Privacy Policy

Last updated: August 4, 2026

1. What we collect

To provide the service we collect: your email address (at checkout, via Stripe), your payment transaction identifiers (from Stripe; we never see your card number), your invention disclosure and any uploaded figures, and standard technical logs (IP addresses and requests) needed to operate and protect the site.

Gift certificate information. If you purchase a gift certificate and ask us to email the code to a recipient, we collect the recipient's name, email address, and phone number, at your direction, and use them solely to deliver the gift code and to administer the gift certificate. If you redeem a gift certificate, we collect the email address you provide so we can deliver your report and administer the redemption.

2. How your invention data is used

Your disclosure and figures are used solely to produce your report: they are analyzed, searched against patent databases, turned into a draft Preliminary Patentability Assessment, and provided, together with the draft, to the firm's registered patent practitioner, who reviews and approves every report before delivery. They are never published, shared with other customers, sold, or reused.

3. Retention and deletion: the purge

Your invention data is retained on our systems only as long as the search and the practitioner's review require. Within 15 minutes of your report being delivered, your disclosure text, uploaded figures, all intermediate search data, and the report file are permanently deleted from our systems. Files are overwritten before deletion and database fields are scrubbed. A daily automated audit verifies that no invention data persists. Our application logs are filtered so they never contain disclosure text.

4. What we keep

After the purge we retain only: (a) order records: your email address, Stripe transaction identifiers, amounts, order status, and processing timestamps, kept for accounting, support, and dispute resolution; (b) the firm's practitioner review correspondence: the draft report and your disclosure text as sent to the reviewing practitioner, kept as the firm's record of the professional review performed on your report; and (c) the firm's copy of the delivery email, including the report PDF, which serves as the firm's record of what was delivered. These firm records are held confidentially by the firm and are not published, shared, sold, or reused. Gift certificate purchase and redemption records (purchaser email, recipient contact details if provided, redemption email, and timestamps) are retained as part of our purchase records; they never contain invention content.

5. Third parties

We use: Stripe (payment processing), patent database and public information providers (the USPTO, the European Patent Office, WIPO, Google, and other online sources of information, which receive search queries derived from your disclosure but never your identity), Anthropic (the AI analysis provider that processes your disclosure to produce the report), and our email infrastructure (to deliver your report). Each receives only what it needs to perform its function.

6. Cookies

The site uses an essential session cookie for form security (CSRF protection).

7. Email

We send transactional email only: your submission link, your report, a reminder if your link is unused after 7 days, and gift certificate codes and receipts where applicable. No marketing email.

8. Your rights

You may request a copy or deletion of the records we hold about you (the order records and the firm's delivery record) by contacting us. Note that invention data is already deleted automatically as described in section 3.

9. Contact

Underwood & Associates, LLC, 3904 Valley View Rd., Crystal Lake, Illinois, 60012, United States. See the Contact page.