DRAFT — ATTORNEY REVIEW REQUIRED BEFORE PUBLISHING
This page is the site's unauthorized-practice-of-law posture and the source of the footer disclaimer that appears on every page of this site. Do not publish any page of this site until counsel has signed this one.
We are not a law firm. Here is what that changes for you.
Every takedown service in this category says a version of this sentence, usually once, in 10pt grey at the bottom of a page. This is the full version. It is here so you can read it before you give us anything, not after.
§1 — No attorney-client relationship
Using this site creates no attorney-client relationship. Paying us creates none either. Signing our service agreement or the Letter of Authorization creates none.
Nobody at Leak Cleaner is acting as your attorney at any point, in any matter, at any price. There is no tier that changes this. There is no upgrade that changes this.
If you need somebody who owes you the duties an attorney owes a client, you need to hire an attorney. That is a different relationship with a different set of protections, and we cannot supply it.
§2 — Nothing you tell us is privileged
Attorney-client privilege protects certain communications between a client and a lawyer from being demanded in a proceeding. It does not protect communications with us.
What you send us is business correspondence held by a vendor. If a court orders us to produce it, we would have to produce it. We would tell you first, unless a court order forbids us from telling you.
This is the single most misunderstood thing about services like ours. Read it twice before you decide what to write in a support ticket.
What you do send us is encrypted, and we never ask for your content in the first place, so there is no library of it here to demand. What we hold, and for how long, is published per category. Those are technical and published protections. They are real, and they are not privilege.
What we hold, and for how long →
See what we store and for how long →
§3 — We give you information. We do not apply it to you.
There is a line we hold on every page, in every email, in every chat message, at every hour.
On our side of the line: how a statute works in general, what a host usually does after a notice, what a form field means, what a deadline in a published procedure is, what we did and when we did it, and what we found.
On the other side of the line: what any of that means for your situation. Whether you would win. Whether a document binds you. Whether to sign something. Whether to file something. Which of two routes is better for you specifically.
The test we hold ourselves to on every message is one sentence. Are we telling this person what the law means for them, or are we giving them information and carrying out something they authorized?
If you ask us a question on the wrong side of that line, you will get a straight refusal and a suggestion that you ask an attorney. That is not us being unhelpful. It is the only answer we are permitted to give, and a service that answers it anyway is telling you something about how it operates.
§4 — What we actually do, and the authority for each
These are ministerial acts you authorize us to carry out. None of them require a licence.
| What we do | Why it does not require a lawyer |
|---|---|
| Send notices under the US copyright takedown law (17 U.S.C. § 512(c)) as your authorized agent | § 512(c)(3)(A)(vi) requires the signature of the owner or a person authorized to act on their behalf. It does not say attorney. |
| Send removal requests under the TAKE IT DOWN Act as your authorized person | The statute expressly contemplates a request from an authorized person acting on behalf of the depicted individual. |
| File search-engine delisting requests | A private request to a private company under its own published policy. |
| File platform trust-and-safety, impersonation, and delisting reports | Contract remedies under a platform's own terms, not proceedings. |
| Assemble factual evidence files for an attorney you hire yourself | Investigative work. We gather facts. Your attorney draws the conclusions. |
| Publish general education about how these statutes work | General information, not applied to any one person's facts. |
Every one of those is a thing you could do yourself. We do it under our name instead of yours, and we keep doing it on day 3, day 7 and day 14, including the weeks you cannot face it. That is the entire value. It is not a substitute for counsel.
§5 — Templates and downloads
Where we sell or give away a document, that document is a general-purpose product. It was drafted once, for nobody in particular.
It may not fit your facts. It may not fit your state or your country. We do not review your situation before you download it, we do not choose which document you need, and we do not advise you on how to fill it in.
We do not warrant that any template is enforceable where you live, or that a court would read it the way you read it.
Every downloadable file carries this same posture in its header and its footer, so it stays attached to the document after it leaves this site.
§6 — We make no promise about any outcome
We do not promise removal. We do not promise a timeline on a third party's servers. We do not promise that a host, a registrar, a search engine, a platform, or a site operator will do anything at all.
Where we do make a bounded commitment, it is written into the terms with its denominator, its definition, its exclusions and its claim window. If a commitment is not written there, we did not make it.
What the guarantee covers, in full →
§7 — If you have a deadline, talk to a lawyer now
Some clocks in this area are short and some are hard.
If you have received a counter-notification against a notice we filed, if you have been served with anything, if a court date exists, or if someone has given you a date by which you must respond, stop reading this site and get an attorney today.
We will not advise you on any of those. We will hand you your file, in full, in a format your attorney can use, on request, at no charge.
§8 — Outside the United States
Most of the statutes described on this site are US law. We describe them because most of the largest hosts and search engines respond to them.
If you live outside the US, your own country's rules apply to you and they may differ in ways that matter. The EU's notice-and-action rule and the UK Online Safety Act are separate routes with separate procedures, and we use them where they fit.
We are not qualified to tell you what applies to you where you live.
§9 — The rule we answer under, published so you can hold us to it
Every message here is answered by a person, under a written rule. Everyone who answers — staff, contractor, anyone — works under that rule before they send a first message. Where unauthorized practice actually happens is not on a website. It happens in a direct message at 1am, when somebody is trying to be kind.
Every message we send carries this line:
Leak Cleaner is not a law firm and nothing here is legal advice.
If we cross that line with you, we want to know, and we will correct it in writing. That is not a customer-service gesture. Us crossing that line is a licensing exposure for this company, so our interest and yours point the same direction.
§10 — Where to find an attorney
We do not choose one for you and we do not rank, score, match, or filter attorneys by your problem or your state.
The state bar association where you live runs a lawyer referral service. That is the route. Ask for a practice area, not a person, and ask what an initial consultation costs before you book it.
§11 — The four disclaimers, and where each one goes
Footer, every page on the site, minimum 13px:
Leak Cleaner is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. Communications with Leak Cleaner are not protected by attorney-client privilege. Nothing on this site is legal advice about your specific situation.
Rendered on every route including /emergency, where it is the only footer content, and including /report/[token]. Link the phrase "not a law firm" to this page.
Above the fold, first element on the page, above the H1:
Leak Cleaner is not a law firm. We do not give legal advice, we do not tell you what your contract means, and we do not choose an attorney for you.
Required on /defend, /protect/leak-removal, /protect/ncii-deepfakes, /protect/privacy-first, /for/agencies, /for/agencies/onboarding, the model-facing authorization screen, the three interim stubs, and every page in this /legal/ set.
Persistent band, pinned to the top of the page, above the first word of the answer, visible on scroll. Same string as above. Required on every /guides/* page and every /leak-sites/* page, index and template. One string, two placements. There is no third wording.
Every message, every channel:
Leak Cleaner is not a law firm and nothing here is legal advice.
Required on the scan confirmation email, the single follow-up email, the report delivery email, the agency one-pager email, the model authorization email, the model authorization SMS, the agency roster status email, the authorization confirmation screen, the authorization decline screen, payment receipts, the weekly and monthly client report emails, every support signature on every channel, and every in-product screen when the portal ships. It is the last sentence of body copy in every one of them, delivered by CANON-EMAIL-FOOTER on anything sent by email.
One surface on that list does not exist and is deliberately named as not existing: the annual pre-renewal reminder required 15 to 45 days before each annual renewal. It is only required if annual prepay ships at launch. Nothing may link to it or describe it as existing until it is written.
Last updated LAST_UPDATED. Previous versions are archived and available on request.