Terms of Service

Sidebar is operated by Sidebar AI LLC, an Illinois limited liability company (“Sidebar,” “we,” “us”).

Sidebar is an AI research and drafting workspace for legal professionals. It provides access to frontier AI models over enterprise no-retention channels, legal research grounded in published court opinions, document drafting, and a persistent matter workspace. Plans and pricing are described at /pricing.

You must provide accurate account information and keep your credentials secure. Seats are for individual named users within your firm. You are responsible for use of the service under your account.

Use Sidebar only for lawful purposes in connection with professional work. Do not attempt to breach tenant isolation, probe or overload the service, resell access, or use the service to violate the rights of others. We may suspend accounts that endanger the service or other customers, with notice where practicable.

You are responsible for having the authority to submit whatever you put into Sidebar — including client files and any third-party or personal information they contain — and for doing so consistent with your professional and confidentiality obligations and any client consent you are required to obtain.

Sensitive health information. Sidebar is a general legal-work tool. It is not a HIPAA business associate and is not intended for protected health information (PHI) or medical records. Do not upload PHI or medical records to Sidebar. Sidebar does not sign business associate agreements and disclaims any representation that it is suitable for PHI.

You own everything you put into Sidebar and everything it generates for you. You grant us only the limited license required to operate the service for you: to store your content (encrypted as described in our Privacy Policy), process it through the AI model you select, and display it back to you. We do not use your content to train models, we do not sell it, and no AI provider we route to retains it or trains on it.

We treat all workspace content as your confidential information. We access it only as necessary to operate the service, at your direction (e.g., a support request), or as required by law under the process in Section 9. A data processing agreement is available on request for firms that require one.

Sidebar is a tool, not a lawyer. Output may be incomplete or wrong, and citation verification reduces — but does not eliminate — the need for professional review. Sidebar does not verify whether an authority remains good law; check treatment through your citator practice before relying on or filing anything.

You (the attorney) review all output and remain solely responsible for your work product, consistent with your professional obligations, including competence and supervision duties under applicable rules of professional conduct and guidance such as ABA Formal Opinion 512. Sidebar is designed to be supervised: citations link to their sources so review is practical, not theoretical.

This section is our commitment about what happens if a third party seeks your data from us; the full policy is at /legal/legal-process.

(a) Demands belong with you. Our position is that civil discovery demands for customer content should be directed to the customer — the account holder — not to Sidebar, and we will assert available legal protections to that effect.

(b) Notice first. Unless we are legally prohibited (e.g., by a sealed order), we will notify you promptly of any subpoena, warrant, or other legal demand for your data before producing anything, and allow you a reasonable opportunity to object or move to quash.

(c) Minimum production. If compelled to produce after you have had the opportunity to respond, we produce only what is legally required, narrowly construed.

(d) Deleted means gone. Content you have deleted under our deletion practices no longer exists on our systems and cannot be produced.

Subscriptions bill monthly through Stripe and can be canceled anytime, effective at the end of the billing period. Fees are non-refundable except where required by law.

You can export your conversations and delete your data at any time. On account closure, we erase your data per the Privacy Policy. If Sidebar ever discontinues the service, we commit to at least a 90-day window for you to export your data, followed by deletion.

Sidebar relies on third-party providers (listed at /legal/subprocessors) and can retrieve public materials such as court opinions and web results. Those third-party materials and services are governed by their own terms, and we are not responsible for the content or availability of third-party sources.

We may label some features as beta, preview, or experimental. Those features are provided as-is, may change or be withdrawn, and may be less reliable than generally available features. Do not rely on a beta feature for anything you cannot independently verify.

The service is provided “as is” and “as available” without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that AI output is accurate, complete, current, reflects good law, or will achieve any particular result. [Counsel: conform to standard form.]

To the maximum extent permitted by law, neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, and our aggregate liability is capped at the amounts you paid us in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law. [Counsel: confirm cap and carve-outs.]

You will defend and indemnify Sidebar against third-party claims arising from your use of the service in violation of these terms or applicable law, or from content you were not authorized to submit. [Counsel: add mutual/IP indemnity as appropriate and conform to standard form.]

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Illinois, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the exclusive venue for any dispute is the state and federal courts located in Illinois. We will try in good faith to resolve any dispute informally first; please contact us before initiating a formal proceeding. [Counsel: confirm venue county and any arbitration / class-action-waiver decision, intentionally left open in this draft.]

Provisions that by their nature should survive termination — including content ownership, confidentiality, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, and dispute resolution — survive termination of these terms.

We will notify account holders by email of material changes before they take effect, and update the “last updated” date above. Questions about these terms: legal@sidebar-ai.com.