What we keep, and what we don't.

shark.law is operated by Plaintify, which is the company responsible for this site and the party this policy runs to. shark.law and Plaintify Answers (plaintify.ai/answers) are the same service behind two names: one database, one set of rules. Using either is covered by this policy. Plaintify's full company-wide policy, which also covers its software for law firms, is at plaintify.ai/privacy.

Plaintify is not a law firm and shark.law is not your lawyer. Using it creates no attorney–client relationship, so nothing you type here is protected by attorney–client privilege. Please do not send anything you would not want read by someone other than a lawyer you have hired.

1. What we collect

1.1 Your question, and our answer

Before your question is stored, personal details are removed from it: people's names become their role (“my landlord”), street addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, government ID numbers, and account, policy or case numbers are replaced with a placeholder. Dates, dollar amounts, city and county names, business and public-body names, and statute or rule numbers are kept, because the law often turns on them. What we store is that de-identified copy of the question, a normalised form of it, and a mathematical representation of its meaning (built from the de-identified text) used to find relevant law. We also store the answer we produced — which is written to refer to people by role, never by name — the statutes and cases it cited, our confidence in it, which model and which version of our instructions produced it, and how long it took and cost.

The removal is automated, in two passes: a fixed set of patterns for emails, phone numbers and ID-style numbers, and an AI reading for names and addresses. It can miss things — an unusual name, a detail that identifies you without naming you. Please leave names and identifying details out of your question; the tool does not need them, and the answer is not better for having them.

That last part is deliberate. A tool that tells people what the law says has to be able to show its work afterwards — which answer was given, on what date, grounded in which authority. That record is what makes the service accountable rather than merely confident.

1.2 What we do not keep from a document you attach

If you attach a lease, a letter or another PDF or Word file, it is read in memory to pull out the text, used to answer you, and discarded. The file is never written to our storage, and neither is its text. The only thing that persists is the short question derived from it, which you can see and edit before you submit.

The document's text is sent to our AI provider while the answer is being written — see section 4.

1.3 A random ID, and a scrambled fingerprint of your IP

Your browser generates a random identifier and keeps it in local storage. It is not linked to your name, your email or any account, because there is no account. It exists so a follow-up question knows which conversation it belongs to, and so you can delete your own data later.

We do not store your IP address. We store a salted one-way hash of it — a fingerprint that cannot be turned back into an address — used only to enforce the daily question limit and to detect abuse. The daily limit looks back 24 hours, so once a session has been quiet for 24 hours the fingerprint has no remaining job and is cleared from it; an hourly task does that. If the secret salt is ever missing, the system refuses to produce a hash at all rather than store a weak one.

1.4 Your acknowledgements

When you start, we record which state you chose, that you confirmed you are at least 13, the version of the terms you accepted, and when. This is the record that you were told what this tool is and is not.

1.5 Feedback signals

Whether you marked an answer helpful, and whether the “talk to a lawyer” option was shown to you, clicked, or used. No content, just the action.

1.6 If — and only if — you ask to be connected with a lawyer

That form collects your first and last name, email address, an optional phone number, your state, the type of matter, and a short summary of your question with personal details removed (the same de-identified copy described in 1.1). We also store the exact wording of the consent you agreed to and its version, so there is a record of what you were told at the moment you agreed.

1.7 Error diagnostics

We use Sentry to catch crashes. In normal use it records nothing about your session. When an error occurs, it captures a replay of the interface to help us reproduce the fault — configured so that all text is masked and all images and media are blocked, so your question is not captured in it. It also samples about one in ten page loads for performance timing.

2. What we never collect

• No account, password, or identity verification.
• Your name — unless you type it into a question and the automated removal misses it. Please leave it out.
• No advertising or marketing cookies, no ad network, no third-party tracking pixels, no cross-site profile of you. shark.law carries no advertising technology of any kind.
• No purchase of information about you from data brokers.
• We do not ask for, and do not want, your Social Security number, financial account numbers, or medical records. Please do not include them.

3. Local storage on your device

shark.law sets no advertising cookies. It stores three values in your browser's local storage: sl_answers_anon (the random ID above), sl_answers_session (which conversation you are in) and sl_answers_state (which state your question is about, so you are not asked twice). Clearing your browser storage removes all three and ends the session on this device. Because we run no cross-site tracking, there is nothing for a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal to switch off — but we honour those signals as an opt-out of any disclosure described in section 6.

4. AI providers

To answer you, your question — and the text of any document you attached — is sent to our AI providers: Anthropic, which writes the answer, and OpenAI, which converts text into the numerical form used to search the law. They act as our service providers under commercial API agreements and process this content only to return a result to us.

Your question is not used to train or fine-tune any AI model — not ours, not theirs. We do not feed consumer questions into any model-improvement process. We do review aggregate figures, such as how often the tool refuses to answer or how often an answer is well grounded, to measure and improve quality.

4.1 Reuse of answers between people

When two people ask the same question about the same state, we may serve the second person the answer we already produced, rather than paying to generate it again. What is reused is the answer — a statement of public law. Nothing about the first person travels with it. Answers based on a document you attached are never reused this way, because those turn on your particular facts.

5. How we use what we collect

• To answer your question and any follow-up.
• To keep the record described in 1.1 — what was said, when, and on what authority.
• To enforce the daily limit and to detect abuse of a free service.
• To measure and improve accuracy, in aggregate.
• To connect you with a law firm, only if you ask us to.
• To comply with law, and to protect someone's safety.

6. Who else sees it

6.1 Participating law firms — only at your request

If you submit the “Connect me with a lawyer” form, we send your name, contact details, state, matter type and question summary to law firms that are licensed in your state, participate in our referral programme, and handle that kind of matter. More than one firm may receive it, and any of them may contact you. That is stated on the form itself before you submit.

Once a firm receives your information it controls that copy independently, under its own privacy policy and its own professional obligations. Deleting your data here does not reach into a firm's files — you would need to ask that firm directly. Firms are not given your question text, only the summary described above.

Plaintify is not a law firm, does not practise law, and does not take any share of a fee from a firm you end up hiring. We are not a lawyer referral service certified by any bar association unless expressly stated.

6.2 Service providers

The companies that make the service run, each acting on our instructions: Vercel (hosting), Supabase (database, hosted in the United States), Anthropic and OpenAI (section 4), Sentry (error diagnostics), Resend (email to firms when you request a connection), and Cloudflare (bot protection, where enabled).

6.3 Legal and safety

We may disclose information if the law requires it, or where we believe in good faith it is necessary to prevent serious harm. If we are ever compelled to produce your data, we will tell you unless we are legally prohibited from doing so.

6.4 We do not sell your information for money

We do not, and will not, sell personal information for money. We do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. The one disclosure we make to another business for its own use is the law-firm connection in 6.1, and it happens only because you asked for it. Some state privacy laws define “sale” or “sharing” broadly enough that a referral of this kind could fall within it, so we treat it that way: you can decline simply by not using the form, and you can have the record deleted at any time under section 8.

7. How long we keep it

8. Your rights

You can delete everything yourself, right now. Every answer page has a Delete my data link. It removes your session and every question and answer tied to it. You do not have to ask us, prove who you are, or wait.

You may also ask us to confirm what we hold about you, to correct it, to provide a copy, or to delete it, by writing to privacy@plaintify.ai. We do not charge for this and we will not treat you differently for asking. We will respond within 45 days.

We extend these rights to everyone, whatever state you live in. The states we cover do not all give residents the same statutory privacy rights, and we would rather not run a service where your rights depend on which side of a state line you happen to be on.

One honest limitation: because there is no account, we usually cannot tell which data is yours except through the random ID in your browser. That is why the self-service delete link is the reliable route, and why an email request may require you to send it from the address you gave us on a referral form.

9. Security

Traffic is encrypted in transit and data is encrypted at rest. The tables holding consumer questions are not readable by any customer account — only by the service itself. IP addresses are hashed with a secret salt rather than stored. Documents are never written down. No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise; if a breach affects your information we will notify you as required by law.

10. Children

shark.law is not directed to children under 13, and you must confirm you are at least 13 to use it. We do not knowingly collect information from a child under 13. If you believe we have, write to privacy@plaintify.ai and we will delete it.

11. Where your data is held

In the United States. shark.law answers questions about Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas, and Louisiana law only and is intended for people in the United States; it is not directed to the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom. If you use it from outside the US, you are sending your information to the US.

12. Changes

If we change this policy we will change the version and effective date at the top, and for a material change we will say so on the site. The version in force when you used the service is the one that governs that use.

13. Contact

privacy@plaintify.ai reaches the person responsible for privacy at Plaintify. Please include “shark.law” in the subject so it is routed correctly.

Notice at collection

Sensitive personal information is not collected, and no information is used for cross-context behavioural advertising. Retention is as stated in section 7.

shark.law is operated by Plaintify. It provides legal information, not legal advice, and using it does not create an attorney–client relationship. Back to shark.law