts. The $185.00 figure overstated the cost by $20.00 for anyone pricing a Faulkner County filing. We cannot say when Faulkner changed its page, so we cannot say how long that one was wrong.

What we did. The fee-waiver section now names the procedure, links and quotes the Judiciary’s own affidavit, and lists what the form asks. The headline figure is $165.00, sourced to both county schedules as read on 2 October 2026; the county table, the component table, the range callout, the section summaries, the visible FAQ and the FAQPage structured data were all changed together so that none of them disagrees with another. The e-filing component is now marked “not confirmed” rather than $20.00. The e-filing box, which had claimed a $20 portal fee and called it “a percentage surcharge,” now carries the one e-filing figure the Judiciary does publish — the $100 one-time eFlex registration fee — and says who it applies to. The 404 claim about arcourts.gov is corrected. Three paragraphs on the page had a duplicated tail, one of them restarting mid-figure (“NOT itemized here.5.00 flat”); two were rewritten and the third de-duplicated.

What we are deliberately still not claiming. We have not read Rule 72. The Judiciary’s rules database serves its collection indexes but answers every document request with a bot challenge, so we do not tell you the standard a judge applies to an in forma pauperis request, what papers accompany the affidavit, or whether a refusal can be appealed. We have not read Administrative Order 21 either, so we are not saying the $20.00 e-filing fee was withdrawn — only that no official source we can reach publishes it. We have verified two of Arkansas’s 75 county circuit clerks; three of the larger counties block automated readers and the State does not publish its own code in free full text, so $165.00 is what two counties publish and not a statewide fee. The page says all of this on its face.

What we published. From 23 September 2026, What a New Hampshire divorce actually costs to file carried a box headed “We are checking these four figures with the court, and you should know why”. It said the Judicial Branch’s own linked PDF — described as Circuit Court Filing Fees, revised 12/28/2021 — gave $250.00, $252.00, $125.00 and $250.00 where the page gave $280.00, $282.00, $135.00 and $225.00; that “the court’s own current link serves the lower figures”; that “we can no longer stand behind where our figures came from” because we had “not been able to locate” the 1 July 2025 schedule on the Judicial Branch’s site; and it closed by telling readers to “budget $282.00 and expect to be told less”. By then the page’s own “Open questions” section said the opposite — that the live PDF is stamped 07/01/2025 and shows $280/$282 — so the page contradicted itself on its central number.

What is true. On 2 October 2026 we downloaded the Circuit Court Filing Fees document the Judicial Branch serves from its Forms and Fees page and read the file with pdftotext -layout rather than through an extraction service. Every page of it is footer-stamped 07/01/2025; its embedded modification date is 26 August 2025. Under FAMILY DIVISION – FILING FEES it reads: “Original Entry of All Divorce Matters without Minor Children, including cross-petitions, and Registration of Foreign Decree … $280.00”; “Original Entry of All Divorce Matters with Minor Children or Parenting Matters, including cross petitions, and Registration of Foreign Decree … $282.00”; “Petition to Change Court Order – with full agreement … $135.00”; “Petition to Change Court Order or Petition for Contempt – without full agreement … $225.00”. All four of our figures. Family Division Rule 1.3 sets $280.00, $135.00 and $225.00 independently of the schedule, RSA 458-D:7, III is the “additional fee of $2” that makes the second figure $282.00, and RSA 490:26-a, I is the authority under which the Supreme Court sets any of it. The companion Superior Court Fee Schedule on the same page is headed “Effective 07/01/2025”, so a 1 July 2025 schedule plainly does exist and is where it was said not to be.

What we did. The box is replaced with a dated statement that the figures are confirmed, quoting the schedule and naming the three sources, and the “expect to be told less” instruction is gone. No figure on the page changed in either direction. Four further defects found in the same read are fixed. The section headed “New Hampshire does not break this down” was wrong and is rewritten: Rule 1.3(B) allocates “18.22% of the entry fee paid in each petition and cross-petition in marital cases” to the mediation and arbitration fund under RSA 461-A:7, X, Rule 1.3(C)(1) puts the order of notice and guardian ad litem fee inside the entry fee, and RSA 458-D:7, III accounts for the $2.00. “Open questions on this page” held no open question, only the settled PDF finding, and now holds three real ones. The page’s single outbound link, labeled “Read the official source” in the fee-waiver section, pointed at the fee schedule rather than at the waiver procedure; it now points at the Judicial Branch’s How to Request to Pay a Lower Fee or File for Free page and the section names the forms it prescribes, NHJB-3234-DFP-B and NHJB-2065-F. Three published costs the page had omitted are added: the compulsory Child Impact Program at $85.00 paid to the provider, sheriff’s service at the RSA 104:31, II figure of $30 plus statutory mileage, and $40.00/$10.00 for a certified decree or the divorce certificate alone. The page went from one outbound source link to ten, and the stale — entity in one structured-data answer is replaced with a real em dash.

What we are deliberately not claiming. We cannot reconstruct what the 23 September read saw, and we are not asserting that the Judicial Branch changed, replaced or re-dated anything. The claim here is narrow: the file on its site on 2 October 2026 is stamped 07/01/2025 and publishes those four figures. We are not saying the 25 September reply from the Judicial Branch confirmed them — it did not; it pointed at the Forms and Fees page, and reading what that page serves is what settled it. We are not publishing how much of the $280.00 reaches the mediation fund: Rule 1.3(B) prints “18.22%” and “($41.00)” and those two do not agree at a $280.00 entry fee, so the page says so instead of picking one. We do not publish what a county sheriff charges today, because RSA 104:31, XIII lets each county convention raise the $30 and no statewide list of the results is published. And we did not re-read the other figures that live on New Hampshire pages beyond this one; the $85.00 class fee is the only cross-page figure checked, and it already matched the New Hampshire kit.

What we published. What a Mississippi divorce actually costs to file carried a section headed “We could not confirm how a fee waiver works in Mississippi”, and under it: “Almost every state has a way to file without paying up front — usually called proceeding in forma pauperis — but we could not find Mississippi’s procedure published on an official source, so we are not going to describe one. Ask the clerk directly.” Under “What we could not find out” a further line read “Fee-waiver mechanism not confirmed.” Meanwhile the page’s own visible FAQ answered “What if I cannot afford the filing fee in Mississippi?” with “There is a process for asking the court to waive or defer it, and this page sets out what Mississippi requires” — which the page did not do. That answer was also being emitted into the page’s FAQPage structured data, so the version handed to search engines promised a procedure the body refused to give. The section index compounded it: the entry for “If you cannot afford to file” summarized not the waiver but the card-surcharge box, so a reader with no money was told only that there is no extra charge for e-filing.

What is true. Rule 3(b) of the Mississippi Rules of Civil Procedure, in the text the Judiciary published with a 1 July 2026 revision date: “Proceeding In Forma Pauperis. A party may proceed in forma pauperis in accordance with sections 11-53-17 and 11-53-19 of the Mississippi Code Annotated. The court may, however, on the motion of any party, on the motion of the clerk of the court, or on its own initiative, examine the affiant as to the facts and circumstances of his pauperism.” The Judiciary also publishes a handout titled Pauper’s Right to Waiver of Filing Fees, last modified 26 March 2026, which quotes the rule and both statutes. Miss. Code Ann. § 11-53-17, “Poor persons may sue without security for costs”: a citizen “may commence any civil action, or answer a rule for security for costs in any court without being required to prepay fees or give security for costs, before or after commencing suit, by taking and subscribing the following affidavit” — and the statute prints the affidavit in full, beginning “I, _________ , do solemnly swear that I am a citizen of the State of Mississippi, and because of my poverty I am not able to pay the costs or give security for the same in the civil action (describing it) which I am about to commence…” Miss. Code Ann. § 11-53-19: “The court may dismiss an action commenced or continued on affidavit of poverty, if satisfied that the allegation of poverty was untrue.” Both documents were fetched from courts.ms.gov and read as PDFs on 1 October 2026.

Why we had missed it, and why that is not much of an excuse. The page’s stated reason for the gap was that Mississippi paywalls its own Code behind a LexisNexis portal, and that part is true — we still cannot read § 25-7-9 from a state server. But the waiver was never in the Code alone. It is in a rule of the Supreme Court, published as a PDF on the Judiciary’s own website, with no challenge page and no login, alongside a handout written for exactly this question. One inaccessible publisher had been treated as the whole of Mississippi’s law. The earlier check appears to have looked for the statute and stopped when the statute would not open, rather than asking whether the court that sets the fee had said anything about not paying it.

How long it was live, and what it cost a reader. The page was built on 20 August 2026 and carried this until today — six weeks. Mississippi is the poorest state in the country by median household income, and the section was addressed by name to the reader who cannot put $148 to $168 on a counter. What it told that reader was that the state publishes no way through and that they should go and ask. The affidavit the statute prints is the way through, and it has been on a state web server the whole time.

What we did. The section is rewritten and now quotes Rule 3(b) in full, quotes both statutes including the affidavit text, links all three sources with the date we read them, and says plainly that what Mississippi asks for is a sworn affidavit rather than a means test. The FAQ answer is rewritten in the body and in the FAQPage structured data so the two agree. The section index entry now describes the waiver. The “Fee-waiver mechanism not confirmed” line is replaced with the two things that genuinely are not published: no statewide form, and no income threshold. A raw — entity that was being emitted into one structured-data answer field is replaced with a real em dash. The page also now links Uniform Chancery Court Rule 9.01, which it had been relying on without citing.

What we are deliberately still not claiming. No figure on the page was wrong and none has been changed. We publish no income threshold, because neither statute sets one and we are not going to derive one. We do not name a form: the rules prescribe none and no chancery clerk we checked publishes one, so the page says to ask the clerk what they want the affidavit written on. We have not re-read §§ 11-53-17 or 11-53-19 in the Code itself — we are quoting the Judiciary’s own reproduction of them, which is an official source but not the codifier’s. § 25-7-9 remains unread from any official source. And one small inconsistency is left standing rather than papered over: the page’s “Sources last checked” stamp still reads 20 August 2026, which is older than the Harrison County confirmation already described on the page and older than the sources read today. Moving that stamp would assert that all thirteen county schedules were re-read today, and they were not. It stays until they are.

What we published. What a New York divorce actually costs to file carried a section headed “We could not confirm how a fee waiver works in New York”, and under it: “Almost every state has a way to file without paying up front — usually called proceeding in forma pauperis — but we could not find New York’s procedure published on an official source, so we are not going to describe one.” The same sentence was repeated in the page’s section index. Under “What we could not find out” a further line read “Fee waiver / poor person relief: mechanism, threshold, form and coverage all unverified.” Meanwhile the page’s own visible FAQ answered “What if I cannot afford the filing fee in New York?” with “There is a process for asking the court to waive or defer it, and this page sets out what New York requires” — which the page did not do. That FAQ answer was also being emitted into the page’s FAQPage structured data, so the version handed to search engines promised a procedure the page refused to give. Two other claims on the page were also wrong by then: that the itemisation “could not be cross-checked against an OCA publication”, and that the index number, RJI and note of issue are all “statewide statutory fees … not county-set”.

What is true. New York publishes the procedure, and two Unified Court System documents set it out. The New York County Matrimonial Support Office’s instructions for e-filing an uncontested divorce, dated 29 July 2020, state that purchasing the index number “requires payment of a $210.00 fee (the fee may be waived through a poor person’s waiver which can be obtained in the Help Center, Room 116 at 60 Centre Street)”, and name the initiating paper in the same sentence we had said we could not confirm: “Next, a Summons with Notice or a Summons and Verified Complaint must be e-filed and served upon the defendant.” The Unified Court System’s Uncontested Joint Divorce Information Booklet (JD-1) — release date 1 February 2020, revised as of 1 October 2021 — gives the mechanism: “If you qualify as indigent, you can apply for a fee waiver for the court fees to start the case, such as the index number… Only ‘Plaintiff’ (Spouse 1) can file a Fee Waiver Application (also called a Poor Person Application).” The forms are an Affidavit in Support of Application to Proceed as a Poor Person, with proof of income attached “such as a W-2 or benefit statement”, and a Poor Person Order; the affidavit is filed at the County Clerk’s Office with the initiating papers, must not be signed except before a notary, and a granted waiver reaches the later fees too — the JD-1 lists the Note of Issue and RJI fees as payable “unless you or your spouse was approved for a fee waiver.” The same booklet also corrects the county claim in terms: “Note of Issue and the Request for Judicial Intervention (RJI): $125 total. Depending on the county, the fee may be split differently between the Note of Issue and the RJI.” The $95.00 and $30.00 we itemised are Dutchess County’s split, not a statewide one.

Why we had missed it, and why that is not much of an excuse. Every official New York source we had tried was genuinely unreachable, and still is: www.nycourts.gov, ww2.nycourts.gov, iapps.courts.state.ny.us and webfiles.nycourts.gov all return HTTP 403 behind a Cloudflare managed JavaScript challenge, www.nysenate.gov returns 403 the same way, and public.leginfo.state.ny.us resets the connection. We did not bypass any of them. But iappscontent.courts.state.ny.us serves Unified Court System PDFs with no challenge at all, and county governments republish the court system’s own booklets — the JD-1 we read is served by the Broome County Clerk. One blocked hostname had been treated as the whole of New York’s court system. Worse, our own New York kit already said it: “New York’s Poor Person relief (CPLR §1101) can waive the index number fee, note of issue fee, and service costs.” Two of our pages answered the same question opposite ways, and the one a reader with no money would land on first is the one that said we did not know.

How long it was live, and what it cost a reader. The page was built on 20 August 2026 and carried this until today — six weeks. The cost falls on exactly the narrowest group of readers this site has: someone who cannot put $210 on a counter, reading the section written for them, being told the state does not publish a way through and to go ask a clerk. The procedure existed the whole time, has a name, and has two forms with titles. Some number of people read that and concluded there was nothing to ask for.

What we did. The section is rewritten and now quotes both Unified Court System documents, names the two forms, says who may file and when, links to both sources with the date we read them, and states that a granted waiver covers the $125 as well as the $210. The FAQ answer is rewritten in the body and in the FAQPage structured data so the two agree. The “could not be cross-checked against an OCA publication” sentence is replaced with the cross-check, which also corroborates the $335.00 top of the range from the court system rather than from one clerk. The county section is corrected: the totals are statewide, the split of the $125 is not. The initiating paper is named. The page previously carried no outbound link to any official source while its own opening line promised every figure was “traced to a statute, a court fee schedule, or a clerk’s own published page — and linked to it”; it now links to the two court-system documents and to both county clerk schedules. The Dutchess schedule was re-read today: index number $210.00, RJI $95.00, note of issue $30.00, certificate of dissolution $5.00, all unchanged, so the source-checked date moves to 30 September 2026. What we are not claiming. No figure on the page was wrong and none has been changed. We are not publishing an income threshold — neither document states one, and we are not going to derive it. We are not asserting CPLR 8018, 8020 or 1101 as read: no New York government server would serve us the statute text, so those remain named as the customary cites and nothing more, and that line stays under “What we could not find out”. We are not claiming the JD-1’s form names apply outside the Uncontested Joint Divorce Program, only that both documents point to the same poor person’s waiver. And sheriff service fees, the parenting-class requirement, mediation cost and any e-filing surcharge remain unverified for New York, because the sources for those really are only on the blocked host.

What we published. The e-filing by state table answers one question: may a person representing themselves electronically file a divorce? It said Your choice for Arkansas, Hawaii, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. In all eleven the answer is no. It also asserted an answer for Louisiana, Missouri and Virginia that no primary source we could then reach supports. (All three were read on 1 October 2026 and are no longer marked not confirmed; Virginia produced a correction of its own, above.) The page’s headline finding was that four states do not permit it. The number is sixteen.

Why it matters. This is the most practical sentence on a kit page — how you actually get the papers to the court. A reader in New Mexico was told they could file from home, when Rule 1-005.2(B)(1) NMRA states that self-represented parties “are prohibited from electronically filing documents.” A reader in South Carolina was told the same, when the e-filing program is limited to licensed attorneys and runs only in the Court of Common Pleas, which does not hear divorces. The cost of the error is a wasted evening at best and a missed deadline at worst.

What changed. All fifty rows were re-read against the court’s own rule, order or judiciary page on 30 September 2026. Eleven rows moved to closed to you. Four moved to not confirmed, in those words. Maine became county-by-county, because its rollout is still in progress. Nevada improved: a statewide Supreme Court rule permits self-represented e-filing, which we had recorded as varying by court. The eleven kit pages were rewritten in the same pass so the table and the kit cannot disagree, and five of them now cite a different source, because the one they carried did not support the answer.

Why we made it, which is the part worth reading. On six of the eleven states the research was right and the summary line contradicted it. New Mexico’s kit page said “You may e-file, but you do not have to” at the top, and four lines below, in its own words, “self-represented parties are affirmatively prohibited from e-filing in district court civil cases” — with the rule quoted in full underneath that. Oklahoma’s page said a self-represented party cannot register. South Carolina’s said the same. So did South Dakota’s and New Hampshire’s. Each of those pages was arguing with itself, in public, for weeks.

And our own check passed it. On 29 September we compared all fifty table rows against all fifty kit pages and published the result: zero mismatches. That was true and nearly worthless. The check compared the table’s summary against the kit’s summary — two restatements of the same research — and both said “Your choice.” It never compared either against the rule quoted on the same page. A check built that way can catch a transcription slip and cannot catch a summary that contradicts its own source, because both copies of the summary agree with each other perfectly. Our methodology page had warned, in those words, that two passes over a misread rule would agree; it did not occur to us that the misreading could be a headline sitting directly above the correct reading.

What we changed about how we check. The nightly kit check now compares each e-filing badge against the Account text and the rule quoted in that block’s own Authority note, and reports any page where the headline and the source disagree. Run against the site as it stood this morning, that check catches six of these eleven: Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina and South Dakota. It does not catch Arkansas, Hawaii, Montana, Utah or Wyoming, and that is not a weakness in the check — those five pages did not contain the right answer anywhere, so there was nothing on them to contradict. Those are research failures and they need a different remedy. (This paragraph first said seven. Two tallies were conflated while this entry was being written; it was corrected the same evening, about twenty minutes after publication.)

Update, 1 October 2026. This correction originally moved Tennessee to not confirmed as well. That was wrong in the other direction. Tenn. Sup. Ct. R. 46 approves e-filing court by court, so the unreadable statewide rule is not the authority that answers the question — the local rules are, and four of them are readable and now quoted on the kit page. Tennessee reads depends on your county. Marked not confirmed for roughly one day.

Live for approximately six weeks before correction. Found during a scheduled re-verification of the whole table, not reported by a reader.

What we published. Vermont divorce costs opened with “It costs $90.00 to file for divorce in Vermont” and put $90.00 in the headline figure, with “– $295.00 (three published tiers)” in small type beneath it. $90.00 is the lowest of three tiers and it is conditional. The page’s own FAQ then answered “Is the divorce filing fee the same in every Vermont county?” with “No. Vermont sets a base fee and individual counties add their own charges on top, so the total depends on where you file” — contradicting the section two screens above it, which said correctly that the fee is fixed statewide. That FAQ answer was also being emitted into the page’s FAQPage structured data, so the wrong version is what search engines were handed. Two cost rows read not published: sheriff’s service of process, and the COPE parent-education class. A section headed “Nothing extra to e-file” said we had looked for a portal fee and a card surcharge and “found neither published”, directly above a table listing a published 2.89% card rate for e-filing. And a line under “What we could not find out” said the statute itself could not be read on the Legislature’s site — a sentence that also broke off mid-word.

What is true. 32 V.S.A. § 1431(b)(2) reads: “Prior to the entry of any divorce or annulment proceeding in the Superior Court, there shall be paid to the clerk of the court for the benefit of the State a fee of $295.00 … If the divorce or annulment complaint is filed with a stipulation for a final order, the fee shall be $90.00 if one or both of the parties are residents and $180.00 if neither party is a resident, except that if the stipulation is not acceptable to the court or if a matter previously agreed to becomes contested, the difference between the full fee and the reduced fee shall be paid to the court prior to the issuance of a final order.” $295.00 is what you pay unless you have a signed agreement the court accepts. On counties: the fee is set by statute for the whole Family Division and paid “for the benefit of the State”; the Judiciary publishes no county surcharge. On the two unpublished rows — 32 V.S.A. § 1591(1)(A)(ii) fixes $75.00 “upon presentation of each return of service for the service of papers relating to divorce, annulments, separations, or support complaints”, with mileage on top at the rate allowed State employees under the prevailing VSEA contract; and UVM Extension, the body the Judiciary itself directs filers to, publishes the COPE figure: “The cost to attend is $79 per person.” The statute reads perfectly well at legislature.vermont.gov — § 1431 sits in chapter 17 of Title 32, and our earlier attempt had been fetching chapter 7.

The tiers themselves never moved. $295.00, $90.00 and $180.00 are correct and unchanged, confirmed twice: in the statute text read from the Legislature’s own server, and on the Judiciary’s published fee schedule, which cites § 1431(b)(2) for each amount and states them in the same words. No figure on the page was wrong. What was wrong was which one we led with, and what we said around them.

How long it was live, and what it cost a reader. The page was built on 20 August 2026 and carried all of this until today — about six weeks. The headline is the one that matters. Someone budgeting from it would have set aside $90 for a filing that costs $295 unless both spouses sign, and a filer who cannot reach agreement is exactly the person least able to absorb the difference. The county sentence pointed people at a phone call to a clerk that Vermont gives them no reason to make.

What we did. The headline now leads with $295.00 and names the condition for $90.00. The FAQ answer is rewritten in the body and in the structured data. The sheriff and COPE rows carry the published figures and link to the sources. The e-filing section now says what Vermont does publish: no portal fee, and a card surcharge that is higher through e-filing (2.89%) than at the counter (2.39%). The page had no outbound link to any official source, while its own opening line promised every figure was “traced to a statute, a court fee schedule, or a clerk’s own published page — and linked to it”; it now links to the statute and to the current fee schedule, and the court links point at vtcourts.gov, which is where vermontjudiciary.org now redirects. The fifty-state comparison and the state-law table both carried the same county claim for Vermont and are corrected, and the Vermont kit, which had the sheriff’s fee as an estimated “$75–$100”, now carries the statutory figure. What we are not claiming. Not that no Vermont clerk ever charges for anything unlisted, only that no county surcharge is published. Not a mileage figure — the statute sets it by reference to a union contract we have not traced to an official source, so the sheriff row says “$75.00 plus mileage” and the contested all-in on the kit now reads “from $528 + mileage” rather than the tidy range it used to show. And not a date for the fee schedule: the Vermont Judiciary still prints none, which is why that row still says so.

What we published. Mississippi divorce costs gave Harrison County’s uncontested joint divorce as $153.00 in the county table, in the county-by-county spread, in the component breakdown and in the FAQ — including the FAQ’s structured data, which is what search engines are handed. The headline of the same page said $168.00. We had flagged the contradiction in an open box and said we had written to the clerk, which was true, but the wrong figure stayed published in four places while we waited.

What is true. The Harrison County Chancery Clerk’s office answered on 30 September 2026: “The irreconcilable differences divorces are $168.00. You have to see the Special Master to get the divorce finalized. The $153.00 filing fees are for Name Changes and other things like that, which do not use a special master and therefore, that is why there is a difference in the pricing.” So $153.00 was never a divorce fee. Both numbers are real and we had attached the second one to the wrong kind of filing.

The arithmetic should have caught this before the clerk did. Our own page listed the components — $85.00 base, $57.50 statutorily mandated, $15.00 Special Master, $10.50 board-approved — and printed “= $153.00” directly underneath. That sum is $168.00. A total that does not equal its own addends was sitting on the page in plain sight, and no check we run looks at whether a printed sum is correct. That is the real finding here, and it is worse than the wrong figure.

How long it was live, and what it cost a reader. Since the Mississippi county sweep. Anyone budgeting from the county table for a Harrison County divorce was $15.00 short at the counter — the exact failure mode that sends somebody home to come back another day. The headline figure was right throughout, so a reader who took the number from the top of the page was fine; a reader who scrolled to their own county was not.

What we did. All four places now read $168.00, the quoted answer is on the page, and the breakdown explains that the Special Master is not optional on an irreconcilable differences divorce. What we are still not claiming: the $163.00 contested figure. We asked about irreconcilable differences and were answered about irreconcilable differences; $163.00 remains our own sum of the clerk’s published components and is labelled as unconfirmed. We do not name the individual who replied.

What we published. Rhode Island divorce costs carried five defects. The worst: a section headed “We could not confirm how a fee waiver works in Rhode Island”, telling readers we could not find the procedure on an official source. A second section headed “Nothing extra to e-file” said we had looked for a portal fee and a card surcharge and “found neither published” — directly above a table listing $17.50, $3.25 and a 3.25% card fee. The page also said the official source carried no effective or revised date; said e-filing was mandatory for attorneys and that filing over the counter avoided the two e-filing charges; and answered the fee-waiver question in its own FAQ with “this page sets out what Rhode Island requires” while the body said the opposite. That FAQ text was also being emitted into the page’s structured data, so the wrong version was what search engines were handed.

What is true. The Family Court’s Electronic Filing System Guidelines for Domestic Relations Cases publish the waiver route in terms. Section 8.2.1 requires a Motion to Proceed in Forma Pauperis, an Order and an Affidavit in Support, filed at the clerk’s office rather than electronically; section 8.2.3 says that if it is granted “the cost of service of process and filing fees shall be waived”. On e-filing, section 1.1 says efiling “shall be mandatory for all parties except for incarcerated individuals or where a waiver is granted”, and that self-represented litigants “may electronically file documents … but are not required to do so” — not attorney-specific. The three charges are published on the Judiciary’s eFileRI Fees schedule, stamped Revised March 2026; the Superior Court schedule carrying the same charges is stamped Revised November 2021; and the history line of § 9-29-19 ends at P.L. 2014, ch. 34, § 5.

The number never moved. $120.00 is correct and unchanged, read in full text from the General Assembly’s own server: § 9-29-19(a)(1), “For the entry of every petition, complaint, or action … $120.00”, with $10.00 of it forwarded to Rhode Island Legal Services under subsection (c). The $140.75 electronic total is unchanged, and no other page needed a new figure.

How long it was live, and what it cost a reader. The waiver section is the one that matters. It is aimed at people who cannot find $120, and it told them their state offered nothing — when a motion filed at the counter would have waived both the filing fee and the cost of service. Anyone who read it and gave up was turned away by us, not by Rhode Island.

What we did. All five are corrected and the page now carries five links to the primary sources, which it had none of — no external link of any kind appeared anywhere on it, while its own opening line promised every figure was “traced to a statute, a court fee schedule, or a clerk’s own published page — and linked to it”. One thing is deliberately left open: whether a Family Court counter filing carries the $17.50 and $3.25. Only the Superior Court’s schedule speaks to counter-scanned cases, the Family Court publishes no schedule of its own, and we would rather print “unconfirmed” than guess in either direction.

What was wrong. What it costs to file for divorce in Pennsylvania opened with “It costs $250.00 to file for divorce in Pennsylvania”, and its headline stat block printed $250.00 above the line “$334.73 across the three counties confirmed”. The same summary was repeated in the page’s structured data — both the Dataset description Google reads and one of the FAQPage answers — and the row on what divorce costs to file in every state printed “$250 – $334.73”, while the column immediately beside it printed the correct “$93 – $398”. Divorce laws by state printed “$333.73 / $195.25 / $398.00” in the same cell.

Why it was wrong. $250.00 is the Berks County Prothonotary’s fee for a divorce complaint containing one count. It is not a Pennsylvania figure and there is no Pennsylvania figure: each county prothonotary adopts its own fee bill under 42 Pa.C.S. § 1725(c), advertised in the Pennsylvania Bulletin, and Philadelphia’s is set by statute as a county of the first class. Of the sixteen counties whose schedules we had read and published on that same page, the fee ran from $93.00 in Potter County to $398.00 in Bucks County, with a median near $216. Ten of the sixteen charged less than the $250.00 we led with. The “$334.73 across the three counties confirmed” line was worse than stale: it survived from a version of the page that had confirmed three counties, and was still on the page after the county table had grown to sixteen.

What it changes for a reader. Somebody in Potter County budgeting from our headline was told to find $250.00 when the prothonotary wanted $93.00. Somebody in Bucks was told $250.00 and would have arrived $148.00 short. This is the specific harm of a national average printed as a local price, and we had the right numbers on the same page while the headline said otherwise.

What we changed. The lede, the stat block, the FAQ answer, the Dataset description, the fifty-state cost row and the laws-by-state cell all now read $93.00 – $398.00, Potter to Bucks, across the 16 counties we confirmed, and each says that Pennsylvania publishes no statewide fee. Four further defects found in the same read were fixed with it: Philadelphia was printed as $333.73 in three places across two pages — the cost page’s e-filing line and both the e-filing note and the cost table on the Pennsylvania kit — against $334.73 everywhere else (it is $334.73: the eleven statutory components on the face of the Philadelphia schedule sum to it exactly); the Berks fee bill was cited as “updated and effective 7/23/2026”, a date that existed only inside a file name — the schedule prints December 1, 2025 on its own first page, and the dead link to it now points at the county’s prothonotary page; Pennsylvania’s county was spelled Center in five places and is Centre; and the Washington County figures now say on their face that the most recent fee bill the county publishes is effective January 1, 2019, with its statewide JCPF component shown at the superseded $40.25.

What we still cannot confirm. Allegheny County. Our page carried $195.25 from a Family Division schedule effective 13 January 2025 in one place and “the clerk publishes no divorce filing fee we could read” in another. We cannot settle it: alleghenycounty.us, which hosts the Department of Court Records, refuses automated requests on every path, and the Fifth Judicial District’s own site publishes divorce procedure but no fee. Both places now carry the $195.25 figure with its date and an instruction to confirm by phone, which is what we can honestly say.

Found by a scheduled fee re-check reading each county prothonotary’s own published schedule against what the page claimed. The error had been live since the page was published.

What was wrong. Three pages quoted $50 as the cost of filing for divorce in Virginia. How to file for divorce in every US state used it to set the bottom of a national range — “the filing fee runs from $50 in Virginia to $435 in California” — and Divorce laws by state printed “$50 base” in its headline statistic, in its fifty-state table, and in the 8.7× spread it calculated from it. How to file for divorce in Virginia gave the fee as “roughly $50–$90”.

What the statute actually says. Va. Code § 17.1-275(A)(26): “In all divorce and separate maintenance proceedings, and all civil actions that do not include one or more claims for the award of monetary damages, the clerk’s fee chargeable to the plaintiff shall be $60, $10 of which shall be apportioned to the Courts Technology Fund”. The $50 we were printing is Account Code 304 — the part of that $60 that stays with the clerk after the $10 technology apportionment is taken out. It is an accounting line on a remittance schedule. It is not a price, and it is not payable on its own.

What it actually costs. The Circuit Court Fee Schedule published by the Office of the Executive Secretary lists the divorce row as writ tax $5, Technology Trust Fund $8, legal aid $9, Courts Technology Fund $10, clerk $50 and indigent defense $1 — a $83 mandatory core — then adds up to $4 for a law library, up to $2 for courthouse maintenance and up to $5 for paper submission where the locality has adopted them. We queried Virginia’s own Circuit Court Fee Calculator for all 120 circuit courts on 27 September 2026, taking every court name from its own dropdown. Eight totals came back: $83.00 in 4 courts, $85.00 in 15, $87.00 in 20, $88.00 in 3, $89.00 in 26, $90.00 in 6, $92.00 in 15 and $94.00 in 31. Virginia is still the cheapest state in which to file, but only in Amherst, Essex, Northumberland and Roanoke County. More of its courts charge $94 than charge anything else.

A second error, found in the course of fixing the first. What it costs to file for divorce in Virginia named Fairfax at $94.00 while the Virginia kit gave Fairfax as $89.00. Fairfax is $94.00. The $89.00 was the fee schedule’s generic “basic cost” column, which assumes the law library and courthouse maintenance fees at their maximum and no paper-submission fee; Fairfax charges the paper-submission fee as well.

And a third, which is a trap in the calculator itself. Our Virginia cost page warned readers to watch for “Richmond City Circuit ($83.00)” against “Richmond Circuit — Richmond County ($94.00)”. Both halves were wrong, and the reason is worth saying plainly: there is no “Richmond City Circuit” in the calculator. The city of Richmond is “Richmond Circuit” and charges $94.00; the rural county is “Richmond County Circuit” and charges $85.00, not $94.00. We had recorded $83.00 for a court name that does not exist — because the calculator answers $83.00, the bare statutory core, to any court name it does not recognize, including a blank one. It does not say that it has not understood you. Any fee we ever took from that tool by typing a court name rather than choosing it from the list could have come back as the cheapest figure in the state. That is now how the page describes it, and the sweep behind it was redone using only the dropdown’s own names.

What we changed. The national range on the kits hub now reads $83 to $435. The spread on the fifty-state page is 5.2×, not 8.7×. The Virginia kit gives $83–$94 with the distribution, names the $60 statutory clerk’s fee as a component rather than a price, and corrects Fairfax to $94. Its “typical all-in” floor has moved from $70 to $83, because $70 was below the cheapest filing fee in the state and so could not happen. The Virginia cost page corrects Richmond County to $85.00 and rewrites the naming warning.

What we are not claiming. These are the figures Virginia’s own calculator returned on 27 September 2026 for a divorce with no sheriff service and no amount in controversy. Localities adopt and drop these assessments by ordinance, and the fee schedule itself carries a revision date rather than an effective date for each court. Call the clerk before you write the check.

What we did. Every case name with a reporter citation printed anywhere on the site — forty of them — was read in primary text: the Library of Congress and supremecourt.gov for US Reports, and the printed reporter volumes for everything else. Not summaries. Thirty-eight were correct in every particular — name, volume, reporter, page, court and year.

The one that matters. Business goodwill in a divorce cited Trahan v. Trahan, 49 So. 3d 889, as “(La. Ct. App. 2010)” and described it as “an example of a state permitting the discount, with a specific percentage affirmed on appeal.” 49 So. 3d 889 is not an appellate opinion and contains no percentage. It is a one-line disposition of the Louisiana Supreme Court in Scott David Trahan v. Margaret Garrison Trahan, No. 2010-C-2014, 12 November 2010, and its entire text is an application for a writ of certiorari and review, followed by the word “Denied.” There is a First Circuit decision underneath it at a different citation, which we have not read. The underlying point about marketability discounts may well be sound; this citation does not establish it. The page now says exactly that, and it also now names the source it was taken from — a valuation consultancy’s article, not a court.

The smaller one. The prenup and death carried the same short case name we corrected elsewhere today: it is Lasche v. George W. Lasche Basic Retirement Plan. Fixed.

Why this is filed as high rather than medium. Nothing here changed a legal rule stated on a page. But a citation is a promise that a reader can go and check us, and a citation pointing at a one-line writ denial is a promise we could not keep. That is the kind of error this site exists to avoid, so it is graded on what it would have cost a reader who followed it, not on how much text changed.

Still outstanding, and stated plainly. Forty-five further case names appear on the site with no reporter citation at all — among them Tropea v. Tropea, Bisbing v. Bisbing, Travis v. Murray and Jaffee v. Redmond. A reader cannot check any of those. They have not been verified and are not claimed to be; adding their citations is scheduled work, not done work.

How long it was live. Not established.

What changed. Every published figure on all fifty state cost pages — 491 of them — was re-read against the court’s own fee schedule or the statute cited beside it. Six pages were wrong. Two of those cost money:

• Alabama. We published Madison County at $245.00, reconstructed from the statutory docket fee plus the county’s local-act add-on. The Twenty-Third Circuit Court publishes a flat $324.00 to file a divorce. Anyone who budgeted from our page arrived $79 short. The page now leads with the court’s own figure and explains that a statutory reconstruction is a floor, not a total.
• Minnesota. We published $340.00, correctly cited to Minn. Stat. § 357.021, subd. 2(1). That figure is the statutory base fee and nobody pays it. Scott County’s published total is $403.00 — the base plus a $50.00 county fee and a $13.00 law library fee. The citation was right and the page was still misleading, which is the worse kind of error.
• Kansas. The law library row cited K.S.A. 20-3162, a section that does not exist. The fee is set by K.S.A. 20-3129, at $2.00 to $10.00 in a case like a divorce. Separately, sheriff service was published as “varies” when K.S.A. 28-110(a) sets a flat statewide $15.00, waived entirely for Protection from Abuse Act process. Both are now stated.
• Florida. Every dollar figure was right; three of them pointed at the wrong subsection. $295 was cited to § 28.241(1)(b), which is the reopen fee capped at $50; the $4 court education fee to (1)(c), which is the cross-claim fee; and the $10 summons to § 28.24, which contains no summons charge at all. A reader following any of those citations landed on a different fee. They now read (1)(a)1.b., (1)(a)1.c. and (1)(d).
• Virginia. Two errors in one box. We published the Courthouse Construction Fee as “$0.00 – $2.00”; it is capped at $3.00 and charged only where the amount in controversy exceeds $500.00, so on a divorce it is $0.00. And we stated that “the official source carries no effective or revised date” — the Office of the Executive Secretary’s fee schedule prints Rev: 07/26 in the footer of every page. We had been reading the undated calculator instead of the dated schedule.
• South Dakota. We told readers that SDCL § 16-2-29.2 is the fee-setting statute. It is the fee-waiver section and sets no amount. The clerk of courts fees are at § 16-2-29. No figure changed.

What we did. All six pages were corrected and re-stamped. Twenty-five other states came back exact on every figure and were re-stamped too. Nineteen states were not re-stamped — some because a source could not be read, some because a citation does not support the fee attached to it, and three (Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee) because the sweep ran out of budget before it finished them. Those stamps stay where they were. A stale date is honest; a fresh one we did not earn is not.

Also found, and not yet fixed. New Hampshire’s page and the Judicial Branch schedule it links disagree on four figures, and Harrison County, Mississippi publishes two different totals for the same divorce from two of its own pages. We have written to both rather than guess.

What we published. A live payment link for the $149 annual mark, on two public pages — the badge page and the assessment page — beside the words “license it here once you have passed” and “only license it after you have passed the assessment.”

What was actually true. “Once you have passed” was an instruction, not a gate. The link was a plain public URL. Anybody who reached either page could have paid $149 without taking the assessment, without holding a real estate license, and without us checking anything. Nothing in the checkout knew who they were.

Why this is the most serious kind of error we can make. This site argues on page after page that the certification is free, cannot be bought, and means a named human verified a license with the agency that issued it. The one thing that is for sale is the mark that represents it. Leaving that purchasable by strangers meant somebody who had been checked by nobody could have displayed our mark to a person in the middle of a divorce. The gate we describe at length did not exist at the only point where money changes hands.

What we did. The payment link has been removed from the site entirely and is now published nowhere. It is sent to an agent after they pass the assessment and after their license has been verified with the issuing agency. Both pages keep the price, what the mark buys and what it does not — an agent should be able to read all of that before deciding. They simply no longer hand out the key.

How long it was live. The link went up on 18 September 2026 and came down on 19 September. Nobody bought it, which is luck rather than design, and is not a reason to grade this lower.

How it was found. By the site’s owner, reading the page and asking why the mark was available to people who had not passed. Not by a check, because no check looks for this.

What we published. In the present tense, on six pages: “We email you at seven days… We ask again at six months.” On the application page it was the rating that governs an agent’s place once they are on a panel. On the badge page it was listed as grounds for stripping a certification. On the referral page it was the answer to “what if it goes wrong.”

What is true. The sender does not exist. Nothing has been built that emails a referred client at seven days or at six months.

Why we are calling this an error rather than a plan. It had not yet misled anybody, because we have not made a referral yet — there has been no client to email. But a page that says “we email” is making a claim about the present, and the day the first introduction goes out is the day that claim becomes false. It would have become false quietly, at the exact moment nobody was auditing it.

What we did. All six pages now say we will, and three of them say in the same breath that no referral has been made yet, so nothing has run yet. We would rather describe a machine that is not switched on than let a reader assume it is.

How long it was live. Since each page was written. We do not have a date we are confident in for all six and we are not going to state one.

What we published. The box at the top of this page has listed six checks running on a schedule. The daily one said every page was fetched and checked for “broken internal links, claims we have retired and must never republish… and whether any page contradicts what we say about our own money.” Two of the other five — a Monday structural pass and a monthly re-read — were described in the same terms.

What was actually running. One of the six. The source monitor re-fetches every external link we cite, roughly 4,700 of them, and reports when one dies or changes. That check is real, it is live, and it works. The others were written down as intentions and read on this page as facts.

How we know they were not running. On 19 September every published page was read rather than searched, and the read found one example from each category the daily check names: four retracted claims still live in paraphrase (“the cap is real and it stays at five,” “two to five in a county,” “re-verified annually,” “more than eight hundred and fifty pages”); one broken internal link, inside the code we ask agents to copy and paste; and a live $149 checkout for a credential another page says is not open. A daily check doing what this box claimed would have caught all six.

Why the sweeps kept reporting clean. The retraction list was a list of exact phrases. Nobody writes the same sentence twice. The retracted claim was “never more than five”; what was live said “it stays at five” and “two to five in a county.” A string search passes and the claim is still on the page. A check for a retired claim has to test what the sentence means, which is why it has not been built yet and why saying it had been was wrong.

How long it was live. The box has described six checks since it was written. We are not going to state a start date we cannot evidence — it is weeks, not days.

What we did. The box now says what runs and, in the same breath, what does not. No check was deleted from the plan; the claim that it was already running was deleted. This entry stays whether or not the checks get built, because a plan published here is a claim like any other.

What we published. Sixty-nine links on thirty-eight pages, pointing at Justia, FindLaw and similar commercial sites, with the link text reading “source” — and on eight pages “the state source.” Justia is not the state source. It is a private company republishing state law.

Why it matters more here than it would elsewhere. The one thing this site claims is that every quotation was read in the source named on the page, on the state’s own site. A reader checking our work clicks the link that says “source.” Sending them to a republisher while telling them it is the state is the exact failure the rule exists to prevent, and we did it on thirty-eight pages.

What is true. Some states genuinely publish no free official text — Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee publish their codified statutes only through a commercial publisher. For those, a commercial link is the best available and our own rule expressly allows it, provided the label says what it is. That proviso was the part we were not honouring.

What we did. All sixty-nine now read “read it on Justia” (or FindLaw, or whichever) followed by “a commercial publisher, not the state’s own site.” No citation changed and no URL changed — only the label, because the label was the thing that was false. Where an official state link already existed on the same page it was left exactly as it was: Iowa, for instance, cites legis.iowa.gov correctly on the same page where a Justia link was mislabelled.

How it was found. By accident, and that is the uncomfortable part. It surfaced while correcting something unrelated on the Mississippi money page; one link looked wrong, and a sweep of all 993 published pages found thirty-seven more. No automated check was looking for this, because the rule lived in our heads and in a skill file rather than in a gate. One now is: the pre-publish gate blocks any commercial-publisher link whose label does not say so, and it runs across every live page daily.

Why this is graded high. Not because a reader would have been misinformed about the law — the citations themselves were right, and Justia’s text of a statute is generally accurate. Because it misrepresented where our information came from, on a site that asks to be trusted precisely on that point. How long it was live: we do not have a reliable date for when each link was added and are not going to invent one. Months.

What we published. A family of fifty pages at /cost-of-divorce-in-<state>/, each headed “How much does a divorce cost in [state]?” and each leading with a filing fee in large type. Across all forty-nine we checked, there is not one link to a court, a legislature or any other official source — not a single one. Every other money page on this site ties its figure to a fee schedule or a court rule. These do not.

What is true. We do not yet know, state by state, which number is right — and that is itself the finding. A parallel family at /<state>-divorce-costs/ covers the same ground with the figure cited to the court’s own fee schedule, and on fourteen states the two families disagree: Alabama, Delaware, Hawaii, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia. New York is the widest — $335 on the uncited page against $210 on the sourced one. A reader could have budgeted from either.

What we have done today, and what we have deliberately not done. Every one of the forty-nine now carries a notice at the top of the page saying its figures are not sourced and linking to the sourced page for that state; on the fourteen, the notice says in terms that the two pages disagree and which one to use. We have not overwritten the numbers. Copying a figure across from the other page would be moving a number without reading its source, which is the same class of mistake that produced this. The fourteen are being re-verified against each state’s fee schedule, and this entry will be updated when they are.

Updated the same day, and the update is worse than the original entry. We went back to each state’s own fee schedule, and the problem is not fourteen wrong numbers. It is that for seven of these states a single filing fee does not exist. Alabama, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Tennessee set a base by statute and let each county add its own surcharges, so the real answer is a range: Pennsylvania runs from $214.25 in Chester County to $398 in Bucks, and Tennessee from $184.50 in Davidson to $431.50 in Shelby. On six states the true fee matches neither figure we published. And Hawaii, Michigan, Tennessee and Mississippi have a second tier for cases with minor children that neither of our pages shows at all — Michigan is $175 without children and $255 with.

Minnesota is the one to understand, because both our pages were right. The statewide base is $340. Hennepin County’s total is $402, because the county adds $50 and a $12 law library fee. One page published the base and the other published one county’s total, and neither said which it was. Two correct numbers, presented so that a reader could only conclude one of them was wrong.

So the fix is not a number, it is the format. A page that answers “how much does a divorce cost in Pennsylvania” with one figure in large type is giving a wrong answer however carefully the figure was chosen. Those pages are being rewritten to show the statutory base, the county variation and the tiers, the way our Vermont page already does with three figures for three filing scenarios. Until that is done, all forty-nine say at the top that their figures are unconfirmed and that the clerk of the court is the only number that binds you. We have not published the re-verified figures as a corrected table, because several of them rest on a single reading of a single county’s schedule, and a single reading is how this started.

The base-fee-plus-county trapIt is worth naming on its own, because it is not a Cusp problem, it is everywhere. Most published “filing fee by state” tables give one number per state. In at least seven states that number cannot be right for most filers, and there is no way to tell from the table which states those are.

Why this is graded high. It is a figure about money, on a page whose only job is that figure, published without a source, and in fourteen states wrong by our own account. How long it was live: these pages have carried uncited fees since they were created. We do not have a creation date we are confident in for the whole family, so we are not going to state one — it is months, not days.

How it was found, which matters more than the fix. Not by a reader and not by a state agency. By a site-wide copy gate, run for the first time across all 991 published pages, which flags a dollar figure with no citation near it. The check had been written days earlier and had only ever been run on pages we were about to publish. Running it over everything already live is what surfaced this, and it is now a daily job.

Update, 18 September 2026 — we did not do what this entry said we would. The paragraph above says those pages “are being rewritten” to show the base, the county variation and the tiers. They were not. On 18 September all fifty /cost-of-divorce-in-<state>/ pages were retired and now redirect permanently to the sourced page for the same state at /<state>-divorce-costs/. We are recording the change of plan rather than quietly editing the sentence, because a plan published on this page is a claim like any other.

Why retire rather than rewrite. The sourced family already covers every one of the fifty states — we checked the mapping is one-to-one — and does it at roughly five times the length with each figure tied to a statute or a court’s own fee schedule. Rewriting forty-nine uncited pages to match a page that already exists would have produced two versions of the same answer, which is the condition that caused this error in the first place. Nothing a reader could use was lost: the only material on the retired pages that the sourced pages lack was the county-by-county figures, and those were the uncited numbers this entry is about.

What is still outstanding, and we are not pretending otherwise. The base-fee-plus-county trap described below is a real defect in the surviving pages too. Seven states — Alabama, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Tennessee — cannot honestly be answered with one number, and the sourced pages for those states still lead with one. Retiring the duplicate family does not fix that; it only stops us getting it wrong in two places at once.

What we published. On 13 September, in a correction on this page: “Neither affidavit does any arithmetic. Both are fillable PDFs with zero calculation built in — we checked the files themselves and there is no scripting of any kind in either.”

What is true. Both JD-FM-6-SHORT and JD-FM-6-LONG calculate automatically, and thoroughly. Each carries a calculation-order array with 36 entries and 36 fields with a calculate action. The long form has 712 form fields and 821 JavaScript actions; the short form has 413 fields and 493. Both carry document-level JavaScript.

What the form works out for you, so nobody reads our old sentence and does it by hand: total base pay across up to three jobs; every mandatory deduction per job and their total; total other deductions; total weekly expenses; total liabilities and total weekly payments toward them; home equity as fair market value minus the mortgage and any line of credit; equity in each vehicle; the net value of real estate, vehicles, bank accounts, stocks and funds, insurance, retirement plans, business interests and other assets; the total net value of all assets; children’s assets; total gross weekly income across items (a) to (y); and net weekly income as gross minus mandatory deductions.

How we got it wrong, precisely. We counted the byte sequences /JS and /AA in the raw file and got zero for both. In a modern PDF those objects sit inside compressed object streams, where a byte scan cannot see them. Reading the same two files with a real PDF library found everything above in seconds.

The part that is worse than the mistake. The same scan reported zero form fields on a form that is plainly fillable. That is an impossible result, it was printed in our own output, one of us read it, wrote it down as “field count approx: 0” — and published the conclusion anyway. The check announced its own failure and we did not listen. An anomalous zero is not a finding; it is a broken instrument.

What this cost, said plainly. We had recommended building a paid financial-affidavit workbook — a spreadsheet that adds up what the form supposedly would not. That product had exactly one justification and this correction removes it. The recommendation is withdrawn. What the form genuinely does not do is narrow: it prints the weekly-conversion rules (bi-weekly divide by two, monthly multiply by twelve and divide by fifty-two, and so on) but does not apply them, and it does not tell you which of the two forms you need. Neither is worth charging for.

What we changed about how we check. Any claim about what a file does is now made with a library that parses the format, never a byte scan — and an implausible zero stops the work instead of feeding it. The Connecticut guide never carried the wrong claim; it was in our own reasoning and in this corrections page, which is where it has been undone.

How we found it. After correcting Connecticut we audited all fifty state kit pages for the same pattern: a page steering a reader between two versions of a form using words like simple and complex, with no figure nearby. Six pages matched. Four were the standard disclaimer sentence and not the error. Two were real.

Maryland, what we said. That CC-DR-030 “is built for straightforward child-support-guideline cases” and CC-DR-031 “is for alimony, contested property, or income above the guidelines” — required under Rule 9-202.

Maryland, what is true. Two things were wrong. The rule is 9-203, not 9-202, and each form says so on its own face: CC-DR-030 prints “Md. Rule 9-203(b)” and CC-DR-031 prints “Md Rule 9-203(a)”. And the choice is a number: the Maryland Judiciary’s own guidance is CC-DR-030 where the case includes child support and combined monthly income is $30,000 or less, and CC-DR-031 where the case addresses alimony, property distribution or child support and combined monthly income is more than $30,000. $30,000 a month is $360,000 a year, the top of the Maryland child support guidelines schedule — which is why our old phrase “income above the guidelines” was pointing at the right line without ever printing it.

Connecticut, the leftover. On 13 September we corrected the short-vs-long paragraph and the JD-FM-6-SHORT row of the forms table, and missed the JD-FM-6-LONG row two lines below it, which still described the long form as being for “self-employment/real estate/complex finances”. The same wrong test, in the same table, surviving the fix aimed at it. It now states the $75,000 threshold.

What the audit also found, and this part is good news. All fifty state kit pages are structurally complete: seven to nine sections each, between 15 and 99 form identifiers, a filing-fee table on every one, the deadline calculator with its one-week and one-day reminders on every one, and the “not a law firm, not legal advice” statement on every one. Fee-waiver material is missing from six of them — Mississippi, Louisiana, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Hawaii — and that is the gap that matters most, because it matters most to the readers least able to pay. It is logged and will be fixed.

The lesson we are writing down rather than learning twice. Both errors were the same act: paraphrasing a form’s instruction instead of quoting its threshold. A paraphrase reads more helpfully and can be wrong in both directions at once. Where a court form states a test, we now print the test.

What we said. That JD-FM-6-SHORT is “built for simpler finances — mainly W-2 wage income, no business interests” and that JD-FM-6-LONG is “for anyone with self-employment income, real estate beyond a primary residence, or more complex holdings.”

What is true. Both forms state the test in their own first paragraph, and it is a number. JD-FM-6-SHORT: “Use this short version if your gross annual income is less than $75,000 … and your total net assets are less than $75,000.” JD-FM-6-LONG: “Use this long version if either your gross annual income is more than $75,000 … or your total net assets are more than $75,000, or if both are more than $75,000.” Both forms are Rev. 2-16.

Why this is high severity and not a wording quibble. The two tests disagree in both directions. Under Connecticut’s actual rule, a self-employed person earning $40,000 with $10,000 of net assets uses the short form — our page would have sent them to the long one. A straightforward W-2 employee earning $90,000 must use the long form — our page implied the short one was fine. The second error is the damaging one, and the page’s own sentence explains why: filing the short form when you are over the threshold is the most common way to be sent back to redo it. We printed the warning and then gave the advice that causes the thing it warns about.

How we found it. Not by re-reading our own page. By downloading both PDFs from jud.ct.gov/webforms and reading the instruction paragraph at the top of each. The test was in the first four lines of both documents.

What changed. That section now leads with the dollar threshold, states the and / either logic explicitly, gives both counterintuitive cases, and names Section I and Section IV as where the two figures come from. The forms table row no longer says “simple finances”.

One thing we noticed while checking and are not going to fix, because we cannot. Neither affidavit does any arithmetic. Both are fillable PDFs with zero calculation built in — we checked the files themselves and there is no scripting of any kind in either. Every subtotal and total on a sworn financial statement is added up by hand by the person signing it, on a form last revised in February 2016.

What we said. Both kits carried the badge “Your choice” and the headline “You may e-file, but you do not have to,” and both said paper was “still accepted — you can file over the counter.”

What is true. Neither state lets a self-represented divorce filer e-file at all. Douglas County District Court’s clerk states it flatly: “eFiling is for Attorneys only. If you are a member of the public attempting to file with the District Court, do not use eFiling.” In Kentucky a KYeCourts account does offer “Self-Represented Litigant” as an account type — which is how we got this wrong — but the Court of Justice’s own eCourts Help site says: “At this time, self-represented litigants are only able to electronically file small claims cases.” Divorce is not on that list.

How we found it. Building the fifty-state e-filing comparison forced every state’s fields to be read against each other rather than one page at a time. Both kits were internally contradictory and had been all along — the Kansas cost field already said “pro se filers do not use the system,” and its Account field already said the system was closed to them, directly under a badge saying the choice was yours. Nobody reading one page in isolation had reason to notice.

What we changed. Both badges now read “You file on paper.” Both kits gained a Who may e-file row quoting the rule, and the Paper row now says paper is required of you rather than merely accepted. The same reading also found three states — Alaska, Illinois and Iowa — badged “Required of you” while their Paper row said paper was freely accepted; each now names its actual exemption route, which differs in all three.

What it turned up next. Reading fifty states’ fields against each other, rather than one page at a time, also showed what was missing. Bankruptcy appeared on five questions inside divorce and debt and nowhere else — and typing “bankruptcy” into this site’s own search sent you to two unrelated pages. There was no page saying what a filing actually stops. There is now: bankruptcy and divorce, read against 11 U.S.C. §§ 101(14A), 362(b)(2), 523(a) and 1328(a). A gap is not a correction, so it is recorded here as what the correction led to rather than as an error of its own.

How long it was live. Since the e-filing boxes were added to the kits.

What we said. That the largest US study of sexual abuse allegations in custody disputes “found sexual abuse alleged in 1.9%” of cases.

What the study says. “Records maintained by family court workers place the figure at less than 2%.” An inexact bound. The authors did not publish a decimal, and no source we can find reports one. We invented the precision.

Why this is worse than being wrong by more. A number that is off is an error. A number that is more precise than its source is a claim about how carefully we read, and it was false. That is the one thing this site says it does not do.

What we changed. The sentence now quotes the bound. It also names the study and its year for the first time — Thoennes and Tjaden, 1990 — and says the 50/33/17 determination breakdown comes from a subsample of 129 cases, not from the full sample. That denominator was missing, and “about half were believed to involve abuse” reads very differently at 129 than at several thousand.

How long it was live. Since the page was published on 4 September 2026.

What was wrong: Our money page said California never adopted the federal change to alimony taxation “for any agreement, whenever executed,” because its Internal Revenue Code conformity date is frozen before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. That was true when written about instruments executed 2019–2025. It is not true now. Under SB 711, California conforms to the federal treatment for any divorce or separation instrument executed on or after 1 January 2026 — and for a pre-2026 instrument modified after that date where the modification expressly says the SB 711 amendments apply.

Why it matters: anyone divorcing in California right now is on the wrong side of the date we described. Two identical orders signed six weeks apart, either side of 1 January 2026, now have different California tax treatment for the life of the order. Telling someone they still get a state deduction they no longer get is the kind of error that shows up as an assessment.

Why we made it: we reasoned from California’s general conformity-date mechanism instead of reading the Franchise Tax Board’s own alimony page, which states the position and the dates directly and was last updated 7 January 2026. The general mechanism was the right explanation for the old rule and the wrong guide to the current one. Found while running a fifty-state conformity survey.

Live for approximately eleven hours before correction.

What was wrong: The page said Alabama’s Protection From Abuse Act contains no firearms provision, and that the federal rule was therefore the only protection. Alabama does prohibit firearm possession by a person subject to a qualifying protection order, at Ala. Code § 13A-11-72(a)(1) — mandatory, automatic, and a Class C felony.

Why: We searched all eleven sections of the Protection From Abuse Act and found nothing, and stopped there. The provision is in the criminal code, not the domestic violence chapter. This is the most consequential error we have made: telling someone no protection exists when it does is worse than most things a page like this can do.

Live for approximately four hours before correction.

What was wrong: The page said South Dakota had no firearms provision at all. In fact SDCL § 25-10-24 lets a court require the respondent to surrender any dangerous weapon and any concealed pistol permit to local law enforcement.

Why: The section sits inside chapter 25-10 — the chapter we searched. We missed it. Because the provision is discretionary, the practical effect of the error was to make readers less likely to ask for something they are entitled to request.

Live for approximately seven hours before correction.

The claim: Usually given as a ladder — 50% of first marriages, 67% of second, 73% of third. It appears on legal sites, therapy sites, and in books from major publishers.

What we found: No primary source. The attribution most often given is the Forest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Missouri — a graduate teaching school, not a research body, which never published a study supporting it. It announced closure in December 2014, closed in 2015, and filed for Chapter 11 in 2018. There is no document to check and no institution left to ask.

Why it survives unchallenged: because nothing official contradicts it. The National Center for Health Statistics discontinued collection of detailed marriage and divorce certificate data effective 1 January 1996, announced in the Federal Register of 15 December 1995, citing resource constraints and state reporting that had fallen to roughly 77% coverage of marriages and 49% of divorces. No federal agency has published a divorce rate broken out by order of marriage in over three decades.

What is actually defensible: Bramlett & Mosher, NCHS Vital and Health Statistics 23(22), 2002, using the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, Table 41: 39% of second marriages disrupted within ten years, against 33% of first marriages. Second marriages are somewhat less stable. They are not twice as likely to fail.

Caveat we are obliged to state: that figure covers women aged 15–44 in 1995, so it excludes older remarriers entirely and describes marriages formed decades ago. It is the best available federal estimate, not a current national figure. There isn’t one.