Terms of Use

1. Acceptance, parties and eligibility

These Terms of Use (“Terms”) govern your use of Rhett Precedent at https://rhett.legal/rhett-precedent/ (“Rhett Precedent” or the “Service”). The Service is operated by Foolscape Technologies Private Limited (“Foolscape”, “we”, “us”), under the Rhett brand. “You” means the person using the Service and, where you use it for an organisation, that organisation.

By using the Service you accept these Terms, the Privacy Policy, the Disclaimer and the Case Removal and Redaction Policy, each of which forms part of these Terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service.

You must be at least 18 years old and legally able to enter a binding agreement. If you use the Service for an organisation, you confirm that you have authority to bind it.

Rhett Workspace clients who use “Sign in with Rhett” are also bound by their Rhett Workspace subscription terms. Where those terms and these Terms conflict on a point about Compass or My Vault, the subscription terms prevail; on every other point, these Terms prevail.

2. The Service and its tiers

Rhett Precedent lets you search and read judgments and orders of the Supreme Court of India, the High Courts and tribunals, with citations and the treatment each judgment has received from later courts.

Reading judgments is free and will remain free. Daily limits, download limits and the features in each tier may change; we will announce material changes on the Service.

The court copy is the judgment as the court published it. The Service makes it available for your convenience; the court’s own website remains the authoritative record.

3. Accounts

An account is personal to you. You may not share your sign-in, let anyone else use your account, or use another person’s account. A Rhett Workspace client may give access to the people in its workspace under its subscription terms; each of them must use their own sign-in.

You are responsible for everything done through your account until you tell us at ask@rhett.legal that it has been compromised. Keep your Google or Rhett sign-in secure.

You may close your account at any time by writing to ask@rhett.legal. Section 6 of the Privacy Policy explains what happens to your Vault.

4. Acceptable use

You may use the Service to research, read, cite, quote and download judgments for any lawful purpose, personal or professional, including in court filings, opinions and teaching. The judgments themselves are public records and nothing in these Terms limits your right to use them.

You may not:

• access the Service by any means other than the interfaces we provide, or use bots, scrapers, crawlers or scripts to extract data from it;
• copy, mirror or republish the Service’s search index, citation data, judicial-treatment data, Compass outputs or page layouts, in whole or in substantial part;
• download court copies in bulk, exceed the limits for your tier, or try to circumvent daily limits, sign-in or any technical restriction;
• use Compass outputs to train, fine-tune or benchmark any machine-learning model;
• interfere with the Service, probe it for vulnerabilities, or place loads on it that degrade it for others;
• use the Service to harass or stalk any person named in a judgment, or to compile profiles of individuals from judgments;
• misrepresent Rhett Precedent, Compass or Datence as the source of legal advice, or present Compass output as the opinion of Rhett or of an advocate; or
• use the Service in breach of any law, including the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, Section 72 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 and Section 16 of the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, each of which restricts the disclosure of certain identities.

If you want programmatic or bulk access, write to ask@rhett.legal. Access of that kind is available only under a separate written agreement.

5. Intellectual property: what we claim and what we do not

What we do not claim. Judgments and orders of courts and tribunals are public records. Section 52(1)(q)(iv) of the Copyright Act, 1957 permits anyone to reproduce and publish them. We claim no copyright in the text of any judgment or order, and you need no permission from us to copy, quote or republish a judgment you obtained from the Service.

What we claim. Everything else about the Service is ours or our licensors’: the search index and ranking, the citation and judicial-treatment data we compile, the headnotes, metadata and page structure we add, Compass and its outputs, Datence, the Rhett name, marks and logos, and the software and design of the Service. These are protected by copyright, database, trade-mark and other laws. You may not reproduce, distribute or exploit them except as these Terms allow.

Your content. Notes and other material you add to My Vault remain yours. You grant us the licence needed to store and display them to you and, for a Rhett Workspace client, to the people in that client’s workspace.

6. Compass

Compass is a research tool. It is not legal advice and is not an opinion of Rhett, of Foolscape or of any advocate. It selects and presents passages from judgments. It can miss relevant authority, surface authority that has since been overruled or distinguished, misread a passage, or rank passages unhelpfully. It is for you, a professional or a reader exercising your own judgment, to read the full judgment, verify every passage against the court copy, check its current status and decide whether it applies.

You use Compass at your own risk. We make no promise that Compass output is accurate, complete, current or fit for any purpose, and we accept no liability for anything you do in reliance on it. Section 9 sets out the limits of our liability.

Compass does not accept document uploads. Do not enter confidential, privileged or personal information into a Compass query. Section 5 of the Privacy Policy explains how queries are handled.

7. My Vault

My Vault lets you save judgments, follow them and see every later decision that cites them. Vault contents belong to you. We store them to provide the Vault and for no other purpose.

For a Rhett Workspace client, the Vault is kept per client. Everyone that client adds to its workspace can see that client’s Vault. It is the client’s responsibility to decide who it adds.

Follow alerts depend on our index being updated. We will try to record every later citing decision, but we do not promise that every citing decision is captured or captured promptly. Judgments and orders that are removed or redacted under the Case Removal and Redaction Policy will be removed or redacted in your Vault too.

When your Rhett Workspace subscription ends, your Vault is kept so that you can resume if you subscribe again, and is deleted when you ask us to. Section 6 of the Privacy Policy has the details.

8. Subscriptions and Rhett Workspace

Judgment search and reading on Rhett Precedent are free. Google sign-in is free. Unlimited Compass and the per-client Vault are features of a Rhett Workspace subscription.

We do not take payment on Rhett Precedent. Pricing, billing, renewal, cancellation and refunds for Rhett Workspace are governed by the Rhett Workspace subscription terms and the agreement between the client and Rhett. Nothing in these Terms creates a right to a refund of any subscription fee.

9. No legal advice, warranties, liability and indemnity

No legal advice. Rhett Precedent is a research tool and a publisher of public records. Nothing on it, including search results, citation data, judicial-treatment data and Compass output, is legal advice. Using the Service, saving judgments, running Compass or emailing us does not create a lawyer-client, advocate-client or fiduciary relationship with Foolscape, with Rhett, or with any advocate associated with Rhett. If you need advice on your situation, consult a qualified advocate.

As is. The Service and everything on it are provided “as is” and “as available”. We make no warranty, express or implied, that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free or secure, or that any judgment, citation, treatment note or Compass output is accurate, complete, current or fit for a particular purpose. The Disclaimer explains the known limits of the data.

Limitation of liability. To the fullest extent the law allows, Foolscape, Rhett and their directors, employees, advocates and suppliers are not liable to you for any loss or damage arising from your use of, or inability to use, the Service or anything on it, including loss of profit, business, data or reputation and any indirect or consequential loss, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), statute or otherwise, and whether or not we were told it was possible. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the greater of INR 1,000 and the amount you paid to use Rhett Precedent in the 12 months before the claim.

Indemnity. You will indemnify Foolscape and Rhett against any claim, loss, cost or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your breach of these Terms, your misuse of the Service, or your use of any judgment or Compass output in breach of law.

10. Suspension, termination, governing law, grievances and changes

Suspension and termination. We may suspend or end your access, or block an IP address or network, without notice if we reasonably believe you have breached these Terms, if a court or authority requires it, or to protect the Service or other users. We may also withdraw or change any feature. Sections 5, 9 and 10 survive termination.

Removal of content. We remove or redact judgments only under the Case Removal and Redaction Policy. We may correct errors in metadata, citations and treatment data at any time.

Governing law and courts. These Terms are governed by the laws of India. The courts at Jodhpur, Rajasthan have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from these Terms or the Service.

Grievances. Complaints about the Service, these Terms or any content go to the Grievance Officer, Foolscape Technologies Private Limited, ask@rhett.legal. We acknowledge complaints within 7 days and aim to resolve them within 30 days. Requests to remove or redact a judgment follow the Case Removal and Redaction Policy.

Changes. We may update these Terms. The date at the top is the date of the current version. Material changes will be announced on the Service before they take effect, and your continued use after that is acceptance.

General. These Terms, the Privacy Policy, the Disclaimer and the Case Removal and Redaction Policy are the whole agreement between you and us about Rhett Precedent. If a clause is unenforceable, the rest stands. Our not enforcing a clause is not a waiver. You may not assign these Terms; we may assign them to a successor of the Service. Notices to you may be sent to the email address on your account; notices to us go to ask@rhett.legal.