Privacy Policy

Legal Buddy is a service operated by Oduduwa Muziq (Pty) Ltd, a private company incorporated in the Republic of South Africa under registration number 2023/250283/07, with its registered office at 41 Aston Road, Lonehill, Sandton, Gauteng, 2062, South Africa.

In this Privacy Policy, “Legal Buddy”, “we”, “us”, and “our” refer to Oduduwa Muziq (Pty) Ltd trading as Legal Buddy. We are the responsible party (data controller) for the personal information processed through legal-buddy.co.za and our WhatsApp and voice channels. We connect individuals and small businesses with vetted, independently licensed lawyers, using AI to conduct intake conversations, provide general legal information, and match users with appropriate lawyers.

For privacy enquiries, contact us at hello@legal-buddy.co.za.

We collect information in three ways:

• Information you provide directly — when you sign up via our forms (your name, email address, phone number, country, and a description of your legal need), or when you message our AI via web chat or WhatsApp (the content of your messages and any documents you share).
• Information collected automatically — basic technical information such as your IP address, browser type, and the pages you visit. We use a single anonymous identifier stored in your browser to help our AI remember your conversation across visits. This identifier is not linked to your real-world identity unless you provide identifying details.
• Information from lawyers — if you are a lawyer applying to join our network, we collect your professional credentials, areas of practice, location, and contact details.

We do not knowingly collect special categories of personal data (such as health data or religious beliefs) unless you choose to share them as part of describing your legal matter.

We use your information to:

• Provide the Legal Buddy service — answer your questions, draft documents on your behalf, match you with lawyers in your jurisdiction, and follow up.
• Operate, maintain, and improve our AI assistant and the platform generally.
• Communicate with you about your enquiry, including by email and WhatsApp where you have engaged us through those channels.
• Comply with legal obligations and protect against fraud and abuse.

Conversation content and document drafts are stored so we can respond to follow-up questions and provide context to a matched lawyer with your consent. We do not sell your personal information. We do not use the content of your conversations to train AI models.

We rely on the following processors to operate Legal Buddy. Each processes your information only on our instructions and under appropriate contractual safeguards.

• Anthropic — provides the Claude AI model that powers our intake assistant. Conversation content is sent to Anthropic for processing. See Anthropic's privacy policy.
• ElevenLabs — generates spoken voice replies in our voice modes. The text of AI replies is sent to ElevenLabs for speech synthesis.
• Resend — sends transactional email (signup confirmations, replies from our team).
• Twilio— handles WhatsApp messaging. Inbound messages and our AI's replies pass through Twilio's infrastructure.
• Vercel — provides our website hosting, serverless compute, and content delivery.
• Neon — hosts the database where signups, chat sessions, and document drafts are stored.

We may share information with the lawyer we match you with, only after you confirm you want to be matched.

Some of our processors are located outside your country (for example, Anthropic and Vercel are based in the United States; Neon stores data in regions you may not reside in). When we transfer personal data outside its country of origin, we rely on standard contractual clauses or equivalent legal mechanisms.

We keep signup details and conversation history for as long as you remain a user, plus a reasonable retention period afterwards (typically up to 24 months) for service continuity, legal compliance, and dispute resolution. You may request earlier deletion (see Section 8).

We use industry-standard safeguards including TLS encryption in transit, encrypted storage, access controls, and regular reviews of our processors. No service is perfectly secure; if you ever encounter a security concern, please tell us at hello@legal-buddy.co.za.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access the personal information we hold about you, to correct it, to have it deleted, to restrict or object to certain uses, and to receive a portable copy. Where the legal basis for processing is consent, you may withdraw consent at any time. To exercise any of these rights, email hello@legal-buddy.co.za and we will respond within the timeframe required by your local law.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority.

Legal Buddy is not directed at children under 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided us with information, please contact us so we can delete it.

When you message Legal Buddy via WhatsApp, your messages and the AI replies are processed via Twilio and Meta's WhatsApp Business Platform. Meta's own privacy policies also apply to your use of WhatsApp. You can stop the conversation at any time by sending STOPor by simply not replying — we won't initiate contact with you outside the 24-hour customer-service window unless you have consented to ongoing communication.

We use a single anonymous identifier in your browser's localStorage so the AI can remember your conversation across visits. We do not use third-party advertising cookies. Our hosting provider may set strictly necessary technical cookies to deliver the site.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Material changes will be communicated by updating the effective date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, by emailing registered users. Continued use of the service after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Questions, requests, or complaints about this Privacy Policy can be sent to hello@legal-buddy.co.za.