Case Exchange
Last updated: Not yet in force
This platform is used by attorneys. Almost everything it holds is about an attorney and their licence, not about anybody’s client.
The rest of this page is the detail behind those four lines.
What you tell us. Your name, email address, telephone number, firm name and the counties you practise in. Your password is stored by our authentication provider in a form we cannot read.
What the State Bar tells us. When you give us your bar number we look it up and record the name on that record, the admission date, the current status, a link to the public profile, and when we last checked. We check again periodically for as long as your account is open.
What the identity check tells us. We record whether it passed, the name it read from your document, a reference number, and how many attempts have been made. That is the whole of it. The document itself, any photograph of you, the document number and your date of birth stay with the identity service and are never sent to us.
What you do here.The cases you post, the proposals you send and receive, which referrals you are part of, when you were shown the other attorney’s credentials, what you stated about your conflict check, and when each document was signed.
Payments. The amount, whether it succeeded, and a reference from our payment processor. We never see your card details. They go from your browser to the processor and do not pass through us.
Notes we write. If an account needs review, an administrator may record why. Those notes are visible to administrators only.
A listing carries the county, the type of matter, why it is being referred, a written summary, answers to questions about that type of case, and the next deadline. A private note and the full detail are held back until a match is made.
Everything in a listing is written by the attorney posting it. We ask them not to identify anybody and the platform is built around that expectation, but the words are theirs.
There is no place on this platform to record who a client is. No name, no date of birth, no address, no telephone number, no case number, no list of opposing parties. Not in a hidden field, not visible to administrators, not anywhere.
That is a deliberate design decision rather than a policy we could change quietly. Each attorney runs their own conflict check against their own records, which we have never seen, so a copy here would improve nobody’s check while putting the most sensitive information in the product onto our systems.
There is one exception and it is narrow.To send an agreement for signature we need somewhere to send it, so the posting attorney supplies their client’s email address at that moment. It is passed straight to the signing service and is written to no table of ours. When a screen needs to show where the document went, we read it back from the signing service rather than keeping our own copy. The client types their own name when they sign, so we never receive it.
The summary, the private note and several answers are free text. An attorney can type anything into them.
We ask attorneys not to identify their client or anybody else, we say so on the form, and posting a case requires acknowledging it. We cannot check whether they complied. Only the attorney knows what would identify their client to somebody who already knows the matter.
So anything typed into those boxes is held as it was written, and it is visible to whoever the platform shows that case to. If you are an attorney reading this, that is the reason to be careful about what goes in them. If you believe something identifying has been posted about you, write to us and we will deal with it.
We use other companies to run parts of the service. Each gets only what that part needs.
We may also disclose information if the law requires it, to establish or defend a legal claim, or to protect somebody’s safety.
We do not sell your information, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not give it to other attorneys except as the service obviously requires: your credentials are shown to the attorney on the other side of a referral before either of you commits, which is the whole point of showing them.
For counsel to decide
Whether written processing agreements are required with each of these companies, and whether any of them handles information outside the United States in a way that needs describing here, are both questions for counsel. The services themselves should be named individually in the final version.
We use a cookie to keep you signed in. Without it the platform cannot tell one request from another and you would be signed out constantly.
The page counting described below sets an identifier so that two visits from the same browser are not counted as two different people. It is not tied to your name, and it is not set at all on the pages a client sees.
We do not use advertising or tracking cookies of any kind.
When a page breaks we are sent a report so it can be fixed. It says what went wrong, on which screen, and which case or referral was involved.
Those reports are deliberately stripped before they leave. Email addresses are removed, and so is the private link a client uses to sign, which is the one thing in a web address here that would let somebody else act. We have also switched off the parts of that service that would otherwise attach your sign-in session, whatever you had typed into a form, and information read from the database.
We count which pages are used so we can tell where the service is confusing. That is a page address and nothing else. We do not record what you click, what you type, or the contents of your screen.
Neither of these runs on the pages a client sees. A client is not a user of this platform, has no account and never asked us for anything, so we do not measure them. Faults on those pages are still reported, because a fault there stops somebody signing a document that matters to them.
We keep your account information for as long as your account is open. You can ask us to close it at any time.
Some records outlive the account. A referral that happened, the fee that was charged, and the signatures that were captured are the evidence that the referral was done properly. Both attorneys may need that evidence years later, and so may a regulator, so we keep it after an account closes.
For counsel to decide
How long each category should be kept, and whether any of it must be kept for a minimum period, are questions for counsel. The record types are listed above and no retention period is stated here because inventing one would be worse than admitting it is undecided.
Access is restricted at the database itself rather than only in the application, so a request for a row you are not entitled to returns nothing even if something above it were wrong. Some columns, such as the notes an administrator writes, are unreadable by the person they are about.
Connections are encrypted. The credentials that could bypass those restrictions exist only on the server and are never sent to a browser.
No system is perfectly secure and we do not claim otherwise. What we can say is that the most sensitive information in this field, a client’s identity, is not here to be lost.
You can see and correct most of your information from your profile. Some of it you cannot change yourself: your bar number and the details we read from your bar record are fixed once your account is approved, because they are shown to another attorney deciding whether to work with you, and a credential its own subject can rewrite is not a credential.
You can ask us to close your account, and you can ask us what we hold about you. Write to us using the address below.
For counsel to decide
Which statutory rights apply is counsel’s call, and it is not straightforward here. Every account holder is a business user rather than a consumer, which affects how California’s privacy legislation treats them; and the small amount of information touching a client raises a separate question about whether this platform acts on its own behalf or on the attorney’s. The final version needs a rights section written to whatever answer that produces, including how a request is verified and answered.
This platform is for practising attorneys. It is not intended for anybody under 18 and we do not knowingly collect anything about a child.
We may update this policy. If a change is significant we will tell account holders before it takes effect.
Write to us at support@caseexchange.app.
For counsel to decide
The operating entity and a postal address for privacy enquiries are not yet settled, and whether a named contact is required depends on the answer in section 12.
Case Exchange is software that makes an introduction and generates the required paperwork. It is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. Attorneys agree their own referral terms with each other.