Privacy, retention & platform terms

Operator and contact

Fidelis Choga operates The Legal Desk personally at 5 Dromore Road, Highlands, Harare, Zimbabwe. For privacy requests, corrections, complaints or accidental sensitive disclosures, contact thelegaldesk263@gmail.com. Identify the record without repeating sensitive case information.

Free platform; payments outside the website

The platform is free at launch for clients and lawyers. We do not collect legal fees, payment details or a lead fee. Agree fees and make all payments directly outside this website. The Legal Desk is a matching platform, not a law firm or an emergency service. Registration, approval or acceptance of a proposal does not itself establish a lawyer–client relationship. Approval is not a guarantee of competence or results.

Do not provide sensitive information

Keep brief titles, summaries, proposals and timeframe fields non-confidential. Do not include party identities, identity numbers, financial account details, health information, passwords or confidential documents. Do not share sensitive information with a lawyer before conflict checks and formal engagement. Any necessary confidential exchange after engagement must take place securely outside this website. A practising-certificate picture is the only supported document upload; do not attach unrelated documents.

Information collected

Firebase Authentication handles sign-in, verification and password recovery. We receive your account identifier, verified email and available name; the application database does not store your password. We store profiles, lawyer credentials and certificate pictures, briefs, proposals, selections, review decisions and operational audit records to operate the service and prevent misuse. Only the administrator publishes blog articles; published articles and author details are public.

Access and contact sharing

Draft briefs are private to their creator within the application. Submitted summaries are visible to approved lawyers with current certificates. Anything typed into a summary is visible to those lawyers. A proposal and its lawyer’s verified contact email are visible to that lawyer and the brief owner. The client’s verified contact email is shared with the selected lawyer only after explicit acceptance. Other lawyers do not receive it. Certificates are private to the applicant and administrator within the application. The operator and authorised providers may have administrative access for security, support and lawful operational purposes.

Seven-day proposal-text retention

All proposal-message text expires seven days (168 hours) after original submission, regardless of selection or withdrawal. It is withheld from application responses at expiry. An automatic cleanup is scheduled every minute to blank expired text in the active database; outages or provider limits may delay physical cleanup. Logging in or selecting a lawyer does not restart the clock. We cannot reliably identify every sensitive passage, so the entire proposal message is removed. Fees, timeframes, status and selection records remain: do not put sensitive information in these retained fields.

This rule does not delete accounts, profiles, certificates, brief summaries or contact details. Withdrawal is not deletion. Request earlier removal of accidental sensitive disclosures using the contact above. Other records are reviewed separately for continuing service, verification, security and applicable legal needs; they are not covered by this automatic cleanup.

Backups and recipient copies

Cloudflare recovery backups may retain a recoverable copy after active deletion. The recovery window is up to seven days on the Workers Free plan or thirty days on the Paid plan. These copies are not available through the normal website. After recovery, expired proposal text must be scrubbed again before restoring access. We cannot erase copies a recipient independently saved or communications sent outside the website. Do not retain proposal text merely to bypass expiry.

Providers and privacy requests

Cloudflare supplies hosting, the database and private certificate storage. Google Firebase supplies authentication. Their infrastructure may process information outside Zimbabwe. Contact the operator about processing arrangements or to request access, correction, objection or deletion, subject to identity verification and applicable law. A legal preservation obligation may affect a deletion request. Application access is restricted by identity and role; certificate storage is non-public. No website can guarantee absolute security.

Notifications and acknowledgements

Marketplace offer emails are not enabled at launch; check your workspace for proposals. Firebase verification and recovery emails remain available. Registration and proposal/selection confirmations acknowledge these notices and the specified contact sharing. Blog articles are general information, not advice on your case. Contact the operator before submitting information you do not wish processed on these terms.