Service Terms — Stern Bench Assistant

These Service Terms govern Your use of Stern Bench Assistant and supplement the Platform Agreement.

1. SERVICE DESCRIPTION

1.1. Stern Bench Assistant is a web-based AI-assisted legal research and workbench tool designed to support offshore legal research through conversational interaction, authority-backed answers, and live retrieval from Stern Bench's curated corpus of publicly available judicial decisions.

1.2. For the serious pilot ring, the Service is intended to operate as a dedicated deployment for a firm, team, or named user group with persistent workspace-associated threads and related pilot workspace state.

1.3. Core features may include:

• persistent research threads and workspace-associated conversational history;
• conversational legal research and iterative follow-up questioning;
• model-directed retrieval from Stern Bench's offshore case corpus;
• citation-backed answers with links to underlying authorities;
• paragraph-level pinpoints where available;
• saved or workspace-associated assistant history, preferences, exported artifacts, and related research materials; and
• other assistant features Stern Bench makes available from time to time.

1.4. The Service is designed to support legal research. It does not provide legal advice, legal representation, or professional judgment. You remain solely responsible for reviewing and independently verifying all outputs, authorities, citations, and paragraph references before relying on them.

2. THREADS, OUTPUTS, AND RESEARCH LIMITATIONS

2.1. Stern Bench may maintain persistent threads, workspace-associated conversation history, and other saved assistant materials in order to provide continuity across a user's research workflow throughout the pilot term.

2.2. The Service generates or enriches outputs using AI systems. Outputs may contain errors, omissions, incomplete reasoning, incorrect citations, incorrect characterizations of authorities, or unsupported inferences.

2.3. The Service is grounded in Stern Bench's curated corpus. Stern Bench does not guarantee that the corpus includes all authorities relevant to any issue, matter, jurisdiction, or time period.

2.4. Where the Service provides citations, links, summaries, or paragraph references, those materials are provided to assist legal research only. You are responsible for checking the underlying primary sources.

3. DATA PROCESSING MODEL

3.1. Prompts, thread messages, instructions, follow-up requests, and related interactions are processed in real time to provide the Service.

3.2. The Service may retain thread content, saved prompts, saved responses, exported artifacts, and related workspace- or account-linked assistant data in order to provide continuity, saved history, pilot workspace functionality, and service operation during the serious pilot term.

3.3. Stern Bench may maintain limited operational metadata needed for security, abuse prevention, debugging, attribution, analytics, performance monitoring, service operation, and account administration, as described in the Privacy Policy.

3.4. For the serious pilot ring, uploads are off by default unless Stern Bench expressly enables them in writing for the applicable pilot deployment. The Service may provide export functionality, including Word-compatible exports, where enabled. Unless Stern Bench expressly enables such functionality in writing or in-product, the Service does not include third-party document-management-system integrations, Outlook integrations, email integrations, or similar enterprise content connectors.

4. USE RESTRICTIONS SPECIFIC TO ASSISTANT

You may not use the Service to:

• misrepresent AI-generated outputs as independently verified where they have not been;
• generate or present fabricated authorities, citations, quotations, paragraph references, or legal analysis as if they were verified legal sources;
• build, train, or materially improve a competing legal AI assistant or legal research system through systematic extraction, automated harvesting, or reuse of the Service, its outputs, or the corpus, except to the extent expressly permitted in writing by Stern Bench; or
• circumvent any account, rate, plan, or firm-access limitations or share credentials or thread access except as permitted under the Terms.

5. PAID AND PILOT USE

5.1. The serious pilot ring is made available under a written pilot, evaluation, or paid arrangement, subject to product availability and commercial policy.

5.2. Certain features of the Service, including dedicated deployment or workspace isolation, persistent threads, upload enablement, export functions, higher usage limits, team or firm functionality, or priority support, may be available only under the applicable written pilot arrangement or other written commercial arrangement.

6. DELETION AND TERMINATION EFFECTS

6.1. Where the Service exposes deletion controls for chats, exports, or other account- or workspace-associated materials, You may use those controls to delete the materials made available for deletion through the Service.

6.2. Upon termination of the applicable Services or deletion of the relevant account or workspace, Stern Bench will handle retained thread content, saved assistant artifacts, account data, uploaded materials, exports, and other retained materials in accordance with the Platform Agreement, Privacy Policy, and, where applicable, the DPA. Deletion from the user interface does not necessarily mean immediate removal from logs, local browser storage, backups, or other residual technical records.