Privacy Policy

Proper Counsel PLLC ("Proper Counsel," "we," "us," or "our") is a New York professional limited liability company and law firm. We operate this website and the following related sites and brands:

• propercounsel.co, Proper Counsel, the firm's principal site
• properip.co, Proper IP, a brand of Proper Counsel PLLC
• getproperip.com, proper-ip.com, properipcounsel.com, and properlegal.co, additional sites operated under the Proper IP brand
• counseldesk.ai and aicounseldesk.com, which redirect to propercounsel.co

Proper IP is a trade name of Proper Counsel PLLC. It is not a separate company, and it is not a non-lawyer service. When you engage Proper IP, you are engaging a law firm.

This Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal information collected through these sites (together, the "Sites"). It is the single policy for all of them. Where a provision applies to only some of the Sites, we say so.

This Privacy Policy governs personal information we collect through the Sites.

Separately, and more protectively, information you give us in the course of seeking or receiving legal services is governed by our professional duty of confidentiality under Rule 1.6 of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct, and may be protected by the attorney-client privilege and the work-product doctrine. Those obligations are broader and stricter than any privacy policy, and nothing in this policy limits them.

Where this policy and our professional obligations conflict, our professional obligations control.

Information you give us directly.

Contact and inquiry information, name, email address, phone number, company, role, and anything you choose to tell us when you contact us, book a call, or subscribe. Where you book a call through our scheduling page, that includes the time you selected and anything you enter in the notes field.

Trademark intake information, the mark you want to protect, your description of your goods or services, logo files, website, use status and dates of first use, the legal name and entity type of the mark owner, state of formation, domicile and billing address, related entities, key individuals, any third parties you identify as using or disputing a similar mark, and the name and title of your authorized signer.

Billing information, name on card, billing email, and billing address. Card details are collected and processed directly by our payment processor; we do not receive or store full payment card numbers.

Engagement and matter information, anything you provide once we represent you. For general counsel and transactional engagements this can include contracts, corporate records, cap table and financing documents, product and technical documentation, vendor agreements, and communications with counterparties.

Information collected automatically. IP address, browser and device type, pages viewed, referring URL, and approximate location, primarily via server logs. Our website analytics is aggregate, cookieless, and does not identify you. See Section 9.

Information from third parties and public records. In the course of clearance and filing work we obtain information from public sources, including the USPTO's trademark databases, state corporate registries, domain registries, and general web sources.

Separately, and described in full in Section 4, we obtain business contact information about people who have not contacted us, from public funding announcements, press coverage, company websites, public business registries, and commercial business-contact databases.

Some people reading this did not come looking for us. We wrote to them. This section explains that, because you are entitled to know how we got your name.

How we identify companies. We monitor publicly announced startup funding rounds. Our sources are public: funding announcements, press coverage, company websites, public business registries, and commercial business-contact databases that compile the same. We do not buy consumer data, we do not scrape private systems, and we do not obtain anything from behind a login.

What we hold about you. Your name, your job title, your work email address, your company's name and website, and publicly reported information about your company's funding. That is all, and it is business-contact information rather than personal-life information.

What we do with it. We generate a preliminary trademark clearance report for your company's brand name, using public United States Patent and Trademark Office records and your company's public website. We then send you one email offering legal services and linking to that report, and at most two follow-up messages. We stop on any reply, on any request to stop, and after those follow-ups regardless.

What this is. A solicitation for legal services, and attorney advertising, governed by Rules 7.1 and 7.3 of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct. We say so in the message.

We do not sell it, and we do not share it. Not to anyone, for any purpose, ever. It is used to contact you about legal services and for nothing else.

Lawful basis, for readers in the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland. We rely on legitimate interests under Article 6(1)(f) of the GDPR: our interest in offering professional services to businesses that plausibly need them, weighed against your interests. We consider the balance appropriate because the data is limited, is business rather than private in nature, is obtained from public sources, is not combined with anything else, and is used for a small number of messages that are easy to stop. If you disagree, you can object, and your objection to direct marketing is absolute. See Section 15.

How to be removed, and what removal actually does. Reply to any message and say so, or email martin@propercounsel.co. We will add you to a suppression list and you will not hear from us again.

Being honest about the limit of that: Rule 7.3(c)(3) of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct requires us to retain a list of the recipients of any solicitation for three years after it was last sent. So a removal request stops all future contact and removes you from active use, but it does not erase the record that we wrote to you. That record is kept because a professional rule requires it, is not used for anything else, and is not shared. We would rather tell you that than promise a deletion we are not permitted to perform.

Submitting an intake form, booking a call, emailing us, or paying a fee does not create an attorney-client relationship. That relationship requires agreement on both sides, and our practice is to record it in a written engagement letter signed by both of us. Section 2 of our Terms of Use explains how the relationship is formed, and how it is not.

Before an engagement letter is signed, you are a prospective client. Under Rule 1.18 of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct, we owe prospective clients a duty of confidentiality with respect to information learned in the consultation, but that duty is narrower than the one we owe clients, and we may already represent, or later represent, someone with interests adverse to yours.

Practical guidance: send us only what the intake form asks for, or what we ask for in an introductory call. Do not send us confidential business information, trade secrets, draft agreements, or details of a dispute until we have confirmed we can represent you and an engagement letter is in place. Information you volunteer before then may not be protected, and in some circumstances may prevent us from representing you at all.

• To evaluate a request for services, including running a conflicts check before we accept a matter.
• To prepare and deliver legal services, including clearance searches, opinions, USPTO applications, office-action responses, commercial contracts, corporate and governance work, financing and transactional support, and fractional general counsel services.
• To prepare engagement letters and open matters.
• To process payments and manage billing.
• To communicate with you about your matter, your inquiry, or your filing.
• To contact you about legal services where we identified you from public sources, as described in Section 4.
• To operate, secure, and improve the Sites.
• To comply with legal, regulatory, and professional obligations, including recordkeeping requirements applicable to New York lawyers.

We do not use your information for targeted advertising, and we do not train third-party AI models on your confidential information.

This section applies to trademark applications we file for you. It deserves its own section, because it surprises people.

A U.S. trademark application is a public record. When we file on your behalf, the USPTO publishes the application and its contents in publicly searchable databases. The owner's name, the owner's domicile and mailing address, the mark, the goods and services, dates of first use, specimens, and the signature block are all publicly visible and are indexed by search engines and by commercial data brokers who scrape USPTO records.

The USPTO currently masks the owner's email address from public display, but the mailing and domicile address and the other details above remain public.

You should expect solicitation mail and email, some of it deceptive, after filing. Certain address information can in limited circumstances be shielded from public view under USPTO rules. If this matters to you, raise it with us before we file, and we will discuss the options and their limits.

We cannot retract information once it has been filed with the USPTO.

Filings we make in other contexts, including certificates of formation and securities filings made on your behalf, are also public records. We will tell you what becomes public before we file.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

We disclose information only as follows:

Service providers. Vendors who process information on our behalf under contract and only on our instructions, including payment processing (Stripe), email and productivity (Google Workspace), document storage (Dropbox), website hosting (Lovable and Cloudflare), call scheduling (Cal.com), privacy-friendly cookieless analytics (Plausible Analytics), e-signature (BoldSign), and AI-assisted tooling (Anthropic for internal drafting and research; and, for our free report and website-description features, third-party models accessed through OpenRouter, which process only the public website information you provide). We also use automated web-research tooling that reads public company websites in order to prepare the reports described in Section 4. See Section 10 regarding AI tooling.

The USPTO and other government authorities, as necessary to prosecute your matter. See Section 7.

Co-counsel, local counsel, or foreign associates, where your matter requires it and you have authorized it.

Where required by law, including in response to a subpoena, court order, or lawful demand, subject to our obligation to assert the attorney-client privilege and any other applicable protection on your behalf where grounds exist to do so.

In connection with a sale or reorganization of the practice, subject to the professional rules governing client files and client consent.

Some of the Sites use a small number of strictly necessary cookies to operate core features such as secure checkout and sign-in. The sites at getproperip.com, proper-ip.com, properipcounsel.com, and properlegal.co use no cookies at all.

For analytics, we use Plausible Analytics, a privacy-friendly, cookieless service that measures aggregate usage, such as page views and button clicks, without cookies, without cross-site tracking, and without collecting personal information. We record only aggregate events (for example, that a checkout page was viewed), never your name, email, or anything you enter into a form. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. Because our analytics uses no cookies and collects no personal data, no cookie-consent banner is required. You can control cookies through your browser, though blocking strictly necessary cookies may prevent parts of the Sites from working.

We use software, including AI-assisted tooling, to support research, drafting, search, and triage. Three commitments govern that use:

• A licensed attorney reviews all substantive work product. No filing, opinion, or advice is delivered to you on the strength of an automated output alone.
• We do not permit third-party providers to use your confidential information to train their models.
• Our professional obligations of confidentiality and competence apply to our use of these tools exactly as they apply to everything else we do.

Our free clearance report and website-description features analyze only public information, such as your public website; we do not send confidential client information to these third-party models.

We retain personal information for as long as needed for the purposes described above and to meet our legal and professional obligations. Client files and related records are retained in accordance with our file-retention practices and applicable New York requirements, which in certain cases require retention for at least seven years. Inquiry and prospective-client information that does not become a matter is retained only as long as necessary to run conflicts checks and meet our recordkeeping obligations.

Solicitation records. Where we have sent you an unsolicited communication offering legal services, we retain a record of the communication and of the recipient list for three years from the date it was last sent, as required by Rule 7.3(c)(3) of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct, and we retain a copy of the communication itself for the period required by Rule 7.1(k). These records are kept solely to meet those obligations. They are not used for anything else and are not shared.

We maintain administrative, technical, and physical safeguards appropriate to the sensitivity of the information we hold, including access controls, encryption in transit, and vendor diligence. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. Email is not a secure channel; tell us if you need a more secure method and we will arrange one.

You may ask us to correct information we hold about you, unsubscribe from marketing email at any time using the link in the message, ask to be added to our suppression list so that we do not contact you again, or ask us to delete inquiry information that has not become a matter. Requests to delete information contained in a client file, or in records we are required to keep, may be limited by our professional and legal obligations, including the solicitation record described in Section 11.

To make a request: martin@propercounsel.co.

This section applies to California residents and is provided under the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the CPRA.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We have not done so in the preceding twelve months.

Categories of personal information we have collected in the preceding twelve months: identifiers (name, email, postal address, IP address); customer records (billing information, signer name and title); commercial information (services purchased); internet activity (site usage); geolocation (approximate, from IP); professional or employment information (title, role, company); and inferences drawn from the foregoing, if any. We collect these from you directly, from your device, and from public records. Where we contacted you without a prior request from you, the identifiers and professional information described in Section 4 were collected from public sources and from commercial business-contact databases rather than from you.

Purposes: as described in Section 6.

Categories disclosed for a business purpose in the preceding twelve months: identifiers, customer records, and commercial information, to the categories of service providers described in Section 8.

Sensitive personal information: we do not collect sensitive personal information for the purpose of inferring characteristics, and we use any such information only as permitted without an obligation to offer a right to limit.

Your rights. Subject to verification and to the exceptions below, California residents may request to know the categories and specific pieces of personal information we have collected, request correction of inaccurate information, request deletion, and opt out of sale or sharing (not applicable, we do neither). We will not discriminate against you for exercising these rights.

How to exercise. Email martin@propercounsel.co with the subject line "California Privacy Request." We will verify your identity by matching the information in your request against information we already hold. You may use an authorized agent with written authorization.

Important exceptions. Information subject to the attorney-client privilege or the work-product doctrine, and information we are required to retain under professional or legal obligations, is exempt from deletion and access requests. Where an exception applies, we will tell you which one.

This section applies if you are located in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland. Where it conflicts with another section, this one controls for those readers.

Controller. Proper Counsel PLLC, 401 New Karner Road, Suite 301, Albany, NY 12205, United States. Contact: martin@propercounsel.co. We have not appointed an Article 27 representative, on the basis that our processing of EEA and UK data is occasional, is limited to business-contact information, and does not involve special categories of data or large-scale monitoring. If that assessment changes, we will appoint one and update this section.

Where we got your data, if you did not give it to us. This is the disclosure required by Article 14. If we contacted you without you having contacted us first, we obtained your name, title, work email, and company information from public sources: funding announcements, press coverage, company websites, public business registries, and commercial business-contact databases compiling the same. Section 4 describes this in full.

Purposes and lawful bases.

• Contact you to offer legal services: legitimate interests, Article 6(1)(f).
• Evaluate a request for services, run conflicts: legitimate interests, and steps prior to entering a contract, Article 6(1)(b).
• Provide legal services under an engagement: performance of a contract, Article 6(1)(b).
• Retain records required by professional rules: legal obligation, Article 6(1)(c), and legitimate interests.
• Operate and secure the Sites: legitimate interests.

Your rights. Subject to verification, you may request access to the personal data we hold about you, correction of inaccurate data, erasure, restriction of processing, and portability, and you may object to processing based on legitimate interests.

Your right to object to direct marketing is absolute. If you tell us to stop contacting you for that purpose, we stop. No balancing test applies and we will not ask you to justify it.

Limits on erasure. Two limits, both mandatory rather than chosen. Information subject to the attorney-client privilege, the work-product doctrine, or our duty of confidentiality under Rule 1.6 of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct is exempt. And the three-year solicitation record described in Section 4 is retained because a professional rule requires it. Where a limit applies, we will tell you which one.

Automated decision-making. We do not make decisions producing legal or similarly significant effects about you by automated means alone. Our clearance reports are generated automatically, and they are preliminary information rather than a decision about you. A licensed attorney reviews all substantive work product.

International transfer. We are based in the United States and our service providers are largely United States based. Where we transfer personal data out of the EEA or the UK, we rely on the standard contractual clauses or another approved transfer mechanism in our agreements with those providers.

Retention. As described in Section 11.

Complaints. You may complain to your local supervisory authority. In the United Kingdom that is the Information Commissioner's Office. We would prefer you raise it with us first, at martin@propercounsel.co, and we will respond within one month.

The Sites are directed to businesses and professionals and are not intended for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect information from children.

We may update this policy. We will post the revised version here and update the "Last updated" date. Material changes will be flagged conspicuously.

martin@propercounsel.co

martin@properip.co

Proper Counsel PLLC, 401 New Karner Road, Suite 301, Albany, NY 12205