The terms, in plain English

1. The service

CivitasOPS is a hosted web application for land survey and civil engineering firms. It reads the documents your firm uploads and produces working papers from them — call tables, closure reports, easement registers, permit matrices, comment-response matrices, plan set checks, pursuit briefs, answers to questions with their sources — for your firm's people to review. We run it; you use it in a browser. These terms apply to every person at your firm who signs in.

2. Accounts and seats

A subscription carries a number of named seats. A seat is one person's account, invited by your firm's administrator, and may not be shared. Your firm is responsible for who it invites, for keeping credentials private, and for what is done under its accounts. Tell us at once if you believe an account has been used by someone it was not issued to.

3. Acceptable use

Use the service for your firm's own professional work. Do not upload material you have no right to process, attempt to reach another firm's data, probe or load-test the service without asking, resell access, or use the output to build a competing product. We may suspend an account that does any of these while we talk to you about it.

4. Your documents

Your firm owns the documents it uploads and everything the service produces from them. We process them only to provide the service to your firm: to read them, index them for your firm's own search, produce the working papers, and keep them where your firm's people can find them. We do not use your documents to train models, and we do not sell or share them.

To provide the service we use these subprocessors, and only these:

• Microsoft Azure — hosts the service and holds your firm's files and database, keeps our secrets, and sends the email the service sends. Region: West US 3, United States.
• Anthropic, OpenAI or Google — receive the passages of a document's text that are needed to read it, depending on which provider your firm connects with its own key or, where your plan includes the CivitasOPS key and your firm chooses it, which provider CivitasOPS's own account is with.
• OpenAI or Google — receive the text of your documents in short passages to build your firm's search index.

We will give you thirty days' notice before adding a subprocessor. If your firm connects its own key with a model provider, your agreement with that provider governs what it does with the text. Where your firm reads on the CivitasOPS key, our agreement with that provider governs it, and we will name the provider in the service.

5. Professional review

Measurements — bearings, distances, curves, closure, area, coordinates — are computed arithmetically from the text of a document as it was read. A language model locates and transcribes the words; it does not produce a number. Where a reading is uncertain, the service flags it rather than filling it in, and every finding quotes the passage it was read from so a person can check it.

Everything the service produces is research support for a licensed professional's review. It is not a survey, a legal description, a title opinion or a permit determination, and it does not replace a field visit, a title examination or a regulator's decision. Responsibility for any work that is sealed, filed, recorded or relied upon remains with the licensee who reviews and signs it. Your firm agrees that nothing produced by the service will be sealed, filed or recorded without that review.

6. Allowance and suspension

Each subscription carries a monthly allowance of documents and a separate allowance of Chat questions. A plan that includes the CivitasOPS key also carries a monthly allowance for reading on it; when that is used up, reading on the firm's own key continues. When an allowance is used up, new analysis on it waits until the next month; nothing is billed past the allowance, and everything already produced stays readable and exportable. If a subscription lapses or is unpaid, sign-in is refused until it is put right. Your data is kept for the period in section 8 either way.

7. Availability

The current plan carries no service-level agreement. We aim to keep the service available and will tell you what happened when it is not, but we do not yet commit to an uptime figure, a response time or a credit. Planned maintenance is announced in advance where we can. If your firm needs a service level, ask; it is a different plan and a different price.

8. Data retention and deletion

A document your firm deletes in the application is removed at once — its text, its search entries, its upload and anything a project read from it. On cancellation, your firm's data is deleted within 30 days of your request, and backups age out within a further 14 days. Before deletion you may export what the service has produced; ask if you need help doing that. We keep account and usage records — who was on the subscription and how much of it was used — for as long as the law and our accountants require.

9. Confidentiality

Your documents and what is produced from them are confidential to your firm. We look at them only to provide the service, to fix a problem your firm has asked us to fix, or when the law requires, and our staff and subprocessors are bound accordingly. Where your client requires a non-disclosure agreement, we will sign a reasonable one.

10. Limitation of liability

The service is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, our total liability to your firm for anything arising from the service is limited to the fees your firm paid us in the twelve months before the claim, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost profit, or the consequences of relying on output that was not reviewed as section 5 requires. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

11. Termination

Your firm may cancel at the end of the current billing period by telling us. We may terminate for a breach of these terms that is not put right within thirty days of notice, or at once for a breach of section 3 that puts other firms' data at risk. On termination, section 8 applies.

12. Changes

We may change these terms. Changes that reduce what we commit to take effect at your next renewal, and we will tell you thirty days before that. Other changes take effect when published here.

13. Governing law

Placeholder: these terms are governed by the laws of [State], United States, and disputes are heard in the courts of [County, State]. Counsel to confirm.

Questions about these terms go through the contact page. The privacy page says what this website itself keeps.