How We Check Information
Guides about documents are only useful if they are right on the day you read them. This is the process behind ours — what is checked, against what, by whom, and where the limits of that checking are.
- Written from cases this bureau has actually handled
Every guide here starts from work the bureau has done: a client’s certificate that a registry office would not accept, a notary who wanted a different wording, a consulate that changed its checklist between two orders in the same month. That is the raw material, and it is the reason these pages describe what actually happens at a counter rather than what a regulation implies should happen.
It is also the reason the checking below exists. Experience tells you what usually happens; it does not tell you what the current rule says, and the two drift apart.
Before an article is published
What gets verified
- Every rule stated as fact is checked against the instrument that establishes it — the law, the regulation, the convention, or the receiving body's own published requirements — and that instrument is listed under the article with the date of the check.
- Names of authorities are checked against what those authorities are called today. Agencies get merged, renamed and abolished, and an article naming a body that no longer exists is wrong in a way readers cannot detect.
- Anything presented as a deadline, a validity period or a fee is either sourced or removed. A plausible number nobody can trace is the single easiest way for a guide to mislead.
- Prices and turnaround times are reconciled against what this bureau actually charges and delivers, not against what would read well.
- Claims about what a foreign authority will accept are softened to what we have seen accepted, because we can vouch for the second and not the first.
What a lawyer looks at
We separate two kinds of statement. Describing a procedure — which office issues a document, what a notary certifies, what an apostille is attached to — is something we do daily and can state from experience. Interpreting a law, or predicting how a foreign authority will treat a document, is a legal conclusion.
For selected articles where legal conclusions matter, we engage a lawyer under agreement to read the text before it goes out. Where that has happened, the article says so under the byline, with the reviewer’s name, their confirmed qualification and the date. Where it has not, there is no review line — and no badge, no seal and no wording implying otherwise. Most articles on this site describe procedure and legitimately carry nothing there.
After publication
Requirements move. The most reliable signal that something has changed is a reader telling us their office asked for something our article does not mention — that is worth more to us than any scheduled review, and it is why the contact link on every one of these pages is real.
When a published article turns out to be wrong or out of date, we change it and log the change: the date, and a plain description of what was altered, printed under the article and collected on one page for the whole site. We do not silently edit and move on.
The limit, stated plainly
None of this makes an article a substitute for the organisation that will receive your documents. A consulate can apply a requirement that appears in no published list; a registry office in one region can want a form another does not. Before you file anything, confirm the current requirements with the body that will actually take them. Every guide here says so, and it is not a formality — it is the one step we cannot do for you from a webpage.
Related
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Editorial policy
Who is accountable for what we publish, and the claims we refuse to make.
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Corrections and updates
Every correction we have made to a published article, with dates.
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Rule changes log
When each country rule on this site was last checked against a real case or an official source.
The material on this site is provided for general informational purposes and is based on practical experience with translations and document formalities. It does not constitute legal advice. Laws and institutional requirements may change, so current conditions should be confirmed with the relevant authority, notary, consulate or qualified legal professional before submitting documents.
