Privacy Policy

1. Who we are and what this policy covers

Rhett Precedent (https://rhett.legal/rhett-precedent/) is operated by Foolscape Technologies Private Limited (“Foolscape”, “we”, “us”), a company incorporated in India, under the Rhett brand. Foolscape is the data fiduciary for the personal data described in this policy.

This policy covers everything on Rhett Precedent: judgment search and reading, Compass, My Vault, sign-in and the court copy download. It applies to visitors who are not signed in, to people who sign in with Google, and to Rhett Workspace clients who use “Sign in with Rhett”. Rhett Workspace at rhett.technology and the Rhett Legal website at rhett.legal have their own privacy terms; where you use both, this policy governs what happens on Rhett Precedent.

We collect only the data needed to run the service you are using. Every item listed below is tied to a function of the service that cannot work without it. By using Rhett Precedent you accept this policy and the Terms of Use. If you do not accept them, please do not use the service.

Contact: ask@rhett.legal. Registered office: 308, Mudit Mansion, Pal Link Road, Jodhpur Pincode:342008

2. Personal data inside published judgments

The judgments and orders on Rhett Precedent are public records. Each one was pronounced in open court and published by the court or tribunal that decided it, on that court’s own website. Rhett Precedent reproduces them as the court made them available, together with citations and later judicial treatment.

Names, addresses and other details that appear inside a judgment were placed in the public domain by the court, not by us and not by you. We do not collect this data from the people it describes, and we do not use it for any purpose other than publishing the judgment as a public record and making it searchable. Section 52(1)(q)(iv) of the Copyright Act, 1957 permits the reproduction and publication of judgments and orders of courts and tribunals. Personal data that is publicly available because a person is under a legal obligation to make it so falls outside the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 under Section 3(c)(ii) of that Act.

We will not remove or alter a judgment because a person named in it asks us to, except in the circumstances set out in our Case Removal and Redaction Policy: an order of a competent court, and the redaction of victims and children where the law requires it. That policy explains how to make a request and how we decide it.

3. Data we collect from you, and why each item is necessary

We collect no more than the service needs. The table lists each item, when it is collected and the function that depends on it.

We do not collect payment or bank details on Rhett Precedent. Subscriptions for Compass and My Vault are handled in Rhett Workspace under its own terms. We do not collect caste, religion, health, biometric or financial data on Rhett Precedent, and we do not ask you to upload documents to Compass.

We rely on the following grounds under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023: your consent, given when you sign in; and the legitimate use of data you voluntarily provide for the purpose you provided it, under Section 7(a).

4. Cookies

Rhett Precedent uses strictly necessary cookies only. The service does not work without them:

• a session cookie, which keeps you signed in. It expires when you sign out or after 14 days without using the site;
• a free-search cookie (precedent_anon), which counts the free searches of a visitor who is not signed in. It holds only short hashes of those searches, never their words, and expires at midnight India time;
• two short-lived sign-in cookies, set only while you sign in: one protects the sign-in form and expires after 12 hours, the other ties a “Sign in with Rhett” request to your browser and expires after 30 minutes.

Your search filters are kept in the page address, not in a cookie.

We do not show advertisements and we do not use advertising, cross-site tracking or social-media cookies. Any usage measurement we do is on our own servers and is aggregated; it does not profile individuals. You can clear or block cookies in your browser, but the daily limit and sign-in will then not work.

5. Compass and Datence

Compass is powered by Datence, an artificial-intelligence model operated by Rhett. Datence runs on servers in Mumbai, India. Your Compass query does not leave India and is not sent to any third-party AI provider.

When you run a Compass search, the proposition you type is processed to identify the passages in the judgment index that support it and the passages that go against it. The proposition and the result are kept, sealed (encrypted with a key derived from the query) and tied to your account, for up to 7 days, so that repeating the same search is answered quickly, and are then deleted. They are never used to train, fine-tune or improve Datence or any other model. Compass questions sent in a link can appear in our server logs, which are kept as section 8 describes.

If you save a Compass result to My Vault, the saved judgments become Vault data and are kept under section 6. The proposition itself is not added to the Vault; it is kept sealed for up to 7 days and then deleted, as described above.

6. My Vault

What you save in My Vault is yours. We store it so that you can return to it, and so that we can record every later decision that cites a judgment you follow.

Who can see it: you; and, for a Rhett Workspace client, the people that client has added to its workspace. Rhett’s engineering and support staff can reach the systems that hold Vault data only to operate, secure and troubleshoot the service. They work under confidentiality obligations and do not read Vault contents for any other purpose, including legal work for Rhett or for other clients.

If your Rhett Workspace subscription ends, your Vault stays stored so that you can resume where you left off if you subscribe again. It is not opened, shared or used in the meantime. You may ask us to delete it at any time by writing to ask@rhett.legal, and we will do so within 30 days unless a law requires us to keep it.

7. Who we share your data with

We do not sell personal data and we do not share it for advertising. We share it only as follows.

• Hosting and infrastructure providers in India that run the servers Rhett Precedent operates on. They process data on our instructions, under contract, and may not use it for their own purposes.
• Rhett Workspace, operated by the same group, so that your Rhett sign-in, subscription status and client Vault work across both services.
• Google, when you choose to sign in with Google. Google’s handling of your Google account is governed by Google’s own privacy policy, not ours.
• Courts, tribunals, regulators and law-enforcement agencies, where a law, a court order or a lawful request requires disclosure.
• Professional advisers, and a successor business, if Foolscape is reorganised or sold, subject to the same protections.

Your data is stored and processed in India. We do not transfer it outside India except where a lawful disclosure above requires it.

8. How long we keep your data

Where a law, a court order or a pending dispute requires us to keep data longer, we keep it only for that purpose and only for as long as required.

9. Your rights

For the data we collect from you under section 3, you may:

• ask what personal data we hold about you and how we use it;
• ask us to correct data that is inaccurate or incomplete;
• ask us to delete your account, your Vault or other data we hold about you;
• withdraw the consent you gave at sign-in, by deleting your account; the service will then revert to what is available without signing in;
• nominate a person to exercise these rights for you if you die or become incapacitated; and
• raise a grievance with the Grievance Officer in section 10.

Write to ask@rhett.legal from the email address linked to your account. We respond within 30 days. We may ask you to verify your identity before acting on a request, and we may refuse a request where a law requires us to keep the data or where the request is repetitive or unfounded, in which case we will tell you why.

These rights apply to data about you that we collected from you. They do not apply to the contents of judgments and orders, which are public records we did not collect from you. Requests about those are handled under the Case Removal and Redaction Policy.

10. Security, children, changes and grievances

Security. We use encryption in transit, access controls, logging and regular review to protect the data we hold. No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal data, we will notify you and the Data Protection Board of India as the law requires.

Children. Rhett Precedent is for adults. You must be 18 or older to sign in. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18; if we learn that we have, we delete it.

Links. Judgment pages link to the court copy and to court websites. Those sites have their own privacy practices and we are not responsible for them.

Changes. We may update this policy. The date at the top is the date of the current version. Material changes will be announced on Rhett Precedent before they take effect. Continued use after that date is acceptance of the updated policy.

Grievance Officer. Concerns about this policy or about how we handle your personal data go to:
Grievance Officer, Foolscape Technologies Private Limited
ask@rhett.legal
308, Mudit Mansion, Pal Link Road, Jodhpur Pincode:342008

We acknowledge grievances within 7 days and resolve them within 30 days. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may approach the Data Protection Board of India.