Privacy Policy
Last updated: 13 November 2026
Kanoon Sathi ("we", "us") operates kanoonsathi.com, a directory and referral service that connects people who have a legal problem with independent lawyers. We are not a law firm and do not provide legal advice. This policy explains what personal data we collect, why, who we share it with, and the rights you have under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 ("DPDP Act") and the Information Technology Act, 2000.
1. What we collect
If you submit a legal problem: your name, phone number, city, the category of your problem, your description of it, how urgent it is, and a rough budget range for legal fees.
If you sign up as a lawyer: your name, email address, phone number, State Bar Council and enrolment number, courts of practice, practice areas, years of experience, city, languages spoken, a short bio, and an optional photograph. Once approved, we also store your login credentials (password stored only as a one-way hash). If you joined through another lawyer's personal invite link, we record whose link it was; this is never shown publicly.
Automatically: a session cookie strictly necessary for logged-in admin and lawyer accounts, and standard server logs (IP address, browser type, pages requested) used for security and to prevent abuse. We do not currently use analytics or advertising trackers.
2. Why we process it (purpose and consent)
By submitting the intake form you consent to us processing your data for the specific purpose of reviewing your request and connecting you with a suitable lawyer. By signing up as a lawyer you consent to us reviewing your profile and, if approved, publishing it in our public directory. We do not use your data for any unrelated purpose without asking you first.
3. Who we share it with
- Lawyers. When we forward your request to a lawyer, they see your city, category, description and urgency. Your name and phone number are shared with a lawyer only after that lawyer accepts your request. If a lawyer declines, they never see your contact details.
- Our team. Authorised administrators review every request and lawyer profile. New-request alerts are sent to our internal address, help@kanoonsathi.com.
- Service providers. Our website and database are hosted with Hostinger. To help our team understand a request and find a lawyer who fits, we may send the description of your problem, your city and the choices you made on the form to Anthropic, whose AI model Claude reads it and suggests a practice area and suitable lawyers. We remove phone numbers, email addresses and your name from the text first, and never send your contact details. Anthropic processes it on servers outside India and, under its commercial terms, does not use it to train its models. A person on our team still reads every request and makes the choice. When a login code or a code to see a request's details is sent on WhatsApp, the mobile number and the code go through Meta's WhatsApp service. We do not sell or rent personal data to anyone.
- Legal requirements. We may disclose data where required by law, court order or a competent authority.
Approved lawyer profiles (name, city, the State Bar Council they are enrolled with, courts, practice areas, experience range, languages, bio and photo) are published publicly on this website and in our app by design. A lawyer's enrolment number is used only by our team to verify them and is never shown publicly: profiles say only “Enrolled with [State] Bar Council”. Lawyer phone numbers and email addresses are never displayed publicly either.
4. How long we keep it
Client requests are retained for as long as needed to complete the referral and for a reasonable period afterwards for record-keeping and dispute resolution, after which they are deleted or anonymised. Lawyer profiles are retained while the profile is live and for a reasonable period after deactivation. You can ask us to delete your data sooner (see section 6).
5. Security
Data is transmitted over HTTPS, stored in an access-controlled database, and administrator and lawyer accounts are protected by hashed passwords and login rate-limiting. No system is perfectly secure; if we become aware of a breach affecting your data we will notify you and the relevant authority as required by law.
6. Your rights
Under the DPDP Act you have the right to access a summary of the personal data we hold about you, to have inaccurate data corrected, to have your data erased where it is no longer needed for the purpose it was collected, to withdraw consent, and to nominate a person to exercise these rights on your behalf. To exercise any of these rights, email help@kanoonsathi.com from the phone number or email address you gave us so we can verify it is you. We will respond within a reasonable time and in any case within the period required by law.
7. Grievance officer
If you have a complaint about how we handle your data, contact our grievance officer at help@kanoonsathi.com. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may approach the Data Protection Board of India once it is operational.
8. Children
This service is intended for adults. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18; if you believe a minor has submitted data, contact us and we will delete it.
9. Cookies
We use one strictly necessary session cookie for admin and lawyer logins. It contains no personal data and expires when you close your browser. If you switch the site to Hindi (or back to English), a second cookie, ks_lang, remembers that choice for a year; it holds only the language. If you open a lawyer's personal invitation link to join as an advocate, a ks_ref cookie remembers which lawyer invited you for 30 days, so the invitation is recorded if you sign up later; it holds only that lawyer's invitation code and is removed when you sign up. We do not currently use analytics or advertising cookies; if that changes, we will show a consent notice before any such cookie is set.
10. The app and phone notifications
The Kanoon Sathi app on Google Play opens this same website. It collects nothing beyond what the website does, and has no ads and no analytics. So that a page can say "You're offline" when there is no connection, the website (and the app) keeps a copy of its design files (styles, fonts, icons) and that offline page on your device. It never keeps the pages you visit, anything you type into a form, or anyone's personal details.
Notifications, for lawyers and our team only. If a lawyer or administrator turns on "Notify me on this phone", we store the address their browser's push service gives for that device (a web address at Google, Apple, Mozilla or Microsoft, with two encryption keys), linked to their account. We use it only to send a short notice when a case is forwarded to them (the city and practice area only) or, for our team, when a new request arrives (the practice area only). A notification never contains a client's name, phone number or description, and it is encrypted so the push service cannot read it. The stored address is deleted when they turn notifications off, when the push service tells us it is no longer valid, or when the account is deleted. Clients do not get notifications and nothing is stored for them.
11. Changes
We may update this policy from time to time. The date at the top shows when it was last changed. Material changes will be flagged on this page.
Questions: help@kanoonsathi.com. See also our Terms of Service.
