Truefield Standard LLC is not a law firm. It publishes a standard, applies a published methodology to vendor documentation, publishes the results, and licenses a certification mark to vendors meeting the threshold.
Truefield does not provide legal advice, does not form attorney-client relationships, and does not represent that any certified vendor complies with any law. Certification means conformity with identified Truefield criteria as of a stated review date.
Language that must never appear in any Truefield material: "attorney approved," "legal approval," "legally compliant," "our lawyer has determined," "reviewed by counsel," or any construction making a bar credential the substance of the assessment. A founder's admission may appear accurately in a factual founder biography and nowhere else. It may not appear beside the certification mark, on certificate headers, in rating headlines, in outbound vendor sales material, or in any construction such as "attorney-developed," "lawyer reviewed," or "legal-grade." The bar credential is not a selling point.
The approved biography form is:
Alex Kagianaris is the founder of Truefield and author of the Truefield Standard. He is also admitted to practice law in California. His role at Truefield is not the provision of legal services, and Truefield assessments do not constitute legal advice or legal-compliance opinions.
The claim is always: Truefield has determined that Vendor X satisfies Version [X.X] of the Truefield Standard.
Layer 1 โ Automated assessment. Software collects published documents, applies the criteria, extracts supporting language, flags missing documents, and produces a provisional score with citations and a confidence value per criterion.
Layer 2 โ Exception handling. Human review occurs only where the Assessment Protocol defines a condition as non-automatable: conflicting evidence, ambiguity above threshold, an unresolved precedent question, suspected manipulation, appeal, conflict issue, or methodology defect. Routine validation of automated findings is not a required step.
Layer 3 โ Program control. Truefield controls the Standard, eligibility rules, methodology and model versions, automation rules, audit process, certification issuance, surveillance, and mark withdrawal. Control is exercised over the system, not by manual approval of each determination.
Technology-Assisted Assessment. Truefield may use software, automated collection, machine learning, artificial intelligence, structured rules engines, and other technologies to collect evidence and generate preliminary findings. Certification determinations are subject to the automated controls, exception-review requirements, audit procedures, and other safeguards prescribed by the Assessment Protocol. The identity or professional qualification of any particular individual is not a condition of certification unless expressly required by the applicable Standard.
| Role | Qualification | Function |
|---|---|---|
| Exception Reviewer | Completed Truefield reviewer training; demonstrated competency against the Protocol | Resolves determinations escalated under the Protocol. Does not review Green or Yellow findings |
| Certification Officer | Appointed by the Manager; completed reviewer training | Administers the program: approves Standard and Protocol versions, approves automation rules, reviews audit results, investigates systemic failures, supervises appeals, suspends automation on reliability failure, authorizes classes of certificates. Does not approve individual certificates |
| Legal Methodology Reviewer | Admitted in at least one U.S. jurisdiction | Resolves criteria the Protocol designates as requiring legal interpretation |
| Methodology Chair | Appointed by the Manager | Owns the Standard, criterion interpretations, precedent, reviewer training, escalation rules |
| Substitute Reviewer | Independent; not employed by Truefield; unaffiliated with any Member's law practice | Conducts assessments from which others are recused under ยง7 |
One person may hold multiple roles. The Manager may delegate any role to qualified personnel without amending this Charter. That sentence is the point of the rewrite.
Decision required โ appointed before first publication, not after a conflict arises. The Charter must identify the Substitute Reviewer's eligibility, independence criteria, compensation, authority, confidentiality obligation, term, and replacement procedure. Compensation is never contingent on whether certification issues.
| Band | Condition | Handling |
|---|---|---|
| Green | Validated deterministic rule or validated machine interpretation rule applies; all hard gates cleared; confidence above threshold | Automatic final determination. No human approval. Standard audit sampling |
| Yellow | Approved precedent applies to a new factual instance with sufficient factual equivalence | Automatic final determination. Elevated audit rate |
| Red | Novel interpretation, conflicting evidence, suspected manipulation, conflict issue, or methodology defect | Human exception review |
| Appeal | Any reconsideration | Human review by someone other than the original decision-maker |
Human-intervention rate is the governing metric. Target [1โ5]% at maturity.
Confidence is computed by Truefield, not self-reported by a model. A model's own stated confidence is not a gate.
Four conditions are mandatory. Failure of any one prevents a Green determination regardless of aggregate confidence:
Three further conditions inform confidence within otherwise eligible findings: document version and date known; deterministic rule or approved precedent applies; independent pass agrees.
Criterion lifecycle: Red โ precedent โ Yellow โ machine rule โ Green. A precedent does not remain a human-review item indefinitely. Once enough instances accumulate it is converted into a machine-executable interpretation rule, and the criterion moves from Yellow to Green on revalidation.
The public Standard can be copied. The proprietary asset is the historical vendor dataset, the normalized document corpus, criterion-level labeled examples, machine rules, the precedent graph, longitudinal change data, and certification network effects โ years of labeled outcomes showing how vendor contracts actually implement the criteria.
Automation eligibility is granted per criterion-version by measured agreement, not assumed. A criterion reaches Green only after blind validation shows it meets the agreement threshold over a minimum number of observations.
Eligibility is version-specific. A material change to a criterion or to its machine rule, including through a new Standard version, does not carry prior eligibility forward and triggers revalidation. Eligibility is revoked automatically where audit performance falls below the Protocol threshold.
Criteria are designed for machine assessability. Where a criterion requires judgment about whether a provision is adequate, it is restated to ask what the document observably says โ e.g. not "does the agreement adequately explain ownership of footage" but "which of the following does the governing agreement expressly state: vendor ownership / customer ownership / other express allocation / no express provision / conflicting provisions." A criterion that repeatedly requires interpretation is a criterion asking the wrong question.
Rating โ every vendor in scope is scored from publicly available documentation and the score is published. No fee. No consent. No opt-out.
Certification โ voluntary, and structured so that no fee ever attaches to assessment. Assessment against the public Standard is part of the ordinary rating process every vendor receives free. Where a vendor qualifies and wishes to display TRUEFIELD VERIFIED commercially, it enters an annual licence covering the mark, continuous monitoring, the public verification page, badge API access, certificate management, and annual revalidation.
The distinction is deliberate and load-bearing. A vendor does not pay Truefield to be evaluated. It pays for commercial mark rights and the surveillance infrastructure that keeps the mark accurate. That makes it structurally impossible to argue a vendor purchased a favourable evaluation, because the evaluation happened before any money moved and would have happened anyway.
Fees are flat and published within objective tiers by company size and product scope. Two vendors in the same tier pay the same fee whether they scored 20 or 58.
A vendor cannot buy a rating, and cannot buy its way out of one. No fee attaches to assessment or to any result.
Buyer-sponsored assessment. A league, district, association, or insurer may fund assessment of a defined vendor universe. The sponsoring buyer has no control over methodology, scope of criteria, timing of publication, or any result, and its sponsorship is disclosed on each affected entry. A sponsored vendor is assessed identically to an unsponsored one and may decline nothing. This is disclosed under ยง6A on the same terms as any other commercial relationship.
Public verification is free and requires no account. Anyone scanning a badge reaches vendor, Standard version, verification date, expiry, status, and a link to the full assessment โ with no login. Putting basic trust verification behind registration would destroy the network effect that makes the mark worth buying.
Truefield does not sell remediation services, readiness consulting, template policies, or document drafting to any vendor it rates or certifies.
This is stricter than the surrounding commercial logic invites, and deliberately so. Truefield adopts the independence principle reflected in international certification-body practice (the ISO/IEC 17021 family) as a governance benchmark. Truefield does not claim conformity with or accreditation under any such standard, and adopting the principle does not subject it to that regime.
The reason is practical. The accusation this business must survive is predictable: "Truefield gave us a bad grade so it could sell us the cure." This section permits a one-sentence answer: Truefield does not sell remediation.
Prohibited products. Truefield will not sell to any rated or certifiable vendor: remediation consulting; contract, privacy-policy, or DPA drafting; RFP answers; sales collateral; certification-readiness consulting; clause libraries designed to improve that vendor's score; paid appeal; expedited correction; guaranteed certification; paid score suppression; or bespoke advice on what to write in order to pass.
This list is reproduced in the LLC operating agreement. Independence is governance, not policy.
Permitted vendor product โ benchmarking. Truefield may sell a vendor intelligence product reporting that vendor's percentile, category benchmarks against the assessed universe, historical score movement, document-change alerts, and aggregate market statistics. Benchmarking reports where a vendor stands. It does not tell a vendor what to write, and it supplies no language. A statistic about the market is not remediation of a vendor.
The line is: "78% of assessed vendors publish no defined incident-notification window" is permitted. "Add the following incident-notification clause" is prohibited under the list above.
What Truefield may do, free and published identically for every vendor:
The Evidence Gap Report is diagnostic, not remedial. It states which criterion was not satisfied, what was not located, and what CATEGORY of evidence would satisfy it. It never supplies language.
Permitted: "DAT-02 was not satisfied because Truefield did not locate a public subprocessor list with a change-notice commitment. Evidence capable of satisfying this criterion includes a publicly accessible subprocessor list and a contractual notice procedure."
Prohibited: "Add the following clause to your DPAโฆ" or "Rewrite Section 12 as followsโฆ" That is consulting.
Truefield treats the gap report as part of its independent assessment rather than a paid remediation service.
Where actual drafting is required, Truefield says: obtain advice from your counsel. Never "retain the affiliated firm."
Truefield rates vendors without their consent and publishes the result. The certification-mark framework governs the badge; it does not govern statements Truefield publishes about companies that have paid it nothing and agreed to nothing. This section governs those statements.
Every published rating states what was assessed and when. Each entry identifies the documents relied on, their source URLs, the retrieval date, and the Standard version applied. A rating without an observation date is not published.
Absence is reported as non-location, never as non-existence. The published form is:
Truefield did not locate a publicly available data processing agreement for this vendor as of [date].
Never:
This vendor does not have a data processing agreement.
Truefield observes published documents. It does not know what exists privately, and a vendor that negotiates its DPA per customer is in a different position from one that has none. Any published phrasing asserting the latter from evidence of the former is a factual error and is corrected under ยง12.
Scope is disclosed on the face of every rating. Where a vendor does not publish the agreement governing its organizational customers, the entry states that the rating reflects only the documents that are public and identifies which documents those are.
Pre-publication notice. Each vendor receives its complete rating, with the underlying evidence, no fewer than ten business days before first publication, at no charge, with an invitation to identify factual errors and to submit additional documents. A vendor may request one extension of five business days for good cause. Publication occurs automatically at the end of that period whether or not the vendor responds, and whether or not it pays for anything. Correction remains available indefinitely thereafter โ the notice period is not a vendor veto.
Corrections are free, unconditional, and prompt. The correction route in ยง12 is available to every rated vendor regardless of certification status.
Correction history is public. An erroneous rating is never silently replaced. The entry carries a dated record of what changed:
Revised 27 August 2026 โ DOC-03 changed 0 โ 2 after the vendor identified a publicly dated incorporated policy.
Evidence finding is stated separately from the Standard determination:
Evidence finding: Truefield did not locate a defined incident-notification period. Standard determination: under SEC-01, that evidence scores 0.
A score is the application of a disclosed methodology, not an accusation.
Commercial independence. No rating is created, withheld, delayed, altered, or removed on account of a vendor's payment, refusal to pay, threat, commercial relationship, or relationship to any Member's law practice. Ratings are not offered as an inducement and are not withdrawn as a concession.
No characterization beyond the criteria. Published ratings state which criteria were met, which were not, and the evidence relied on. They do not characterize a vendor's conduct, motives, competence, or legal position, and do not state or imply that any vendor has violated any law.
The following never appear in any published rating: unsafe, dangerous, privacy violating, irresponsible, unlawful, illegal, deceptive, noncompliant, non-compliant, negligent, reckless. The published form is a score under a named Standard version and nothing more.
Truefield ratings can be commercially damaging.
Automatic recusal applies where a reviewer, or any lawyer at a law practice they are affiliated with, so far as known:
Former representation triggers a documented independence analysis, and automatic recusal where the former matter was substantially related to the subjects being scored, or where there is any realistic risk that confidential information could influence the review.
Representation of a competitor is not inherently disqualifying. It is recorded as an appearance issue and analysed.
On recusal the assessment transfers to the Substitute Reviewer.
Public disclosure. Where a material conflict affects a rating, its existence and type are disclosed on the face of the entry. Client confidences are never disclosed. The published form is:
A Truefield principal has a disclosed financial or professional relationship potentially relevant to this assessment. All exception review was conducted by an independent Substitute Reviewer.
Confidential-information controls. Truefield maintains a conflict register separate from any law practice's system, populated only with enough data to identify conflicts and never with substantive legal matter information. No information learned through legal representation is used in any assessment. Ratings use the published corpus and materials submitted to Truefield only.
Founder or principal investment in a rated vendor. Divestment before launch is preferred. Where an interest is retained, the vendor is rated identically and is never excluded from the rated set โ exclusion would defeat the proposition that every vendor in scope is rated regardless of commercial relationship, and certification-mark law disfavours discriminatory refusal. The following apply:
Standing prohibitions. Truefield takes no equity, revenue share, advisory seat, or board position with any vendor in scope. No referral fees pass in either direction between Truefield and any Member's law practice. Neither entity bills for the other's work. Separate accounts, invoicing, branding, personnel functions, and records throughout.
Certification is available on nondiscriminatory terms to eligible applicants satisfying the Standard and all published conditions of certification. Federal law permits cancellation of a certification mark where the owner discriminatorily refuses to certify a party that maintains the standards or conditions the mark certifies.
Threshold โ deliberately unset. The certification threshold is fixed only after the first vendor cohort has been scored and the distribution of results and Critical Criteria failures is known. A number selected before seeing the dataset would be arbitrary, and this Charter applies to its own threshold the same discipline ยง4 applies to automation: earned from measured data, not assumed.
Certification requires a weighted score of at least [TBD]% AND zero Critical Criteria failures.
The certification threshold and Critical Criteria applicable to an assessment may not be altered for an individual applicant. Changes may be adopted prospectively through the methodology-change process and a new Standard version.
"Critical Criteria" is the external name for what the assessment system encodes as tier 1.
| Mark | Type | Function |
|---|---|---|
| TRUEFIELD | House trademark | Source of the Standard, report, and platform |
| TRUEFIELD VERIFIED | Certification mark | Used by qualifying vendors to signify conformity |
The same mark cannot serve both roles for the same services.
Resolved: TRUEFIELD VERIFIED. "Verified" states what Truefield does โ verifies conformity with a defined documentary standard. "Certified" invites a reading that Truefield has assessed company quality, product safety, or legal compliance generally. The badge carries the Standard name beneath it:
TRUEFIELD VERIFIED Youth Sports Data & Contracting Standard
Third-party display. Truefield may license display of certification status through APIs and partner platforms โ procurement systems, league management software, insurance and district purchasing platforms โ provided Truefield retains control over accuracy, currency, and withdrawal of the mark.
Carried verbatim on every certificate, badge page, and published entry:
TRUEFIELD VERIFIED indicates that Truefield determined, based on the documentation assessed, that the identified vendor satisfied the applicable criteria of the Truefield Standard v[X.X] as of [date]. Verification is not legal advice, a determination of compliance with law, or a representation that the service is free of risk. Verification reflects a documentary assessment and does not include technical security testing, product testing, or verification of actual operational practices except where expressly stated. Certification does not constitute an endorsement of the vendor generally. Truefield is not a law firm and no attorney-client relationship arises from verification.
Rating disclaimer. Free public ratings carry comparable language, displayed MORE prominently than the certificate disclaimer, because ratings are published without any contractual relationship:
About this rating. This rating reflects Truefield's application of the identified version of the Truefield Standard to the publicly available and submitted documentation identified on this page as of the stated assessment date. It is a documentary assessment, not legal advice, a determination of compliance with law, technical testing, or a representation that the vendor's actual practices conform to its published documents. A score reflects only the criteria of the identified Standard version.
Certificates issue automatically when all published conditions are met. The platform issues; no person clicks approve.
Post-issuance audit replaces pre-issuance review. The Assessment Protocol establishes minimum audit rates based on criterion maturity, validation history, observed error rate, materiality, and changes to the Standard or automation system. Audit coverage is 100% for a newly automated criterion during its initial period. Sampling increases as observed error rates rise, and a criterion automatically reverts from Green to Yellow or Red when audit performance drops below the Protocol threshold. Affected vendors are rescored immediately on discovery of a material system error.
System failure and suspension. Where a systemic defect may materially affect issued certifications, Truefield may suspend automated issuance, suspend affected certifications provisionally, rescore the affected population, and require human exception review until reliability is restored. A system capable of issuing automatically requires an equally strong mechanism for stopping itself.
Certification runs [12] months and is structured as an annual subscription including the license, continuous monitoring, automated rescans, change detection, the public profile, and renewal assessment. Continuing control over mark use is an obligation of ownership, not an upsell.
A material change in a certified vendor's documents is assessed within [30] days. A vendor falling below threshold is notified in writing, given [30] days to remediate, and if unremediated has certification suspended and its public entry updated. Continued display after revocation is a license breach.
Withdrawn and unknown certificates must resolve, not fail. Every certificate identifier ever issued resolves permanently to a status page. A suspended, revoked, expired, or lapsed certificate resolves to a page stating its status and the date of that change; an identifier never issued resolves to a page stating that no certification matching it was issued. A certificate identifier must never return a not-found error. A badge on a vendor's site is scanned by people who cannot distinguish a withdrawn certification from a broken link, and a failure that reads as a technical error rather than a withdrawal defeats the surveillance and revocation procedures above. This requirement takes effect before the first certificate identifier is issued.
Truefield must exercise legitimate and continuing control over use of the certification mark. The surveillance, suspension, audit, rescoring, and revocation procedures in this section are mechanisms through which Truefield exercises that control.
Correction. A vendor may at any time submit evidence of an objective factual error โ wrong URL, superseded document, extraction error, missed document โ via the correction route. Corrections are handled by automated or expedited reassessment and do not require a formal appeal.
Appeal. A vendor may seek reconsideration of the application of the Standard within [30] days of a published score or refusal, in writing, identifying the criteria disputed and the document language relied on. Decided by a reviewer other than the original decision-maker, or by the Substitute Reviewer where bias is alleged. Outcome and reasoning recorded; where a score changes, the published entry is corrected with a dated note.
Corrections and appeals are free, and will not be monetised. Truefield does not offer expedited correction, priority appeal, reconsideration fees, or any paid route to accuracy. Accuracy is free; the mark licence is paid. Where repetitive or abusive appeals become operationally burdensome, the response is a published procedural limit, never a fee.
The Standard is versioned; every change carries version, date, and reason. Prior versions remain published. Criteria are never added, removed, or reweighted in response to a specific vendor's circumstances, in either direction. Changes altering an existing certification trigger notice and a grace period to the vendor's next renewal.
Retained [7] years: every snapshot assessed with hash and retrieval date, every determination with reasoning and confidence, escalation records, recusals and independence analyses, refusals, corrections, appeals, certification agreements, and mark licenses.
Software provenance. For every automatic determination Truefield preserves: Standard version; criterion version; deterministic rule or precedent identifier; model provider and version where used; prompt or template version; retrieved source and hash; extraction; contradictory-evidence search result; each confidence-stack component; automation eligibility state; audit status; and the final determination timestamp.
The record must permit reconstruction of why the system reached a given determination years afterwards. It is the evidentiary basis for everything published.