A privacy policy you can actually read.

Effective date: November 1, 2026. This Privacy Policy describes how Hart David Carson LLP (“the firm,” “we,” “us”) collects, uses, discloses, and protects information in connection with hartdavidcarson.com, the HDAi platform, our advertising, and the ways you contact us. It is written to reflect what the site and the firm actually do, no more and no less.

What changed on November 1, 2026. This version adds how we handle advertising click identifiers and campaign tags, lead forms on Google, Facebook and Instagram, booking a call, downloads from the HDAi Document Studio, phone calls answered by our AI receptionist and their recordings, text messages, signing documents online through Proof, and payments for flat-fee engagements (sections 2 to 7 and 9).

1. Who we are

Hart David Carson LLP is a limited liability partnership organized under Illinois law, with its principal office at 1 East Erie Street, Suite 525-5459, Chicago, Illinois 60611. For the purposes of data-protection laws that use the terms, the firm is the “controller” of personal information collected through this website. You can reach us about anything in this Policy at counsel@hartdavidcarson.com or +1 (630) 395-9496.

2. What we collect

Information you give us

Contact form. Name, email address, and your message; optionally phone, organization, and the practice area your matter concerns; and a separate, unbundled choice about receiving firm updates. We also record the page you wrote from and the record of how you reached the site, described below.

Booking a call. The booking form first asks whether you are in Illinois; if you are not, it sends nothing. Otherwise you give us your name, email address and phone number, the package you are interested in, the names of the other people we need to check for conflicts of interest (for example, your spouse, or every owner and investor in a company), your acknowledgment of how we handle conflicts, and, in separate boxes, whether you want firm updates by email and text reminders about your call. The booking form has no space for the details of your matter, by design. Your contact details and package choice go to our client-relationship system, which emails you a link to choose a time; the other names go only to the attorney who runs the conflict check and are never added to that system.

Lead forms on Google, Facebook and Instagram. If you answer one of our ads by completing a form inside Google, Facebook or Instagram, the platform sends us what you submit: typically your name, email address and phone number, and your answers to a few multiple-choice questions, such as whether you live in Illinois. Facebook and Instagram may fill in some fields from your profile, and you can change them before you submit. The platform runs the form under its own privacy policy; once your answers reach us, this Policy applies.

Phone calls. When you call the firm, an AI receptionist may answer. It tells you at the start of the call that it is an AI assistant and that the call is recorded; if you would rather not be recorded, you can end the call and write to us instead. The call is recorded and transcribed, and we keep a summary along with your name, your phone number, and any message or booking request you leave. If the AI receptionist is unavailable, your call may be forwarded to a member of the firm or to voicemail, which records and transcribes your message.

Text messages. Once our text-messaging number is registered with the mobile carriers, we text you confirmations and reminders about your call only if you agree when you book or ask us to. We send marketing texts only to people who have agreed to them in writing. Message and data rates may apply; reply STOP to stop texts or HELP for help. We do not share mobile numbers, or consent to receive texts, with third parties or affiliates for their marketing or promotional purposes; the service providers that send our texts receive them only to do so.

Signing online. Family Plan documents are signed and notarized online through Proof. To do that, Proof verifies your identity and records the signing session, as notary law requires, and keeps those records under its own legal obligations as well as our instructions.

Payments. If you engage us for a flat-fee package, you pay through the payment processor named in section 4. You enter your card or bank details on the processor’s own payment page, so they never pass through our servers. We receive confirmation of the payment and limited details about it, such as the amount, the date, and the card brand and last four digits.

Structure Diagnostic. Your answers to the six diagnostic questions and, if you choose to send the result to the firm, your email address.

HDAi Document Studio. The answers you type into a document interview — which may include information that is sensitive, such as Social Security or taxpayer identification numbers, financial figures, and family details, where a document requires them. Interviews assemble in your browser: nothing you type into an interview is transmitted to the firm unless and until you choose to send a draft to a Hart David Carson attorney for review. Please do not include Social Security numbers or similarly sensitive identifiers in a draft you submit for review unless the document requires them; you can leave such fields blank and supply them after engagement.

Downloading from the Document Studio. Using the Studio is free: the interview, the live preview and the finished draft need nothing from you. To download, print or copy a document, you give us your email address, your first name if you like, and short answers to a few questions: what the document is for (your company, a client you advise, or you and your family), for a company its stage and any big plans for the next 12 months, and your state, or that you are outside the United States. With them we record which document you exported, its category and jurisdiction, the type of export, the record of how you reached the site described below, and the version of the notice you saw. Later downloads in the same browser skip the form and are recorded against the email you gave. We use these details to send you occasional legal updates and offers by email, which you can stop at any time with the unsubscribe link in any of them, and to learn which documents and which ads lead to downloads. Outside the United States, we email you only if you tick the box on the form. Your document answers and the text of your document stay in your browser and are never sent to us by this step. Using the Studio does not make you a client of the firm.

Email and other correspondence. Whatever you choose to include when you write to us directly.

Information collected automatically

This site does not load advertising or analytics scripts: no Google tag, no Meta pixel or other social-media pixels, no analytics beacons, and no fingerprinting. It sets no cookies. Our hosting infrastructure keeps standard, short-lived server logs (IP address, browser type, pages requested) for security and capacity purposes, as essentially every website’s does.

How you reached the site, including from our ads

The site keeps a short record of how you reached it, in your browser’s local storage rather than in a cookie. It notes your first visit, your most recent visit through one of our tagged links, and your most recent click on one of our Google ads. For each it keeps the page you landed on and the time, plus any campaign tags we added to the link (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term and utm_content) and the click identifier Google adds to ad links (it appears in the address as gclid, gbraid or wbraid). For a first visit that came from another website, it keeps that site’s name, not the page. The record stays on your device for 90 days unless you clear it sooner. It reaches us only if you send an inquiry or book a call, when it travels with it so that we know which ad or site brought you.

When an inquiry reaches us with a Google click identifier, we tell Google that an inquiry came from that click by sending the click identifier and the time of the inquiry, unless your browser sent a Global Privacy Control signal with the inquiry. We do not send Google your name, email address, phone number, or anything about your matter, and we do not tell Google or Meta who becomes a client.

Information stored only on your device

The site uses your browser’s local storage for small conveniences that never leave your device unless you submit them: your motion-preference settings, a cached copy of your Structure Diagnostic answers, an in-progress Document Studio draft so you can resume it, a note that you have given your email for Studio downloads, with that email, for 30 days (and, if a download’s details could not be sent, a copy kept for one retry), an engaged Family Plan client’s interview answers so the interview can be resumed, the record of how you reached the site described above, and the last jurisdiction brief you viewed. You can clear all of it at any time through your browser’s site-data controls.

3. How we use information

We use the information above to respond to you and to book and hold the calls you ask for; to run conflict-of-interest and intake checks before any engagement; to provide the services you engage us for and the HDAi services you request, including routing a draft to a licensed attorney when you ask for review; to take payment for engagements; to keep accurate records of calls and the messages you leave; to learn which of our ads lead to inquiries, as described in section 2, and which documents and ads lead to Studio downloads; to protect the site and our systems; to comply with legal and professional obligations; and to send occasional legal updates and offers by email, to people who download from the Document Studio (outside the United States, only if they tick the box) and to others only where they have separately opted in, which you can stop at any time by unsubscribing or writing to us. We do not use your information to train artificial-intelligence models, and we do not use automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects about you.

4. How information is shared

We do not sell personal information. Apart from the click identifier and inquiry time we send Google to measure our own ads (section 2), we do not share personal information for advertising. We share information only with:

• Service providers acting on our instructions: our hosting providers (the static site host, and Render, which runs the HDAi order services and the service that receives web inquiries, booking requests, Studio download details and call records); our client-relationship system (GoHighLevel), which receives identity, routing, source, campaign and consent information, the package you ask about, booking times, your answers to a lead form’s multiple-choice questions, and, for Studio downloads, your email address, first name, answers to the download questions and which document you exported, while the substance of your matter, the names you give us for the conflict check, and your document answers and document text are deliberately kept out of it; our practice-management system (Clio), which we use for conflict checks and client files; Stable, which fulfils registered-agent and virtual-office orders and therefore receives the company, state or city, recipient and mail-handling details you enter; Stripe, which processes payments for engagements (or LawPay or Clio Payments, if your engagement letter names one of them instead), with card details going to the processor directly and never touching our servers; Proof, which runs our online signings and notarizations and receives the documents being signed and the details it needs to verify your identity; ElevenLabs, which runs our AI receptionist and records, transcribes and summarizes the calls it answers; and Twilio, which carries calls to and from our phone lines and records and transcribes voicemail.
• Google, which receives the click identifier and the time of an inquiry that followed a click on one of our Google ads (section 2). We share nothing with Meta: when you use a lead form on Facebook or Instagram, Meta already holds what you submitted there.
• Professional advisers and successors, if the firm is ever reorganized, in which case your information remains protected by this Policy and our professional obligations.
• Authorities, where a law, court order, or professional rule requires it, and then only to the extent required.

Information you send us in connection with a prospective or actual engagement is additionally protected by the professional-responsibility rules that govern lawyers, which are stricter than privacy law.

5. Retention

We keep contact and intake records for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes above and to satisfy our professional-responsibility, conflict-checking, and record-keeping obligations, and then delete or anonymize them. Lead-form submissions and call summaries become part of those intake records. Studio download records stay in our client-relationship system until you ask us to delete them; if you unsubscribe, we keep only what we need to honor that. ElevenLabs deletes call recordings and transcripts 90 days after the call; voicemail recordings and transcriptions stay in our Twilio account until we delete them; and Proof keeps the records of an online notarization for as long as notary law requires. Payment records are kept for as long as our accounting and professional-responsibility obligations require. Draft documents submitted for attorney review are retained as part of the intake record; drafts you never submit exist only in your own browser, and the record of how you reached the site stays in your browser for 90 days, or until you clear it.

6. Security

Information transmitted to us travels over encrypted connections, and we collect the minimum the task requires. No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, and we cannot promise absolute security; if a breach affecting your information ever requires notice under applicable law, we will provide it without undue delay.

7. Your rights and choices

Wherever you live, you may ask us what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, and withdraw any marketing consent — write to counsel@hartdavidcarson.com and we will honor the request unless a professional or legal obligation requires us to retain a record. We honor these requests as a matter of policy without regard to whether a particular state statute technically applies to a law firm of our size.

Advertising measurement. If you would rather we not report your inquiry to Google, turn on Global Privacy Control in your browser, or clear this site’s data before you send the inquiry: with no click identifier stored, nothing is reported.

State privacy laws. Residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, Texas, Oregon, Montana, and other states with comprehensive privacy statutes have rights of access, correction, deletion, and portability, and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising them. We do not sell personal information. The only information we pass to an advertising platform is the click identifier and inquiry time described in section 2, and we treat a Global Privacy Control signal sent with an inquiry as an opt-out of that.

Visitors from the UK and European Economic Area. Where UK or EU data-protection law applies, our legal bases are your consent (marketing, including the box on the Studio download form), steps taken at your request before entering an engagement (intake, booked calls, and HDAi requests), and our legitimate interests in operating and protecting the site and in measuring our own advertising. You have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, and objection described in that law, and the right to complain to your supervisory authority, including the UK Information Commissioner’s Office. Information you submit is processed in the United States, and where required we rely on appropriate safeguards for that transfer.

8. Children

This site is intended for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18; if you believe a minor has provided it, contact us and we will delete it.

9. A note on confidentiality

Sending information through this website, a lead form, a booking form, or a call does not create an attorney-client relationship, and information sent before the firm has run a conflicts check and agreed to act for you may not be treated as privileged. Please keep the details of your matter for your conversation with an attorney after the conflict check, and do not send confidential or time-sensitive information through the website or a lead form.

10. Changes to this Policy

When we change this Policy we will change the effective date above, and for material changes we will say so prominently on this page. The current version is always at hartdavidcarson.com/firm/privacy/.

11. Contact

Hart David Carson LLP · 1 East Erie Street, Suite 525-5459, Chicago, Illinois 60611 · counsel@hartdavidcarson.com · +1 (630) 395-9496.