Privacy Policy

1. The short version

• We collect what we need to do legal work for you: your contact details, what you tell us about your case, the documents you upload, and the record of your agreement and payment.
• We do not sell your information, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not use advertising pixels or cross-site trackers.
• Some information goes to the companies that run our systems (hosting, database, email, payments, mail, AI). Each one is named below with exactly what it receives. They may use it only to provide the service to us.
• AI tools help draft and read documents. A licensed attorney reviews every AI-assisted draft before it is relied on. Our AI provider may not train on your content.
• If you got a letter from us about a lawsuit, we found your name and the suit in public court records. You can tell us never to write to you again.
• You can ask us what we have, correct it, or delete it by emailing cmcclurgesq@gmail.com. Some records must be kept under our professional duties as lawyers or because the law requires it.

2. Who we are and what this covers

This policy is published by FairCounsel™, which operates this website and its tools (the “Operator” in our Terms of Service), on behalf of the Georgia law firm that provides the legal services offered here. When we say “we” or “us”, we mean both, acting together. Our attorneys are licensed in Georgia and our legal services cover Georgia matters.

This policy covers:

• the website at faircounsel.pro, including the Second Look™ and Debt Defender™ intake, the Founding-50 pilot sign-up, the referral page, and the website chat assistant;
• the Client Portal, where clients read messages, upload documents, approve documents and pay invoices;
• the FairCounsel mobile app for iPhone and Android;
• the debt validation letter tool, in its self-service and attorney-signed forms;
• the letters we mail to people who have just been sued, and the pages those letters link to;
• email, paper mail and notifications we send in connection with any of these.

It does not replace the engagement agreement you sign with the firm. Where that agreement says something more specific about your file, the agreement controls.

3. What we collect, and when

What we collect depends on what you do. Each situation is listed separately so you can find yours.

When you visit the website

• Server logs. Our hosting provider records each request your browser makes: the page, the time, your IP address and browser type. We use these logs to keep the site running and to find and stop abuse.
• A random visitor ID, stored in a cookie for one year, so we can tell a repeat visit from a new one. It is a random string, not your name.
• How you got here. If you arrive from one of our stickers, letters, ads or links, or with a referral code, we remember that tag, the page you landed on and the referring site for 60 days. If you later start a case, the tag is copied onto it so we know which outreach works.
• Page-view counts through Vercel Web Analytics, which does not use cookies. We send it no page from an intake, payment, portal, sign-in or letter screen, and we strip IDs and tokens from every address before it is counted.
• Rate-limit records. Public forms and endpoints count requests per IP address for a short window to stop flooding. The counts expire with the window.

When you use the website chat assistant

The chat bubble on public pages answers general questions about our services. What you type is sent to our AI provider to produce the reply and is not stored by us. The assistant is given only a fixed fact sheet about the firm, never any client file. It is not a lawyer and the conversation is not confidential, so do not type details of your own case into it.

When you start an intake, sign up for the pilot, or ask us to contact you

• Your name, email address, phone number and mailing address.
• What you tell us about your case: the court, case number, the other party, what is claimed, the dates on your documents, and your answers to our questions.
• The documents you upload, such as the complaint, summons, orders, filings or transcripts, and the text we read out of them.
• The record of your agreement to our engagement terms, with the date, time and the IP address the agreement was accepted from. We keep this as evidence that you agreed.
• For the Founding-50 pilot: your name, email, phone, the kind of debt, whether you have been served, your notes, and when you consented.

Before you pay, the intake is protected by a cookie in your browser and by a link in the resume emails we send you. The cookie lasts 14 days and the link stops working after 14 days.

When you are a client

• Your file: everything above, plus the documents our attorneys prepare, court filings, discovery, the attorney’s notes and facts entered on your behalf, deadlines, and the tasks we ask you to complete.
• Messages between you and your legal team in the portal, including attachments. A voice memo you record in the portal is stored as an audio file with your case, together with any transcript your browser produced while you spoke.
• Payments: the amount, date and status of each payment and invoice, and the last four digits and card brand that our payment processor reports back. We never see or store your full card number.
• Sign-in records: the sign-in links and codes we send you, and when you sign in.
• Access log: when you or a member of your legal team opened a case page or a document, and when a document was rendered or emailed. This protects your file by showing who looked at what.
• Service of process records: when a paper in your case was mailed or emailed to the other side, the vendor’s tracking events, and the certificate of service built from them.

When you use the validation letter tool

What you type stays in your browser until you choose to save, pay or send it to an attorney. If you save a letter we keep your email address, your name and address as you typed them for the letter, the collector’s name and address, the account reference, the amount claimed and the dates you entered, the letter itself, the documents you add (the collector’s notice, proof of mailing, any reply) and the text we read from the collector’s papers, and the record of when the letter was mailed. A saved letter is protected by a 90-day cookie and by the link in the emails we send you.

If you ask us to read a photo or PDF of a collector’s letter to fill in the form, that file is sent to us and to our AI provider for reading, even if you never save the letter. We do not keep the file unless you save.

The assistant on a paid letter’s page answers general questions about the process. It is given only the stage and dates of your letter, never your name, address, account number, amount or the collector’s papers. We record which kind of question it answered, not your words.

When you use the mobile app

• Your email address, to send you a sign-in code and to find your cases.
• Your sign-in session, stored in your phone’s secure storage and removed when you sign out.
• If you turn on notifications, a push token for your phone and whether it is iPhone or Android. The token is removed when you sign out.
• If you choose a photo or take a picture of a document to send to your legal team, that image. The app does not read your photo library or camera at any other time.

The app has no advertising and no analytics.

If you got a letter from us about a lawsuit

Our attorneys write to people who have just been sued in Georgia collection cases. We get the information for those letters from public court records, such as a clerk’s export or a docket search: the defendant’s name and mailing address, the court, the case number, the filing and service dates, the plaintiff, its lawyer, the amount claimed and the type of debt. We also record whether a letter was sent, whether its link was opened, and whether a case was started from it.

The letter is lawyer advertising under Georgia Rule of Professional Conduct 7.3. It carries a private link. Opening it shows you the suit we found and lets you start a defense with it already filled in. Opening the link does not make us your lawyers.

You can tell us never to write to you again. See Your choices and rights.

Other people who appear in a matter

A client’s file names other people: the opposing party, its lawyers, witnesses, and anyone mentioned in the papers. We keep that information as part of the client’s file. For plaintiffs and opposing law firms we also keep profiles built from public sources, such as the firm’s own website, state bar records, and public complaint databases, limited to business contact details and the matters they appear in.

Attorneys and team members

Attorneys and staff who use our team tools have a work account: name, email, role, bar number and license details, phone and address, their messages and tasks, and an authenticator for two-step sign-in. On team calls that a participant chooses to record, each person’s microphone is transcribed and only the text is kept; the audio is discarded after transcription, and anyone on the call can opt out of being recorded.

When you refer a friend

The referral page asks for your name and email, your friend’s name and email, and an optional note. We use them once, to send your friend the invitation with your referral code, and we do not add your friend to any list. Your referral code is derived from your email so that we can thank you if your friend becomes a client.

What we do not collect

We do not ask for your Social Security number, date of birth, bank account or card number, and we do not want them. If a document you upload contains them, it is kept with your file under the same protections as everything else.

4. How we use it

• To run a conflict-of-interest check before agreeing to represent you.
• To provide the service you asked for: a case review, a drafted letter or pleading, filing, service on the other side, and representation.
• To communicate with you about your matter, including deadlines and the things we need from you.
• To assign your matter to an available attorney and to let your legal team work on it together.
• To take payment, send invoices and receipts, and keep the financial records the law and our professional rules require.
• To serve papers on the other side and to build an accurate certificate of service from the dates they were actually mailed or sent.
• To send you the sign-in links, codes and notifications you ask for.
• To understand which outreach brings people to us and where the intake loses them, using tags and counts rather than names, so we can improve the service.
• To keep the site secure, prevent abuse, and keep a record of who accessed a file.
• To account for the cost of the AI tools we use, by recording the size of each model call, never its content.
• To comply with the law, court rules and the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct, and to defend our rights.

We do not sell your information, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not use it to build profiles for marketing.

5. AI and automated tools

Software reads documents and prepares first drafts so that a flat fee can cover the work. Here is exactly where AI is used and what it sees.

• Reading your documents. When you upload a complaint, order or other document, its text is extracted. A photo or a scanned PDF with no text layer is transcribed by our AI provider. The result is stored with the document.
• Drafting. Case documents and your answers are sent to our AI provider (currently Anthropic, maker of Claude) to produce draft memos, answers, discovery, motions, briefs and letters. Every draft is reviewed and approved by a licensed attorney before it is relied on, filed or sent to you.
• Research. An attorney can ask a research assistant questions about a case. It can read the case file, check citations with CourtListener, and run web searches. Web search queries are cleaned first and your name, in its usual forms, is removed from them. CourtListener receives only the citation being checked.
• Profiles of the other side. To fill in an opposing law firm’s or plaintiff’s public contact details, the AI provider reads that organisation’s own website. Nothing about you is sent for this.
• The website chat and the letter assistant are described in section 3. Neither is given your personal details.
• Team call transcription. Audio from a recorded team call is sent to OpenAI for transcription and then discarded. Clients are not on these calls.
• Dictation. If you dictate into a text box in the portal, your browser’s own speech recognition turns speech into text. Depending on your browser, that may send audio to the browser’s maker (for example Google for Chrome or Microsoft for Edge) under their terms. You can type instead.

Our AI provider processes content under business terms that restrict use of submitted content to providing the service to us and prohibit using it to train their models. No automated decision is made about you without a person involved: an attorney decides whether to take your matter and approves every document.

6. Who we share it with

We share information in four situations only.

• Service providers that run our systems, under contracts that limit them to providing the service to us. They are listed below.
• Courts, the other side and their lawyers, when that is the legal service. Filing a paper puts it in the court record. Serving it sends it to the opposing party. A validation letter is sent to the collector you named. This is the point of the service, and we do it under your agreement with the firm.
• Co-counsel or local counsel when a matter is referred to or handled with another lawyer, with your consent as the agreement provides.
• As required by law: to comply with a subpoena, court order or legal process, to protect the rights and safety of our clients, our people or the public, or to defend our rights, in each case within the limits our professional rules place on disclosing client information.

If the firm or the Operator is ever merged or sold, your information would pass to the successor under this same policy and the rules of professional conduct.

Our service providers and what each one receives

We do not use advertising networks, remarketing tags, social media pixels or session-recording tools. The Facebook link in our footer is a plain link; nothing is sent to Facebook when you view our pages.

7. Cookies and similar technologies

We use a small number of cookies, all set by us. None of them is used for advertising.

Your browser also stores, on your device only and never sent to us:

• your light or dark theme choice;
• whether you dismissed the Founding-50 announcement;
• a service worker, if you turned on notifications, so alerts can be shown when the site is not open.

Stripe sets its own cookies on its payment forms to prevent fraud; those are governed by Stripe’s privacy policy.

You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings. If you block them, you will not be able to stay signed in or to return to an unfinished intake from the same browser, but the links in our emails will still work.

Because we do not sell or share your information for cross-site advertising, there is nothing for a “Do Not Track” or Global Privacy Control signal to switch off, and our site behaves the same whether or not your browser sends one.

8. Email, mail and notifications

Email we send you

Our emails are about your matter: a sign-in link or code, a welcome, a question from your attorney, a document to read and approve, a payment receipt or invoice, a deadline reminder, or a reminder to finish an intake or to mail a letter. We do not send marketing newsletters. Reminder emails about an unfinished intake carry a link to stop them; replying to any email also works.

Paper mail

We mail court papers to the other side, validation letters to collectors, and advertising letters to people who have been sued. Paper is printed and mailed by the vendor named above. We record the dates the vendor reports; we never guess a mailing date.

Statutory electronic service

When Georgia law allows a court paper to be served by email (O.C.G.A. § 9-11-5(f)), we send it only to an address with a recorded legal basis for email service, we send it to every address listed for that recipient, and the subject line says “STATUTORY ELECTRONIC SERVICE”. Delivery and bounce reports are kept as part of the service record.

Notifications

Mobile and browser notifications are off until you turn them on. You can turn them off at any time in the app, in your browser’s site settings, or by signing out, which removes your phone’s token.

9. How we protect it

• Everything travels over encrypted connections and is encrypted at rest by our database and storage provider.
• Documents live in private storage. They are reached only through short-lived signed links, and only by the client on the matter and the attorneys and staff working on it.
• Every database table is locked so that only our server can read it; the browser never talks to the database directly.
• Attorneys and staff must sign in with a password and a second factor from an authenticator app.
• Access to each file is logged, and key records (service events, payment events, the funnel) are append-only, so history cannot be quietly rewritten.
• Public forms are rate-limited, webhooks from our vendors are authenticated, and the site publishes a content security policy that limits where the browser may send data.
• Mock or test providers cannot be switched on in production without an explicit setting, and nothing is sent until the sending identity is configured.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal information, we will tell you and the authorities as Georgia law and our professional rules require.

10. How long we keep it

11. Your choices and rights

Whoever you are and wherever you live, you can ask us to:

• tell you what information we hold about you;
• correct anything that is wrong;
• delete your information;
• stop reminder emails about an unfinished intake or a letter;
• never mail you again. Tell us your name and ZIP code and we add them to a do-not-mail list that is checked before every mailing. Because the list exists to stop mail, it is kept permanently and is not deleted on request.

Email cmcclurgesq@gmail.com from the address we have on file, or tell us how to confirm it is you. We answer within 30 days. There is no charge, and we will not treat you differently for asking.

Limits on deletion. Where we are your attorneys, the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct require us to keep certain file and trust-account records, and tax law requires us to keep payment records. Proof that a court paper was served is part of the case record and is kept. Where a record must stay, we tell you what it is and why.

State privacy laws. Georgia has no general consumer privacy statute, and most state privacy laws exempt law firms and the information they hold under attorney-client privilege. If you live in a state whose law gives you rights over your information, you can exercise them by the same email, and we will honour them. We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for targeted advertising, so there is no sale or sharing to opt out of.

Notifications can be turned off in the app or your browser at any time. Cookies can be blocked or cleared in your browser; see section 7.

12. Confidentiality and privilege

Once an attorney-client relationship is formed, information relating to your representation is confidential under Georgia Rule of Professional Conduct 1.6, and communications with your attorney for the purpose of legal advice are privileged. This policy sits alongside those duties and never narrows them.

Information you send before the firm has agreed to represent you is handled under Rule 1.18 (duties to prospective clients). Our intake pages ask you not to send confidential details until we have agreed to take your matter, and the website chat is not confidential at all.

The self-service validation letter does not create an attorney-client relationship. The attorney-signed letter and Debt Defender are limited engagements that begin only when the firm accepts your matter, as the agreement you sign explains.

13. Children

Our services are for adults. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has given us information, email cmcclurgesq@gmail.com and we will delete it.

14. Where your information is processed

We are in Georgia, and our providers process information in the United States. If you use our services from outside the United States, your information is transferred here and handled under United States law and this policy.

15. Changes to this policy

When we add a feature that changes what we collect, where it goes or how long we keep it, we update this page in the same release and change the “Last updated” date at the top. If a change materially reduces your rights, we will tell current clients by email before it takes effect.

16. How to reach us

Questions about this policy, or a request about your information:

• Email: cmcclurgesq@gmail.com
• Phone: (321) 294-9540
• Mail: FairCounsel, 4607 Cardinal Ridge Way, Flowery Branch, GA 30542