Access to Justice is a trading name of Vilam Vuong, a sole trader based in England, address 18 Frinsted Road, Erith, DA8 3JX. Vilam Vuong is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy — meaning the person legally responsible for deciding how and why your data is used. Our website is accesstojustice.cc. You can contact us about privacy matters at hello@accesstojustice.cc.
This policy explains how we collect, use, and protect your personal data when you use our Services (currently Family Court and SEND), in line with UK data protection law (UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018).
Our Services involve you sharing information about an ongoing legal or family matter, which can include sensitive personal details. Some of what you share may fall into a legally protected category of especially sensitive data — for example, information about your health, or (less commonly) information about someone's racial or ethnic origin, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation, where that happens to be part of your situation. The fact that something is a family court or SEND document does not, on its own, make it this kind of especially sensitive data — it depends on what the document actually contains.
Documents in this area can also occasionally include information about a criminal offence or allegation, which UK law treats as its own separate category with its own protections. Where this applies, we handle it under the correct legal framework for that category of information, not as an ordinary case document.
Information you give us directly:
Information created through your use of the Service:
Uploaded documents and images are not stored by us. When you upload a document or image, it is processed to generate a response and then discarded — it is not written to disk or kept in our database. We only keep basic metadata about the upload (such as the filename, file type, and page count), never the file itself.
Your conversation history is kept while your account is active, unless you delete it. The text of what you type and what our assistant replies is saved, so your conversation history is available if you return to the product later. This is a deliberate feature, not an oversight. You can delete an individual conversation yourself at any time within the product. There is not currently a self-service way to delete your entire account and all associated data in one step — if you want everything removed, contact us at hello@accesstojustice.cc and we will action it manually. We are working on a proper account-closure process so that conversation data does not remain indefinitely once an account is closed.
We also extract specific facts from your conversations (for example, a relevant date, or the stage your case is at), to help the assistant understand the ongoing context of your case. This is kept for as long as it's needed to provide the service to you, and is deleted along with your account or case data.
If our system detects a signal that you or someone else may be at risk of serious harm, this is flagged and a real person is notified by email so they can review it. This is an automatic signal, not a human assessment — a person reviews what it means and decides what, if anything, happens next. This exists to try to make sure something serious doesn't go unnoticed. It is a safety measure, not routine monitoring of your conversations for any other purpose. The notification does not include the content of what you wrote, but it does include information that could identify your account, so that the person reviewing it can look into the situation.
Safeguarding-flag records are kept for 12 months, unless a specific incident reasonably requires us to keep a record for longer.
We are not an emergency service. If you are in immediate danger, please contact 999. If you are experiencing domestic abuse, you can contact the National Domestic Abuse Helpline. If you are struggling with your mental health, you can contact Samaritans. Please don't rely on us in an emergency.
We use a small number of third-party service providers to run our Services. They only receive the information they need to do their job:
We are still confirming the exact contractual terms, data retention periods, and data-training practices of each of these providers. We do not currently claim that any provider excludes your data from being used to improve their own models, or commit to a specific retention period on their end, because we have not yet independently confirmed this. We are working through this directly with each provider and will update this policy once confirmed.
We do not sell your personal data to anyone.
Our hosting is based in London, UK. Where we use third-party providers based outside the UK (see Section 6), your data may be processed outside the UK as part of that provider's service. We are in the process of confirming each provider's data location and, where data leaves the UK, what legal safeguards apply to that transfer. We will update this section once that review is complete.
We keep automatic backups of our systems, so that we can recover from a technical failure without losing your data. Backups are taken weekly and kept for 28 days.
This affects how quickly a deletion request takes full effect. When we delete your data from our live systems, it may still exist inside a backup made before the deletion, for up to 28 days, until that backup is automatically replaced. We do not use backup copies for day-to-day operation of the Service — they exist only for disaster recovery. We do not currently have a way to remove your specific data from an existing backup file, since backups are copies of the whole system rather than something we can edit.
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Uploaded documents and images | Not retained after processing |
| Conversation history | While your account is active, or until you delete it |
| Extracted case facts | While needed to provide the Service, deleted with your account/case data |
| Safeguarding records | 12 months, unless a specific incident requires longer |
| Operational and security logs | Currently kept without an enforced time limit. We are implementing a 90-day limit; until that is in place, this policy will not claim a 90-day retention period. |
| Payment and accounting records | As long as required by UK tax and accounting law |
| Backup copies | 28 days (see Section 8) |
Under UK data protection law, you may have the right to:
These rights apply in particular circumstances and are subject to legal exceptions — for example, we may need to keep certain records to meet a legal obligation even after a deletion request. If we can't fully action a request, we'll explain why.
To exercise any of these rights, contact us at hello@accesstojustice.cc. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk) if you're unhappy with how we've handled your data.
Note: full account deletion is not yet available as a self-service feature in the product. Until it is, contact us directly and we will action your request manually.
Our Services are intended for adults, and children cannot create accounts or use our Services as account holders. However, because Family Court and SEND matters frequently concern children, adult users may provide personal information about a child as part of their case. We process that information for the purpose of providing the Service to the adult user, with the same care described throughout this policy.
We may update this policy from time to time, particularly as our Services and safeguards evolve. We will let you know of material changes before they take effect.
Questions about this policy, or about your data: hello@accesstojustice.cc.
You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk) if you believe we have not handled your data properly.