Legal Policies for the Open Matter Plans Network

Terms of Use for the Open Matter Plans Network

Section 1: Definitions and Core Platform Architecture

This Terms of Use Agreement constitutes a legally binding contract between the Open Matter Plans Network, hereinafter referred to as OPMN, and the User, whether accessing the platform as an individual or as an authorized representative of a corporate entity, partnership, law firm, or commercial enterprise.

The platform is defined as the collaborative web application, hosting databases, and associated services owned and operated by OPMN.

The core assets of the platform are "Matter Plans," which are structured legal workflows, case management strategies, and tactical task lists mapped to specific legal scenarios.

All Matter Plans integrate the following structural elements:

• SALI Taxonomy Mapping: System-level classification and filtering of plans by Geographic Location and Legal Matter Type, utilizing the industry-standard Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry (SALI) taxonomy.
• Task & Effort Tracking: Granular task lists with effort-estimation tracking based on traditional legal billing tenths-of-an-hour increments, where one unit is equivalent to six minutes of professional work.
• Forking & Modification Logs: Collaborative developer mechanics allowing users to copy an existing parent plan to create a child variation, suggest updates, and record rationales for revisions.
• Structured Exporting: System tools permitting the download of compiled plans into JSON and Excel formats for external database integration.

Section 2: Account Registration, Authentication, and Security

To access the platform, view Matter Plans, or utilize collaborative features, the User must complete the registration process by providing current, complete, and accurate information as prompted by the Registration Form.

The User is entirely responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of their login credentials, password, and account security, and is solely responsible for any and all activities that occur under their account.

The User must immediately notify OPMN of any unauthorized use of their account or any other breach of system security.

One person or legal entity may maintain no more than one free personal account. Single login credentials must not be shared among multiple individuals.

OPMN reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to monitor account activity, audit access locations, and suspend or terminate accounts without refund if OPMN suspects that credentials are shared or utilized in violation of these terms.

Section 3: Dual-Licensing Structure and Usage Restrictions

OPMN operates under a strict dual-licensing business model. Access to and utilization of the platform and its compiled Matter Plans are governed by the User's selected license tier :

• Personal Use License: This license is completely free for personal, non-commercial, private study, academic, or non-profit educational use. The User is permitted to view, fork, modify, and export plans strictly for their individual, non-commercial benefit. This license strictly prohibits any utilization of the plans, metadata, or exported files for direct or indirect commercial gain, professional practice, client representation, or corporate workflow optimization.
• Corporate and Commercial Use License: Any corporate, commercial, law firm, partnership, sole practitioner, or corporate legal department use of the platform, its database, or its compiled Matter Plans requires a paid commercial license. Utilizing any Matter Plan, task list, effort estimation structure, or SALI taxonomy classification for commercial legal representation, professional practice management, client advisory services, or internal business operations without an active, fully paid Subscription License constitutes a material breach of this Agreement and copyright infringement.

Section 4: Collaborative Contributions, Forking, IP Allocation, and Derivative Works

The OPMN platform operates as a collaborative database repository. To maintain the legal integrity of its dual-licensing commercialization model, OPMN must consolidate intellectual property rights over all database compilations, user-contributed improvements, and any resulting modified files.

The User agrees that by posting, uploading, or submitting any User-Generated Content to the platform, including new Matter Plans, task descriptions, effort estimations, suggested revisions, rationales, or classifications, the User is contributing their work freely. The User represents and warrants that they possess the unencumbered copyright or license to submit such content, and that such contribution does not violate any third-party intellectual property rights.

By submitting User-Generated Content, the Contributor hereby grants to OPMN a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, fully sublicensable, and transferable license to store, host, archive, parse, display, copy, modify, distribute, create derivative works of, and commercially exploit the submissions within any of OPMN’s paid corporate products, databases, or enterprise licensing models. This license grant is perpetual and survives any subsequent deletion or removal of the Contributor’s account.

Concurrently, OPMN grants other public users a non-exclusive license to view and fork the plan within the technical confines of the OPMN platform, maintaining the collaborative open-source spirit for non-commercial users while fully preserving OPMN's commercial monetization rights.

Derivative Works Vesting and Assignment: Any modifications, adaptations, customizations, translations, configurations, or derivative works created from or based upon OPMN's Matter Plans, task structures, effort-estimation increments, or metadata (collectively, "Derivative Works"), whether authorized or unauthorized, and whether created by the User or any agent acting on their behalf, shall be the sole and exclusive property of OPMN from the exact moment of their creation (vesting ab initio).

To the extent that any such rights, titles, or interests in and to the Derivative Works do not vest automatically in OPMN by operation of law, the User hereby irrevocably, unconditionally, and perpetually assigns, transfers, and conveys to OPMN all worldwide rights, titles, and interests therein (including all copyrights, patent rights, database rights, trade secrets, and other intellectual property rights) without the need for further consideration.

The User hereby waives, and agrees never to assert, any moral rights, attribution claims, or integrity rights in the Derivative Works to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. The User agrees to provide OPMN with a complete copy of any Derivative Works immediately upon creation or request, and to execute any additional documentation reasonably required by OPMN to demonstrate, establish, or perfect OPMN's exclusive ownership of such works. Any unauthorized modification, customization, or creation of derivative works constitutes a material breach of this Agreement and direct copyright infringement.

Section 5: Strict Anti-Scraping and Database Protection Covenants

The compiled database of Matter Plans, task configurations, effort-estimation increments, and SALI taxonomy classifications is the exclusive, proprietary intellectual property of OPMN, protected by copyright as an original compilation.

The User covenants and agrees that they shall not engage in, facilitate, or permit any of the following unauthorized activities :

• Using any software, automated tool, spider, web scraper, crawler, bot, harvester, or program to extract, harvest, copy, index, parse, or mine any database records, Matter Plans, task structures, effort estimations, metadata, or SALI taxonomy mappings from the platform.
• Accessing the platform, registering an account, or logging into the system behind the authentication firewall for the purpose of harvesting, extracting, or replicating proprietary legal workflows.
• Bypassing, evading, disabling, or brute-forcing any technical security controls, IP blocking mechanisms, rate limits, CAPTCHAs, or robot exclusion headers implemented by OPMN.
• Systematically replicating, distributing, or republishing the curated collections of Matter Plans to establish, feed, or train any competitive database, software application, workflow tool, or machine learning model.
• Reselling, sublicensing, redistributing, or otherwise transferring OPMN Matter Plans, task structures, effort estimations, or metadata to unrelated third parties, including but not limited to law firms, corporate entities, or consultants, or charging any fee to implement, configure, or integrate OPMN content on behalf of any third party.
• Sharing personal account credentials with unauthorized third parties or allowing multiple individuals within an unlicensed commercial organization to access the platform under a single subscription or a free personal account.
• Mining, scraping, harvesting, or programmatically collecting any personal information, contact details, email addresses, or professional profiles of other registered OPMN users for the purpose of marketing, sales, direct recruitment, or spam campaigns.

Any violation of these prohibited use covenants constitutes a material breach of contract, infringes OPMN's database compilation copyright under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), and represents an unlawful trespass on OPMN’s computer systems, subjecting the offender to immediate account termination and civil damages.

Section 6: Audit Rights, Presumptions of Constructive Access and Duration, and Retroactive Multipliers

To ensure compliance with licensing terms, OPMN reserves the right to monitor platform access, user activity logs, system requests, and metadata patterns.

If OPMN has reasonable grounds to believe that a corporate entity, law firm, or user is utilizing OPMN Intellectual Property for unlicensed commercial purposes, OPMN shall have the right, upon seven days' written notice, to conduct a comprehensive audit of the User’s systems, records, and files to verify license compliance.

Presumption of Organisation-Wide Constructive Access: If OPMN identifies or proves that any single employee, contractor, partner, or agent of a corporate entity or law firm has accessed, exported, downloaded, or utilized an OPMN Matter Plan without a valid, paid Commercial Use License, it shall be contractually presumed that the entire headcount of that organisation had constructive access to and possession of that Matter Plan. This presumption establishes that the Matter Plan was communicated, reproduced, and made available across the organisation's shared corporate networks, document management systems, or collaborative directories.

Rebuttal of Presumption of Access: The audited entity shall bear the sole burden of proof to rebut this presumption of access. To successfully rebut the presumption of organisation-wide access, the entity must present verifiable network system audits, single sign-on (SSO) logs, or directory-level security configurations proving to OPMN's reasonable satisfaction that access to the relevant Matter Plan was strictly segregated and technically restricted to a smaller, specifically defined group of authorised users. Absent such verifiable proof, the retroactive commercial license fee (L_retro) shall be calculated using the entire headcount (H_presumed) of the organisation during the period of unauthorised use.

Presumption of Duration: Once a single unauthorized access, download, or utilization event of an OPMN Matter Plan is proven, the unauthorized use is contractually presumed to have occurred continuously from the date of the first download or account registration (whichever is earlier) up to the date of the audit or discovery. The audited entity shall bear the sole burden of proof to rebut this presumption of duration. To successfully rebut this presumption, the entity must present verifiable system-level logs, directory metadata, or email history proving to OPMN's reasonable satisfaction that they completely deleted, removed, or ceased using all OPMN Matter Plans and metadata at an earlier, specific date. Absent such verifiable proof, the time variable (T_months) representing the duration of unauthorized use shall be calculated as the entire duration from the date of first access or registration to the date of the audit.

If an audit or system investigation reveals that the User's utilization of OPMN Intellectual Property exceeds the parameters of their license tier, or that a corporate entity has utilized the platform under the guise of free personal accounts, the offending entity shall be strictly liable to pay OPMN retroactive license fees (L_retro) at a rate of 150% of the then-current enterprise commercial subscription rates (R_sub), calculated in accordance with the headcount and duration rules above.

Furthermore, if the unauthorized utilization exceeds the permitted license volume by more than ten percent, the offending corporate entity shall reimburse OPMN for all reasonable administrative, engineering, legal, and auditing costs incurred in conducting the investigation and enforcing compliance.

Section 7: Enforceable Liquidated Damages and Remedies

The User acknowledges and agrees that the unauthorized commercial utilization of OPMN Intellectual Property, the systematic extraction or scraping of the database, the commercial free-riding on open-access compilations, and the unauthorized resale or downstream distribution of exported files cause immediate, irreparable harm to OPMN’s business operations, competitive advantage, database integrity, and commercial subscription streams.

Because the precise financial valuation of such harm is exceptionally difficult to quantify, the parties agree that the liquidated damages provisions set forth herein represent a genuine, balanced, and contractually binding pre-estimate of the minimum loss necessary to protect OPMN's legitimate commercial and financial interests.

The total liquidated damages (D) recoverable by OPMN upon a proven breach of Section 2, Section 3, Section 4, Section 5, or Section 6 of these Terms shall be calculated in accordance with the following mathematical formulas, which shall be displayed conspicuously and conspicuously set off from surrounding text as standalone block equations to ensure clear notice:

where:

• L_retro represents the baseline retroactive commercial license fees, expressed as:
  L_retro = H_presumed x R_sub x T_months
  where H_presumed represents the total headcount of the organisation (or the rebutted restricted subset of users) presumed to have constructive access under Section 6, R_sub represents the standard monthly enterprise subscription rate per user per plan during the period of unauthorised use (set at $1 per user per month per plan, or as per the standard rate card), and T_months represents the duration of the unauthorized use in months, calculated in accordance with the presumption of duration rules under Section 6.
• N_plans represents the total number of individual Matter Plans accessed, copied, replicated, modified, or utilized for commercial purposes without an active Corporate Use License, with each unauthorized plan or Derivative Work carrying a contractually agreed damages rate of $10,000.
• N_scrapes represents the number of separate automated scraping, crawling, or mass data extraction instances executed, with each instance carrying an agreed damages rate of $250,000 to cover database structural devaluation, competitive disruption, and system remediation costs.
• R_derived represents the total gross revenue, consulting fees, implementation charges, or other financial benefits derived directly or indirectly by the infringer from the unauthorized redistribution, sublicensing, resale, or commercial implementation of OPMN Intellectual Property or Derivative Works to any third party, subject to a minimum default recovery of $50,000 per downstream recipient if gross revenue cannot be forensically established.
• N_users represents the total number of individual user accounts, contact records, or profile datasets programmatically harvested, scraped, or collected in violation of Section 5 or the integrated Privacy Policy, carrying an agreed damages rate of $1 per harvested record.

The parties explicitly stipulate that these figures are not punitive, are not designed in terrorem to merely threaten performance, and are proportionate to the legitimate commercial interests of OPMN in maintaining a secure, collaborative legal ecosystem and protecting its proprietary, dual-licensed assets.

The imposition of these liquidated damages shall be in addition to, and not in lieu of, any other equitable remedies, including immediate injunctive relief and specific performance, to which OPMN may be entitled under law or equity.

Section 8: Disclaimers, Liability Caps, and Indemnification

The Matter Plans, workflows, task structures, effort estimations, and SALI taxonomy classifications provided via the OPMN platform are for educational, collaborative, and organizational purposes only. OPMN does not provide legal advice, representation, or professional services, and the utilization of any platform content is entirely at the User's own risk.

The platform is provided on an "as-is" and "as-available" basis, without any warranties of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to warranties of accuracy, completeness, suitability, quality, merchantability, or fitness for a particular purpose.

In no event shall OPMN, its affiliates, directors, employees, or licensors be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, including but not limited to loss of profits, client disputes, malpractice claims, or data loss, arising out of or in connection with the utilization or inability to utilize the platform.

The maximum aggregate liability of OPMN for any claim arising under these Terms shall be strictly capped at the total subscription fees actually paid by the User to OPMN during the twelve-month period preceding the event giving rise to the claim, or the sum of one hundred Australian dollars, whichever is greater.

The User agrees to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless OPMN from and against any third-party claims, liabilities, damages, and legal costs arising from the User's breach of these Terms, unauthorized commercial utilization of the platform, or infringement of any intellectual property rights.

Section 9: Dispute Resolution and Governing Law

These Terms of Use, and any dispute, controversy, or claim arising out of or relating to this Agreement, including its formation, validity, breach, or enforceability, shall be governed by, construed, and enforced in accordance with the laws of the State of New South Wales, Australia, without regard to conflict of law principles.

The parties submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of New South Wales and any courts competent to hear appeals from those courts.

Prior to commencing any formal litigation, the parties agree to engage in good-faith negotiations to resolve the dispute.

If negotiations fail to achieve a resolution within thirty days, OPMN retains the unilateral right to submit the dispute to binding arbitration in Sydney, New South Wales, in accordance with the commercial arbitration rules then in effect, or to initiate proceedings in the Supreme Court of New South Wales to secure urgent injunctive relief, liquidated damages, or enforcement of its intellectual property rights.

Privacy Policy for the Open Matter Plans Network

Section 1: Introduction and Statutory Compliance Framework

OPMN is committed to recognizing, respecting, and protecting the privacy of its registered users, contributors, and platform visitors.

This Privacy Policy constitutes an integrated component of the OPMN Terms of Use and explains how OPMN collects, uses, stores, secures, and discloses personal information in connection with your access to and interaction with our collaborative web application.

OPMN operates a global collaborative platform and complies with regional and international data protection laws, including the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) for Australian operations , the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for users in the European Union, and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) for California residents.

For the purposes of European data protection laws, OPMN acts as the "Data Controller" of your personal information.

This policy applies strictly to "Personal Information" as defined under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and "Personal Data" as defined under the GDPR, meaning any information or opinion, whether true or not, and whether recorded in a material form or not, about an identified individual, or an individual who is reasonably identifiable.

Section 2: Principles of Data Minimization and Information We Collect

OPMN adheres strictly to the principle of data minimization, ensuring that we only collect the minimum amount of personal information necessary to deliver, secure, and optimize our collaborative database services.

We collect several categories of information, depending on your account tier and interface actions:

• Account Registration Data: To create an OPMN account, you must provide your name, a valid business or personal email address, professional title, and password. For Corporate Use Licenses, we collect domain-level organizational names and associated corporate registration details to ensure licensing compliance.
• User Contribution and Activity Data: When you contribute a Matter Plan, propose a task revision, log effort estimations, fork a parent strategy, or document a strategic rationale, this content is associated with your unique account identifier. This association is necessary to maintain version-control integrity and track contributor histories.
• System Interaction and Forensic Logs: When you navigate the platform, execute search queries, filter by SALI taxonomy classifications, or trigger JSON/Excel exports, our servers automatically log system metadata. This includes your Internet Protocol (IP) address, device user-agent string, cryptographic TLS handshakes, session duration, timestamps, API request parameters, and targeted file identifiers.
• Financial and Billing Information: For paid Corporate/Commercial subscriptions, all payment card and banking details are collected and processed directly by our secure, third-party payment processors. OPMN does not store raw credit card numbers on its servers.

Section 3: How We Use Your Personal Information

OPMN utilizes your personal information strictly for the following defined purposes:

• Platform Administration and Service Delivery: Providing access to our collaborative database, displaying matter plan histories, processing suggested revisions, and executing JSON or Excel export requests.
• Licensing Compliance and Headcount Verification: Utilizing domain filters, activity logs, and SSO data to verify that corporate law firms and departments are complying with our dual-licensing tiers and that usage does not exceed authorized seat caps.
• System Security and Forensic Auditing: Reviewing server logs and interaction metadata to identify, investigate, and block automated scrapers, malicious bots, rate-limit bypass attempts, or unauthorized access behind our firewall.
• Spam and Direct Marketing Defenses: Protecting our user directories from being programmatically harvested and used by third parties to send unsolicited commercial electronic messages (spam), which violate regional anti-spam laws like the Spam Act 2003 (Cth).

Under no circumstances does OPMN sell, rent, or trade your personal information to third-party advertisers, data brokers, or marketing networks.

Section 4: Data Retention, Deletion, and Archiving

OPMN retains your personal information only for as long as is necessary to fulfill the purposes for which it was collected, comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our contractual agreements.

Our data retention and deletion policies are structured as follows:

• Active Account Data: Personal information associated with active OPMN accounts is retained for the lifetime of your account.
• Deactivated and Deleted Accounts: If you choose to delete your OPMN account, your personal profile data, name, and login credentials will be permanently erased or anonymized within 30 days of deactivation.
• Collaborative Contributions and Version-Control Data: Because OPMN relies on a version-controlled database where public plans are frequently forked by other users, any Matter Plans, task configurations, suggested revisions, or rationales you publicly posted cannot be deleted or detached from the system's history. Upon account deletion, your name and identity will be permanently anonymized, and your public contributions will be marked as submitted by a "Former Contributor."
• Forensic Audit Logs: System interaction logs, export tracking files, and security metadata are retained for a minimum of 12 months to support licensing audits and prove contract compliance in legal proceedings, after which they are securely destroyed.

Section 5: Data Security and Anti-Scraping Safeguards

OPMN implements a comprehensive, industry-standard information security program designed to protect your personal information from unauthorized access, loss, alteration, or disclosure.

Our technical and administrative security controls include:

• Encryption Protocols: All data transmitted between your browser and our platform is secured using Transport Layer Security (TLS 1.3) encryption. All personal data stored in our databases is encrypted at rest using AES-256 standards.
• Access Control Isolation: Employees and contractors of OPMN are granted access to user personal information strictly on a "need-to-know" basis, governed by non-disclosure agreements and secure single sign-on (SSO) authentication protocols.
• Technical Scraper Mitigation and Bot Detection: Scrapers routinely target public web applications to harvest personal data cheaply and quickly, violating core privacy principles. To prevent this, OPMN deploys a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to block programmatic harvesting. We use TLS fingerprinting (such as JA3 signature tracking) to analyze cryptographic handshakes and identify automated scripts, regardless of IP rotation. Suspicious navigation triggers automated CAPTCHAs to force human verification.
• Breach Notification Protocol: In the event of a data security breach impacting your personal information, OPMN will comply with its statutory obligations under the Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) scheme of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and Article 34 of the GDPR, notifying affected individuals and relevant regulators within 72 hours of verification.

Section 6: Third-Party Disclosures and Cross-Border Transfers

OPMN operates a collaborative web application that utilizes global cloud infrastructure.

To provide our services, we may share your personal information with trusted third-party service providers who act as data processors on our behalf:

• Cloud Infrastructure and Hosting Providers: Our databases and file assets (including Parquet export files) are hosted on secure, globally distributed servers, such as Cloudflare R2 and Amazon Web Services, situated in secure data centers worldwide.
• Auditing and Forensic Firms: If OPMN initiates a compliance audit under Section 6 of the Terms, we may share relevant system access logs with independent public accounting or forensic investigation firms to verify user volume.
• Regulatory and Legal Disclosures: We will not disclose your personal information to government, regulatory, or law enforcement bodies unless we have a good-faith belief that such action is necessary to conform to statutory legal requirements, comply with a valid court subpoena, protect OPMN's systems, or defend against system trespass.

Your personal information may be transferred to, and stored in, countries outside of your country of residence (including Australia, the United States, and member states of the European Union).

When executing cross-border transfers, OPMN implements appropriate legal safeguards, including standard contractual clauses (SCCs) and data processing agreements, to ensure your data remains protected under equivalent privacy standards.

Section 7: Your Rights and Control Over Your Data

Depending on your jurisdiction, you possess specific statutory rights regarding your personal information, which you may exercise at any time by contacting OPMN’s privacy officer:

• Right of Access and Portability: You have the right to request a copy of the personal information we hold about you. Under GDPR and CCPA frameworks, you can request that this data be delivered in a structured, machine-readable format.
• Right to Rectification: You have the right to request that we correct any inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated personal information.
• Right to Erasure (Right to be Forgotten): You can request the deletion of your account and personal profile data, subject to the anonymization rules for collaborative plan contributions outlined in Section 4.
• Right to Restrict or Object to Processing: You have the right to object to, or request that we restrict, the processing of your personal information, particularly where you dispute the accuracy of the data or our legitimate interest grounds.
• Lodging a Complaint: If you believe that OPMN has handled your personal information in a manner inconsistent with applicable privacy laws, you have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority, such as the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) in Australia, or the relevant Information Commissioner’s Office in the European Union.

Section 8: Changes to this Policy

OPMN reserves the right to modify, update, or revise this Privacy Policy at any time in its sole discretion to reflect changes in our operational practices, technical architecture, or legal obligations.

When material changes are made, we will notify you by posting a prominent notice on the platform dashboard or sending an email notification to your registered address.

Your continued use of the platform after an update becomes effective constitutes your explicit agreement to the revised Privacy Policy.

Section 9: Contact and Inquiries

If you have any questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy, your personal information, or our data security practices, please reach out to us via our Discord community: