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.

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.

Information collected and access

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.

Draft briefs are private to their creator. Submitted summaries are visible to approved lawyers with current certificates. A proposal and the 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.

Seven-day proposal-text retention

All proposal-message text expires seven days (168 hours) after original submission. It is withheld from application responses at expiry and an automatic cleanup is scheduled every minute to blank expired text in the active database; outages or provider limits may delay physical cleanup. Fees, timeframes, status and selection records remain, so do not put sensitive information in them.

Providers, backups and requests

Cloudflare supplies hosting, the database and private certificate storage. Google Firebase supplies authentication. Their infrastructure may process information outside Zimbabwe. Cloudflare recovery backups may retain recoverable copies for up to seven days on the Workers Free plan or thirty days on a Paid plan. Contact the operator to request access, correction, objection or deletion, subject to identity verification and applicable law.

Notifications

Marketplace offer emails are not enabled at launch; check your workspace for proposals. Firebase verification and recovery emails remain available. Blog articles are general information, not advice on your case.