1. Overview

Barrister AI ("the Service") is operated by Barrister AI Pty Ltd (ACN 695 722 699) ("we", "us", or "our"). We are committed to protecting your personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs). This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and store your personal information.

2. Information We Collect

We collect the following personal information when you register for and use the Service:

Account Information

Full name
Email address
Password (stored in hashed form only)
Jurisdiction (e.g. state or territory of practice)
Role (e.g. Judge, Barrister, Solicitor)

Usage Information

Search queries and case viewing history
Feature usage and interaction data
First-party website page views and successful Junior installer redirects, including the requested platform and release, referring page, and whether the request was a download or an automated availability check. A redirect does not tell us whether the file transfer completed.
For a successful Junior installer redirect: IP address, browser and device details, and approximate country or region
If you use the questions helper on our home page: which of our prewritten replies was shown, whether you chose a suggested question or typed your own, how the reply was selected, which link in a reply you followed, and whether your browser was in the group shown the helper. We do not store the text of a question you type (see Section 6).
IP address, used in the moment to limit how often our public forms, analytics and the home-page helper can be called from one address or network. For the helper it is used only as a short-lived rate-limit counter and is not linked to the question or the reply.
Daily digest email preferences

Payment Information

If you purchase a paid feature, your payment details are collected and processed by a secure third-party payment processor. We do not store your full card number. We receive limited transaction and billing information for account, support, reconciliation, and compliance purposes.

3. How We Use Your Information

We use your personal information for the following purposes:

Providing the Service: To operate your account, authenticate your sessions, process your requests, and deliver legal research content and related features.
Personalisation: To tailor case recommendations and search results based on your jurisdiction and role.
Communications: To send daily digest emails with recent cases relevant to your preferences. You can unsubscribe from digest emails at any time.
Payment processing: To manage your purchases, subscription, billing, and transaction records.
Service improvement: To understand usage patterns and improve the Service.
Account-deletion review: To conduct the limited, five-day review described in Section 8 when you request account deletion.
Security and legal purposes: To investigate a specific security incident, suspected fraud, unlawful activity or serious misconduct; resolve disputes; enforce our Terms of Service; establish, exercise or defend legal claims; and comply with law or a court or tribunal order.

4. Pseudonymous Usage and Restricted Access

Our routine operations are designed to limit access to directly identifying information. Where practical, Service activity is handled without displaying your name or email address to personnel reviewing product usage or performance.

Authorised personnel may link account information to Service activity only where you grant support access, or where doing so is reasonably necessary for a specific security, suspected-abuse, dispute, or legal purpose described in this Policy. Access is restricted and limited to the information reasonably necessary for that purpose.

A request to delete an account does not, by itself, indicate wrongdoing and is not, by itself, a reason to identify the user or inspect their private legal content.

5. Cookies and Authentication

The Service uses first-party cookies and similar technologies to authenticate users, maintain secure sessions, remember preferences, and operate the Service. These technologies are required for authenticated features.

We also use a persistent, randomly generated visitor cookie with a signed companion to link first-party page views, successful Junior installer redirects and use of the home-page questions helper over time. If you are signed in, the hand-off may also be associated with your account. A second first-party cookie records whether your browser was randomly chosen to be shown the home-page questions helper or not, so that we can measure whether the helper is useful; it holds only that one word and lasts as long as the visitor cookie. We do not use advertising or third-party tracking cookies.

6. Service Providers and Disclosures

We use third-party service providers to operate and support the Service. They may process personal information only to the extent reasonably necessary to provide services to us, comply with law, or protect their systems and rights. The categories of providers we use include:

Provider category	Purpose	Information processed
Cloud hosting and storage	Operate and secure the Service	Account, usage, and content data
Payment processing	Process purchases and billing	Account, transaction, billing, and payment details
Communications	Send service and requested emails	Name, email address, and communication preferences
Service functionality and processing	Provide requested Service features	Information you submit and relevant source material, where required for the requested feature

AI processing

Where the Service uses AI to produce a result for you — answering a research question, analysing or drafting from the documents in a brief, or holding a Chat conversation — the content you submit is used only to produce that result. It is not used to train any model, by us or by anyone who processes it for us, and anyone who processes it for us is bound by confidentiality obligations. Practitioners assessing whether material subject to a suppression or non-publication order, a subpoena or the implied undertaking may be entered into the Service (for example under Supreme Court of New South Wales Practice Note SC Gen 23, paragraph 9A) will find the relevant facts in this section and in section 7.

Questions helper on our website

Our home page offers a helper that answers questions about Barrister AI itself for visitors who are not signed in. Every reply it shows is written in advance by our team. AI is used only to decide which prewritten reply fits a question you type: the text of your question, and nothing else about you, is sent to an AI service provider outside Australia, which returns a score for each of our fixed questions about it and no text. Choosing one of the suggested questions involves no AI and sends nothing to a third party.

We do not store or log the text of a question you type into the helper, and it is not linked to your visitor cookie or to any account. We send each question under the provider's zero-data-retention setting, which limits it to services that state they do not store it or use it to train any model. We cannot inspect those services' systems ourselves and rely on their stated policies. The helper is not a place for client details or documents; if a question appears to contain them, it is not answered on its merits and you are asked not to send such material. The helper does not give legal advice.

We do not sell or rent your personal information. We may also disclose information where required or authorised by law, to protect users or the Service, to obtain professional advice, or in connection with a genuine corporate transaction, subject to appropriate safeguards.

7. Data Storage and Overseas Disclosure

Some service providers process or store personal information outside Australia, including in the United States. This includes the AI service provider that selects replies for the home-page questions helper (Section 6), which receives only the text of a typed question, and the provider that holds our short-lived rate-limit counters. Where APP 8 applies, we take reasonable steps to ensure that overseas recipients handle personal information consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles.

8. Data Retention

We retain your personal information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide the Service. When you request account deletion, we disable access immediately and retain your account data for five days before deleting it.

During that five-day hold, authorised staff may inspect pseudonymous account metadata, feature usage, case-access history, operational and security logs, and any voluntary exit feedback to understand why users leave, identify service failures, improve the Service and protect it from abuse. Routine account-deletion review does not show your name or email address and does not include opening your research questions or answers, briefs, uploaded documents, notebook content or other private legal content.

We inspect identity or private legal content during the hold only where you have granted support access, or where access is reasonably necessary for a specific security incident, suspected fraud, unlawful activity or serious misconduct, a dispute or legal claim, or compliance with law or a court or tribunal order. Any review is limited to information reasonably necessary for that purpose.

At the end of the hold we delete your personal information and account content, except for a particular record that we are required by law to retain or still reasonably need for a permitted security, fraud-prevention, dispute or legal purpose. Access to any such record remains restricted, and it is deleted or de-identified when it is no longer needed.

Where a chambers or firm pays for a barrister's plan, the invoices and payment records for that plan are kept for five years after the chambers account or the barrister's account is deleted, and are then deleted. Personal details that those records do not need are removed when the account is deleted. Our payment provider keeps its own records of the invoices under its terms.

Raw IP addresses and full browser or device user-agent details recorded for Junior installer redirect and availability-probe events are access-restricted and cleared after 30 days. We retain the remaining pseudonymous interaction metadata only for as long as reasonably needed to understand product usage, diagnose delivery issues, and protect the Service.

Questions typed into the home-page helper are not retained by us at all: they are sent for selection of a reply and then discarded, and they are sent only to AI services that state they do not store them (Section 6). The IP address used to rate-limit the helper is held only as a counter that expires automatically within a short period after the ten-minute window it counts. The pseudonymous record of which reply was shown, and of which test group a browser was in, is kept with our other interaction metadata only for as long as reasonably needed to understand product usage and protect the Service.

One such record is kept in every case. When an account is deleted we retain a one-way cryptographic code derived from the email address, together with whether that address has already used a free trial or an introductory research credit. The code cannot be reversed back into an email address, is not used to contact you and is not used for marketing. We keep it for the single purpose of ensuring free trials and introductory credits are available once per person, and it is retained for as long as we offer them.

9. Your Rights

Under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles, you may exercise the following rights and choices:

Access: Request access to the personal information we hold about you.
Correction: Request correction of inaccurate or out-of-date personal information.
Deletion: Australian privacy law does not provide a general right to erasure, but it requires personal information to be destroyed or de-identified when it is no longer needed for a permitted purpose. We also allow you to request account deletion through your account settings or by contacting us below, subject to the process in Section 8.
Complaint: Lodge a complaint with us if you believe we have breached the APPs. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may lodge a complaint with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

10. Security

We take reasonable steps to protect your personal information from misuse, interference, loss, and unauthorised access, modification, or disclosure. We use administrative, technical, and organisational safeguards appropriate to the nature of the information we handle. However, no method of electronic storage or transmission is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

11. Children

The Service is designed for adults — legal professionals and, through Junior, individuals dealing with their own legal matters — and is not directed at individuals under the age of 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children.

12. Junior for Individuals

Junior is our desktop app. It can be used by legal practitioners and, in its individual mode, by people who are dealing with a legal problem of their own. This section explains what is different about how we handle your information when you use Junior as an individual. Everything else in this Policy still applies.

Your documents stay on your device

The documents you add to Junior are stored on your own computer, not on our servers. When you ask Junior to do something with them (for example, assess how ready your case file is, or prepare a pack to hand to a lawyer), the content is sent to us only for as long as it takes to produce the result. Our servers keep a record that a run happened, when, and what it cost, but that record contains none of your content. The result is sealed so that only your copy of Junior can open it, and the working copy we hold while the run is in progress is held in temporary storage that expires automatically and is then physically deleted.

Litigation funding submissions

We are building a feature that lets you submit your case for consideration by litigation funders. That feature is not yet available. When it is, it will be the one exception to the rule above: if you choose to submit, and only after you have signed a specific waiver that explains what will be shared and with whom, we will store the material you submit for that purpose. Nothing is stored under this exception unless you have signed that waiver.

AI providers

Junior uses third-party AI models to do its work. For the free guide built into Junior, we route requests under a zero-data-retention setting, which limits them to model services that state they do not retain your prompts or the responses. For paid runs sent directly to our primary model provider, that provider may retain inputs and outputs for up to 30 days for abuse and safety monitoring, after which they are deleted. No provider is permitted to use your content to train its models.

Records of what you agreed to

When you accept the terms shown to individual users of Junior (and, in future, any funding waiver), we keep a record of that acceptance: which version of the wording you were shown, a digital fingerprint of that wording, the time, your IP address and your browser or device details. We keep this so that we can show what you agreed to and when. We do not store the wording itself in that record, and the record is never edited or deleted.

Health information

If your matter involves a personal injury, the documents you work with in Junior may include health information about you, which is sensitive information under the Privacy Act. The same rules apply: it stays on your device, it is sent to us only for the run you request, and it is not kept afterwards. By using Junior for such a matter you consent to it being handled in that way for that purpose.

13. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you by email or by posting a notice on the Service. We encourage you to review this page periodically.

14. Contact

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or wish to exercise your rights, please use our contact form.