How Faircase collects, uses, protects and shares information — written for the people whose immigration files we hold, and for the firms who trust us with them.
We do not sell your personal information. We do not use your matter data to train AI models — not ours, not anyone's. Immigration files are among the most sensitive records a person has, and we hold them under attorney confidentiality obligations, encrypted, isolated per firm, and logged on every read.
"Faircase" is two related organizations, and which one holds your information changes your rights and our obligations. This policy explains both.
The company that builds and operates the Faircase platform — the case-management software, the client portal, the document tooling and the websites at faircase.ai and its subdomains. Faircase is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice.
A professional corporation that provides legal services to its own clients under a separate, signed engagement agreement. Where the P.C. represents you, your file is subject to attorney-client privilege and the New York Rules of Professional Conduct.
Depending on how you reach us, you are in one of four relationships:
| You are… | Who decides how your data is used | Faircase's role |
|---|---|---|
| A website visitor Browsing faircase.ai, submitting a contact form |
Faircase | Controller — we decide, and this policy governs directly |
| A firm user An attorney, paralegal or admin at a firm that subscribes to the platform |
Faircase for your account; your firm for everything you put in it | Controller for account and billing data; processor for matter data |
| A client of a subscribing firm Your attorney uses Faircase to run your case |
Your law firm | Processor / service provider acting only on your firm's instructions |
| A client of Faircase Legal Services, P.C. You engaged the P.C. directly for immigration representation |
Faircase Legal Services, P.C. | Technology vendor to the P.C., under the same confidentiality duties |
Why this matters. If you are a client of a subscribing law firm, that firm — not Faircase — decides what data is collected, how long it is kept, and who may see it. Requests to access or delete your data should go to your firm first. We will help your firm answer you, and we will not act on your matter data except on their instruction.
Most privacy policies do not need a section like this. An immigration platform does.
Courts have held that a client's use of a technology service can defeat attorney-client privilege where the provider's own terms permit it to retain, mine, train on, or hand over the content. We have written this policy — and built the system underneath it — so that using Faircase does not weaken the protection your file would otherwise have.
Specifically:
This section describes Faircase's commitments as a service provider. It is not legal advice about whether privilege attaches to any particular communication, and it does not create an attorney-client relationship with Faircase.
When a firm runs a case on Faircase, the platform holds whatever that case requires. For immigration work this routinely includes:
Every field in the Faircase database carries a classification tag, and the tag drives how the system treats that field — whether it must be encrypted, whether reads are audited, how long it is retained, and whether it can be erased on request. This is enforced in code, not left to convention.
| Class | What it is | How it is handled |
|---|---|---|
| C0 Public | No personal data — form catalogs, configuration, reference tables | Standard controls |
| C1 Internal | Operational metadata — statuses, timestamps, descriptors | Access-controlled |
| C2 Confidential | Person-identifying data — names, emails, phone numbers, billing | Access-controlled, firm-isolated, subject to access and deletion rights |
| C3 Sensitive / privileged | A-numbers, dates of birth, attorney work product, and every free-text field and uploaded document | Encrypted at rest, every read written to an audit record, never sent to an unregistered destination |
The default is deliberately conservative: any free-text field and any uploaded file is treated as C3 unless someone documents a reason to downgrade it. In practice that means the substance of an immigration file sits in the most protected tier.
Immigration work necessarily involves categories that privacy law singles out for extra protection. Under the California Consumer Privacy Act — as amended in 2024 to add citizenship and immigration status — and under comparable laws in other states, the following count as sensitive personal information, and we collect them:
We use sensitive personal information for one purpose only: to deliver the legal and case-management services you or your firm asked for, and to meet the legal and professional obligations attached to them. We do not use it to infer characteristics about you, we do not use it for advertising, and we do not sell or share it. Because our use is limited to what the law calls the permitted business purposes, the CCPA right to limit the use of sensitive personal information does not curtail anything we actually do — but you may still exercise it, and we will honour it. See §11.
| Purpose | Legal basis (where GDPR/UK GDPR applies) |
|---|---|
| Providing the platform and the legal services you requested | Performance of a contract |
| Preparing, checking and filing immigration applications | Contract; legal claims; substantial public interest |
| Authenticating users and securing accounts | Legitimate interests; legal obligation |
| Conflict checks and professional-responsibility compliance | Legal obligation; legitimate interests |
| Billing, collections and trust-accounting | Contract; legal obligation |
| Support, debugging and service improvement | Legitimate interests |
| Sending service, case-status and deadline notifications | Contract; legitimate interests |
| Marketing to prospective firm clients | Consent, or legitimate interests where permitted |
| Responding to lawful legal process | Legal obligation |
Where we rely on consent — for example, to send you SMS or WhatsApp messages — you may withdraw it at any time, and the platform records both the consent and its withdrawal. Replying STOP to any text message stops further messages on that number immediately.
Faircase uses AI to draft documents, summarise files, extract data from uploads, answer questions about a matter and assist with form preparation. Four commitments govern that.
Neither Faircase nor our AI providers use your matter data, documents or communications to train, fine-tune or improve any model. Our provider agreements are on zero-retention or no-training terms. Your content is used to answer your request, and then it is done.
AI output is a draft. No filing is submitted, no legal advice is given and no decision about your case is made by a model. A qualified person reviews the work. We make no legally significant decision about you by automated means alone.
The system will not transmit confidential or sensitive data to any host that is not on our published sub-processor register. This is enforced at runtime: an attempted transfer to an unregistered destination is refused, not logged and allowed.
Optical character recognition runs against scanned uploads that cannot be read any other way. Documents that are already machine-readable are processed on our own infrastructure and never leave it for OCR.
The AI providers that may process matter content are listed in §8. A firm administrator can see which AI capabilities are enabled for their workspace, and every AI run is recorded in an audit ledger with its cost, latency and the operation performed.
Generated text can be wrong, incomplete or out of date, and immigration law changes quickly. Nothing produced by an AI feature is a substitute for review by a licensed attorney, and Faircase is not responsible for reliance on unreviewed output. Blank immigration forms and official instructions are always available free at uscis.gov.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We have not done so in the preceding twelve months.
We disclose information in four situations: to the sub-processors below, who help us run the service; to your own law firm and the people it authorises; to government agencies where you or your firm direct us to file or enquire on your behalf; and where the law compels us.
Faircase maintains a sub-processor register as a controlled engineering artifact — the same list the software enforces at runtime. Every entry names the highest classification of data that may cross that boundary.
| Sub-processor | Purpose | Max class |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure & storage | ||
| Amazon Web Services | Application hosting and document object storage | C3 |
| Resend | Transactional email delivery | C3 |
| Sentry | Error monitoring and observability | C1 |
| AI & document intelligence | ||
| Anthropic | AI drafting, summarisation and assistance | C3 |
| OpenAI | AI drafting and assistance, where enabled | C3 |
| Voyage AI | Document embeddings for search and retrieval | C3 |
| Google Document AI | OCR for scanned documents only | C3 |
| Communications & productivity | ||
| Google Workspace | Email, calendar and drive sync; sign-in | C3 |
| Microsoft 365 | Outlook and Teams sync | C3 |
| Twilio | SMS, voice and multi-factor codes | C3 |
| WhatsApp Business (via Twilio) | WhatsApp messaging | C3 |
| DocuSign | Electronic signature | C3 |
| Finance | ||
| Stripe | Payment processing | C2 |
| QuickBooks Online (Intuit) | Accounting sync | C2 |
| Legal research & government sources | ||
| USCIS Case Status API | Status polling by receipt number and A-number | C2 |
| EOIR (ACIS) | Immigration court calendar | C2 |
| Westlaw / LexisNexis | Legal research | C2 |
| U.S. Department of State | Visa Bulletin and country condition reports | C1 |
Several of these are optional integrations that only receive data if your firm connects them. We require a data-processing agreement with every sub-processor that may receive confidential or sensitive data, and we remain responsible for their performance.
We may also disclose information in a merger, acquisition or financing, in which case the recipient remains bound by this policy and by the confidentiality duties attached to matter data; and to our own auditors, insurers and legal advisers under duties of confidence.
Faircase holds files that can determine whether someone stays in the country. The controls below are structural — built into the platform rather than layered on as policy.
Data is encrypted in transit with TLS. Sensitive (C3) fields are additionally encrypted at rest at the column level, so the stored value is opaque ciphertext even to someone reading the database directly. Where a sensitive value must remain searchable — an A-number, for instance — lookup runs against a keyed one-way digest rather than by decrypting the column.
Every firm's data is isolated at the database level by row-level security, enforced by the database itself rather than by application code remembering to filter. A query that arrives without a firm context returns nothing rather than returning everything.
Every access to sensitive data writes an audit event recording who read what and when. The audit ledger is append-only and cannot be edited or erased, including by us.
Confidential and sensitive data cannot leave our perimeter to any destination that is not on the sub-processor register in §8. The check runs at the moment of transmission and fails closed.
Multi-factor authentication, automatic lockout after repeated failed sign-ins, role-based permissions, and per-user authority limits on what automated agents may do on a user's behalf.
Uploaded images are decoded, stripped of EXIF and GPS metadata, size-capped and re-encoded before storage, so a photograph does not silently carry the location where it was taken.
No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise. If we become aware of a breach affecting your personal information, we will notify affected firms and individuals as required by applicable law and by our agreements, without undue delay. Security concerns can be reported to security@faircase.law; we will not pursue good-faith researchers who report vulnerabilities responsibly and do not access data beyond what is needed to demonstrate the issue.
Every record in the platform belongs to exactly one retention class, and the class determines how long it is held and what happens at the end.
| Class | What it covers | Held for | Then |
|---|---|---|---|
| Matter | Case documents, notes, forms, questionnaire responses | Seven years after the matter closes, by default; each firm may set its own longer period to match its bar's file-retention rules | Purged or anonymised |
| Financial & trust | Invoices, payments, IOLTA ledger entries | As required by accounting, tax and trust-accounting rules | Retained as records |
| Audit & consent ledger | Access logs, consent records, erasure tombstones | Retained as the integrity record of the system | Never erased on subject request — see below |
| Operational | Caches, derived data, ephemeral job state | Short-lived | Expired automatically |
Two things constrain deletion, and we would rather be plain about them than surprise you later:
Backups follow their own cycle and are catalogued so that a completed erasure can be attested against them; a record deleted from live systems may persist in backups for a limited period before ageing out.
Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of the following rights. We honour them for everyone, wherever you are, rather than checking your address first.
Know what personal information we hold about you, where it came from, why we have it and who we have shared it with.
Receive a copy in a portable, machine-readable format.
Have inaccurate personal information rectified.
Have your personal information erased, subject to the legal-hold and record-keeping limits in §10.
Restrict our use of sensitive personal information to the purposes the law permits.
Of sale or sharing for advertising. We do neither, so there is nothing to opt out of — but the right exists and we will confirm it on request.
We will not deny service, charge you more, or give you a worse experience for exercising any of these rights.
If we decline a request, you may appeal, and in several states we must tell you how to complain to your Attorney General.
The right route depends on who controls your data — see the table in §1.
The platform handles these requests as tracked records with a defined lifecycle — received, processing, fulfilled, or blocked by legal hold — so a request cannot quietly disappear. We will verify your identity before acting, which for sensitive records may mean more than confirming an email address. We respond within 45 days, and may extend once by a further 45 days where a request is complex, telling you why. An authorised agent may act for you with written permission.
You do not need to be a U.S. citizen or resident to exercise these rights, and exercising them will not affect your case. We do not report immigration status to enforcement authorities, and we do not provide client data for enforcement purposes except where we are legally compelled — in which case we will tell the firm first unless the law forbids it. See §2.
In the preceding twelve months we collected the categories of personal information described in §3, for the purposes in §6, from the sources in §3, and disclosed them for business purposes to the sub-processor categories in §8. We did not sell or share personal information, and we did not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16. We honour Global Privacy Control signals as valid opt-out requests where they apply.
Faircase operates from the United States, and our infrastructure and sub-processors are primarily U.S.-based. Immigration work means a great many of the people in our system live somewhere else — so if you are outside the U.S., understand that your information is transferred to and processed in the United States, whose privacy laws differ from those of your home country and which may permit access by U.S. authorities in circumstances your own law would not.
Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies, we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (and the UK Addendum) for those transfers, supplemented by the technical measures in §9. Where you have engaged us for an immigration matter, the transfer is also necessary for the performance of that contract and for the establishment of legal claims. You may ask us for a copy of the safeguards we rely on.
If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority.
Our public website uses cookies and similar technologies that are strictly necessary to make the site work, plus a limited set that help us understand which pages are useful. We do not use advertising cookies and we do not permit third-party ad networks to track you across our site.
The Faircase application uses cookies only for authentication, session security and remembering your interface preferences. These cannot be switched off without breaking sign-in.
You can control cookies through your browser. We honour the Global Privacy Control signal.
The Faircase platform is a professional tool and is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information directly from children for our own purposes.
Immigration matters routinely involve minors, however — a derivative child on a family petition, an unaccompanied minor in removal proceedings, a child beneficiary of a green-card application. Where a firm or the P.C. holds a minor's data as part of a matter, that data is collected from the adult client or attorney handling the case, is classified in the most protected tier, and is used only for the representation. We do not sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16.
We review this policy at least annually and whenever we add an AI feature, change AI providers, add a sub-processor, or a material new law takes effect. When we make a change that materially affects your rights we will update the date at the top, post the revised policy here, and give notice in the application or by email at least 30 days before it takes effect, so you have time to object or export your data.
Sub-processor additions are announced to subscribing firms in advance, and a firm may object under its subscription agreement.
Faircase is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. Nothing on this website — including any guide, tool, article or other resource — is legal advice. All legal services are provided solely by Faircase Legal Services, P.C. under a separate attorney-client agreement. Communications with Faircase outside that agreement are not protected by the attorney-client privilege. Blank immigration forms and instructions are available free at uscis.gov.