Consumer Terms of Service
Effective September 15, 2026 · Version v1.29
Version v1.29 · Effective September 15, 2026 · Published September 15, 2026
Effective September 15, 2026 · Version v1.29
Version v1.29 · Effective September 15, 2026 · Published September 15, 2026
These are the terms you accept when you create an Octicase account. If you are a law firm, medical provider, records vendor, or other business, different terms apply to you -- see Section 1.3.
This summary is here to help you read the rest. It is not a substitute for it, and if the summary and the full terms ever disagree, the full terms are what counts.
We are not a law firm. We do not give legal advice and we are not your lawyer. Using Octicase does not create an attorney-client relationship with us.
We do not pick a lawyer for you. The Directory is a list. We do not refer, recommend, endorse, rate, or rank anyone on it, and we never send your information to an attorney unless you direct it: to a professional you have already hired (Section 8.2), or through a link you create and address yourself (Section 6.1).
Understand My Options is information, not an answer. It will not tell you whether you have a case, what it is worth, or what your deadline is. Only a lawyer who knows your facts can do that.
Your information is yours. You can download it or delete it whenever you want. If you use Understand My Options without an account, we delete what you submitted about 30 days later. Today we run those deletions by hand, so they can take longer than 30 days and never happen sooner. Once the automatic process is running we will warn you first and you will be able to keep your information (Section 8.3).
You are not giving up your rights. No forced arbitration. No class action waiver. If you are in California, your CCPA, CLRA, and UCL rights stay exactly where they are.
Canceling is easy. If you have a paid plan, you cancel online, in the same place you signed up, without talking to anyone.
Octicase is operated by OCTICASE, INC., a corporation organized under the laws of the State of Delaware ("Octicase", "we", "us", "our"). You can reach us at support@octicase.com.
These terms are an agreement between you and us. They apply when you create an account, browse the Directory, use Understand My Options, or otherwise use our consumer services (together, the "Services"). They also apply, for that access only, to a person who registers to open a link that a consumer or a firm sent through the Services (Sections 1 to 4, 9 and 13 to 18, and the sentences addressed to a link recipient in Sections 6.1 and 8.5, apply to that person; Sections 5 to 8 and 10 to 12 apply only if they also use those Services); if that person is a law firm or other business that is already our customer, its own agreement with us governs everything else.
If you are a law firm, medical or case-review provider, records vendor, settlement company, or any other organization using Octicase in your business, these terms do not govern your use. Your agreement is the Terms of Service and the Acceptable Use Policy. If you signed up as a business but are reading this, use those documents instead.
If you reached a client portal through a link your law firm sent you, your relationship with that firm is governed by your engagement agreement with them, not by these terms, and your use of that portal is governed by the Client and Consumer Portal Terms. Nothing here changes your rights against your own attorney.
This is the most important Section in these Terms. Please read it even if you skip the rest.
Octicase is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. Using the Services does not create an attorney-client relationship between you and us. Nothing you send us is protected by attorney-client privilege. We are a software company that publishes a directory and educational tools.
We do not refer, recommend, endorse, rate, or rank any attorney, law firm, medical provider, or other professional listed on Octicase. We do not choose one for you and we do not tell you who is a good fit. Choosing and hiring a professional is entirely your decision, and doing your own checking before you hire anyone is your responsibility.
We do not send your case, your answers, your summary, or any other information about your situation to any attorney, law firm, or other professional. Not by email, not through the product, and not manually by our staff. If you want a professional to see your information, you send it to them yourself. The only exceptions are entirely in your hands: Section 6.1 (a link you create, which we deliver only to the person you name) and Section 8.2 (transmission to a professional you have already hired and identified). We still never choose, suggest, or refer.
We do not pay, and do not offer, any money or other reward to anyone for referring, recommending, or bringing in a client.
Octicase does not provide medical advice and does not endorse any medical provider. Anything you read here about injuries, treatment, or recovery is general information. Talk to a licensed medical professional about your care.
You also need to give us accurate information when you sign up, and keep it accurate. If we ask for a phone number, it is so that we can let you back into your saved information, send you a one-time code, deliver a link you ask for and, once the process described in Section 8.3 is running, warn you before your information is deleted. Giving it to us, or creating an account, is not consent to calls or text messages from us or from any law firm; that consent is a separate box you can leave unticked, and you can withdraw it at any time (Section 14 of the Privacy Policy).
The Directory is a list of professionals. The information in a listing comes from the professional, not from us, except where we specifically mark something as verified. Some listings are marked as unclaimed: we compiled them from public registries and licensed business directories, the professional has not confirmed them, and they show the category of their source and the date we last refreshed them; they may be out of date. "Claimed" or "complete" means only that the professional took over the listing and filled in the fields; it is not verification.
When we mark a fact as verified, we have checked that one fact and nothing more. For attorneys, that means we confirmed their current license status with the State Bar of California. We confirm license status only, and confirming it is not an endorsement.
Claiming and keeping a basic listing is free today, and no treatment provider is ever charged to be listed. No listing is a paid placement today; if any listing ever is, it will be at a flat price and we will say so on the pages where listings appear. Any paid placement would be advertising, not a recommendation from us, and payment never affects the order of our ordinary search results. We make our money from professionals' subscriptions and any flat listing fees, from paid consumer plans, and from fees that experts, consultants and partners pay us when law firms buy their services through the platform; never from you beyond the plan you choose, never from any attorney as a share of, or an amount measured by, legal fees, and never from any share of anyone's recovery. We do not currently offer sponsored or featured listings. If we ever do, they will be labeled as such, shown separately from the ordinary results, and never offered to any provider of medical care or treatment.
Any fee arrangement you make with a professional is between you and that professional. We are not part of it and we do not guarantee it.
If you think a listing is inaccurate, use the "report incorrect information" link on the listing or email support@octicase.com. A person reviews every report.
If you are in an emergency, call 911 -- Octicase cannot help with emergencies. Understand My Options gives you general educational information about situations like yours. It is a starting point for a conversation with a lawyer, not a replacement for one.
Understand My Options will not:
It is built this way on purpose. Those are legal judgments, and making them for you would be practicing law. Where the platform applies an internal, advisory classification to a submission, a person reviews it before any consequence follows, it is not shown to you, it does not evaluate your claim, and it does not by itself decide your access to the Services. Automated fraud checks at registration are the exception: where such a check reaches the threshold we set, we may suspend the account automatically, and our staff are notified after that has happened rather than before. You can ask us to have a person review the suspension by writing to support@octicase.com, and Section 11 sets out the rest of what applies when we suspend an account.
If a paid plan lets you track dates or set reminders, those are organizational tools working from what you enter. They are not a calculation of your legal deadline.
You can download your Understand My Options summary or have it emailed to yourself. It is your information and you can send it to whoever you want. Where the product offers it, you can also create a link that lets a person you choose view or download your summary and files; that person must register with us (name, phone and a verified email address) to open it, and by registering accepts these Terms for that access; the same is true of anyone who opens anything else shared through Octicase, including a video link or a file a firm sends. Before that link exists you sign the Authorization to Share Your Medical Information, because Cal. Civ. Code Section 56.10(a) does not let us make that disclosure without an authorization, Section 56.11 is what makes one valid, and Section 56.07(b) says in terms that asking us for your own copy is not one. Downloading a copy for yourself, or emailing it to yourself, is a different thing and needs nothing. The free service has limits so that it stays free: you can regenerate a summary once every twenty-four hours, up to five times for the same case, and you can keep three cases of your own at a time. We tell you when you reach a limit and we do not charge you for going over one; we simply ask you to wait or to close a case you no longer need. If you are a professional opening a link, you acknowledge that you received it only because the sender chose to send it and that Octicase did not refer or recommend the sender to you, and you agree not to solicit links and not to treat one as a referral. We do not suggest recipients, we do not provide a list of attorneys to send it to, and, apart from delivering a link you create to the person you name, we do not send it for you. The summary carries a notice that it is not legal advice, is not an evaluation of your claim, does not create an attorney-client relationship, and has not been sent to anyone except at your direction: to a professional you hired under Section 8.2, or to a person you gave a link to under this Section.
Parts of Octicase use AI. Where you are interacting with an AI assistant, we tell you before the conversation starts, and if you ask it whether it is a person, it will tell you honestly that it is not.
AI output can be wrong, incomplete, or out of date. Do not treat it as advice, and do not make a decision about your legal or medical situation based on it alone. Everything in Section 6 about what Understand My Options will not do applies to the AI features too.
We do not describe our AI as a lawyer, as equivalent to a lawyer, or as a substitute for one, because it is not.
The information you put into Octicase belongs to you. We use it to run the Services for you and for the purposes our Privacy Policy lists, which are the only ones. We will not use your name or your story in our marketing without asking you first and getting your express permission. Two things you should know about, both described in Section 8.5: we write aggregated counts that cannot be linked to you, and you give us permission to create and use those; and, only if you say yes on a screen of its own, we keep a record of the facts of your situation without your name; and on a second screen we ask separately whether we may use it to train our own software, so you can allow one and refuse the other. You never have to say yes to either. Everything on Octicase works exactly the same if you do not, and you can change your mind later.
You can download a copy of your information at any time, in a portable format, at no charge and whatever plan you are on. That is not a favour: Cal. Civ. Code Section 56.07(a) requires us to give it to you.
Sharing with a professional you hire. If you hire an attorney or other professional, you can send them your information yourself -- your summary and your files are yours. The product gives you two separate links and you choose which to send: one that shows only your summary, and one that shows the summary together with the files you uploaded. They are different links, you can send one without the other, and either can be revoked. Both are disclosures by us, so both go through the Authorization to Share Your Medical Information first, the same as the direct transmission below. Where the product offers it, you can also direct us to transmit your information to a firm you have already hired that uses Octicase. That transmission is a disclosure by us, not just a click by you, so it goes through the Authorization to Share Your Medical Information first, the same as a link does. When you do, that is you sending it at your instruction -- not us referring you, and not us choosing anyone for you: you identify the firm, we never suggest one. From the moment the firm receives it, the firm is responsible for it as the Privacy Policy describes, and your own copy remains yours. The link described in Section 6.1 is a different route: you create it, you choose who gets it, and the recipient registers to open it.
You can delete your account and your information at any time. We remove it from active systems within 30 days. If you use Understand My Options without an account (including if you start and do not come back), we will delete your answers, your summary and anything you uploaded from active systems 30 days after you submitted them. The automatic process that does this is not in place yet. Until it is, we will run these deletions by hand, which can take longer than 30 days and will not happen sooner, and the warning and the extra thirty (30) days will be offered once that process is running. When it is, and where we have an email address or phone number you have not asked us to stop using, we will tell you seven days before the first period ends, and you will then be able to create an account, or extend the period once by a further thirty (30) days, to keep them; the extension can be taken only once. Before any of that, you can ask us to delete this material at any time and we will do it. What remains after the 30-day deletion is your account record, if you created one; what remains after either deletion is aggregated counts (type of situation, county and month) that cannot be linked to you (Section 8.5). If you ticked the box in Section 8.5 and we kept a record of the facts of your situation, that record is deleted too when you ask us to delete, including from our backups within the period our Data Retention and Deletion Policy states. The aggregated counts are not deleted, because they are not about you: they carry no identifier at all, and we build and publish them so that no person can be worked out from them. Copies inside encrypted backups expire on the ordinary backup cycle described in the Privacy Policy and are not used for anything in the meantime. We keep something longer only where a law, a litigation hold, or a preservation obligation requires it -- and then only what it requires, for as long as it requires. One warning that matters: if your information may be evidence in a dispute, the law may require you to preserve it. Deleting your account does not release you from a duty to preserve evidence, and we cannot recover what you delete. The periods are stated in our Data Retention and Deletion Policy.
If you enter symptoms, treatment notes, or other health information, we use it to produce your summary and to run the Services for you. Information you give us before you hire a professional is not protected by HIPAA when it is in your own hands in our product, because you are not a hospital or an insurer. It is protected by our Privacy Policy and by California law. The Confidentiality of Medical Information Act protects it, and it protects it against us: the law treats a company that offers software letting you manage your own medical information as a provider of health care (Cal. Civ. Code Section 56.06(b)), and that is what we are for what you keep here. In plain words, and these are the law's words and not our promises about the product: the law does not let us hand your medical information to anybody else without a permission from you that meets what Section 56.11 requires, unless a court or the law compels us or the law itself permits it. Asking us for your own copy is not that permission, and the law says so in terms (Section 56.07(b)). Getting your own copy is a different thing and it is your right, at no charge, whatever plan you are on (Section 56.07(a)). The law also reaches what we do with it and not only who we give it to: except as you expressly allow, we may not share it, sell it, use it for marketing or otherwise use it for a purpose that is not necessary to provide health care services to you, and we do not provide health care services (Section 56.10(d)). Whoever receives it, under a permission or under one of the disclosures the law allows, cannot pass it on again (Section 56.13). And if we negligently release it, you can sue us for a thousand dollars without having to prove that it cost you anything (Section 56.36). Where you ask us to send it to somebody else, the permission the law wants is the Authorization to Share Your Medical Information, which is a page of its own that you sign before anything leaves us. Washington and Nevada have consumer health data laws of their own. If you are a resident of either state, or you gave us health information while you were in either state, our Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy covers that information separately and prevails over our Privacy Policy for what it covers.
Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect and why. Two uses of your information matter most, and four other things are worth knowing. First, when you use Understand My Options we write counts by type of situation, county and month, with no identifier that links to you. We keep those counts, and we may use or license them for research and commercial purposes. They are not your personal information, they are the only thing about consumers we would ever sell (apart from how the product is used, which carries nothing about your case and which we would license only in bulk), we sell nothing about consumers today, and Section 4.8 of the Privacy Policy explains how we make sure they cannot be linked to you. We never publish or license a count that covers fewer than ten people. Second, and separately, we may keep a record of the facts of your situation, such as the type of injury, how bad it is, what matters about the case, the county and the month, under an identifier that is not your name. We only keep it if you say yes on a screen of its own that asks for it. On a second screen we ask separately whether we may train our own software with it, and you can say yes to keeping and no to training; if you do, we keep it for your own use and it enters no training at all. Where you allow the training, that software serves our other customers too. We keep a record no longer than twenty-four months, after which we ask you again. We do not sell it today. If we ever want to, we have to ask you again on a page of its own that names the company buying it, tells you we are paid and you are not, and runs out after a year; you never have to sign it, nothing about your service changes if you refuse, and you can withdraw it whenever you want. It is your personal information, not anonymous data, and we say so instead of calling it something else. You can ask us to delete it whenever you want and we will. Deleting a case-level record removes it from our systems within thirty days and from our backups within six months, takes it out of the set we train on, and puts you on a list so that nothing of yours enters any future training; software we had already trained is not undone by your request, and your request does not require us to retrain it or to discard it; we would retrain or withdraw it only where a court, a regulator or the law required it, and then we would. We say this here instead of letting you find out later. We do not keep it at all for anyone under eighteen, and it never includes what videos you have watched. Third, we do not load third-party advertising trackers on any page where you enter information about an injury, a medical condition, or a claim, on any page that plays video, or inside your signed-in account. Fourth, if you are a California resident, you have rights to know, delete, correct, and opt out. Email privacy@octicase.com. Fifth, if we receive a subpoena or other legal demand for your information, we tell you before responding where the law allows, as the Privacy Policy describes. Sixth, if you registered only to open a link, we use your details to deliver it and record access; we add you to marketing only if you tick a separate box (Privacy Policy, Section 4.10).
If you do any of this we may suspend or close your account. Where we can give you notice first, we will.
Most of what consumers use on Octicase is free. If you buy a paid plan, this section applies.
The price, the billing period, and what is included are shown to you before you pay. Payments are handled by our payment processor; we do not store your full card details.
If your plan renews automatically, we tell you so clearly before you pay, we ask you to agree to the renewal terms separately from these terms, and we send you a confirmation afterwards that you can keep. We remind you before a renewal charge wherever the law requires it, including for a free or discounted period longer than 31 days, and for a plan with an initial term of a year or longer if we introduce one, as the Refund Policy details.
You can cancel online, in your account settings, in the same place you signed up. You do not have to call us, email us, chat with anyone, or click through offers to keep you. Canceling stops the next charge; it does not retroactively refund the period you already used, except as described in our Refund Policy or as required by law.
Our Refund Policy sets out when you can get money back. Nothing in it takes away a refund right California law gives you.
If we change the price of a plan you are on, we tell you at least 30 days before it takes effect, and you can cancel before it does.
You can stop using Octicase and close your account at any time, for any reason, from your account settings or by emailing support@octicase.com. Closing your account deletes your information as Section 8.3 describes; download first if you want to keep a copy.
We may suspend or close your account if you break these terms, if we are required to by law, or if we stop offering the Services. If we close your account for a reason other than your breach, we refund the unused portion of anything you prepaid. We will give you a reasonable chance to download your information first, except where we are legally prevented from doing so.
If you die or become unable to manage your account, your legal representative -- an executor or administrator, an agent under a power of attorney, a conservator, or a trustee -- may access, download from, or close your account by writing to support@octicase.com with documentation of their authority. California's Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (Prob. Code sections 870 and following) governs what we may disclose, and by accepting these terms you consent, for the purposes of that law, to our disclosing your account and its contents to your authorized representative in those circumstances. We do not delete the file of an active claim while an estate or representative matter is being resolved.
If your account has been inactive for a long time, we may close it after emailing you notice and a chance to download your information. The retention periods in the Data Retention and Deletion Policy then apply.
We will keep changing Octicase. Features get added, changed, and sometimes removed. If we remove something you paid for, you can cancel and get the unused portion back.
We may update these terms. If a change matters, we will tell you by email or in the product at least 30 days before it takes effect, unless the law requires it sooner. If a change is material and adverse to you, we will ask you to accept it affirmatively before it applies to you; if you decline, you can close your account before it takes effect and we refund the unused portion of anything you prepaid. For any other change, you can close your account before the effective date. We keep the previous versions available so you can see what changed.
We provide Octicase "as is". We do our best to keep it accurate, available, and secure, but we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that everything in the Directory is complete and current. Professionals change addresses, licenses lapse, and information goes stale.
We disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement, to the fullest extent the law allows.
None of this takes away a warranty or protection that California law says you cannot give up. See Section 16.
We are not responsible for what a professional you find through the Directory does or fails to do. If you hire someone and it goes badly, your claim is against them, not against us. We are not a party to your relationship with them. Nor are we responsible for what a person you send a link to does with what they view or download once they open it.
To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits or lost opportunity. Our total liability for all claims relating to the Services is limited to the greater of what you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim or one hundred dollars ($100). These limits do not apply to our gross negligence or willful misconduct, and they do not apply where the law does not allow a limit.
These limits do not apply to anything the law does not let us limit -- including fraud, and including any liability California law makes non-waivable. See Section 16.
Talk to us first. Email legal@octicase.com and give us 30 days. Most problems get fixed without anyone needing a lawyer.
You are not required to arbitrate. We do not force consumers into arbitration and we do not ask you to give up class actions.
If we cannot work it out, you can bring your claim in the small claims court of the county where you live, or in any court of competent jurisdiction in your state of residence. We will not ask a court to move, remove, or dismiss your claim because of a forum clause.
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, except that Section 16 controls if you are in California.
If you live in California, California law applies to you wherever it gives you protection you cannot give up by contract, and that protection wins over anything in these terms that conflicts with it. To be specific, nothing in these terms waives, limits, or changes:
If a court decides any part of these terms would waive one of those rights, that part does not apply to you and the rest still stands.
California residents may also report a complaint to the Complaint Assistance Unit of the Division of Consumer Services of the California Department of Consumer Affairs, 1625 North Market Blvd., Suite N 112, Sacramento, CA 95834, or by telephone at (800) 952-5210.
Octicase, its software, design, and content are ours or our licensors'. We give you a personal, limited, revocable license to use the Services. We are not giving you ownership of anything.
If you send us an idea for how to make Octicase better, we may use it without owing you anything. We are not trying to take your intellectual property -- we just cannot run a product where every suggestion creates a claim.
These terms work together with our Privacy Policy, the Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy (which prevails over the Privacy Policy for the information it covers), Cookie Policy, Refund Policy, the Website Terms of Use (for your use of the public website), the Client and Consumer Portal Terms (where a firm invited you to a portal), and, where you sign something electronically, our ESIGN/UETA Consent and Disclosure. Together they are the whole agreement between us about the Services. Our Data Retention and Deletion Policy states the retention periods referred to in Section 8.3.
That part gets narrowed as little as necessary to make it work, or removed if it cannot be. Everything else stays in force.
You cannot transfer these terms to someone else. We can transfer them in a merger, acquisition, or sale of the business, and we will tell you if that happens.
If we do not enforce something right away, that does not mean we have given it up. These terms do not create rights for anyone other than you and us. Sections 2, 8, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 survive the closing of your account.
17.7 Language
These terms are written in English. Where we have communicated with you primarily in another language - for example if you completed intake in Spanish, spoke with our automated assistant in Spanish, or received our messages in Spanish - you are entitled to receive these terms in that language, and you should not be asked to agree to something you were not given in the language of the conversation. Ask us at support@octicase.com and we will provide it.
-- END OF CONSUMER TERMS OF SERVICE --