Terms of Service
Effective date: June 14, 2026
SmallClaims is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. We provide self-help document preparation and court-preparation tools. You are responsible for reviewing your documents, filing them with the court, paying court fees, and attending your hearing.
1. The Service
SmallClaims is a private document preparation, mailing, and filing assistance service for self-represented users. The service may help generate and mail certified demand letters, prepare small claims filing documents and instructions, and organize uploaded evidence into packets based on the information you provide.
2. No Legal Advice, No Guarantee
SmallClaims is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice, legal opinions, legal representation, or legal strategy. No attorney-client relationship is created. Packets are generated from user-provided facts and materials and may contain mistakes, omissions, outdated rule references, or formatting that a court may not accept. You are responsible for reviewing all packet contents, checking facts, verifying amounts and dates, and confirming current court rules before using any document.
3. Document Preparation and Mailing
Document preparation means preparing materials, instructions, and administrative organization based on the information you provide. You remain responsible for reviewing, signing, filing documents, service of process, deadlines, fees, exhibits, court appearances, settlement decisions, and compliance with state and local rules. Certified demand letters are sent from you, not from a lawyer or law firm.
4. Payments and Refunds
Purchases are one-time payments processed by Stripe. There is no subscription. Card information is entered through Stripe Elements, and SmallClaims does not store your full card number. If a paid packet cannot be generated or downloaded after reasonable retry and support steps, we will either correct the problem or refund the affected purchase. Refund decisions for completed and downloadable packets are handled case by case, considering whether the issue is a service failure, duplicate purchase, or customer support matter.
5. Human Review
The Human Review add-on is a review for clarity, formatting, completeness, organization, missing fields, and obvious administrative issues. It is not legal advice, legal strategy, representation, or a review of the legal merits of your claim. Agents may access the case materials needed to perform the review.
6. Your Content
You retain ownership of the story text and files you upload. You grant us a limited license to store and process them solely to provide, secure, support, and improve the reliability of the service, including text extraction, AI-assisted generation, PDF rendering, private storage, customer support, and Human Review if purchased. You represent that you have the right to upload the materials you provide and that your statements are accurate to the best of your knowledge.
7. Acceptable Use
You may not use the service to harass, defraud, or harm others, to submit false information to a court, or to upload unlawful content, malware, abusive materials, payment fraud, or content you have no right to share. We may suspend access, reject uploads, remove files, deny support requests, or refuse future service when we believe the service is being misused.
8. Access Links and Accounts
Case access links are private bearer links: anyone with a valid link can view that case page. Keep links private and rotate access from the portal if a link was forwarded or exposed. Magic-link login lets you access cases tied to your email address, but you remain responsible for keeping your email account secure.
9. Privacy and Data Requests
Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect, how evidence is handled, which service providers process data, retention practices, and how to request export, deletion, support, or access-link rotation. Some limited records may be retained for payment, accounting, security, fraud prevention, support history, and audit purposes.
10. Availability and Generated Output
We design the service to generate packets quickly, but generation depends on uploaded file quality, third-party services, network availability, and model behavior. Generated output is a draft preparation packet that requires your review. If a route, provider, file parser, payment confirmation, or PDF generation step fails, we may retry, regenerate, provide support, or issue a refund where appropriate.
11. Limitation of Liability
To the maximum extent permitted by law, SmallClaims and its operators are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages, loss of claim value, missed deadlines, court rejection, filing errors, or any loss arising from reliance on generated documents. Our total liability for any claim related to the service is limited to the amount you paid for the affected purchase.
12. Changes
We may update these terms from time to time. Material changes will be posted on this page with an updated effective date. Continued use of the service after changes constitutes acceptance.