1. Who we are
Draftari is a legal-practice management service built for Indian law offices — individual advocates, chambers, and firms registered under the Advocates Act, 1961. It is operated by [Entity name to be confirmed], a company incorporated in India with its registered office at [Address to be confirmed] (“Draftari,” “we,” “us”).
Under the DPDP Act, we play two different roles depending on whose data is being processed:
- Data Fiduciary for the personal data of the individual lawyer or firm representative who creates an account (name, email, phone, bar council ID, billing details). Here, we decide the purposes and means of processing, and we owe you the full set of rights under the DPDP Act.
- Data Processor for the client-matter data that a law office uploads to Draftari on behalf of its clients (case metadata, hearing notes, filed documents, chat between team members). The law office — your firm — remains the Data Fiduciary. We process that data only on your instructions and cannot repurpose it.
This policy covers both roles; where they diverge we call it out explicitly.
2. Personal data we collect
We collect the following categories of personal data:
Account data (you are the Data Principal)
- Name, email address, mobile number (for OTP-based login).
- Professional identifiers you choose to provide: Bar Council registration number, enrolment state, firm name, role within the firm.
- Authentication data: hashed passwords (we never store plaintext), session cookies, device fingerprints for suspicious-login alerts.
- Billing data, if you subscribe to a paid plan: legal name, billing address, GSTIN, payment-instrument metadata (we use third-party payment processors and do not store full card numbers).
Client-matter data (your firm is the Data Fiduciary)
- Case metadata: title, parties, court / tribunal name, Case Number Record (CNR), stage, hearing dates.
- Client contact details that you enter: names, phone, email, address.
- Documents your firm uploads: pleadings, orders, affidavits, contracts, correspondence. Some of this is privileged communication between advocate and client; we treat it accordingly (see section 7).
- Payment and fee records tied to specific matters.
- Messages between members of your firm via the in-app messenger, and posts in shared discussion channels.
Automatically collected
- IP address, browser / device type, operating system, coarse geolocation derived from IP — used for security logging and aggregate analytics.
- Service logs: API requests, error traces, feature usage events (pseudonymised where possible).
Voice input (optional, microphone permission)
- When you tap the microphone button to dictate a note, message, or search query — and when you record a voice note from the paired Apple Watch or Wear OS app — Draftari activates the device microphone for the duration of that recording only. The microphone is never active in the background; the system mic indicator (the orange dot on iOS, the green pill on Android) reflects this.
- Audio is handed to the operating system’s built-in speech recogniser — Apple’s SFSpeechRecognizer on iOS and macOS, Google’s SpeechRecognizer on Android — which returns a text transcript. We store only the transcript that you choose to insert into a note, message, or field. Raw audio is discarded once transcription completes; Draftari does not upload, retain, or transmit voice recordings to its own servers and does not use voice input to build a voiceprint.
- The Indic-language coverage of the OS recognisers is set by Apple and Google. Some Indian languages may route briefly through their cloud services for transcription, governed by Apple’s and Google’s respective privacy terms. We are evaluating Bhashini (Government of India ULCA ASR) as an India-resident alternative; if and when we adopt it, this section will be updated to name Bhashini as a sub-processor under section 5.
- Microphone access is permission-gated by the OS. You can decline at install or revoke at any time via Settings; the voice button will then prompt you to re-grant access and every other Draftari feature continues to work without it.
3. Why we process personal data (purpose)
Account-level data is processed to:
- create and maintain your Draftari account;
- authenticate you on each sign-in (including via SMS or email OTP);
- provide customer support, billing, and service notifications;
- comply with statutory obligations (e.g. tax records under the Income-Tax Act, 1961 and GST);
- detect, investigate, and prevent abuse of the service or security incidents.
Voice input (microphone) is used solely to convert speech into text — a dictation accessibility feature for users who prefer or need to compose by voice. The audio never leaves your device’s OS recogniser; only the transcript text is handed back to Draftari and treated like any other text you typed (account-level if it’s a search term, client-matter if it’s a case note).
Client-matter data is processed only to:
- store and retrieve it on your firm’s behalf, as instructed by you through the product interface;
- enrich it with data from the Indian eCourts system (case status, listings, uploaded orders) when you opt in to that feature;
- operate infrastructure (backup, failover, routine maintenance).
We do not train machine-learning models on client-matter data and we do not share it with third parties except as described in section 5.
4. Legal basis for processing
Under the DPDP Act, personal data is processed either with your consent or on a specified legitimate use. For Draftari:
- Consent for marketing communications, optional integrations (like eCourts sync), and analytics cookies. You can withdraw consent at any time — see section 8.
- Performance of contract for data strictly needed to deliver the service you signed up for (your account, your firm’s matter data, billing).
- Legal obligation for tax, accounting, and court / law-enforcement disclosures where a valid legal process compels us.
- Legitimate use (employment / employment-like purposes) where a firm administrator grants access to a team member who is part of the firm’s engagement.
- Public interest — Advocates Act 1961 (DPDP § 7(d)) for bar-council and judicial notices published through the Court Updates feature. When Draftari operators enter a notice received from a Bar Council of India official, a state Bar Council, or a High Court or Supreme Court communication (“bar-communication”), that entry may contain the name or other identifiers of an advocate in connection with an official disciplinary, admission, or regulatory act. We process this information on the public-interest basis because the Bar Council of India and state bar councils are statutory bodies exercising functions under the Advocates Act, 1961, and disseminating their official notices serves the practice-management needs of enrolled advocates. Emergency bar-communication notices — same-day notices received by phone from a Bar Council official — require an additional two-person co-sign review by independent counsel and the Data Protection Officer before the entry appears in any chamber feed. If you are a Data Principal (an advocate or other individual) who believes their information has been processed under this basis incorrectly, contact the Grievance Officer (section 12) or the Data Protection Board of India under DPDP § 13.
5. Sharing and disclosure
We share personal data only with the following categories of recipients, and only to the minimum extent needed:
- Sub-processors under contract: Supabase (hosted Postgres + object storage, data centres in Singapore and Mumbai), email delivery providers for transactional mail, SMS OTP providers for phone login, and cloud infrastructure providers. Each sub-processor is bound by a data-processing agreement no less protective than this policy.
- Payment processors to charge paid subscriptions (Razorpay or similar). They collect payment instrument data directly; we receive only tokenised references.
- Law-enforcement and regulatory bodies when compelled by a valid Indian court order, statutory notice, or equivalent cross-border legal process. We review every such request for validity before responding.
- Successor in interest in the event of a merger, acquisition, or sale of the Draftari business. Successors inherit the obligations in this policy.
We do not sell personal data to advertisers or data brokers and we do not share client-matter data between customer firms.
No cross-app / cross-site tracking. Draftari does not set advertising identifiers, does not use the iOS IDFA, and does not integrate any third-party analytics SDK that correlates your activity across apps or websites not owned by Draftari. The only data we send to third parties is: error-report traces via Sentry (our crash-reporting vendor, contract-bound and scrubbed of message bodies before upload) and payment tokens via Razorpay. Neither is used for behavioural advertising. This means we do not trigger Apple’s App Tracking Transparency prompt — there is no tracking to ask for permission for.
6. Retention
We retain data only as long as needed for the purposes above, or as required by law:
- Account data: while your account is active, plus up to 90 days after closure so you can recover an accidentally closed account. We anonymise beyond that window, except records we must keep longer (e.g. tax invoices retained for 8 years under the Income-Tax Act).
- Client-matter data: as long as your firm chooses. When you delete a case or document, we soft-delete immediately and purge from backups within 30 days. If your firm closes its account we hand over or permanently delete matter data per your written instruction, subject to any statutory retention duty resting on the firm (typically 5–10 years after matter closure under Bar Council rules).
- Security and audit logs: 12 months, longer if needed for an active investigation.
7. Attorney-client privilege
Documents you upload to a case may be privileged communication between advocate and client under Sections 126 and 129 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023. We do not access, read, or process the contents of these documents for any purpose other than storing and retrieving them on your firm’s instructions.
Our staff access to stored documents is restricted to authorised engineers investigating an operational incident, with per-access logging and a reviewable audit trail. We never use the contents of privileged documents for product improvement, analytics, or machine-learning training.
8. Your rights
If you are a Data Principal (an individual whose personal data we process as a Data Fiduciary — typically the lawyer who signs up), the DPDP Act gives you the following rights:
- Right to access: confirmation of whether we process your data, a summary of what we hold, and the recipients we share it with. Request this via the Settings screen or by emailing the Grievance Officer (section 12).
- Right to correction and erasure: correct inaccurate data, complete incomplete data, update stale data, and erase data that is no longer needed for the purposes above. You can delete your account at any time from the mobile app (Settings → Security → Delete Account), the web app (lawpal.tech/settings/delete-account), or by writing to the Grievance Officer — see lawpal.tech/account/delete for step-by-step instructions and what happens to shared content. Other erasure requests we handle manually within 30 days.
- Right of grievance redressal: contact our Grievance Officer (section 12). If we do not resolve your grievance to your satisfaction, you may approach the Data Protection Board of India under section 13 of the DPDP Act.
- Right to nominate: nominate another individual who may exercise your rights on your behalf in the event of your death or incapacity.
- Right to withdraw consent: where processing relies on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time without affecting the lawfulness of processing before the withdrawal.
If you are a client of a Draftari-using firm and your personal data sits on the platform because your lawyer put it there, your firm is the Data Fiduciary. Please direct access, correction, and erasure requests to the firm first; we will support the firm in fulfilling them.
9. Security
We apply the following technical and organisational measures:
- TLS 1.2+ on all client-server traffic; HTTPS-only for the web app. The mobile apps ship with App Transport Security enforced on iOS and Network Security Config on Android so downgrade to plaintext HTTP is blocked at the OS level. We use only exempt encryption under US export regulations (TSU exception, 15 CFR §740.17(b)(3)) — no custom cryptography in transit or at rest.
- Data at rest is encrypted via our infrastructure provider (AES-256). Database backups are encrypted.
- Row-Level Security (RLS) in Postgres enforces that each firm’s data is isolated from every other firm at the query layer, not just the application layer.
- Multi-factor authentication via OTP for all account sign-ins; passwords are stored only as bcrypt hashes.
- Principle of least privilege for staff access, with quarterly access reviews.
- Incident-response runbook with a dedicated on-call rotation.
No system is perfectly secure. If you notice something that looks wrong — a suspicious login, an unexpected email, anything — email security@lawpal.tech immediately.
10. Breach notification
If we learn of a personal-data breach that is likely to result in harm to you, we will notify you and the Data Protection Board of India within 72 hours of confirming the breach, subject to the rules made under the DPDP Act. The notice will describe the nature of the breach, the data involved, the measures we are taking, and what you can do to protect yourself.
11. Cross-border transfer
Draftari uses a Supabase project hosted in Mumbai (Asia-South-1) as its primary data store. Some operational data (email delivery logs, error traces) may transit through servers in Singapore or the European Union operated by our sub-processors. We transfer data only to jurisdictions and entities that offer protections consistent with the DPDP Act and subject to contractual safeguards.
If the Central Government restricts transfers to specific countries under section 16 of the DPDP Act, we will update our sub-processor list and, if necessary, relocate data.
12. Grievance Officer
As required under section 10(2)(c) of the DPDP Act, our Grievance Officer is:
[Name to be confirmed]
Grievance Officer, Draftari
Email: grievance@lawpal.tech
Postal address: [To be confirmed]
We acknowledge grievances within 48 hours and aim to resolve them within 30 days. If we cannot meet that window we will tell you why and when you can expect resolution.
13. Children
Draftari is a professional tool for advocates and is not intended for use by anyone under 18. We do not knowingly process the personal data of a child as a Data Principal. If you believe a child has created a Draftari account, email the Grievance Officer and we will verify and delete.
14. Changes to this policy
When we make material changes we post the updated policy here, update the version number, and email registered users at least 15 days before the change takes effect. The effective date at the top of this page is always the binding date.
15. Governing law and disputes
This policy and any dispute arising out of it is governed by the laws of India. Subject to the mandatory provisions of the DPDP Act and the jurisdiction of the Data Protection Board of India, the courts at [Seat city — to be confirmed] have exclusive jurisdiction.
16. Contact
General privacy questions: privacy@lawpal.tech. Grievances and DPDP requests: grievance@lawpal.tech. Security issues: security@lawpal.tech.