Terms

These terms are between Mahe and the firm or person using Matter or this website. If your firm has signed a licence agreement with us, that agreement governs wherever the two differ, and this page fills the gaps it leaves. Nothing here reduces rights that a consumer or a data subject has by law and cannot waive.

Using this site, activating a licence, or connecting an account is acceptance of these terms. If you are agreeing on behalf of a firm, you are confirming that you may.

Matter is software for drafting, review and matter files. It is a tool for people who are qualified to do that work. It is not a law firm, it does not give legal advice, and no output of it is advice until a competent person has reviewed it and taken responsibility for it.

Where Matter drafts, summarises, extracts dates or answers a question, it produces a draft to be checked. Automated systems make confident mistakes, including about deadlines, citations and the contents of documents. You remain responsible for what you file, send and rely on. Do not use a computed date as the date without checking it.

For as long as your licence is current, we grant your firm a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to install and use Matter for its own legal work, on the number of seats your licence records. The software is licensed, not sold, and we keep every right we do not grant here.

A licence is activated per machine, which is how seats are counted. Activation identifies the machine and the account activating it; the privacy policy says exactly what that message contains.

Do not sublicence, resell, rent out or run Matter as a service for anyone outside your firm. Do not reverse engineer it except where the law says you may despite this sentence. Do not remove licensing or attribution, or work around the seat count.

Do not use Matter or this site to break the law, to infringe someone else’s rights, or to process material you have no right to process. Do not attempt to reach another firm’s data, probe the hosted services for weaknesses without written permission, or use automated means to overload them. Security research is welcome by arrangement; write to us first.

Your matters are yours. They stay on storage your firm controls, and we do not receive them. Vaults are encrypted at rest with a key bound to a Windows account or derived from a firm passphrase we never see.

The consequence is not a policy and cannot be waived by either of us: we cannot recover your data, read it, restore it, or produce it for you. Backups are your firm’s responsibility. If you enrol a vault in recovery escrow we hold one half of a recovery key and never the other, so recovery needs an officer of your firm and us acting together. Lose your side of that and the data is gone.

Where you use a hosted feature — a sync relay, a client room, a channel — what reaches our servers is ciphertext, and the key stays in the link you share rather than in our database. We can delete what we hold. We cannot hand it over in readable form, because we cannot read it either.

Matter can connect your calendar, directory or mail. Those connections are read-only by construction: the scopes requested are the read scopes, there is no send path in the product, and a source guard fails the build if a send scope is ever introduced. Tokens are sealed by the operating system on the machine that obtained them and are never transmitted to us.

You are responsible for having the authority to connect an account, and for what your provider’s own terms require. Revoking access with the provider ends the connection at once.

Licensing, this website, the sync relay and hosted rooms run on servers we operate. We keep them available and we do not promise a percentage unless your signed agreement states one. Matter is built so that ordinary work continues when they are unreachable: the software runs locally, and a licence does not need us to be online in order to keep working.

We may change, suspend or withdraw a hosted feature. Where a change would remove something your firm relies on, we will tell you before it happens rather than after.

We warrant that we have the right to licence Matter to you, and that we will provide the hosted services with reasonable care and skill.

Beyond that, and as far as the law allows, Matter and this site are provided as they are. We do not warrant that the software is free of defects, that it will be uninterrupted, that it fits a purpose you have in mind, or that anything it generates is accurate, complete or suitable to rely on. Section 2 is the important one: check the work.

Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

Subject to that, we are not liable for lost profit, lost business, lost goodwill, or for loss or corruption of data — including data we are unable to recover for the reasons in section 5 — and our total liability arising in any twelve-month period is limited to the licence fees your firm paid us in that period.

You are responsible for professional decisions taken by your people, and for meeting your own regulatory obligations. Matter is a tool you use to meet them; it does not assume them.

Your firm may stop using Matter at any time. We may suspend or end a licence if fees go unpaid, or if section 4 is breached in a way that is serious or is not corrected after we ask.

When a licence ends, the right to use the software ends with it. Your data does not go anywhere: it is already on your machines, in your control, and no act of ours removes it. Sections 5, 8, 9 and 11 survive.

We may update these terms. The date at the top changes when we do, and where a change materially reduces what your firm gets, we will tell you before it takes effect. Continuing to use Matter after that is acceptance of the new version.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and its courts have exclusive jurisdiction, except that we may bring proceedings to protect our intellectual property wherever an infringement occurs.

Write to hello@mahe.one. What we do with personal data is set out separately in the privacy policy, which forms part of these terms.