Privacy Policy

1. Information We Collect

We collect the following categories of personal information:

• Identifiers and contact information you provide directly: your name, email address, company name, and phone number.
• Commercial and project information: property addresses, legal descriptions, property-owner and general-contractor names and addresses, contract and claim amounts, retainage, work descriptions, and the dates your work started and finished.
• Documents you upload: evidence files (contracts, photos, invoices, change orders, correspondence) you store against a project. These are one category, not two: a file you drop into auto-fill is saved to the project's evidence vault as well, unless you untick that at the review step before the project is created. Photos are stored as your camera took them, including any location the camera recorded in the file; the copy sent to Anthropic for auto-fill is re-encoded first, which removes it.
• Account and billing information: your hashed password, organization membership and role, plan and subscription status. Payment-card details are collected and held by Stripe, not by LienShield.
• Technical and usage information: IP address, browser user agent, pages requested, and server log entries generated when you use the site or the API.

Some of this is personal information about other people — the property owner and the general contractor on your project. You are responsible for having a lawful basis to give it to us, and we process it only to prepare and track the documents you ask us to prepare.

2. How We Use Your Information

We use your information to:

• Generate and manage lien-related documents
• Calculate filing deadlines for your jurisdiction
• Send deadline reminders and filing notifications
• Run the AI features described in Section 3, unless an admin has turned them off
• Bill your subscription and apply plan limits
• Provide customer support
• Keep the service secure, including rate limiting and abuse prevention
• Measure advertising and website performance, as described in Section 7

Your project data, contracts, filings and files are never used to train AI models — not by us, and not by our AI provider (see Section 3). We do not sell your personal information.

3. AI Processing

Two features use AI. Both run on Anthropic's Claude, on United States infrastructure only, and your content is never used to train AI models. Contract auto-fill runs only when you upload a contract, and you can always enter every field by hand instead; the document review runs on each lien or notice you generate. An admin of your organization can turn both features off for everyone in it, in Settings under “AI & your data”; while they are off, nothing from your organization is sent to Anthropic and the rule-based checks on your filings carry on unchanged. Deadlines are calculated by rules taken from each statute, never by AI.

• Contract auto-fill. When you upload a construction contract — or up to 5 files in one upload, such as the contract and the estimator's spreadsheet — we extract the text of each one and send it to Anthropic's Claude API: up to the first 60,000 characters of a document, being its beginning and its end with the middle omitted when it is longer than that, and no more than 120,000 characters in total across one upload. A photo, a screenshot or a scanned PDF has no text to extract, so the image itself is sent instead (a scanned PDF of up to 30 pages, and at most 30 pages of your documents read as pictures across one upload). A long scan is read twice when the first, cheaper pass comes back missing a field — the same pages of the same file, not more of your document — so at most 37 page-images are transmitted for one upload. Either way the API returns the project fields, which we show you to confirm before any of them are filled in.
• Document review. Each time LienShield generates or re-checks a lien or notice form, the contents of that form — property address, owner name and address, claimant, amount claimed, work description and dates — are sent to Anthropic's Claude API for a review against that state's statute. This runs automatically on every generated document while the feature is on.

What happens to that content at Anthropic:

• Processed only in the United States. Every request we send sets Anthropic's inference_geo control to us, which runs the request on Anthropic's US infrastructure (Anthropic: data residency).
• Never used for training. Anthropic's API terms state that retained data “is never used for model training without your express permission.” We have not given that permission and will not (Anthropic: API and data retention).
• Kept for up to 30 days. Anthropic “automatically delete[s] inputs and outputs on our backend within 30 days of receipt or generation.” It may keep them longer where the law requires it, to enforce its usage policy, or for up to 2 years if its automated trust-and-safety systems flag a request (same source).

We do not send your data to any other AI or machine-learning provider. No AI provider receives your password or your payment details.

Files you store against a project are not sent to Anthropic. Auto-fill is the one exception, and it works the other way round: a file you drop into auto-fill is sent to Anthropic to be read, and is also saved to the project's evidence vault unless you untick that before the project is created. Nothing you add through the evidence vault itself is ever sent to an AI provider.

4. Subprocessors

These are the third parties that process personal information on our behalf, what each one is for, and what it receives. We update this list when we add or remove a provider.

Beyond these processors, we may disclose personal information to our professional advisors (such as counsel or accountants), to a successor in the event of a merger or sale of the business, and to law enforcement or another party where we are legally required to do so or where it is necessary to protect our rights or someone's safety.

5. Where Your Data Is Stored

All customer data is stored in the United States, and it is processed there too, with one exception: the emails we send you are delivered by Brevo, in the European Union (see the last item below). LienShield is operated from the United States by Obsidian Clad Labs LLC. Specifically:

• Your account and project data lives in a PostgreSQL database hosted by Railway in its US East region (Virginia), together with that database's backups.
• Files you upload, and our nightly off-site copy of the database, are stored in Cloudflare R2 under Cloudflare's United States jurisdiction.
• The AI features run on Anthropic's US infrastructure (Section 3).
• Billing is handled by Stripe in the US.
• Email is the exception. Verification and password-reset emails, invitations, deadline reminders and the reports you subscribe to are delivered by Brevo, whose servers are in France, Germany and Belgium. Each email's content, which can include project names, property addresses, deadline dates and attached reports, together with the recipient's name and email address, passes through the European Union to be delivered. Nothing else is stored with Brevo.

Two things are global by nature, and neither carries your project, contract or filing data: the website's page code is delivered from Vercel's edge network (a visitor abroad is served from a nearby location), and Google's advertising tag may be processed in Google's data centers worldwide. If you use LienShield from outside the United States, the information you enter is transferred to and stored in the United States.

6. Data Security

Traffic to lienshield.app and api.lienshield.app is encrypted with TLS 1.2 or higher (current browsers negotiate TLS 1.3), with HSTS preload-eligible headers. Passwords are stored as bcrypt hashes and are never logged or returned. Data at rest is encrypted by our hosting providers on their storage layer; LienShield does not add a separate application-level encryption key on top of that. Separation between organizations is enforced in the application: every tenant-scoped query filters on your organization, and each route re-checks your role.

No system is perfectly secure. Our current security posture — including what we have not yet built — is described on our Security page. To report a vulnerability, email security@lienshield.app.

7. Cookies & Tracking

We use Google Ads conversion tracking (AW-18128047823) to measure whether an advertisement led to a sign-up or a subscription. The Google tag loads on our public pages and the sign-up and sign-in pages, and may place cookies on your device. It does not load in the dashboard or on password-reset, email-verification or invitation links. It receives page URLs and conversion events — it does not receive your project, contract, or filing data. You can opt out of personalized advertising through Google's Ad Settings.

We also use Vercel Web Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights to measure traffic and page-load performance. These load on our public pages only — they are switched off on /dashboard and on password-reset, email-verification and invitation links.

A strictly necessary HttpOnly cookie keeps you signed in. We do not currently present a cookie-consent banner and we do not currently detect Global Privacy Control signals. If you want the advertising tag excluded from your visits, use the Google opt-out above or an ad-blocking extension, or email us at support@lienshield.app.

8. Data Retention, Backups and Deletion

We retain your project data for as long as your account is active, because lien records are evidence you may need years after a filing.

Deletes can be undone for 30 days. When you delete a project or an evidence file, it moves to Recently deleted in your dashboard, where a manager or admin can restore it exactly as it was, including its filings, documents and files. After 30 days it is permanently removed from the live database, and uploaded files are removed from storage.

Backups. So that your data is not lost to an accident, an outage or a bad change, the database is backed up three independent ways: continuously (it can be restored to any moment in roughly the last four weeks), in daily, weekly and monthly snapshots kept for up to about three months, and in a nightly copy to separate storage, where daily copies are kept for 35 days and one copy per month is kept for 12 months. All backups are in the United States, are encrypted at rest, and are used only to recover data. Information deleted from the live system, including after an account deletion, remains in these backups until they expire, at most 12 months later.

Account deletion is carried out by a person, not automatically. You can ask for it yourself from Settings › Delete account, which records the request and emails both you and our support address; deleting the data is then done by hand. You can also still just email support@lienshield.app from the address on the account. We will confirm the request, and our target is to complete deletion within 30 days. We may keep a limited amount of data after that where we are required to — for example billing records Stripe must retain for tax and accounting purposes, and security logs — and we cannot retract a lien or notice that has already been recorded with a county office, because that is a public record outside our control.

Before requesting deletion you can export your own data: CSV and Excel exports of your projects, filings, deadlines and evidence are available from the dashboard on every plan.

9. Your Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access the personal information we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, to receive a portable copy, to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information, and not to be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights. If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you also have the right to object to or restrict certain processing and to lodge a complaint with your supervisory authority.

We do not sell personal information for money. We disclose it to the subprocessors listed in Section 4 for the business purposes stated there.

To exercise any of these rights, email support@lienshield.app. Requests are handled by a person rather than an automated console: we will verify that the request comes from the account holder or an authorized agent before acting on it, and we aim to respond within 45 days. There is no charge for a reasonable request.

10. Changes to This Policy

We update this policy when our processing changes — including when we add or remove a subprocessor. The "last updated" date at the top reflects the most recent change. Material changes will be announced by email to account holders.

11. Contact

For privacy-related inquiries, contact us at: support@lienshield.app