Privacy & terms

Version 1. Please read this before uploading anything.

What Case Companion is

Case Companion is an early-stage tool that helps you organize your own family court documents, keep a timeline, and get help understanding and drafting from them. It is provided by Ryan Herbst as a test, free of charge and without guarantees: it can have bugs or be unavailable, and answers can be wrong or incomplete.

It is not legal advice

Case Companion is not a lawyer and does not create an attorney–client relationship. Its answers and drafts are a starting point. Check them against your own documents and records, and have anything you file or send reviewed, ideally by a licensed attorney. Its legal reference library and instructions are set up for Minnesota family court; for a case elsewhere it may be misleading.

How your information is protected

• Your documents, timeline and conversations are in a private workspace that only you (and anyone you explicitly share it with) can open.
• Document files and their text, titles, messages and conversations are encrypted with a key unique to your workspace. The database separately blocks access to other workspaces' records.
• The site only works over an encrypted (HTTPS) connection, and sign-in is protected against repeated password guessing.

Who can see your information

• The operator. Ryan Herbst runs the server and holds the master encryption key, so is technically able to access stored data. The operator will not look at your case data except to fix a problem you ask for help with, or if required by law.
• AI providers. To answer questions and make your documents searchable, the relevant text is sent to Anthropic (Claude, which writes the answers) and Voyage AI (which prepares documents for search). They process it under their own published API terms; please review those if this matters to you.
• Nobody else. Your information is not sold, shared or used for advertising.

Keeping and deleting your information

Your information is kept until you ask for it to be deleted. On request, your whole workspace (documents, timeline, conversations and its encryption key) is permanently deleted. Encrypted backups are kept for up to 30 days and then removed. Contact rherbst612@gmail.com with questions or a deletion request.

Your responsibilities

Only upload documents you have the right to use, keep your password private, and don't use Case Companion for anything unlawful. Access may be ended at any time.