Legal | Brooks Law Firm

Privacy Policy & Terms of Service

We’ve updated our Terms of Service on June 21, 2024. This is our first version. For future updates, we will provide a summary of the key changes. If you don’t agree to our Terms of Service, you can find more information about your options in our Help Center. Our Terms of Service reflect how our business works, the laws that apply to our company, and certain things that we believe to be true. These terms include the following topics:

“Introduction” establishes who we are, who you are, establishes definitions for important terms we will use throughout these terms, and preliminary age requirements that you must meet in order to use our services.

“What you can expect from us” describes how we provide and develop our services.

“What we expect from you” establishes rules for everyone using our services.

“Our content” describes the intellectual property rights to the content you find in our services and whether that content belongs to you, us, or others.

“If Problems or disagreements arise” establishes the legal rights you have, and what to expect in case you or someone else using our services violates these terms.

Understanding these terms is extremely important because, by using our services, you are agreeing to these terms. As a result, we’ve tried to make it as easy to understand as possible. Okay! Let's get started:

Introduction

For the rest of this Terms of Service, we will use these case-insensitive words to describe important things:

We will call this Terms of Service the "Terms".

We will call you "You", "Yours", "You're" and "You are". We will call other users "Others", "Their", and "Theirs".

We will call ourselves "Brooks Law", "we", "us", "our" and "ourselves". Brooks Law is a sole proprietorship with its principal place of business in Boston, MA and operating under the laws of the USA. We are located at Brooks Law, PC, 10 High Street, Suite 3, Medford, MA 02155.

We will call our services "Service" or "Services". Brooks Law provides our Services to You. All of our presently available Services, as well as any future Services, will be subject to these terms. Currently, our Services are:

Use of our website at www.brookslawfirm.com, including any mobile applications, mobile versions of our website, and the desktop version of our website. This encompasses any webpage for any device with the root domain of www.brookslawfirm.com.

Please note that our Services described herein do NOT apply to any legal services we may provide to you, which are governed under a different set of laws and code of ethics located in any engagement letters we may send to you for signing.

What you can expect from us

You can expect Brooks Law to provide a broad range of useful services to you, subject to these terms.

You can expect Brooks Law to improve our services. We may sometimes add or remove features and functionalities of our services, increase or decrease limits to our services, and start offering new services or stop offering old ones. If we make a material change that will negatively impact the use of our services, or if we stop offering a service, we will provide you with reasonable advance notice and an opportunity for you to export your content, except in urgent situations such as preventing abuse, responding to legal requirements, or addressing security and operability issues.

What we expect from you

The permission we provide to you to use our services continues as long as you meet your expectations as set forth below. We expect you to:

Follow these rules. You are expected to follow these rules, along with any additional terms, which could, for example, include things like additional Age Requirements, as well as our other policies that we have created or will create, such as our Privacy Policy. Although we give you permission to use our services, we retain any and all intellectual property rights we have in the services to the fullest extent permitted by law.

Respect others. Our services may involve you interacting with others. Since we want to maintain a respectful, courteous environment for everyone involved, you will: comply with applicable laws, including export control, sanctions, and human trafficking laws; respect the rights of others, including privacy and intellectual property rights; not abuse or harm others or yourself (or threaten or encourage such abuse or harm); and not abuse, harm, interfere with, or disrupt the services. If you find that others are not following these rules, you may report abuse using the "Contact Us" section of our main page. If we act on it, we will provide a fair process of resolving the issue.

Give us permission to use Your Content. Some of our services are designed to let you upload, submit, store, send, receive or share your content. You have no obligation to provide any content to our services and you are free to choose the content that you want to provide. If you choose to upload or share content, please make sure the content is lawful and that you have the necessary rights to use it. We need your permission if your intellectual property rights restrict our use of your content. You provide Brooks Law the following permissions in this License:

License. Your content remains yours, which means you retain any intellectual property rights that you have in your content. You may also have the right to share others' content if they've given you their permission. This License only covers your content only if that content is protected by intellectual property rights. This means this License does not affect your privacy rights for publicly-available factual information that you provide since it's considered common knowledge that everyone is free to use. This License does not include feedback that you offer, such as suggestions to improve our services as well as any information you provide when you report abuse.

This License is a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license, meaning you give us permission to use your content anywhere in the world, without charging us any fees, and that you are free to license your content to others. This License allows us to: host, reproduce, distribute, communicate, and use our content, which could include, for example, saving your content on our systems and making it accessible from anywhere you go; publish, publicly perform, or publicly display your content, if you've made it visible to others; modify and create derivative works based on your content, such as reformatting or translating it; sublicense these rights to other users to allow the services to work as designed, such as enabling you to share your status updates with people you choose; and to sublicense current and potential contractors who have signed agreements with us that are consistent with these terms, only for the limited purposes described in the Purposes section below.

Purpose. This License is for the limited purposes of: operating and improving our services, which means allowing the services to work as designed and creating new features and functionalities; using content you've shared publicly to promote our services, such as, for example, if you write a review about us, we may use it to promote ourselves; and for developing new technologies and services for Brooks Law consistent with these terms.

Duration. This License lasts for as long as your content is protected by intellectual property rights. If you remove any content from our services that are covered by this License, our systems will stop making that content publicly available in a reasonable amount of time, subject to two exceptions: one, if you already shared your content with others before removing it; and two, if you make your content available through another companies' services.

Our Content

Service-related Communications. To provide you with our services, we sometimes send you service announcements and other information. Please see our Privacy Policy to learn more about how we communicate with you. If you choose to give us feedback, such as suggestions to improve our Services, we may act on your feedback without obligation to you. This paragraph also applies to communications as a result of You using our Report Abuse function to report abuse.

Your Content in Brooks Law Services. Some of our services give you the opportunity to make your content publicly available, such as, if you post your thoughts about a blog that you enjoyed reading on our website. Our use of your content is subject to the License that was previously mentioned in these terms. If you remove any of such content, it will be subject to the same terms mentioned in the License.

Your Intellectual Property Rights. If you think someone is infringing on your intellectual property rights, you can send us notice through our Contact form. Be sure to include details of the infringement. We will then appropriate action, with or without prior notice to you.

Brooks Law Content. Some of our services include content that belongs to Brooks Law. You may use Brooks Law’s content as allowed by these terms and any additional terms, however we retain any and all intellectual property rights that we have in our content. Please don’t remove, obscure, or alter any of our branding, logo, or legal notices. If you want to use our branding or logos, please contact us through our Contact form.

Other Content. Finally, some of our services give you access to content that belongs to other people or organizations. For example, we may link a public institution’s homepage on a blog post we provide. You may not use this content without that person or organization’s permission, or as otherwise allowed by law. The views expressed in other people or organizations’ content are theirs’, and don’t necessarily reflect Brooks Law’s views.

If Problems or Disagreements Arise

Consumer Rights. By law, you (1) have the right to a certain quality of service and (2) have ways to fix problems if things go wrong. This only applies to services that you actually pay for, however, so it doesn’t apply to, for example, the free use of our website. As a paying customer, you will continue to enjoy all legal rights granted to consumers under applicable law, and these terms do not limit or take away any of those rights.

Warranties. As use of our website is free and will continue to be free, we make no Warranties as to the use of our website.

Disclaimers. The only commitment we make about our services, the content in the services, the function of our services, and the reliability, availability, or ability of them to meet your needs are fully described in the Warranty section. Other than that, we do not make any other commitments about our services. Unless required by law, we don’t provide implied warranties, such as the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

Liabilities. These terms only limit our responsibilities as allowed by applicable law. Additionally, these terms do not limit our liability for death or personal injury, fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, gross negligence, or willful misconduct. Other than the rights and responsibilities described in this section that arise from problems or disagreements, Brooks Law is not responsible for any other losses, unless they were directly caused by our breach of these terms as well as any of our other policies. If we are liable, then our total liability relating to these terms is limited to (1) Ten (10) United States Dollars.

Indemnification. To the extent allowed by applicable law, you’ll indemnify Brooks Law and its directors, officers, employees and contractors for any third-party legal proceedings arising out of or relating to your unlawful use of the services or violation of any of our other policies. This includes indemnifying us for any liability or expense that comes from claims, losses, damages, judgments, fines, litigation costs and legal fees. Brooks Law is not responsible for loss of profits, revenues, business opportunities, goodwill, anticipated savings, indirect losses, consequential losses, or punitive damages.

What we will do in the case of problems. Before taking any of the actions below, we will provide you with advance notice when reasonably possible, describe the reason for our action, and give you an opportunity to fix the problem, unless we reasonably believe that doing so would: violate the law or a legal enforcement authority’s order; compromise an investigation; cause harm or liability to a user, third party, or Brooks Law; compromise the operation, integrity, or security of our services, or for any other reason that relates to our safety and security.

Removing your content. If we reasonably believe that any part of your content (1) breaches these terms or our other policies, violates applicable law, or (3) could harm our users, third parties, or Brooks Law, then we reserve the right to take down some or all of that content in accordance with applicable law.

Suspending or terminating your access to Brooks Law services. We reserve the right to suspend or terminate your access to our services at any time, subject to applicable law. Reasons may include: repeated material breaches of these terms or other policies; complying with a court order or law; because we reasonably believe your conduct causes or will cause harm or liability to a user, third party, or Brooks Law, or if you or we believe your Brooks Law Account was hacked. You may appeal a suspension or termination through our Contact form. You are always free to stop using our services at any time.

Governing Law. The laws under the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will govern all disputes arising out of or relating to these terms, our services, our other policies and content owned by you or us, regardless of the conflict of laws rules. Disputes between us must be resolved exclusively in the federal or state courts of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and you and Brooks Law consent to personal jurisdiction in those courts. To the extent that applicable local law prevents certain disputes from being resolved in a Massachusetts court, then you can file disputes in your local courts. If applicable local law prevents your local court from applying Massachusetts law to resolve those disputes, then the dispute will be governed by the applicable local laws of your country, state, or other place of residence.

About these terms. By law, you have certain rights that cannot be limited by a contract like these terms of service. These terms are in no way intended to restrict such rights. These terms describe the relationship between you and Brooks Law, and do not create any legal rights for other persons or organizations, even if others benefit from our relationship under these terms. Despite mentioning our services in our examples, some or all of our services may not be available in your country. For any service that has any additional terms that conflict with these terms, the additional terms will govern for that service. If it turns out that any particular sentence or term in these terms are not valid or enforceable, then it won’t affect any other terms. In the event that we don’t take action right away for a breach of these terms, we do not give up any rights that we may have, such as taking action in the future. Finally, we reserve the right to update these terms and add or modify any additional terms for any reason reasonably related to our services or how we do business, for legal, regulatory, or security purposes, or to prevent abuse or harm. If we do materially change these terms or any of our additional terms, we will provide you with reasonable advance notice and the opportunity to review the changes except when we launch a new service or feature or in urgent situations. If you don’t agree to the new terms, or these terms, you should remove your content and stop using the services. You can also end your relationship with us at any time by ceasing use of www.brookslawfirm.com.

We’ve updated our Privacy Policy on June 21, 2024. This is our first version. For future updates, we will provide a summary of the key changes. If you don’t agree to our Terms of Service, please cease use of www.brookslawfirm.com.

Thank you for choosing to use www.brookslawfirm.com. If you’ve been seriously hurt in an accident, you already have a lot on your mind. On top of the concerns about your physical recovery, you and your family may be struggling to make ends meet while you are out of work. You may already be facing a pile of medical bills in addition to your regular expenses, and the insurance companies do not make things any easier. At Brooks Law, our team knows exactly what you are going through. Every day, we work with people just like you, hardworking people who have been injured or disabled and just want to get back to their lives. We can help you navigate the overly complex workers’ compensation system, personal injury claims process benefits system. The following is our Privacy Policy, which applies to both your use of our website, as well as your use of our legal services (which are subject to additional, separate laws and rules of ethics governing legal services):

This policy will cover the following topics:

“What information do we collect?” establishes what type of information we collect from you and how long we keep your information for.

“How and why do we use your information?” establishes how and why we use your information, including how we share your information with others. We will also briefly mention a “cookie” in this policy, which is a type of tracking technology. Information about our use of cookies is in our Cookies Policy, which supplements this policy. It's important that you read both policies (along with all of our policies, for that matter).

“How you can manage your information” establishes your privacy rights and details what you can do to modify or delete information that you provide to us.

“About this Policy” establishes additional details about this policy, which includes how we may update this policy.

We take your privacy very seriously. Understanding this policy is extremely important because it applies to all information we collect through our services. As a result, we’ve tried to make it as easy to understand as possible and we urge you to take the time to read it. Okay! Let's get started:

Introduction

For the rest of this Privacy Policy, we will use these case-insensitive words to describe important things:

We will call this Privacy Policy the “Policy”.

We will call you "You", "Yours", "You're" and "You are". We will call other users "Others", "Their", and "Theirs".

We will call ourselves "Brooks Law", "we", "us", "our" and "ourselves". Brooks Law is a professional corporation with its principal place of business in Boston, MA and operating under the laws of the USA. We are located at Brooks Law, PC, 10 High Street, Suite 3, Medford, MA 02155.

Please note that our Services described in this Privacy Policy also apply to any legal services we may provide to you, which are also governed under an additional set of laws and code of ethics located in any engagement letters we may send to you for signing.

What information do we collect?

When you use our services, we will collect the following types of information:

Basic Information. Brooks Law collects information to provide better services for all of our users, both ones with or without an account. This includes figuring out basic information such as which language preference you have, to more complex things such as figuring out which ads you’ll find most useful, your consumer behavior on HubSpot, or what type of blog articles you might like. The information Brooks Law collects, and how that information is used, depends on how you use our services and how you manage your privacy controls.

Device Identifier Information. When you’re not signed in to a Brooks Law account or accessing our client portal, we store information we collect with unique identifiers tied to your browser, application, or device. This information is basically a random string of random letters and numbers, and we only use it to identify you and maintain settings such as your language preference across browsing sessions. When you are signed into our client portal, we also collect information that we store with your Brooks Law Account, which is treated as personal information.

Personal Information. When you create a Brooks Law Account, you provide us with personal information that includes your name and a password. You can also add a phone number, payment information, or other geographical information to your Brooks Law Account. Even when you aren’t signed into a Brooks Law Account, you might choose to give us other personal information, such as your email, to receive updates about our services. Brooks Law also collects the content that you create, upload, or receive from others when using our services. This includes things like messages you write and receive, photos and videos you save, documents that you create, and comments you make on our website.

Your Activity. Brooks Law collects information about your activity in our services, which we use to improve and personalize your experience, such as recommending additional legal services that we may find useful to you. The activity information we collect may include information provided in HubSpot, articles that you read, views and interactions with our content and ads, subscription and purchase activity, and people with whom you communicate or share content with on our website.

Location Information. We intend to collect information about your location when you use our services, which helps us, for example, recommending the best treatment providers near to you (in the context of Personal Injury or Workers’ Comp). Since we don’t have this capability yet, we can’t really say what this entails, but once we get this capability set up, we’ll make sure to let you know and give you a chance to opt out of it.

Public Information. In some circumstances, Brooks Law may collect information about you from publicly accessible sources. For example, if you made an appearance as counsel in a famous case, and it gets published in a Supreme Court case (hypothetical congratulations, by the way), we may collect information about that. We may also collect information about you from third-parties. For example, licensed attorneys need to register information with the American Bar Association, and we may collect that information from the ABA if it is publicly accessible.

To keep your information secure, we will use encryption to keep your data private. We hope to offer a range of additional security features in the future, like occasional security checkups and 2-step verification to protect your account. We will restrict access to your personal information to Brooks Law employees, contractors, and agents who absolutely need that information in order to process it, and we'll subject them to strict contractual confidentiality obligations. We will continually improve and upgrade how we encrypt and store our code both in the front and backend in order to prevent unauthorized access to our systems. As we continue to grow, we'll make sure to improve our security accordingly.

We will retain your information for different periods of time, depending on what type of information it is, how we use it, and how you configure your settings, subject to the rule of ethics when it comes to the storage of electronic data. Some data will be deletable whenever you like, such as content you create or upload. Other data is deleted or anonymized automatically after a set period of time, which can include third-party advertising data that Google takes. We will keep some data until you delete your Brooks Law Account, and under the rules of ethics we are bound by a duty to keep some data for at least 10 years. Some data we will retain for longer periods of time when it is necessary for legitimate business or legal purposes, such as security, fraud and abuse prevention, or compliance purposes.

We value your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal information. As part of our privacy policy, we ensure that personal phone numbers and any information obtained through opt-in consent will not be shared with affiliated businesses or third parties, in any context, but specifically (and currently) in the context of using Sakari to keep you informed while we perform our legal services. Your trust is paramount to us, and we strive to maintain the highest standards of data protection and confidentiality. This stipulation applies, without exception, and broadly, to this entire privacy policy and terms of service.

How and why we use your information

We use various technologies to collect and store your information, including cookies, pixel tags, local storage, databases, and server logs. You can find more information on our use of cookies, including how to opt out of cookie use, in our Cookies Policy, located on this page.

We’ll use your information to:

Deliver Services. We use this information to deliver our services, like processing search terms in order to return results for you. We also use this information to maintain and improve our services and to ensure they are working as intended, such as tracking abuse reports or other issues that you let us know about. Another example is understanding frequently misspelled search terms to help us improve the results we provide to you on our website.

Deliver Third Party Advertising. We currently allow a certain third party vendor, Google, to use cookies to serve targeted ads based on your prior visits to Brooks Law or other websites. Google has provided a helpful page where you can find out more at How Google uses data when you use our partners’ sites or apps. You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting your Ads Settings in your Account Settings page. Alternatively, you can visit Google’s Ads Settings at https://adssettings.google.com. Alternatively, you can opt out of some third-party vendors’ uses of cookies for personalized advertising by visiting www.aboutads.info.

Receive Third Party Analytics. We also may use third party vendors to track and provide us with analytics, such as page views. Specifically, we use Google Analytics to keep track of our metrics, and you can opt out of Google Analytics, by installing Google’s opt-out browser add-on, located at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

Communicate with You. We use information that we collect, such as your email address, to interact with you directly. For example, we might send you a notification of upcoming changes or improvements to our services or these policies. If you contact Brooks Law, we’ll keep a record of your request to help you solve issues that you might be facing.

Protect Brooks Law, Our Users, and the Public. We use information to help improve the safety and reliability of our services. This will include detecting, preventing, and responding to fraud, abuse, security risks, and technical issues that could harm Brooks Law, our users, or the public.

Currently, Brooks Law does not share your personal information with companies, organizations, or individuals outside of Brooks Law, with the notable exception of Google Analytics and Google Adsense. In any event, we will only share information when:

We have your consent. We'll share personal information outside of Brooks Law when we have your consent. We can't really think of any examples right now where we'd want to do this, even with your consent, as we don't really intend on doing this anyway, but we'll be sure to let you know and to get your consent before we do.

We need to, for legal reasons. We will share personal information outside of Brooks Law if we have a good-faith belief that access, use, preservation, or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or enforceable governmental request, to enforce our Terms of Service, to detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security, or technical issues, and to prevent harm to the rights, property or safety of Brooks Law, our users, or the public as required or permitted by law.

If Brooks Law is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, we’ll continue to ensure the confidentiality of your personal information and give affected users notice before personal information is transferred or becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

If the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) applies to your information, we provide these disclosures and the methods of managing your information described in this policy so you can exercise your rights to receive information about our data practices, as well as to request access to and delete your information. These tools allow you to review, update and delete your information, as well as export and download a copy of it. Currently, you must contact us so that we can manually do so, but we're looking to unveil additional features in the future.

Brooks Law does not sell your personal information. We only share your information as described in this policy, process your information for purposes described in this policy, which include "business purposes" under the CCPA, which include: protecting against security threats, abuse, and illegal activity; auditing and measurement; maintaining our services, research and development, use of service providers, advertising, and to satisfy applicable laws or regulations such as mandatory disclosures by a government authority or law enforcement. If you have additional questions or requests related to your rights under the CCPA, do not hesitate to contact us through our Contact form.

How you can manage your information

Privacy Controls. You may use our services in a variety of ways to manage your privacy. For example, you may simply completely opt out by contacting us.

Exporting, Removing & Deleting Your Information. You can provide us with a request to export your content in your Brooks Law Account if you want to back it up or use it with a service outside of Brooks Law through our Contact form. In the future, we plan on making this easier for you to do, preferably automatically. When we delete your data, we will follow a deletion process to make sure your data is safely and completely removed or retained only in anonymized form. We try to ensure that our services protect information from accidental or malicious deletion. Because of this, there may be delays between when you delete something and when copies are deleted from our active and backup systems. In the future, we'll roll out a data retention information article in our Help Center to give you more information on how long this takes and how we delete your data.

Other Methods. There are other ways to control the information Brooks Law collects (or anyone, for that matter), whether or not you are signed into your Brooks Law Account. For example, you can control your browser settings to control cookie use, and your device may have controls to determine what information we can collect.

About this policy

This Privacy Policy applies to all of the services offered by Brooks Law and services offered on third-party sites, such as advertising services. This Privacy Policy doesn’t apply to services that have separate privacy policies that do not incorporate this Privacy Policy, including the information practices of other companies and organizations that may advertise our services, or services offered by other companies or individuals.

We’ll inevitably need to change this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will never reduce your rights under this Privacy Policy without your explicit consent, and we’ll always indicate the date the last changes were published as well as offer you access to older versions for your review. If the changes are significant, we’ll give you a more prominent notice such as emailing you.