Terms of Service

These terms cover your use of FOIAflow. By creating an account you agree to them. If you are using FOIAflow for a newsroom or another organization, you are agreeing on its behalf as well.

FOIAflow is not a law firm

FOIAflow is a drafting and tracking tool. It is not a law firm, we are not your attorneys, and nothing the product produces is legal advice. Using it does not create an attorney-client relationship and nothing you put into it is protected by attorney-client privilege.

The product assembles a letter from a statute, a jurisdiction and the details you supply, and it drafts an appeal from the exemption an agency cites. Those are documents, not advice about your legal position. Deciding whether to file, what to ask for, whether to appeal and whether a denial was lawful are legal judgments. If they matter to you, take them to a lawyer.

Jurisdiction coverage, and what is verified

Two jurisdictions in the product were built by hand and their statutory citations were confirmed by a person: Federal and Minnesota. Every other jurisdiction was researched and has not been verified by an attorney. Statutes are amended, response windows are changed, and a citation that was right when it was researched can become wrong without anything in this product noticing.

You are responsible for confirming the governing law before you file. Read the letter the product generates. Check the statute and the deadline it names against the current law of the jurisdiction you are filing in. Do not treat a generated citation as verified simply because the product produced it.

Sending is final

When you send a request through FOIAflow, it goes from your own email account to a real government agency. It cannot be unsent, recalled or edited after the fact, by you or by us. Read what you are sending before you send it.

You are the requester of record. The request is made in your name, the agency corresponds with you, and any obligation the filing creates is yours. FOIAflow is the tool you used, not a party to the request and not your representative before the agency.

Your account

You need a confirmed email address to use FOIAflow, and you must be old enough to enter a contract where you live. Keep your credentials to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account, including what anyone you give access to does with it. Tell us promptly if you think it has been compromised.

Acceptable use

Do not use FOIAflow to:

• Break the law, or help someone else break it.
• Impersonate another person or organization, or file a request in a name that is not yours to use.
• Harass an agency or an individual employee, or send volume intended to obstruct an office rather than to obtain records.
• Send unsolicited bulk mail of any kind through the Gmail connection.
• Upload material you have no right to hold, or content that is unlawful to possess or distribute.
• Attack, probe or reverse engineer the service, evade its limits, or try to reach data belonging to another account.

The Gmail connection sends as you, so misuse of it is misuse of your own account with Google and is subject to their terms as well as these.

Your content

The requests you write and the documents you upload remain yours. We claim no ownership of them. We process them to operate the product for you, as described in the Privacy Policy. You are responsible for having the right to upload what you upload.

No warranty of outcome

The service is provided as is. We do not warrant that an agency will respond, will respond on time, will release anything, or will release what you asked for. We do not warrant that a generated letter or appeal will succeed, that a deadline calculated by the product is the operative legal deadline, or that an analysis of a released document is complete or correct. Model-generated text can be wrong and confident at the same time, and it needs to be read as a draft.

We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or free of errors. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, FOIAflow is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or a story, deadline, appeal window or statutory right lost in connection with your use of the service. Our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose.

Some jurisdictions do not allow these limits. Where that is the case, they apply to the extent permitted and no further.

Suspension and termination

You can stop using FOIAflow at any time, disconnect Gmail from the app, and write to us to have your account deleted. We may suspend or close an account that violates these terms or that puts the service or another user at risk. We will tell you why where we can.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The date at the top of this page changes when we do. If a change materially reduces your rights, we will make a reasonable effort to tell you before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept it.

Contact

Questions about these terms go to contact@foiaflow.co.