Service Terms: Stern Bench Research

These Service Terms govern your use of Stern Bench Research (the "Research Service") and supplement the Platform Agreement.

1. Service Description

1.1. The Research Service is a web-based legal research tool that enables users to obtain AI-assisted analysis, summaries, and citation-backed research outputs based on Stern Bench's curated corpus of publicly available judicial decisions.

1.2. Core features of the Research Service may include:

• conversational legal research within an active browser session;
• AI-generated case summaries and research outputs;
• citation-backed answers grounded in the Stern Bench corpus; and
• related research features Stern Bench may make available from time to time.

1.3. The Research Service supports legal research. It does not provide legal advice, legal representation, or professional judgment.

2. Research Outputs and Limitations

2.1. The Research Service uses AI systems and other software systems to generate or enrich outputs. Outputs may contain errors, omissions, incomplete reasoning, incorrect citations, or incorrect characterizations of authorities.

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

2.3. You are responsible for checking underlying primary sources before relying on any citation, summary, quotation, paragraph reference, or analytical output.

3. Session-Scoped Research Model

3.1. Prompts, requests, and interactions submitted through the Research Service are processed in real time to provide the Service.

3.2. In the current Research lane, Stern Bench processes research interactions in a session-scoped manner and does not retain durable user-visible research history by default.

3.3. Prompts and outputs may remain visible during the active browser session and may be used for follow-up interactions within that session.

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

4. No Uploads

4.1. Unless Stern Bench expressly enables document-upload functionality in writing or in the product itself, the Research Service does not accept customer document uploads, client files, or private knowledge-base ingestion.

4.2. The content analyzed through the Research Service is drawn from Stern Bench's curated corpus and the prompts or other inputs you provide through the Service.

5. Research Management Features

5.1. The current Research lane does not provide durable folders, notes, saved outputs, saved searches, collaboration, or similar research-management features by default.

5.2. If Stern Bench later enables saved research artifacts, exports, collaboration, or similar organization features, Stern Bench may publish updated or supplemental service terms applicable to those features.

6. Case Law Corpus

6.1. The case law corpus made available through the Research Service consists of publicly available judicial decisions and related case metadata independently collected, processed, and maintained by Stern Bench.

6.2. Except to the extent expressly agreed otherwise in writing, the corpus, Stern Bench's case metadata, extraction layers, citator structures, and other platform-maintained research infrastructure are not Customer Data or DPA Data.

7. Use Restrictions Specific to the Research Service

You may not use the Research Service to:

• misrepresent AI-generated outputs as independently verified where they have not been;
• generate or present fabricated authority, citations, quotations, or paragraph references as if they were verified legal sources; or
• build or train a competing legal research or legal AI product using the Service, its outputs, or systematic extraction from the corpus, except as expressly permitted in writing by Stern Bench.

8. Paid and Free Use

8.1. Stern Bench may make the Research Service available under preview, evaluation, invite-only, approved-user, or paid arrangements.

8.2. Different plans or written arrangements may include different access controls, usage limits, support levels, or feature sets.

9. Deletion and Termination Effects

9.1. In the current session-scoped Research lane, users may clear or leave the active browser session, but the Service does not provide a durable saved-research library to delete by default.

9.2. Deletion of session-visible content does not necessarily mean immediate removal from logs, local browser storage, backups, or other residual technical records.

9.3. Stern Bench is not responsible for deleting copies of outputs or research artifacts that you exported, copied, or otherwise retained outside the Service.