Affiliate disclosure
Current status
legal-lead.com has four active affiliate relationships (updated September 3, 2026, the day the fourth went live, as promised).
JustAnswer. Some situation guides link to JustAnswer's ask-a-lawyer service. Those links appear only where a quick paid question is a genuinely reasonable middle option between free resources and hiring an attorney.
Rocket Lawyer. Our business-formation guide links to Rocket Lawyer's start-a-business service. That link appears only after the guide has explained how to file directly with your own state for the state's fee, which is cheaper and is the right answer for most single-owner businesses.
LegalZoom. The same business-formation guide links to LegalZoom's independent-attorney service, and only at the point where the guide says a template is the wrong tool: contested or complex ownership, outside investment, or a licensed profession. It sits below the cheaper options rather than above them.
Termly. The business-formation guide mentions Termly's privacy policy generator in the list of obligations that follow forming a company, alongside the option of writing one yourself. It is one line in a checklist, not a recommendation to buy.
In all four cases, if you use the service after clicking our link, we earn a commission at no
additional cost to you. Those links are marked rel="sponsored". Every other
external link on this site still goes to a primary source (a government agency, a court
system, a statute, an academic legal reference) and earns us nothing.
How we choose what to link
The free, authoritative resource is always presented alongside or ahead of the paid one. A reader who never clicks a sponsored link loses nothing: the guides, the statute-of-limitations calculator, and the primary-source citations are complete without it. Our priorities remain:
- Build a reader base who find the guides genuinely useful
- Cite primary sources for every factual claim so readers can verify
- Recommend paid services only where they fit the reader's actual situation
The rules these links follow
Every affiliate link on this site is placed under the same rules, and they are not negotiable with an advertiser:
- Every affiliate link is visibly disclosed in line on the page where it appears, per FTC guidance.
- The underlying HTML carries
rel="sponsored". - Recommendations are governed by the editorial policy below, not by which advertiser pays the most.
- We do not accept "sponsored content" in editorial pages, paid removal of negative coverage, or anything that compromises editorial independence.
Our editorial policy (whether or not money is involved)
We will only recommend a service if all three of the following are true:
- The service is legitimate and operates in good faith with consumers.
- For a typical reader of the page where the recommendation appears, the service is a reasonable starting point.
- We would recommend the same service to a friend in the same situation.
Conversely:
- We will recommend free or government-provided options when they're the right answer.
- We will not recommend services we believe are predatory, regardless of payout potential.
- We will not invent reviews, fabricate experience with services we haven't evaluated, or write fake testimonials.
What we don't do (and won't)
- Sell your data. Email signups go to our newsletter list; we don't sell or share that list.
- Accept paid "sponsored content" in editorial pages.
- Take money to remove negative coverage of a service.
- Promote services with documented patterns of fraud or consumer harm.
Questions
If you have a question about our editorial policy, or want to flag a service we should not recommend, contact us.
Last updated: September 3, 2026.