Privacy Policy

LexConnect (“we”, “us”) operates lexconnect.cc, a South African platform that connects attorneys with advocates. We are the “responsible party” for your personal information under the Protection of Personal Information Act, 4 of 2013 (“POPIA”). Our Information Officer can be reached at hello@lexconnect.cc.

• Account information — your name, email address and role (attorney or advocate). Passwords are stored only as cryptographic hashes by our authentication provider; we never see them.
• Professional profile (advocates) — chambers or bar, year of admission, specialisations, location, headline, biography, indicative day rate and availability. You choose what to include.
• Contact details — your email address and, if you add it, a phone number. These are held separately and gated (see section 4).
• Briefs and responses — the content attorneys submit when approaching an advocate (area of law, court, description, urgency, dates) and advocates’ replies.
• Billing records — subscription status, reveal usage and Paystack customer and subscription references. Card details are captured and stored by Paystack, never by us.
• Usage — a count of views on advocate profiles. We do not run advertising or third-party analytics trackers.
• Diagnostic logs — if something in the app breaks, we record technical details of the fault (the error message, the page it occurred on and the browser type) in our hosting provider’s logs so we can fix it. These logs contain no names or contact details and are kept only briefly.

We process personal information to operate the directory, deliver briefs between the parties, reveal contact details when a brief is accepted, bill subscriptions, send transactional email (brief notifications, password resets), and keep the platform secure. We rely on your consent given at signup, the performance of our contract with you, our legitimate interest in running the service, and legal obligations (such as retaining financial records).

• Advocates’ professional profiles are visible to signed-in users once verified by LexConnect.
• Contact details are withheld until a brief between two parties is accepted — only then are they revealed, and only to that counterparty. This gate is enforced in the database itself, not just the interface.
• Brief content is visible only to the attorney who sent it and the advocate it was addressed to.
• We do not sell personal information to anyone.

We use a small number of service providers (“operators” under POPIA) to run LexConnect: Supabase (database and authentication, hosted in the European Union), Vercel (application hosting), Paystack (payment processing) and Resend (transactional email). Where personal information is processed outside South Africa, it is processed in jurisdictions — the EU under the GDPR — that provide an adequate level of protection as contemplated by section 72 of POPIA.

A brief may describe a legal matter and can therefore contain third parties’ personal — even privileged — information. LexConnect deliberately keeps briefs minimal (no document uploads, no in-app messaging) and attorneys must include only what is needed for an advocate to assess the approach. Both parties remain bound by their professional duties of confidentiality in respect of brief content.

You can exercise your POPIA data-subject rights directly in the app from Account & privacy: export a copy of your data, correct your profile, or delete your account (which permanently removes your profile, contact details, briefs and responses). You may also object to processing or complain to us at hello@lexconnect.cc, or lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator (South Africa): JD House, 27 Stiemens Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg; enquiries@inforegulator.org.za.

We keep your information while your account is active. When you delete your account, your profile, contact details, briefs, responses and billing balances are permanently deleted. Transaction and payment records are retained after deletion only to the extent required by South African tax and financial legislation (generally five years), after which they are destroyed.

Access to personal information is restricted row-by-row in the database itself, so even our own application code cannot read contact details that have not been revealed to the requesting user. Traffic is encrypted in transit, secrets are held server-side only, and payment card data never touches our systems.

We use only strictly necessary cookies: the session cookies that keep you signed in. There are no advertising, profiling or third-party analytics cookies.

If we change this policy we will update this page and the date above, and notify you by email of material changes before they take effect. LexConnect is intended for practising legal professionals and is not directed at persons under 18.