Editorial Policy: How JoinCase Verifies Settlements

Settlement information is money-adjacent and deadline-driven, so accuracy is the product. This page describes exactly how listings on JoinCase are sourced, verified, and maintained. Data last verified August 3, 2026.

Administrator-first sourcing

The claim deadline, fund size, payout tiers, exclusion deadline, and hearing date on every settlement page come from the official court-appointed administrator's website, not from aggregators or news coverage, which are wrong or stale surprisingly often (especially after deadline extensions). The claim link on every page is always the administrator's own domain. We never link a copy, a middleman, or our own redirect.

When an administrator site is unreachable at verification time, we publish only if at least two independent secondary sources agree on the deadline, and we mark the listing clearly: those pages carry a visible notice that we are still confirming details with the administrator, cite the court-notice sources we relied on, and soften any payout figures. The flag comes off only after direct confirmation.

Weekly deadline checks

Every week we:

Sweep settlement rosters and administrator case indexes for new settlements;
Re-check every listing whose deadline falls within the next three weeks, because administrators commonly extend deadlines when claim rates are low or hearings slip;
Re-verify anything still marked unconfirmed, since sites that were down often come back;
Move settlements whose deadlines passed into a closed state: their pages stay live with what-happens-next guidance, but lose the claim button so nobody wastes time filing late.

Every settlement page shows its last-verified date so you can judge freshness yourself.

Original writing only

All summaries and eligibility descriptions on JoinCase are written by us from the underlying documents. We do not copy administrator notices (they are court-approved documents; a paraphrase that drifts is our responsibility, so we cite the source instead) and we do not reproduce aggregator content.

Honest numbers

Payout figures are labeled for what they are: administrator-published amounts, court-filing figures, or third-party estimates.
Pro rata caveats appear wherever payment depends on claim volume. We never present "up to" figures as expected amounts.
No listing ever promises payment. Courts, appeals, and claim validation all sit between filing and money.

Independence

Listings cannot be bought. Advertising and any future affiliate relationships (see theaffiliate disclosure) have no influence on which settlements are listed, how they are ranked (always by deadline), or how they are described. We have no relationship with any court, administrator, defendant, or law firm.

Corrections