Privacy policy

LegalMatch is operated by [REGISTERED ENTITY NAME], a company incorporated in India, registered office [ADDRESS]. In this policy “we” means that company. We are the data fiduciary for the personal data described below.

We are not a law firm. We connect you with independent advocates. When you engage an advocate, they become responsible for the personal data you share with them in the course of that engagement, separately from us.

• When you submit a matter: the type of matter, the area of law, the city or jurisdiction, urgency, your description of the problem, and your name, email and phone number if you give them.
• When you create an account: email, and a password only if you set one. Client accounts are passwordless by default and sign in by a link or one-time code sent to your email.
• If you are an advocate: the above, plus your State Bar Council enrolment number, certificate of practice, qualifications, experience, practice areas and fee bands, for verification and matching.
• Documents you upload, and a record of every time one is viewed or downloaded, by whom, and from what IP address.
• Technical data: IP address, browser, and times of access, kept for security and fraud prevention.

We do not use tracking or advertising cookies. We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with advertisers.

• To match you with advocates and to run the service you asked for — performance of our agreement with you.
• To verify that an advocate is genuinely enrolled with a State Bar Council — a legal and public-interest requirement.
• To take payment and issue invoices — legal obligation and performance of the agreement.
• To keep an audit record of access to documents and to admin actions — legitimate interest in security, and in being able to answer “who saw this file”.
• To send service messages about your matter by email and WhatsApp. These are not marketing; you can turn off non-essential reminders at any time.

We do not use your matter or your documents to train any machine-learning system. There is no such system in the platform.

• Advocates see the matter — its type, jurisdiction, urgency and your description. They do not see your name or contact details until you choose to engage one of them.
• Our operations team sees your matter and the shortlist, because a person reviews every match before it reaches you, and to handle disputes and refunds.
• Service providers who process data on our instructions: hosting and storage, email and WhatsApp delivery, and payment processing. They are bound by contract and may not use your data for their own purposes.
• Authorities, where we are legally required to disclose.

Documents are encrypted in transit and at rest. They are never served from a public address: access is by a signed link that expires within minutes and is issued only after we check that you are entitled to the file. Every view and download is logged.

If you choose to protect a document with your own passphrase, it is encrypted with a key derived from that passphrase. We cannot recover such a document if you lose the passphrase — that is the point of the feature, and it applies to us as much as to anyone else.

• Matter and account records: [RETENTION PERIOD] after your account is closed.
• Documents: [RETENTION PERIOD], or until you delete them, whichever is sooner.
• Invoices and payment records: as long as tax law requires, currently eight years.
• Audit logs: [RETENTION PERIOD]. These are append-only and cannot be edited, including by our own staff.

Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 you may ask us to:

• tell you what personal data of yours we hold and who we have shared it with;
• correct anything inaccurate or incomplete;
• erase data we no longer need for the purpose it was collected for;
• nominate someone to exercise these rights if you die or become incapacitated.

Write to [PRIVACY EMAIL]. We will respond within [NUMBER] days. Some data must be kept despite an erasure request where law requires it — tax records, for example — and we will tell you if that applies.

Your data is stored in India. If you use LegalMatch from another country, you are asking us to handle it here, and Indian law governs it.

Our grievance officer is [NAME], [GRIEVANCE EMAIL], [ADDRESS]. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India.

If we change this policy in a way that affects you, we will tell you by email before it takes effect. The date at the top always shows the current version.