Privacy Statement

The website www.clausebase.com is operated by ClauseBase BV, with registered office at Alfons Stesselstraat 9, 3012 Wilsele, Belgium and registered with the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises under company number 0723.768.270 (hereafter: “ClauseBase” or “we”).

This Privacy Statement explains how ClauseBase, as the data controller, uses any personal information about you when we do, or are preparing to do, business with each other.

Personal data handling at clausebase.com

We go to great lengths to avoid the use of cookies on this website (www.clausebase.com). While we do collect some anonymous statistics through Plausible, a separate service, we do not actively track users through cookies (as so many other websites do).

For our product videos, we also make use of the special YouTube subdomain youtube-nocookie.com, to avoid that YouTube would offer cookies to your browser when you merely visit our website. However, please note that when you actually click on a video, some information ("Local Storage") may get stored in your browser.

Obviously, when you get in contact with us (e.g., by booking a demo), or when you subscribe to our newsletter, we will get access to your contact details (name and email). Such processing is, however, separate from the website. Beloiw explains how we do business with you.

All in all, we therefore do not actively collect or analyse any personal data about you when you browse this website. In other words, when you visit this website, but do not actively contact us, we at ClauseBase have no possibility to know who you are, or be aware when you re-visit this website in the future.

Personal data handling through ClauseBuddy

We also process personal data when you use the ClauseBuddy add-in, installed in MS Word or MS Outlook (or alternatively used in a plain web browser).

Behind the scenes,  ClauseBuddy uses exactly the same account as the account you can use to use the "full document automation" web app made available on various subdomains of clausebase.com (e.g.: https://app.clausebase.com, https://fr.clausebase.com, https://nl.clausebase.com). From a user perspective, ClauseBuddy is just another view on the same underlying database, with just a few differences — e.g., you access it through Microsoft Word / Outlook as an add-in (instead of using a regular browser), it is focused on individual clauses (instead of entire documents) and its functionality is deliberately much more limited.

For the most part (access rights, other legal rights, contact information, etc.), we can therefore refer to the web app's privacy statement. Below, we merely describe the few data protection differences between the web app and the add-in.

1. Which categories of personal data do we collect?

In ClauseBuddy, we additionally collect the following usage-related data:

• Type of search you perform (keyword-based, folder-based, similarity). We do not collect the actual content of your search.
• Types of clause customisations you perform (e.g., changing legal terms or changing datafields). Once again, we do not collect the contents of the actual customisations — we only collect the type of customisation you perform.
• Additional clause information that you happen to consult (e.g., inspected legal doctrine).
• Preferences activated or deactivated.
• Internal number of the clause you insert in MS Word.
• Clause databases and search folders used.
• If you make use of the AI Bot, then your prompt (description of a clause, or the text to summarize) may be stored for some time by the third party we involve (currently OpenAI.com). We explicitly warn for this behaviour within the software.
• If you make use of clause lockers in the Clause Hunt functionality, we also store the Word/PDF files that you upload, so as to facilitate your searches through these documents. Note that if you make use of a private servers for this functionality, no data will ever be accessible to ClauseBase.

2. Why do we process ClauseBuddy-specific data?

Similar to the web app, the personal data we collect for ClauseBuddy is collected to help us understand how our users make use of ClauseBuddy. The underlying reasoning is that, given this type of software is quite new for most legal professionals, we try to understand how our user bases makes use of our product — which features are heavily used, which are ignored, which may perhaps be confusing, and so on. In all these cases, the legal basis for our processing activities is our legitimate interest to provide the best possible service to you and the organisation of which you are a part.

We also use a subset of labelled clauses to enhance our artificial intelligence (AI) engine, so that it can, for example, learn through hundreds of examples what a typical confidentiality clause looks like in a certain jurisdiction, in a certain language. In this process, your clause is chopped into unrecognisable ingredients that are then analysed by the AI-engine. Even in the unlikely scenario where your clauses contain personal data, any recognisability will be gone — similar to how you no longer recognise the ingredients that were mixed and mashed into fertilizer.  In any case, the output produced by the AI engine will never contain personal data, as it will (at best) be the label of a certain clause category. 

3. How long do we store ClauseBuddy-specific data?

We store the aforementioned ClauseBuddy-related user metrics during 12 months. 

The "AI-ingredients" mentioned above are used for as long as your clauses remain stored on our systems.