Most English-language writing about Thai law is a summary of a summary. Somebody reads a firm's guide, rewrites it, and the version after that rewrites the rewrite. Nobody goes back to the Act. By the time it reaches you, the threshold has drifted, the section has been amended, and there is no way to tell.
This page explains how we avoid that, in enough detail that you can check whether we actually do it.
Every statement carries its source
Every legal proposition in every article carries the Act and the section it comes from. You do not have to take a word of it on trust. You can go and read the provision yourself.
An article you can check is worth more than an article you have to believe.
Where the law comes from
Every legal statement is checked against primary Thai legislation: the Acts and Codes themselves, in the form they are actually in, rather than another firm's description of them. In practice that means the Civil and Commercial Code, the Foreign Business Act and its three annexed lists, the Land Code, the Condominium Act, the Revenue Code, the Hotel Act, the Immigration Act, the Investment Promotion Act, the Sap-Ing-Sith Act and the ministerial regulations, notifications and departmental orders issued under them.
We maintain our own research library of these texts, kept current and searched section by section, so a drafting question can be answered from the wording rather than from memory. It is the same library we use on client work. The articles are not written to a different standard than the advice.
Secondary sources have a place. A published commentary can point us at the right provision, and a professional guide can tell us how something is usually handled. Neither is ever the authority for a statement of law in an article. If the only support for a sentence is that another website says so, the sentence does not go in.
How a statement gets onto the page
The process is the same for every article, and it runs in this order.
- The question comes first. Article topics come from questions clients actually ask, in the words they ask them. We do not write to fill a content calendar.
- Each legal issue is searched separately against the primary legislation. A single article usually raises four or five distinct issues and each is looked up on its own.
- The governing provision is read in full, in its exact wording, not as a search snippet. Thresholds, time limits and the difference between "shall" and "may" all live in the detail.
- The draft is written only from what those provisions say. Nothing is written from recollection of how the rule works.
- The finished draft is checked back against the sources, section number by section number and figure by figure. Anything that cannot be traced to a provision we have actually read is cut, or rewritten as a description of practice and labelled as such.
The last step is the one that matters. It is easy to write a plausible sentence about Thai law. The check is designed to catch the plausible sentence that turns out to have no provision behind it.
What this looks like on the page
Here is a sentence from one of our articles, reproduced exactly as it is published.
A transfer of shares in a Thai private limited company is void unless it is made in writing and signed by both the transferor and the transferee, with the signatures certified by at least one witness. The transfer has no effect against the company or against third parties until the fact of the transfer and the transferee's name and address are entered in the register of shareholders [Civil and Commercial Code, section 1129].
The bracket at the end is the whole point. That sentence is not our characterisation of the position, and you do not have to accept it because we wrote it. The section is named, so you can open the Code and read it for yourself. Every article also closes with a sources block listing each Act and section it relies on.
Statute, regulation and practice are three different things
A great deal of confusion about Thai law comes from treating these as interchangeable. They are not, and our articles say which one is being described.
| Type | What it is | How it appears in an article |
|---|---|---|
| Statute | An Act or a Code, passed by the legislature and published in the Royal Gazette. It binds everybody and it changes only by amendment. | Named with its section number, for example "Foreign Business Act B.E. 2542, section 36". A statement resting on an Act carries the most weight. |
| Ministerial regulation, notification or order | Issued by a ministry or a department under a power the Act gives it. It has legal force, it sits underneath the Act, and it is changed far more often. | Named as a regulation or an order, with its number and year, and with the body that issued it. Never described as though it were in the Act. |
| Administrative practice | How an office actually handles a matter day to day. It is not law. It differs between provinces and it can change with no amendment to anything. | Labelled as practice and attributed to the type of office, for example "Land Offices on the islands generally require". Never stated as a rule. |
Where administrative practice and the statute point in different directions, the article says both and says which is which. That gap is often the most useful thing on the page.
Some Thai law exists only in Thai
Several Acts, and most ministerial regulations, have no official English version. Unofficial translations circulate, and they disagree with each other on exactly the numbers that matter.
Where we rely on a provision that we have read in Thai, we translate the part we are relying on and we always give the Act's name and the section number so the Thai text can be found and compared. We do not treat an English translation as the law. The Thai text governs, and where a translation is doing work in an article we say that it is a translation.
Every article is dated twice
Each article shows a published date and a last-reviewed date.
Last reviewed means somebody went back to the legislation on that date and confirmed the statements still hold and the section numbers are still right. It is not a cosmetic date bump to make a page look fresh. If nothing has been re-checked, the date does not move.
Articles are re-checked on a schedule, and immediately when something changes that affects them: an amending Act, a new ministerial regulation, or a shift in how a department is applying an existing rule. Where a change is significant, the article says what changed and when, rather than quietly rewriting history.
What we will not publish
- Anything from a live matter. No client is named, no development is named, no plot is identified, and no fact pattern is recognisable. Articles are written from the legal question, never from a file.
- Anything that reads as a workaround. Where the law prohibits something, we describe the prohibition and stop. We do not publish methods for getting around a rule or avoiding detection.
- Comparisons with other advisers. We do not comment on how other firms work, directly or by implication.
- Diagnoses of the reader. An article describes what the law requires and what officials examine. It does not tell you what your own situation means. That needs your documents in front of somebody.
- Numbers we cannot source. If a figure is quoted, it carries the provision or the publication it comes from and the date. Statistics that circulate without an origin do not appear here.
Corrections
If you find something wrong, email info@proviso-consulting.net with the page and the point. We will check it against the provision and, if you are right, fix the article and move the last-reviewed date. Where a correction changes the substance of what an article said, we note the change on the page rather than edit it silently.
Where a position is unclear, and the honest answer is that the point is unsettled, the article says that.
None of this makes it advice
Everything here is about accuracy, not about application. An article can be entirely correct about a section of the Land Code and still be the wrong basis for a decision about your own land, because the law that applies to you depends on facts an article cannot know. See our disclaimer for the full position, and get in touch if you need the question answered on your own facts.
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