Legal

Here’s the catch-all page for all that legal stuff: policies, disclaimers and disclosures (oh my!). By reading or using the site, you agree to these terms.

I. SITE POLICIES

Registration

We urge you to register to use the site. Registration allows you, the user to take advantage of many neat tools such as site customization and tracking your comments. Your registration information stays confidential with us. We will not sell or otherwise disclose email addresses or other registration information to any source (or use it ourselves for that matter). So relax, your secrets are safe with us!

Editorial Discretion Over Submissions

* We welcome all proposals for surveys, articles, story ideas and on-going sequels. If you have an idea, please submit it either through the Contact page or you can email it directly to elefant@myshingle.com.

* We seek quality, original work. We judge submissions on merit as well as relevance to our audience. If submissions meet our standards, we will publish them, no matter how provocative or controversial. At the same time, we’re trying to maintain a professional demeanor here. When you contribute to our site, please use language appropriate to submit in a court filing and not language which would lead a court to submit you to contempt charges. Get the idea? Moreover, as we specified on our Don’t Sponsor Us page, we’re not interested in marketing schemes, affiliate deals or anything that smacks of huckser-ism or is just plain slimy.

Comments

*We moderate comments. For now, anonymous comments are accepted, though we reserve the right to change this policy. Likewise, FOR WHATEVER REASON AND IN OUR SOLE DISCRETION, we reserve the right to close comments on a given topic, remove comments, decline to post comments and block commenters from the site.

You Write It, It’s Yours

* In contrast to many websites and listservs run by other groups or associations (even bar associations, believe it or not!), by posting to our site, you grant MyShingle.com a non-exclusive right to post your work at our site. We will not reprint, resell or retain any material posted by any individuals at our site to anyone else. All authors and contributors to MyShingle.com retain the ability to compile, resell and republish work submitted to MyShingle.com and indeed, we encourage you to do so. We may not be able to pay for your contribution — so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have the right to find someone else who will pay for it? And we’re certainly not going to profit off someone who contributed to our site without compensation.

Linking Wants to Be Free

* Lincoln (a small firm lawyer) freed the slaves and today, Linkin’ wants to be free! At MyShingle.com we don’t require permission to link to our website and concomitantly, we do not seek permission to link to other sites. In our view, information at websites are the same as articles in hard copy publications – and who has ever consulted a work’s author for permission to cite it in a footnote? At the same time, we maintain rigorous standards for citing to material at a website. Any citations at our website will include, to the extent possible, the article title, author, date of publication and website where published or else cite to the entire URL.

We Strive for Accuracy and Directness

* When we include links at our site, we strive for accuracy and directness. We’ve all been in the situation where we click on a URL with great anticipation only to be lead on a wild goose chase down three levels to find the information advertised in the link or worse, to find a dead link. We will do our best to avoid this result. We try to, where possible link directly to the cited article itself (or describe how to get to the article) rather than to an upper level page and of course, to perform quality control on our links to maintain their accuracy. Unfortunately, due to the nature of our site, which is rich with links and also includes links to current newspaper stories (many of which are only archived for a short duration), one hundred percent accuracy may elude us, at least in the beginning. As our site builds, we will add staff and try to come up with procedures to keep abreast of these matters. For the time, we rely on you, our readers, to please report all dead or indirect links to us at elefant@myshingle.com.

We Stand By Our Word

* If you’re looking for the ubiquitous hundred line legal disclaimer, you won’t find it here at MyShingle.com. We don’t do disclaimers. Rather, we stand by what we say and publish at MyShingle.com — and a disclaimer vitiates that commitment. Second, most of us here are lawyers, so let’s be real: do you really believe for a minute that a disclaimer is going to insulate you from liability anyway? Various bar associations have concluded otherwise, at least with respect to whether a disclaimer can effectively prevent formation of an attorney-client relationship at a website. See DC Bar Opinion 316, Lawyer Participation in Chat Rooms, nt. 11-12.

On the other hand, we’re not infallible. If we make a mistake, please let us know, as clearly as possible so that we can rectify the situation.

II. FTC DISCLOSURES AND AD POLICIES

1. We accept advertising and paid sponsorships in our sidebars. We do not accept mandates from those advertisers or sponsors on what we write here. Period.

2. As described at our Don’t Sponsor Us page, we don’t maintain affiliate relationships. From time to time, we’re provided with a review copy of books or software and when that’s the case, we’ll disclose the gift. In addition (and somewhat obviously, I would think), Carolyn Elefant receives financial benefits in the form of royalties from her books, Solo by Choice and Social Media for Lawyers that are promoted at the site.

3. We don’t accept sponsored posts or reviews, because they’re simply too deceptive, even with appropriate disclaimers.

III. PRIVACY POLICY

What information do we collect?

We collect information from you when you register on our site, place an order or subscribe to our newsletter.

Any data we request that is not required will be specified as voluntary or optional.

When ordering or registering on our site, as appropriate, you may be asked to enter your: name, e-mail address or State, profession. You may, however, visit our site anonymously.

What do we use your information for?

Any of the information we collect from you may be used in one of the following ways:

• To improve customer service
(your information helps us to more effectively respond to your customer service requests and support needs)

• To process transactions
Your information, whether public or private, will not be sold, exchanged, transferred, or given to any other company for any reason whatsoever, without your consent, other than for the express purpose of delivering the purchased product or service requested by the customer.

• To send periodic emails

The email address you provide for order processing, may be used to send you information and updates pertaining to your order or request, in addition to receiving occasional company news, updates, promotions, related product or service information, etc.

Note: If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from receiving future emails, we include detailed unsubscribe instructions at the bottom of each email.

Do we use cookies?

Yes (Cookies are small files that a site or its service provider transfers to your computers hard drive through your Web browser (if you allow) that enables the sites or service providers systems to recognize your browser and capture and remember certain information

We use cookies to compile aggregate data about site traffic and site interaction so that we can offer better site experiences and tools in the future.

Do we disclose any information to outside parties?

We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your personally identifiable information. This does not include trusted third parties who assist us in operating our website, conducting our business, or servicing you, so long as those parties agree to keep this information confidential. We may also release your information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with the law, enforce our site policies, or protect ours or others’ rights, property, or safety. However, non-personally identifiable visitor information may be provided to other parties for marketing, advertising, or other uses.

Third party links

Occasionally, at our discretion, we may include or offer third party products or services on our website. These third party sites have separate and independent privacy policies. We therefore have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of these linked sites. Nonetheless, we seek to protect the integrity of our site and welcome any feedback about these sites.

Online Privacy Policy Only

This online privacy policy applies only to information collected through our website and not to information collected offline.

Your Consent

By using our site, you consent to our privacy policy.

Changes to our Privacy Policy

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes on this page, send an email notifying you of any changes, and/or update the Privacy Policy modification date below. Policy changes will apply only to information collected after the date of the change.

This policy was last modified on June 8, 2010

If you have any questions about our privacy policy, please contact Carolyn Elefant at elefant@myshingle.com