ESQ HQ · New York Law Watch
How Law Watch works
Where the decisions come from. Law Watch takes slip opinions from the New York State Law Reporting Bureau’s daily pages for each court and the weekly advance sheets. Only the opinion text is kept. The Bureau’s headnotes, digest entries and research references are editorial matter published under licence and never enter the pipeline.
Clean text first. Before any model reads a decision, the text is checked for damage: dropped ligatures (the “fled” for “filed” problem), page furniture copied from the website, truncated pages and other extraction faults. A decision that cannot be cleaned is held and is not published.
The holding. A summary of the holding, forty to one hundred and twenty words, is drafted by the firm’s own in-house model from the clean text and graded by three independent model reviewers. A summary that fails grading is held.
The court’s words. Every quotation on this site was checked word for word against the opinion text by the firm’s verification engine before it was shown. If a passage did not verify, it is not here. Nothing on this site is set in quotation marks unless it passed that check.
Selection. Every decision that passes these gates gets a record. Records that meet the site’s substance floor (a complete holding, at least two verified quotations, a mapped court and area, a resolvable official text) are listed in search engines; records that do not meet it are still published but are marked to be left out of search listings, and are shown in the “Also decided” lists. Decisions are flagged noteworthy by rule (a split between departments, a question of first impression, a statute construed for the first time, a reversal on a point of law, a substantial dissent) and a flagged decision becomes a featured decision only when the editor has read it and approved a headline.
House style. All prose on the site passes a mechanical style and language check before publication: no hype, no filler, no unverified quotation, no em-dashes.
Corrections. A correction to any record is logged on the corrections page with the date and what changed.
What is never published here: headnotes or digests from the Official Reports; any quotation that did not verify against the opinion; any decision whose source text failed the clean-text check; any claim about a decision that is not in the decision.