Vetting & Transparency

How We Find Counsels

We identify potential overseas counsels through the following channels — all public, transparent, and attributable:

• Public professional platforms — We review publicly available profiles on law firm websites, legal directories, and professional networks. We only use information that is already in the public domain.
• Peer referrals — Trusted partners and existing network members may suggest counsels they have worked with. These suggestions are vetted through the same verification process.
• Direct outreach — We contact law firms that publicly disclose China-related practices or cross-border capabilities and invite them to join our network.

What We Verify

For every counsel on our network, we independently verify the following identity signals:

• Public professional profile — The counsel has a verifiable professional presence: law firm website bio, legal directory listing, or institutional profile.
• Bar registration— We check the counsel's bar admission against the official state or supreme court bar registry in their jurisdiction. This is the single most important identity signal.
• Domain ownership matching — We verify that the email domain or firm website associated with a counsel matches their professional listings.

Beyond these identity checks, we surface additional signals that are not verified by us but are reported from public sources: China desk presence, China client cases, transaction experience, Chinese language services, and relationship path signals. These are shown as data points, not guarantees.

What We DO NOT Do

• We do not scrape or crawl private data. Every data point we use comes from public, attributable sources. We do not access private profiles, login-required content, or proprietary databases.
• We do not guarantee outcomes or legal advice.CounselPort is a matching and verification platform, not a law firm. We do not evaluate the quality of legal work, predict case outcomes, or provide legal advice.
• We do not claim endorsement. Inclusion is not an endorsement for any specific matter.
• We do not charge referral fees. We do not take commissions, referral fees, or kickbacks from any counsel or law firm on our network.
• We do not store credentials. We do not ask for or store passwords, login credentials, or access tokens of any counsel.

Our Commitment

CounselPort is built on trust — between us and the Chinese teams who use our platform, and between us and the overseas counsels who join our network.

Our scoring model is deterministic and transparent: zero AI calls, pure rule-based math. Every score is attributable to specific signals. We do not use black-box algorithms to rank counsels.

This transparency page will always reflect exactly what we do and what we do not do. If anything changes about our process, we update this page — not rewrite history.