Methodology
How the figures on this site are collected, what is deliberately excluded, and who pays us.
Last verified 22 July 2026
An index that scores the market it profits from has to answer one question before anything else: who pays it, and does that change what it says. This page answers that first, then sets out how the numbers are collected and what is deliberately left out. If any of it reads as an exception being made, that is a defect — tell us and it gets fixed in the open.
Commercial relationships
This site is published by RWA Legal Index. The following relationships could reasonably be read as affecting what appears here. They are listed by name, not summarised, and the same disclosure appears on the affected entity wherever it is scored.
| Entity | Relationship | How it is handled |
|---|---|---|
| Gofaizen & Sherle | Client of the consultancy that publishes this site | No advisor ranking is published yet. Where this firm's data appears (e.g. in the cost index), it is treated exactly like any other source and flagged the same way. If an advisor index is published, it will score this firm under the same public weights as every other, with no manual adjustment, and this disclosure will state where it lands. |
We do not take a share of legal fees. Fee sharing with non-lawyers is prohibited in most of the jurisdictions covered here, and a commission on a referred matter would make the word "independent" unusable. Nothing on this site can be paid for.
How cost figures are collected
- A figure is recorded only if it appears in a public source with an attributable URL. Each cost row links to that source, and each jurisdiction row links to the regulator's official page. Every source link was checked live on the last-verified date.
- Every row keeps its verbatim quote, currency, cadence and the date of the source.
- Rows are tagged for whether the source sells the service it is pricing.
- Figures are never averaged across sources. Averaging incompatible scopes produces a number that describes nothing.
- Where sources disagree, the disagreement is published rather than resolved.
What is excluded
- Figures without a currency or without a stated component.
- Estimates presented without a source, including our own.
- Sources older than the stated review window, unless flagged with their age.
- Vendor totals that bundle paid-up capital into "cost" without saying so.
Known gaps
Platform pricing is largely unpublished — several major issuance platforms disclose no fees at all, and the figures we do hold for them are secondary. Law-firm pricing is almost entirely quote-based. There is no public postmortem from an issuer stating what a completed project actually cost. Where we do not know, the table says so rather than estimating.
Editorial and monetisation policy
Placement here cannot be bought. There is no pay-to-rank, and no paid position in any list or shortlist. If the site ever carries sponsorship or a paid data update, it will be labelled as such and kept separate from the editorial dataset, never mixed into a score or an ordering. If we introduce someone to an adviser and that introduction is compensated, the compensation is disclosed at the point of introduction, not buried here. We do not take a share of legal fees — fee-sharing with non-lawyers is prohibited in most of the jurisdictions covered, and a commission on a referred matter would make the word "independent" unusable.
Review cadence
The published data is reviewed on a schedule and after any material regulatory change. The data set was last reconciled on 22 July 2026 and is next scheduled for review on 22 October 2026. Material changes and corrections are recorded on the changelog with their date.
Corrections
If a figure attributed to you is wrong, out of scope or out of date, we will correct it and record the change with its date, on the changelog. Corrections are not conditional on any commercial relationship. Use the correction form.