How We Verify
Data as of , from data/verification-receipts.json.
Some pages on UK Law Reference display a small "Machine checks" line. This page explains exactly what that line means: what our automated scripts actually check, what numbers they produce, and — just as importantly — what they do not check. These are software checks, not a substantive legal review. No one has read every page on this site and confirmed the law is stated correctly; that is not what these checks do.
Quote matching against official judgment transcripts
For cases with a judgment cached from Find Case Law, a script compares every quoted passage attributed to that judgment against the cached transcript text, normalising whitespace and punctuation. Each quote gets one of three grades:
MATCH
The quote appears verbatim (after normalisation) in the cached transcript. Only MATCH-grade quotes count toward the "n of m matched" figure shown on a case page.
NEAR
Most of the quote's wording appears in the transcript but not an exact match — commonly punctuation drift or an ellipsed middle. Not counted as matched.
MISS
Below the matching threshold. This does not automatically mean the quote is wrong — it may come from a law report rather than the transcript, or a different stage of the same litigation — but it has not been machine-confirmed against the transcript text. Not counted as matched.
A case page only ever shows the honest fraction: matched quotes over total quotes checked on that page. If a quote is NEAR or MISS, it is not folded into the matched count, and the fraction is shown as-is — we never round up. Cases with no cached judgment, or no key quotes, show no machine-checks line at all: there is no artifact to report, so we report nothing rather than a generic badge.
Site-wide, last audit 2026-08-24:
174 of 174 quotations checked across 125 cached judgments were MATCH-grade (0 NEAR, 0 MISS).
External link health
A separate script periodically probes every external URL cited across the site's content files and records whether each one resolves (OK), redirects, returns a dead-link status from a trusted host, or needs a manual check (bot-blocks and untrusted 4xx responses are not auto-classified as dead). Confirmed dead links are triaged against a replacement URL, with the fetched evidence recorded per link. This check runs site-wide, against the URLs cited across our content, rather than being tied to individual pages — so it appears here as an aggregate, not as a per-page receipt.
Last sweep 2026-07-28, 1641 URLs probed:
- 886 resolved cleanly (OK)
- 298 redirected
- 162 confirmed dead from a trusted host
- 295 flagged for manual check (bot-blocks / untrusted responses)
- 347 of 353 triaged dead/redirected links had a replacement URL identified
- 217 further links reviewed for cross-host redirects (canonical-domain moves, trailing slashes, fragment-only differences)
Forms fee/reference drift
For each court and tribunal form listed on the site, a script fetches the form's official gov.uk publication page and checks whether the form code we cite still appears on that page — a signal that the form may have been renamed, withdrawn, or consolidated into a different form since we last checked. This is also a site-wide aggregate rather than a per-case receipt, since forms content is not part of the case-law dataset.
Last run 2026-07-19:
25 forms checked against their gov.uk page; 6 were flagged as potentially renamed or withdrawn. As of 2026-07-28, 0 remain flagged.
What is not checked
These scripts check narrow, mechanical things — does a quoted string appear in a cached document, does a URL resolve, does a form code appear on a government page. They do not check, and never claim to check:
- Whether a case summary, ratio, or explanation of the law is accurate
- Whether a citation is to the correct case, section, or authority
- Whether the law described is still current (statutes are amended, cases are overruled)
- Whether content is relevant, complete, or appropriate advice for a reader's situation
- Anything on pages outside the scope of these three checks — most site content has no machine-check artifact at all, and shows no receipt
Automated, not a legal review
These checks are run by scripts, on a schedule, against cached and fetched source material. No human legal review sits behind the "Machine checks" line or the figures on this page — it is exactly what the software found, nothing more. UK Law Reference is not a law firm and is not authorised or regulated by the SRA, BSB, or CILEX Regulation. Content on this site is general legal information, not legal advice, and using it does not create a solicitor-client (or barrister-client) relationship. For advice on your specific situation, consult a regulated legal professional.