Thank you @nocodeventure.
@scriptschool there is a lot to discuss there, and you are bringing up a really good point that is always relevant in “legal tech.” There are three general areas to consider with privacy and privileged information: (1) statutorily mandated privacy, (2) ethical privacy, and (3) privacy based on fairness and reasonableness.
The first, statutory privacy, is pretty easily dispelled here because there isn’t a statute (like HIPAA) that mandates additional privacy.
The second, ethical privacy, is really where the concerns are. Lawyer’s are governed by a set of ethics rules called the Rules of Professional Conduct. They vary a bit depending on each state. Across the board, many of the rules governing privilege, confidentiality, and conflicts of interest are relaxed in the context of a free legal clinic. Essentially, volunteer legal clinics make it difficult to have the type of privacy controls one would have in place in their private law office, and the need to get access to legal information to those who can’t afford it otherwise outweighs the need to totally safeguard the information. Regardless of that, I treated this app as if it were not a free legal clinic and complied with the more stringent Rules of Professional Conduct that control a private practice in my state, Washington. The controlling Rule of Professional Conduct is RPC 1.18(e). It says that a lawyer develops no attorney/client relationship with a prospective client, and is not prohibited from use of any information learned in the meeting, if the client consents to those terms before-hand - which clients do in our Terms of Use. Now, of course the attorneys volunteering in this virtual clinic have no desire to “use” any information obtained from the people they are advising, they just want to help advise people during a scary time.
Finally, as @nocodeventure pointed out, most other concerns just come down to whether or not the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy accurately disclose who would have access to what information, and how it will be used. Our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy do that by stating who will see what client information (only attorneys on the platform), and we link to Bubble’s Privacy Policy and disclose that Bubble will have access to the information as well. As long as that is disclosed there is no legal or moral concern. Granted, the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy in this app are not my finest work, but they get the job done and we were in a rush to get this launched.
I appreciate you raising this issue. This is an important topic people need to take seriously. If there are others in the Bubble community who are confused or concerned about privacy rules I would be happy to publish some resources on terms of use and privacy policies. I’ve drafted several for clients (and my own apps) in the past.
