A facilitator, and clear about it.

Acceptance of these terms

By ticking the acceptance box when you create an account, you enter into a binding agreement with us on these terms and confirm you have read our Privacy Policy. You may not create an account without accepting.

Under the Electronic Transactions Ordinance 2002, acceptance given electronically in this way has the same legal effect as a signature.

We record, for each account: the version of these terms accepted, the version of the Privacy Policy accepted, and the date and time of acceptance. You may request a copy of that record at any time.

If you are accepting on behalf of a law firm or other organisation, you confirm that you are authorised to bind it, and "you" in these terms means both you and that organisation.

If you do not agree, do not create an account and do not use the Platform.

Definitions

What Wakalat is, and is not

Wakalat is a technology platform. It is not a law firm, does not practise law, does not provide legal advice, and is not a party to any lawyer-client relationship formed through it.

• We do not select, recommend, endorse or supervise any Advocate.
• We do not guarantee the quality, competence, conduct or availability of any Advocate.
• We do not guarantee any outcome in any matter.
• We are not your agent, and we do not accept service of any legal process on your behalf.
• Nothing on the Platform — including anything the Assistant produces — is legal advice from Wakalat, and using the Platform does not create a lawyer-client relationship with Wakalat.

Accounts and eligibility

• You must be 18 or over and legally capable of entering a contract.
• The information you give us must be accurate, and you must keep it current — particularly enrolment and identity details used for verification.
• One account belongs to one person. Do not share credentials, and tell us at once if you suspect unauthorised access.
• Advocate, Firm Administrator and Platform Administrator accounts must keep two-factor authentication enabled.

You are responsible for everything done under your account. We may suspend an account where we reasonably believe it is compromised, fraudulent, or being used in breach of these terms.

Undertakings specific to your role

6.1 If you are a Client

• You will give accurate information in a consultation request, including opposing-party details used for conflict-of-interest checking. An inaccurate conflict check can disqualify an Advocate from acting and prejudice your own matter.
• You understand that submitting a consultation request does not create an engagement, and that an Advocate may decline.
• You will pay agreed fees directly to your Advocate, outside the Platform.
• You will not post another person's confidential or privileged information.

6.2 If you are an Advocate

You warrant, on each occasion you use the Platform, that:

• You are enrolled with a Provincial Bar Council and in good standing, and no order suspends or restricts your practice.
• Every enrolment, identity and qualification detail you submit is true, and every supporting document is genuine and unaltered.
• You will notify us promptly if your standing lapses, is suspended, is subject to disciplinary proceedings, or is otherwise affected.
• You will comply with the Pakistan Legal Practitioners and Bar Councils Act 1973 and the Rules made under it, including the 1976 Rules on advertising and solicitation, and with all professional-conduct obligations that apply to you.
• You accept that the lawyer-client relationship, the scope of work, the advice given, all deadlines, and all professional conduct are your responsibility, not ours.
• Conflict-of-interest checking is your professional duty. Our tooling assists that check; it does not discharge it.
• You will not use the Platform to solicit in any way that breaches the advertising rules applicable to you.

6.3 If you are a Firm Administrator

• You warrant that you are authorised to act for the firm and to bind it to these terms.
• You are responsible for members you add, and for removing those who leave.
• You will not use firm-level access to reach a Matter you are not a party to. Firm-level administration does not grant access to privileged matter content.

Verification and public listing

No Advocate or firm profile becomes publicly discoverable until a Platform Administrator has verified Bar Council enrolment and CNIC identity. Court tier — Advocate, Advocate High Court, or Advocate-on-Record Supreme Court — is derived from the verified enrolment category. It is not something you type in.

• Submitting a verification request does not guarantee approval. We may reject it or ask for more, and we record the reason.
• Where standing lapses, the profile is suspended and removed from public search.
• Every verification decision is recorded permanently with the reviewer's identity and timestamp.

Verification confirms enrolment and identity. It is not an endorsement of any Advocate's competence, and it is not a recommendation.

No outcome claims, and neutral ranking

The Pakistan Legal Practitioners and Bar Councils Rules 1976 restrict how advocates may advertise and solicit. The Platform is built to keep every listing inside those limits, and this is enforced by the system rather than left to each user.

• Win rates, success rates, case scoreboards and comparative success claims are never displayed — on any profile, public or private.
• You must not submit such claims in a profile, a review, a judgment listing, or anywhere else. We will remove them.
• Trust signals are limited to verified credentials, consent-based reviews that describe the experience rather than the result, and reported judgments an Advocate has expressly consented to list.
• Search ranking is based on relevance and rotation. Placement is not for sale, and is never presented as a ranking of performance.

The lawyer-client relationship

When a Client and an Advocate agree to work together through Wakalat, the resulting engagement is between them. Wakalat facilitates the introduction and provides the workspace; it is not your lawyer and does not supervise the work.

• Scope, strategy, advice, deadlines and professional conduct are the Advocate's responsibility.
• Sending a consultation request does not create an engagement. No relationship exists until the engagement agreement is in place.
• Fee arrangements are agreed between the Client and the Advocate.

The case room and the document vault

The case room is a private, matter-scoped workspace. Access is enforced on the server for every request, and every privileged action is written to an append-only audit log.

• Use it only for the Matter it belongs to. Do not attempt to reach a Matter you are not a party to.
• You are responsible for what you upload: you must have the right to share it, and it must not be unlawful, malicious or infringing.
• We may apply file-type and size limits, and may refuse or remove content that endangers the Platform or its users.
• The Client of a Matter may request deletion of a vault document; the Matter's assigned Advocate resolves that request. Both steps are logged.
• Documents are delivered only through short-lived signed links. Do not attempt to share, extend or reuse those links outside the authorised parties.

Keep your own copies of anything you need to retain. We take backup and durability seriously, but the case room is not your record of last resort.

Fees and the ledger

Wakalat is not a payment processor and does not hold, transmit or escrow money. The fee ledger is a record layer sitting on top of a signed engagement agreement between the Client and the Advocate.

• A milestone changes status only when the Client marks it and the Advocate confirms it. Neither side can move it alone.
• Payment happens outside Wakalat, directly between Client and Advocate.
• An invoice exported from the ledger is a record of what both parties recorded here — it is not a demand for payment by Wakalat.
• Disputes about fees are between the Client and the Advocate. The ledger and its history are available to both as evidence of what was agreed and recorded.

The Platform is free to use at launch. There is no charge to create an account, search for an Advocate, send a consultation request, list a practice, or use any workspace, vault or ledger feature. Any fee you agree with an Advocate is a matter between you and that Advocate.

Reviews and user content

• A review must come from genuine experience of working with that Advocate, and must describe the experience rather than assert a case result.
• Do not post another person's confidential or privileged information.
• Reviews and judgment listings are moderated. We may decline to publish, or remove, content that breaches these terms or the advertising rules.
• Anyone can flag content for review. Flags are assessed by Platform Administrators.
• You keep ownership of what you post. You grant us the licence needed to host, display and deliver it as part of operating the Platform — nothing wider.

The AI legal assistant

The Assistant answers questions about Pakistani law from a curated corpus and cites the sources it relied on. It exists to give you a grounded starting point and to point you toward a verified Advocate — not to replace one.

What it is, and is not:

• It gives legal information, not legal advice. It cannot advise on your own situation, and it will decline when asked to.
• It answers only from its corpus. If nothing relevant is held, it says so rather than guessing, and it tells you when confidence is low.
• It will not predict how a case would be decided, and will not compare Advocates or forecast outcomes.

Coverage at launch: the corpus is statutes only. Case law — Supreme Court and every High Court — is deferred until a licensed source is in place, and the Assistant will say so if you ask a case-law question. The coverage page lists exactly what is held.

Your responsibility:

• Do not rely on it for a limitation period, a filing deadline, a procedural step, or any decision about your own matter. Verify with a verified Advocate.
• Statutes are amended. An answer reflects the version held in the corpus at the time it was generated.
• Do not paste privileged material or another person's confidential information into it. Use the case room for anything confidential.
• Do not use it to generate legal advice for onward supply to others as though it were professional advice.
• Use is rate-limited. Do not attempt to circumvent those limits or to script access.

Answers are generated by a language model and may be incomplete or wrong even when citations are present. Wakalat gives no warranty as to the accuracy, completeness or currency of any Assistant answer, and accepts no liability for a decision taken in reliance on one. We may change, limit or withdraw the Assistant at any time.

Acceptable use

You must not:

• Impersonate an Advocate, a firm, a Client or Wakalat, or misrepresent your enrolment or identity.
• Submit forged or altered verification documents, or otherwise attempt to evade verification.
• Attempt to access a Matter, document or account you are not authorised to access, or probe, scan or test our access controls without written permission.
• Scrape, crawl or bulk-extract profiles, corpus material or any other part of the Platform.
• Upload malware, or interfere with the availability or integrity of the Platform.
• Use the Platform to solicit in a way that breaches the advertising rules applicable to advocates.
• Use the Platform to commit or facilitate any offence, including under PECA 2016.

We may suspend or terminate access for breach, and where a breach involves professional conduct we may refer it to the relevant Bar Council.

Complaints

A Client can raise a complaint about a Matter from inside its case room. Complaints are reviewed by Platform Administrators — never by the Advocate complained about — and may be escalated to the relevant Bar Council, which is the body with disciplinary jurisdiction over advocates.

Wakalat can moderate content, suspend a listing and escalate a complaint. It cannot adjudicate a legal dispute between you and your Advocate, and it does not act as arbitrator.

Intellectual property

The Platform, its name, its interface and its software are ours and are protected by law. These terms grant you a limited, revocable, non-transferable and non-exclusive right to use the Platform as intended, and nothing more.

Statutory and judicial material in the Assistant's corpus is sourced from official publications and reproduced with its citation. Where a source imposes its own conditions, those conditions apply to that material.

Third-party services

The Platform relies on third-party infrastructure, listed in section 8 of our Privacy Policy. We are not responsible for the acts or omissions of those providers beyond our own obligations to you, and their availability is outside our control.

Availability, suspension and termination

• The Platform is provided on an as-available basis. We do not promise uninterrupted availability, and we may carry out maintenance.
• We may add, change or withdraw features — including the Assistant and its coverage.
• You can close your account yourself at any time, from the app or the website. Section 11 of the Privacy Policy explains what is retained afterwards and why.
• We may suspend or terminate access for breach of these terms, for a lapse in professional standing, or where required by law.

On termination: your right to use the Platform ends immediately. Sections that by their nature should survive — 4, 11, 12 (licence), 16, 19, 20, 21 and 22 — survive. Before closing your account, export anything you need, since access ends at once.

Disclaimers

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Platform is provided without warranties of any kind, express or implied. In particular we do not warrant:

• the quality, competence, conduct, standing or availability of any Advocate or firm listed;
• the accuracy, completeness or currency of any Assistant answer or corpus material;
• that the Platform will be uninterrupted, secure or error-free.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for:

• indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss;
• loss of profit, business, goodwill, opportunity or data;
• the acts or omissions of any Advocate, Client or firm, including any advice given, deadline missed, or duty breached;
• any decision you take in reliance on an Assistant answer;
• any dispute between a Client and an Advocate, including a fee dispute.

Our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with these terms and your use of the Platform is limited to the greater of (a) the total fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim, and (b) PKR 100,000.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

Indemnity

You will indemnify us against any claim, loss, liability or reasonable cost arising from:

• your breach of these terms or of any applicable law or professional rule;
• content you submit;
• for Advocates: any claim by a Client relating to your legal services, your professional conduct, or your standing.

Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and the courts of Pakistan have exclusive jurisdiction.

Before starting proceedings, write to us at info@wakalat.app describing the dispute. We will respond within 30 days and both parties will attempt in good faith to resolve it. This does not prevent either party from seeking urgent interim relief.

A complaint about an Advocate's professional conduct belongs to the relevant Provincial Bar Council, which has disciplinary jurisdiction. These terms do not limit your right to complain to it.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The version and effective date at the top will change.

Where an update materially affects your rights, we will tell you in the product or by email before it takes effect, and we will ask you to accept the updated terms the next time you sign in. If you do not accept, you may continue to access your existing Matters for 30 days in order to export your data, after which access ends.

Continuing to use the Platform after a non-material update means you accept it.

General

• Entire agreement. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us on this subject.
• Severability. If any provision is held unenforceable, the rest continues in force.
• Waiver. A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
• Assignment. You may not assign your rights. We may assign ours to a successor of our business on notice to you.
• Notices. We may notify you in the product, by email, or by push notification. You notify us at info@wakalat.app.
• Force majeure. Neither party is liable for failure caused by events beyond its reasonable control.
• Language. These terms are published in English. If we publish a translation into Urdu or any other language, it is provided for convenience only; in the event of any conflict, the English version prevails.

Contact

• General: info@wakalat.app
• Pakistan: Crystal Telecom, M2, Plot 37C, Street 10, Khadda Market, Phase 5, Karachi · 0334-1221495
• United Kingdom: Cloudex Technologies LTD, 852, 85 Dunstall Hill, Wolverhampton WV6 0SR · info@cloudextechnologies.io · +44 7840 983410
• Website: https://www.cloudextechnologies.io/