Privacy Policy

Your privacy is very important to us. At the Texas Civil Justice League, we have a few fundamental privacy principles that we follow:

• We do not ask you for personal information unless we truly need it to provide better services for you. 
• We do not share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law, develop our products, or protect our rights.
• We don’t store personal information on our servers unless required for the on-going operation of our site.

As a project of the The Texas Civil Justice League (“TCJL”), TCJL owns and operates TexasJudges.org. It is TCJL’s policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating this website.

Website Visitors
Like most website operators, TCJL collects non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. TCJL’s purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how our website visitors use our website. 

TCJL also collects potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for logged in users and for users leaving comments on our blogs. TCJL only discloses logged-in user and commenter IP addresses under the same circumstances that it uses and discloses personally-identifying information as described below, except that blog commenter IP addresses are visible and disclosed to the administrators of the blog where the comment was left.

Gathering of Personally-Identifying Information
Certain visitors to this website choose to interact with TCJL in ways that require TCJL to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that TCJL gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. For example, we ask visitors who comment on our blog to provide a username and email address. TCJL maintains email addresses from specific users who wish to receive TCJL updates via email. In each case, we only collect information necessary or appropriate to fulfill the purpose of the visitor’s interaction with TCJL. TCJL does not disclose personally-identifying information other than that described below. Visitors may always opt out or refuse to supply personally-identifying information, with the understanding that it may prevent them from engaging in certain website-related activities.

Aggregated Statistics
TCJL may collect statistics about the behavior of website visitors. For instance, TCJL may monitor the most popular pages on TexasJudges.org or use spam screened by appropriate security practices to help better identify future spam while improving user experience. While TCJL may provide this information to others (i.e. security contractors and stakeholders), we do not post this information publicly on TexasJudges.org. TCJL does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below.

Protection of Certain Personally-Identifying Information
TCJL discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only to its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know or otherwise come into contact with that information in order to process it on TCJL’s behalf or to provide services available through TCJL, and (ii) that have agreed not to disclose it to others. Some of those employees, contractors and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country; by using TCJL’s website, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. TCJL will not rent or sell potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information to anyone. Other than to its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations, as described above, TCJL discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only in response to a subpoena, court order or other governmental request, or when TCJL believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of the Texas Civil Justice League, third parties or the public at large. If you are a registered user of a TCJL website and have supplied your email address, TCJL may occasionally send you an email message to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with TCJL and the services and/or products TCJL provides. We primarily use direct email communications to communicate this type of information, so we expect to keep this type of email to a minimum. If you send us a request (for example via a support email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish it in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users. TCJL takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information.

Cookies
A cookie is a string of text-based information provided by the server that websites store on a visitor’s computer and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. TCJL uses cookies to identify the services requested by the user each time the user visits the site, such as saving your login information at your request. TexasJudges.org visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using TCJL’s websites (or any other site, for that matter), with the drawback that some features of TCJL’s website may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

Business Transfers
If TCJL, or substantially all of its assets were acquired, or in the unlikely event that the Texas Civil Justice League ceases to operate, goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information is one of the assets that are transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur to prevent a disruption of service and that any acquirer of TCJL may continue to use your personal information as set forth in this policy.

Ads
Ads appearing on any of our websites may be delivered to users by advertising partners, who may set cookies. These cookies allow the ad server to recognize your computer each time they send you an online advertisement to compile information about you or others who use your computer. This information allows ad networks to, among other things, deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest to you. This Privacy Policy covers the use of cookies by TCJL and does not cover the use of cookies by any advertisers.

Anti-SPAM (reCAPTCHA)
You acknowledge and understand that the reCAPTCHA API works by collecting hardware and software information, such as device and application data, and sending these data to Google for analysis. The information collected in connection with your use of the service will be used for improving reCAPTCHA and for general security purposes. It will not be used for personalized advertising by Google. Pursuant to Section 3(d) of the Google APIs Terms of Service, you agree that if you use the APIs that it is your responsibility to provide any necessary notices or consents for the collection and sharing of this data with Google. For users in the European Union, you and your API Client(s) must comply with the EU User Consent Policy. Your use of the reCAPTCHA technology on this site is subject to the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Comments
Comments and other content submitted to TCJL’s anti-spam service are not saved on our servers unless they were marked as false positives, in which case we store them long enough to use them to improve the service to avoid future false positives.

Privacy Policy Changes
Although most changes are likely to be minor, the Texas Civil Justice League may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and at TCJL’s sole discretion. TCJL encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to our Privacy Policy. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.