Portal Platform Terms

This page is information, not an agreement, and you are not being asked to accept it.

The terms of use and privacy notice that govern your portal — the ones you may have been asked to read and agree to — are your law firm's, and they are shown to you inside the portal itself. This page exists to answer a different question: who Forsivo is, and why a company you have never heard of is involved in your file.

1. Who we are

Forsivo makes the software your law firm uses to run its practice, including the client portal you sign in to. We are a technology company. We are not lawyers, we are not your lawyers, and we have no part in your legal matter.

Your firm chose Forsivo the way it chose its phone system or its document scanner. The portal wears your firm's name and your firm's colours because it is your firm's portal; we built it and we run it.

2. Your firm's terms, not ours

The portal can present a terms of use and a privacy notice and record that you agreed to them. Those documents are written and published by your firm. They describe your firm's obligations to you and what your firm does with your information.

We built the mechanism that shows them and records your acceptance. We did not write the words, and the platform does not permit us to change them. Two details of that mechanism are worth knowing, because they are unusual and they work in your favour:

What you accepted is stored as text, not as a link. A record that you accepted a page at some address proves nothing, because the page behind an address can be rewritten later. Your acceptance instead records the exact words you were shown, together with a cryptographic fingerprint of them.
Published versions cannot be edited. If your firm needs to correct a document, it must publish a new version, and everyone is asked again. The database refuses edits and deletions to published documents and to acceptance records.

That is also why this page is not part of what you accept. Incorporating an outside web page by reference would defeat the point — the record can only attest to words you were actually shown.

3. What we hold, and for whom

Everything in your portal — your documents, your messages, your questionnaire answers, your invoices, your contact details — is your law firm's client file. We store it and we protect it, on your firm's instructions and on your firm's behalf.

We do not decide what your firm collects from you, how long your firm keeps it, or who at the firm may see it. Your firm decides all of that.

What you tell your firm about your matter is protected by attorney-client privilege and by your firm's professional duty of confidentiality. Our involvement as your firm's technology provider does not narrow either, and we do not treat our access as a waiver of anything.

The controls we implement are listed in the privacy policy. We hold no third-party security certification and will not imply one.

4. How signing in works

There is no portal password. When you ask to sign in, the portal emails you a link. Opening that link signs you in.

The link works once and is consumed the moment it is used.
It expires fifteen minutes after it is sent.
We store only a cryptographic hash of it, never the link itself.

Please treat the link like a key, because that is what it is. Anyone holding it can reach your file until it is used or expires. That is a real limitation of how passwordless sign-in works, and we would rather say so plainly than let you discover it.

Do not forward a sign-in email. If you think someone else has reached your account, tell your firm straight away.

Not sure whether a sign-in email you received is genuine? Here is how to check.

5. What the portal is not

It is not a substitute for talking to your attorney. It is a convenient place to read what your firm shares with you, send what your firm asks for, see invoices, and exchange messages.

Deadlines do not run through the portal. Sending a message or uploading a document here does not meet a court deadline and does not pause one. If something is time-sensitive, call your firm.

It is not your only copy. Your file is not stored only in the portal. Ask your firm for a copy of anything, at any time.

6. What we do with your information

We use it to run the portal for your firm. Specifically, we do not:

sell it or share it with anyone for their own purposes;
use it for advertising;
use it to train machine learning models;
read your file for any reason other than operating the platform, fixing a fault your firm reported, or responding to a security incident.

We use service providers — hosting, email delivery, payment processing — who see what they need to in order to provide those services and are not free to use it otherwise. They are listed by name in the privacy policy.

If you want to know what is held about you, or to correct it, ask your firm. It is their file, and answering for it is theirs. A request sent to us will be forwarded to them.

7. Availability

We may need to take the portal down for maintenance, and we do not guarantee it will be reachable at any particular moment. Do not rely on it for anything urgent. Your firm can always reach your file another way, and so can you — by asking them.

8. If your firm stops using Forsivo

Your file belongs to your firm and goes with it. If your firm's account closes, your firm receives a complete export of its data and the portal stops being available to you. Your firm remains your point of contact for your file, exactly as before.

9. Who to ask

About your matter, your documents, your invoice, your information, or anything you were asked to agree to — ask your law firm. They are your counterparty and we are not.

About the software itself, or if you believe you have found a security problem, you can reach us at security@forsivo.com. We will not discuss the contents of a firm's file with anyone but the firm.

See also about our emails, the privacy policy, and the terms of service that govern the firm's use of Forsivo.