Terms of Service

1. Who these terms are between

These terms are between Forsivo LLC, an Oregon limited liability company ("we", "us") and the law firm that holds a Forsivo account ("the firm", "you"). They cover the firm, everyone the firm authorises to use the platform, and the firm's use of the client portal we provide.

They do not create any agreement between us and the firm's clients. A client's relationship is with the firm, and the terms a client is asked to accept in the portal are the firm's own — see the portal platform terms.

2. What Forsivo is

Forsivo is practice management software for law firms, delivered over the internet. It holds matters, contacts, calendars, tasks, time entries, invoices, expenses, documents and trust accounting records; it assembles estate planning documents from templates; and it provides a client portal that the firm can open to its clients.

We host it, we maintain it, and we change it. Some changes add capability. Some remove or replace it. Where a change would materially reduce something you rely on, we will give you at least 30 days' notice before it happens, rather than telling you after.

3. Limited release

Forsivo is in limited release with a small number of firms. That is a real description, not marketing modesty, and it has consequences you should weigh before putting client work into it:

Features may change, be replaced, or be withdrawn on shorter notice than a mature product would give.
We have not measured or committed to an uptime figure, and we do not offer a service level agreement.
Document templates and the deed generator cover Oregon only. They are not suitable for use in another jurisdiction without your own review and adaptation.
Practice areas other than estate planning are not built. Where you see a name for one, treat it as a placeholder.
Forsivo holds no third-party security certification. Section 7 describes the controls we actually implement; it does not describe an audit, because we have not had one.

4. What Forsivo is not

We are not a law firm and we do not give legal advice. Nothing the software produces is a legal opinion, and no part of it is a substitute for the professional judgement of a licensed attorney.

Generated documents are drafts. Forsivo assembles instruments — trusts, wills, deeds, assignments, letters — from templates and from the answers you and your clients supply. Whether a given instrument is correct for a given client, correctly executed, correctly recorded, and correctly funded is your professional responsibility and remains so. Review everything before it leaves your office.

The software's guardrails are aids, not a compliance function. Forsivo declines some obviously wrong operations — it will not offer to retitle a qualified retirement account into a trust, for example, because that is a taxable distribution. Those refusals exist because a tool that lets you pick the wrong option is worse than one with no opinion. They are not exhaustive, and their absence in any particular case is not an endorsement.

Forsivo does not hold client funds. Trust accounting in Forsivo is a record of transactions, not a bank. Reconciling that record against your actual trust account, and complying with the trust accounting rules of your jurisdiction, is yours.

5. Your account and your people

You decide who at your firm gets access and what role each person holds. You are responsible for what those people do in the platform, for removing access when someone leaves, and for the accuracy of what your firm enters.

Staff sign in at login.forsivo.com, through an identity provider we operate on Auth0. Client portal access works differently: a client is sent a single-use link that expires, and no client password exists. That design, and its consequences, are described in the portal platform terms.

Tell us promptly if you believe an account has been reached by someone who should not have reached it.

6. Your data stays yours

Everything your firm puts into Forsivo — matters, documents, client information, financial records — remains the firm's. We do not acquire ownership of it by hosting it.

We use it to run the service for you. Specifically, we do not:

sell it, rent it, or share it with anyone for their own purposes;
use it for advertising;
use it to train machine learning models, nor send data to any models.

We access it only where we need to in order to operate the platform, investigate a fault you have reported, or respond to a security incident — and where the law requires disclosure, we will tell you unless we are prohibited from doing so. Where we are permitted to, we will give you reasonable advance notice before we disclose anything, disclose no more than the demand actually requires, and allow you time to seek a protective order or otherwise assert privilege on your client's behalf.

You can export your data while your account is open, and for a period after it closes — see section 11.

7. Confidentiality and privilege

We understand that most of what your firm stores in Forsivo is confidential client information and much of it is privileged. We treat it that way.

The controls the platform implements:

Tenant isolation in the database: PostgreSQL row-level security keyed per firm, enforced beneath the application rather than by application code remembering to filter.
Field-level encryption: Social Security numbers, tax identifiers and bank details are encrypted per-field using AWS Key Management Service.
Encryption in transit and at rest: Traffic is served over TLS; stored data and backups are encrypted at rest.
Append-only audit log: Audit records cannot be updated or deleted — the database refuses it.
Ethical walls: Matter-level screening you configure. A screened user receives a 404, not a 403, so the existence of the matter is not disclosed by the refusal.
Role-based permissions: Access within your firm is scoped by the role you assign.

We use third-party infrastructure and service providers to deliver the platform — hosting, email delivery, payment processing, identity. They see what they need to see to provide their service and are not free to use it for anything else. The current list is published in our privacy policy, and we will tell you at least 30 days before we add to it.

We hold no security certification. The above is a description of implemented controls. It is not SOC 2, it is not HIPAA attestation, and it is not ISO 27001, and we will not describe it as any of those.

Breach notification

If we become aware of unauthorized access to your firm's data, we will notify you without undue delay, and in any event no later than 10 days after we discover it or have reason to believe it has occurred, tell you what we know and when we knew it, and support your own notification obligations to clients and regulators.

Processing personal data on your instructions

Most of the personal data in the platform is your firm's client file, and we process it as your processor, on your documented instructions and for no other purpose. Our people are bound to keep it confidential. Any subprocessor we engage is bound to obligations at least as protective as these. We will delete or return the data on your instruction, subject only to the append-only records described in section 11.

To allow you to verify our technical and organizational measures, we will, upon reasonable written notice, respond to a standard security questionnaire from your firm no more than once a year.

8. Acceptable use

Do not use Forsivo to:

store or transmit anything unlawful, or anything you do not have the right to store;
attempt to reach another firm's data, or to circumvent the isolation between tenants;
probe, scan or load-test the platform without our written agreement;
resell access, or provide the platform to a firm that does not hold its own account;
upload malware, or interfere with anyone else's use of the service.

If something you are doing is putting the platform or another firm's data at risk, we may suspend the account causing it. We will tell you why, and we will restore access as soon as the cause is resolved.

9. Availability

We aim to keep Forsivo running and to schedule maintenance where it will disturb the fewest people. We do not commit to an uptime percentage, we do not offer a service level agreement, and we do not offer service credits — because we have not measured the figure that would make such a commitment honest.

Do not treat the platform as your only copy of anything, and do not treat it as a deadline mechanism. If something is time-critical, do not rely on the software being reachable at the moment you need it.

10. Fees

During limited release, the fees for your firm — if any — are whatever we have agreed with you separately in writing. There is no published price list, and these terms do not create one.

If we introduce or change fees for your firm, we will agree it with you in advance rather than announcing it. If we cannot agree, either of us may end the arrangement under section 11. Payments your clients make through the portal are handled by a third-party processor; card surcharges, where they apply, are disclosed to the payer at the point of payment.

11. Ending the arrangement

You may stop using Forsivo at any time. Tell us, and we will close the account.

We may end the arrangement on at least 60 days' notice. We may end it immediately if the account is being used in a way that endangers the platform or another firm's data.

On termination you get your data. We will provide a complete export of your firm's matters, documents and records in a usable format, and we will keep the data available for that purpose for 90 days after the account closes.

One thing we cannot promise, and will not: complete erasure on request. Audit records and acceptance records in the platform are append-only at the database level — the system physically refuses to update or delete them. That is deliberate, and it is what makes those records worth anything. We can delete your substantive content; we cannot make the audit trail forget that it existed.

12. Changes to these terms

If we change these terms, we will tell the firm's administrators at least 30 days before the change takes effect and post the revised version here with the date it was published. If a change materially reduces your rights and you do not accept it, you may end the arrangement under section 11 and take your data with you.

13. Warranties and liability

Warranties and disclaimers

Forsivo is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis. We disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. Specifically, we do not warrant that any document assembled by the platform is legally effective, complete, or suitable for a given client's estate. The platform is an administrative tool; the legal efficacy, proper execution, funding, and recording of any generated instrument remains your exclusive professional responsibility. Section 7 is a description of the controls the platform implements as at the date of these terms, not a warranty of any particular result — but we will not describe a control we have not implemented, and we will tell you if we withdraw one.

Exclusion of indirect loss

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential, special, or punitive damages. This includes, without limitation, loss of profits, loss of goodwill, lost or corrupted data, or costs of substitute software, even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages.

Limitation of liability

Our total cumulative liability arising out of or related to this agreement, whether in contract, tort, or otherwise, will not exceed the greater of: (a) the total fees you paid to us for the platform in the twelve (12) months immediately preceding the incident giving rise to the liability; or (b) $1,000.

Indemnity

You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold us harmless from any third-party claims, liabilities, damages, or costs (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of the content your firm puts into Forsivo, your firm's own professional judgement, or your use of Forsivo in breach of section 8. This includes, but is not limited to, claims brought by your clients regarding the legal sufficiency or accuracy of documents produced using the platform, or any alleged breach of your professional duties.

This indemnity does not apply to any claim to the extent it arises from a defect in the platform, from our negligence or wilful misconduct, or from our breach of these terms.

Our indemnity to you

If a third party claims that the platform, or a template or generator we supply, infringes its intellectual property rights, we will defend the claim and pay any damages finally awarded against you, provided you tell us promptly, do not admit liability, and let us conduct the defence.

14. Governing law

Governing law and venue

This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Oregon, without regard to its conflict-of-law principles. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods and the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act do not apply. Any legal suit, action, or proceeding that is not subject to arbitration will be instituted exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Multnomah County, Oregon. Both parties consent to the personal jurisdiction and venue of these courts.

Dispute resolution and arbitration

Before filing a formal claim, both parties agree to attempt to resolve the dispute informally by contacting the other party. If the dispute remains unresolved after 30 days, any claim arising out of or relating to these terms or the platform must be resolved through binding arbitration seated in Multnomah County, Oregon, administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Commercial Arbitration Rules then in effect. The arbitration will be conducted by a single arbitrator appointed under those rules. Each party bears its own costs, and the parties share the arbitrator's fees equally. The arbitration is confidential, except that either party may disclose its existence and outcome where it must do so to meet a professional, regulatory or insurance obligation.

Exceptions to arbitration

The only exceptions to the arbitration requirement are claims seeking injunctive or equitable relief for the alleged infringement, misappropriation, or violation of a party's intellectual property rights, which may be brought directly in the state or federal courts of Multnomah County, Oregon.

15. General

What you may use, and what stays ours: For as long as your account is open, you may use the platform for your firm's legal practice. The software, the document templates and the deed generator are ours and stay ours. Nothing here transfers any of it to you, and section 6 governs your data in the other direction. If you send us suggestions, we may use them without owing you anything for them.
If either of us changes hands: Neither of us may transfer this agreement without the other's written consent, except that either may transfer it to a successor of substantially the whole of its business. If Forsivo is the party changing hands, we will tell you before it takes effect, and you may end the arrangement and export your data under section 11 without waiting out any notice period. You do not have to stay with a successor you did not choose.
What survives: Sections 6, 7, 11, 13 and 14 continue to apply after the arrangement ends.
If part of this does not hold: If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, that part is limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest continues in force.
Notices: Formal notice to us goes to legal@forsivo.com. If you need a postal address for formal service, ask and we will provide it. Formal notice to you goes to the firm's administrators at the email addresses on the account.
Things outside anyone's control: Neither of us is liable for a failure to perform caused by something genuinely outside our control. This does not excuse a failure to pay, and it does not suspend section 11.
The whole agreement: These terms, together with anything we have agreed with you separately in writing about fees, are the whole of the agreement between us on this subject.
What your firm publishes into the portal: The terms of use and privacy notice your firm publishes into the client portal are your firm's own. You are responsible for their content and their legality; we provide the mechanism that displays them and records acceptance.

16. Contact

Questions about these terms: legal@forsivo.com.
Security reports: security@forsivo.com.
Anything else: hello@forsivo.com.

See also the privacy policy and the portal platform terms.