Privacy Policy

Honest Elf is an Electronic Filing Service Provider (EFSP) operated by Zhakhan LLC, doing business as Honest Elf. We transmit court filings to Texas courts through the Tyler Technologies Odyssey File & Serve Electronic Filing Manager (EFM). In this policy, "Honest Elf," "we," and "us" mean Zhakhan LLC, which is the entity responsible for the personal information described here.

This policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, who we share it with, and how long we keep it. It covers our website, our web application, our API, and our Model Context Protocol (MCP) server used by AI assistants.

It does not cover how courts, the Tyler EFM, or payment processors handle information after we transmit it to them. Those systems have their own policies and their own retention rules.

Account and firm information. Your name, email address, phone number, firm name and address, attorney bar numbers, and your role within the firm. Your e-filing credentials for the Tyler EFM are stored encrypted and are used only to authenticate you against the EFM.

Filing and case information. Case numbers, court locations, case types, filing codes, and the parties on a case — including party names, email addresses, phone numbers, and mailing addresses. We also store service contacts you select for electronic service.

Documents. The PDFs and other documents you upload for filing, along with their metadata (title, security level, page count). Documents are stored in encrypted cloud object storage. Whatever you put in a document — including any personal information about you or third parties — is collected as part of that document.

Payment information. We do not collect or store full card numbers or bank account numbers. Payment details are entered directly into the court system's payment processor (TOGA). We store the resulting payment account reference, a masked descriptor (such as card type and last four digits), the account nickname, and the fee amounts associated with your filings.

Technical and usage information. IP address, browser and device information, pages viewed, actions taken in the application, and error diagnostics. We record API and MCP tool calls for security, billing, and troubleshooting.

Support communications. If you contact us through the support form or by email, we receive your name, email address, and whatever you write to us.

We use the information described above to:

• Assemble, validate, and transmit your filings to courts
• Authenticate you and keep your account secure
• Calculate, quote, and process filing and service fees
• Show you filing status, clerk review outcomes, and service notifications
• Provide support and respond to your requests
• Detect, investigate, and prevent fraud and abuse
• Operate, debug, and improve the platform
• Comply with legal obligations and court rules

We do not sell your personal information. We do not share it with advertisers, and we do not use your filings or documents to train machine learning models.

This is the most important thing to understand about filing electronically.

When you submit a filing, we transmit it to the Tyler EFM, which delivers it to the court's case management system. Once a court accepts a filing, it becomes part of that court's record. Many court records are public.

We cannot retract, redact, seal, or delete anything from a court record. Requests to seal or restrict access must be made to the court under the applicable rules. Deleting your Honest Elf account does not remove anything that has already been filed.

You are responsible for redacting sensitive information — such as Social Security numbers, financial account numbers, and dates of birth — from documents before you upload them, as required by court rules.

Courts and the Tyler EFM. Filing data, party information, and documents are transmitted to Tyler Technologies' Odyssey File & Serve EFM and on to the destination court. This is the core purpose of the service.

Service contacts you designate. If you use electronic service, the documents and service information you select are delivered to the contacts you choose.

Payment processors. Payment details are handled by the court system's payment processor (TOGA) and its downstream processors. We receive only a reference and masked descriptor back.

Service providers we rely on. We use vendors to run the platform, each with access limited to what their function requires:

• Cloud hosting and database providers (United States)
• Amazon Web Services (S3) for document storage
• Resend for transactional and support email
• PostHog for product analytics
• Sentry for error monitoring

Legal and safety. We may disclose information when required by law, subpoena, or court order, or when necessary to protect our rights, our users, or the public.

Business transfers. If Honest Elf is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, information may be transferred as part of that transaction, subject to this policy.

Honest Elf offers a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server so that AI assistants — such as Claude or ChatGPT — can help you prepare and submit filings. Connecting an assistant is entirely optional.

How the connection works:

• You authorize the connection through OAuth. The assistant receives a scoped access token, not your password or your e-filing credentials.
• Once connected, the assistant can act on your behalf within your own firm's data: searching courts and cases, listing codes, reading and editing your drafts, uploading documents, quoting fees, and submitting filings.
• It cannot access other firms' data, and it cannot see your stored payment credentials.
• Submitting a filing requires an explicit confirmation step after the fee total has been quoted.

When you use an AI assistant, the content of your conversation — including case details and document content you paste or that tools return — is processed by that assistant's provider under their privacy policy, not ours. Review your AI provider's policy before sharing sensitive case material.

We log MCP tool calls for security and billing: who called which tool, when, the outcome, and how long it took. We store a one-way digest of the arguments rather than the arguments themselves, so filing payloads are not duplicated into these logs.

You can revoke an assistant's access at any time by disconnecting Honest Elf in that AI client, or by contacting us. Revocation takes effect immediately for new requests.

We use strictly necessary cookies to keep you signed in and to protect against request forgery. These cannot be turned off without breaking the application.

We use PostHog to understand how the product is used — which pages are visited and which flows are completed. We use Sentry to capture errors so we can fix them. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

Your browser's Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal is not currently acted on automatically, because we do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising.

• Account and firm records — kept while your account is active, and afterwards as needed for legal, tax, and audit purposes.
• Filings, envelopes, and documents — retained as part of your filing history so you can demonstrate what was submitted and when. Court-accepted filings are also retained by the court and the EFM independently of us.
• Drafts you never submit — deleted when you delete the draft, along with the documents attached to it.
• Security, audit, and fee-ledger records — retained for a limited period appropriate to fraud prevention, dispute resolution, and accounting.
• Analytics and error data — retained per the provider's default retention window.

We protect information with measures including:

• Encryption in transit (TLS) and at rest
• Encrypted storage of e-filing credentials, isolated from application data
• Certificate-based mutual authentication with the Tyler EFM, using credentials we do not expose to clients
• Access controls scoped to your firm, with scoped tokens for API and MCP access
• Audit logging of privileged and automated actions

No system is perfectly secure. You are responsible for keeping your credentials confidential and for notifying us promptly if you believe your account has been compromised.

You can:

• Access and correct your account, firm, attorney, and service contact information in the application
• Delete unsubmitted drafts and their documents
• Remove payment accounts
• Revoke AI assistant and API access
• Request a copy of the personal information we hold about you
• Request deletion of your account

Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under laws such as the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act or the California Consumer Privacy Act, including the right to appeal a denied request. We do not discriminate against anyone for exercising these rights.

Two limits apply to deletion. First, we cannot delete anything from a court record, as described in section 4. Second, records we are required to keep for legal, accounting, or fraud-prevention reasons are retained for the applicable period. Your Tyler EFM account is separate from your Honest Elf account and is governed by Tyler's own policies.

To make a request, contact us at the address in section 14. We will verify your identity before acting on it.

Honest Elf is intended for adults filing court documents. We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from children under 13. Court filings may of course reference minors; that information is handled as filing content under this policy and under applicable court rules.

Honest Elf operates in the United States, and information is stored and processed there. If you access the service from outside the United States, you understand that your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States.

We may update this policy as the service changes. When we do, we will revise the "last updated" date above. If the change materially affects how we handle your information, we will give notice in the application or by email. Continued use after an update means you accept the revised policy.

Questions about this policy, or requests about your information, can be sent to:

Zhakhan LLC (d/b/a Honest Elf)
privacy@honestelf.com

You can also reach us through the support page.