Acceptable Use Policy

This Acceptable Use Policy is part of your Terms for Stern Bench Research. Capitalized terms used but not defined in this policy have the meanings given in the Platform Agreement.

You agree not to, and not to direct, encourage, or permit others to use the Service to:

1. Violate Law or Rights

• violate applicable law or regulation;
• infringe, misappropriate, or violate another person's intellectual property, privacy, confidentiality, or other legal rights;
• submit content that you do not have the right to submit to the Service; or
• use the Service in connection with sanctions, export-control, or embargo violations.

2. Misuse Research Outputs

• present fabricated, unverified, or AI-generated authority, quotations, citations, or paragraph references as though independently verified;
• use the Service as a substitute for professional legal judgment without human review;
• misrepresent Output as legal advice provided by Stern Bench; or
• use the Service in a way that is likely to mislead clients, courts, regulators, or counterparties about the reliability or provenance of the Output.

3. Compromise Security or Service Integrity

• introduce malware, destructive code, or harmful payloads;
• interfere with or disrupt the Service or the systems used to provide it;
• bypass, disable, test, or probe security or access controls without authorization;
• scrape, crawl, or systematically extract Service content or Output using automated means except as expressly permitted in writing; or
• attempt to reverse engineer, discover, or replicate the Service's models, retrieval logic, ranking systems, or underlying software systems.

4. Build Competing Systems from the Service

• use the Service, its Output, or systematic extraction from the case corpus to build or train a competing legal research or legal AI product, except as expressly permitted in writing by Stern Bench.

5. Use the Service for High-Risk or Improper Decisioning

• make automated decisions that have a material legal effect on an individual without appropriate human review; or
• use the Service as the sole basis for eligibility, enforcement, compliance, or legal-service decisions where human professional judgment is required.

Stern Bench may suspend or terminate access for violations of this Acceptable Use Policy.