Data integrity
Verified before it reaches you.
Anyone can assemble a page of numbers. The hard part — the part that decides whether a brief is worth trusting with a career decision — is making sure every one of those numbers is true. At Footnote, not a single figure reaches you or the public until it has been traced to a named source, checked against the original record, and confirmed. We are not in the business of compiling plausible-sounding data. We are in the business of being right.
Six standards every figure has to clear.
A purpose-built verification system enforces these at every stage — from the moment a source is read to the moment a brief is sealed. The methods are ours; the standard is yours to hold us to.
Primary sources, or nothing
We read the record at its origin — SEC filings, U.S. Department of Labor datasets, federal court dockets, state layoff notices. Never an aggregator, a scraped profile, or an anonymous review.
Every figure keeps its receipt
A number exists in a brief because a named, public document says so. We hold the source it came from — the filing, the docket, the dataset row — and we hand it to you as a link you can open yourself.
Grounded to the exact words
When a figure is drawn from a document, it has to appear in that document, verbatim. If the words aren't there, the number doesn't ship. A paraphrase never becomes a fact.
Attribution is exact, never approximate
Records are matched to a company by hard identifiers, not a fuzzy name guess. Attributing one company's lawsuit or wage case to another is not a rounding error — it is a falsehood, and our system is built to make it impossible.
A label that matches what it measures
Every field says exactly what it is. Dollars owed are dollars owed, not a count of cases. We refuse the quiet lie of a truthful number wearing the wrong name.
Silence is made loud
When a source goes dark, our system does not shrug and publish an empty space that reads like “nothing to report.” A gap is flagged as a gap. Absence is never allowed to masquerade as zero.
certified federal wage records, cross-checked and queryable
U.S. jurisdictions of layoff (WARN) filings, refreshed daily
of a sealed brief's claims trace to a source you can open — ungrounded, it doesn't ship
The lines we won't cross
Integrity is as much what we refuse to do.
We don't buy scraped people-data.
What appears in a brief, we can point to. Nothing enters it from a data broker.
We don't guess a thin record.
When the public record is sparse or lagging, we say so — rather than manufacture confidence it can't support.
We don't let a broken pipeline look quiet.
A failed source raises an alarm to a human. It is never dressed up as a calm, empty result.
We don't publish what we can't stand behind.
We would rather withhold a number than ship one we haven't confirmed against the source.
“If we can't point to where a number came from, it doesn't belong in front of you.”