Terms of Use

NeedleSearch  ·  Version 2.0  ·  Effective 9 August 2026

1. Agreement

These Terms of Use govern your use of needlesearch.ai, chat.needlesearch.ai, and our REST and MCP APIs (together, the "Service"), operated by NeedleSearch from France with servers in Sweden.

By creating an account or using the Service you accept these Terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service.

The Privacy Policy forms part of these Terms. Where you process personal data of third parties through the Service, a separate data processing agreement also applies and takes precedence over these Terms in the event of conflict.

2. What the Service is, and what it is not

NeedleSearch indexes document collections that you provide and answers questions about them, citing the specific page behind each statement.

It is not:

• a database of case law, legislation or any other legal corpus. Demonstration collections distributed through the Marketplace are sample data, not a legal research product;
• a source of legal advice. We are not a law firm and we do not practise law. No lawyer–client relationship arises between you and us;
• a substitute for professional judgement, or for reading the source documents.

3. Artificial intelligence

3.1 You are interacting with an AI system

Answers, summaries, extractions and classifications produced by the Service are generated by artificial intelligence, not by a person.

3.2 The output can be wrong

Large language models produce fluent text that can be factually incorrect. The Service is designed to reduce this — every assertion must be traceable to a retrieved page, and a second model checks the draft against the sources cited — but this reduces the risk rather than eliminating it.

In particular, the Service may:

• fail to find a relevant document or passage that exists in your collection. Recall is not guaranteed, and a negative answer is not proof that something is absent;
• misread text from a poor scan, a handwritten annotation or a low-quality fax;
• attribute a statement to the wrong source, or cite a page that does not support it;
• misinterpret legal meaning, particularly across languages and legal systems;
• omit context that changes the meaning of a passage it has quoted correctly.

3.3 You must verify

Open and read the cited page before relying on any statement the Service produces — in particular before filing anything with a court or tribunal, advising a client, or making a representation to another party. The citation exists so that you can check it. Using the output without checking it is a misuse of the Service.

You remain solely responsible for the professional work in which you use the Service, including your duties of competence, confidentiality, candour toward a tribunal, and supervision.

3.4 Decision-making roles

The Service is a research aid for a qualified professional. It is not designed, tested or certified as a decision-making instrument.

If you intend to use the Service in the exercise of a judicial, arbitral or other adjudicative function — as an arbitrator, tribunal member, tribunal secretary or alternative dispute resolution body — please tell us in writing at legal@needlesearch.ai first, so that we can confirm what is and is not appropriate for that use.

3.5 We do not train on your content

We do not use your documents, queries or the answers generated to train, fine-tune or evaluate any model of our own. Third-party model providers operate under their own terms; the current position, including its limits, is set out in section 4.4 of the Privacy Policy.

4. Accounts

• You must be at least 18 and able to enter into a binding contract.
• The Service is intended for professional use. If you register on behalf of an organisation, you confirm that you are authorised to bind it, and "you" means that organisation.
• Give us accurate registration information and keep it current.
• You are responsible for everything done under your account and for keeping your credentials confidential. Tell us at security@needlesearch.ai immediately if you suspect unauthorised access.
• One account per person. Do not share credentials. Organisation plans include named seats; a seat belongs to one identified individual and may be reassigned but not shared.

5. Your content

5.1 It stays yours

You keep all right, title and interest in the documents you upload and the queries you submit ("Your Content"). We claim no ownership.

5.2 The licence you give us

You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, transmit, convert, extract text from, index, embed and display Your Content only so far as necessary to operate the Service for you and to comply with the law. The licence ends when you delete the content or close your account, subject only to the backup rotation described in the Privacy Policy.

This licence does not allow us to use Your Content for our own product development, for training models, for benchmarking, for marketing, or to show it to any other customer.

5.3 What you confirm

By uploading, you confirm that you have the right to do so and that doing so breaches no confidentiality obligation, protective order, court order, professional privilege, data protection law or third-party right.

Deciding whether a given document may lawfully be uploaded to the hosted Service is your call. Section 4.2 of the Privacy Policy tells you where the text goes; use that to make the decision. If a document may not leave your jurisdiction or your perimeter, use a private-perimeter, on-premises or air-gapped deployment — or do not upload it.

5.4 What you may not upload

Material that is unlawful to possess or transmit, material containing malware, material obtained through unauthorised access, or material you are specifically ordered not to disclose to a third-party processor.

6. Acceptable use

You may not:

• reverse engineer, decompile or otherwise attempt to derive the source code, model weights or prompts of the Service, except so far as that restriction is void under applicable law;
• resell, sublicense or offer the Service to third parties as a service of your own, unless we have agreed in writing;
• extract data by automated means beyond your plan's limits, or circumvent rate limits, quotas or billing;
• probe, scan or test the security of the Service without our prior written consent. We welcome good-faith vulnerability reports at security@needlesearch.ai;
• use the Service to build a competing product or to generate training data for a competing model;
• use the Service in breach of applicable sanctions or export control law;
• interfere with other tenants, attempt to reach another tenant's data, or do anything that degrades the Service for others.

We may suspend an account immediately and without notice where continued use presents a security risk, a legal risk, or a risk to other customers. We will tell you why as soon as we reasonably can.

7. Marketplace

The Service includes a Marketplace through which users publish document collections and other users add them to their own workspace.

• If you publish a collection you confirm that you hold all necessary rights, and that publication breaches no copyright, database right, confidentiality obligation, licence term or data protection law. You will cover any claim against us arising from your publication.
• You grant other users a non-exclusive licence to use a collection you publish within the Service.
• We do not verify published collections. They come from their publisher, not from us, and we make no promise about their accuracy, completeness, legality or fitness for any purpose.
• We may remove any collection at any time without liability, including on notice of infringement or unlawful content.
• Demonstration collections that we publish are sample data for evaluation. They are third-party material used on the terms of their source; we make no representation that they are complete, current or accurate, and they must not be relied on as a legal source.
• Paid collections are not available. No payment obligation arises between users through the Marketplace.

8. Plans, fees and payment

• Current plans and prices are published on our website. Prices exclude VAT and any other applicable tax, which is added at checkout where required.
• Subscriptions renew automatically until cancelled. You can cancel at any time in the billing portal; cancellation takes effect at the end of the paid period.
• Payments are processed by Stripe. We do not receive or store your full card details. Your use of Stripe is also governed by Stripe's own terms.
• Plans carry usage limits — storage, monthly AI budget, seats, API calls. Exceeding a limit may cause requests to be refused until the next period or until you upgrade. Free accounts carry a small monthly AI budget and are intended for evaluation.
• Refunds. We do not refund periods already elapsed. If we terminate without cause we will refund the unused portion. Statutory withdrawal rights are preserved where they apply; note that a professional buying for their practice is generally not a consumer.
• We may change prices on 30 days' notice before your next renewal. If you do not accept the change, cancel before renewal.
• If payment fails we may suspend the account, and after 14 days terminate it and delete the data in accordance with the Privacy Policy.

9. Availability

We aim to keep the Service available, but these Terms contain no commitment to any level of availability. Any service level commitment must be in a signed order form or enterprise agreement; where none exists, the Service is provided on an "as available" basis.

We may carry out maintenance, and will give advance notice of planned maintenance where practicable.

10. Our intellectual property

The Service — software, interface, prompts, model configurations, documentation and the NeedleSearch name and marks — belongs to us or our licensors. These Terms give you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Service during your subscription, and nothing more.

Output. As between you and us, you own the answers generated from Your Content, so far as they are capable of ownership. Note that AI-generated text may not attract copyright in some jurisdictions, and that similar output may be generated for another user from different content.

Feedback. If you send us suggestions we may use them without restriction or payment. Do not send us anything confidential as feedback.

11. Third-party services

The Service depends on third-party providers, listed in section 5 of the Privacy Policy. We are responsible for our providers' performance of the tasks we engage them for, but not for their own products, terms or availability. A failure or change at a provider may interrupt or alter the Service; we will act reasonably to restore it or substitute a provider.

12. Warranties

To the fullest extent permitted by law the Service is provided "as is" and "as available", and we exclude all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty arising from a course of dealing.

We specifically do not warrant that:

• the Service will find every relevant document or passage in your collection;
• output will be accurate, complete, current or free from error;
• output is suitable for filing with or submission to any court, tribunal or authority without verification;
• the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free.

Nothing in these Terms excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded. Consumers keep their statutory rights.

13. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law:

• Neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill, business opportunity or anticipated savings, however arising.
• Each party's total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with these Terms, whether in contract, tort (including negligence) or otherwise, is limited to the greater of the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, and USD 100.
• Nothing here limits your obligation to pay fees due, or either party's liability under section 14.

14. Indemnity

You will defend us and cover any third-party claim arising from Your Content, from your breach of sections 5.3, 5.4, 6 or 7, from your use of output in breach of section 3.3, or from your breach of applicable law.

15. Confidentiality

Each party will keep the other's confidential information confidential, use it only for the purposes of these Terms, and protect it with at least reasonable care. Your Content is your confidential information. These obligations continue for five years after termination, and indefinitely for material subject to legal professional privilege.

16. Term and termination

• These Terms apply while you have an account.
• You may terminate at any time by closing your account.
• We may terminate for material breach not cured within 30 days of notice, or immediately for a breach of section 6 or where the law requires it.
• On termination your access ends and your data is deleted in accordance with the Privacy Policy. Export your data before terminating.
• Sections 5.3, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17 and 18 survive termination.

17. Sanctions and export control

You may not use the Service if you are located in, ordinarily resident in, or acting on behalf of a person in a country or territory subject to comprehensive sanctions, or if you appear on a restricted-party list maintained by the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom or the United Nations. You confirm that you are not such a person and will not make the Service available to one.

18. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by French law, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The courts of Paris have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of or in connection with these Terms.

Consumers in the EEA and the UK keep the right to bring proceedings in the courts of their place of residence, and this section does not deprive them of the protection of mandatory local law. A consumer in the EU may also use the European Commission's online dispute resolution platform.

Before starting proceedings, please write to legal@needlesearch.ai. Most disagreements are resolved faster by email than by court. Nothing in this section prevents either party from seeking urgent injunctive relief.

19. General

• Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Policy, any data processing agreement and any signed order form are the entire agreement between us on their subject matter.
• Order of precedence. Signed order form, then data processing agreement, then these Terms, then the Privacy Policy.
• Changes. We may amend these Terms. For material changes we will give at least 30 days' notice in the application and by email. Continued use after the effective date is acceptance; if you do not accept, terminate before that date.
• Assignment. You may not assign without our written consent. We may assign to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets.
• Severability. If a provision is unenforceable the rest stands, and that provision is read down to the minimum extent necessary.
• No waiver. Failing to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
• Force majeure. Neither party is liable for a failure caused by an event beyond its reasonable control.
• Notices. To us: legal@needlesearch.ai. To you: the email address on your account.
• Language. These Terms are drafted in English. Any translation is provided for convenience only; in the event of conflict the English version prevails, except where mandatory local law provides otherwise.