A facilitator, and clear about it.

This agreement

These terms govern your use of the Wakalat website, the Wakalat mobile applications and the AI legal assistant. By creating an account or using the service, you accept them. If you are accepting on behalf of a law firm, you confirm you are authorised to bind it.

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.

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.
• Lawyer, 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.

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 or ask for more, and we record the reason.
• You must tell us promptly if your standing lapses, is suspended, or is otherwise affected.
• 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. Wakalat is built to keep every listing inside those limits, and this is enforced by the platform 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 on the platform. 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, governed by their professional obligations.
• Conflict-of-interest checks are the advocate's duty. Our tooling assists that check; it does not discharge it.
• Sending a consultation request does not create an engagement. An advocate may decline, and no relationship exists until the engagement agreement is in place.
• Fee arrangements are agreed between the client and the advocate.

Nothing on Wakalat — including anything the AI assistant produces — is legal advice from Wakalat, and using the platform does not create a lawyer-client relationship with Wakalat.

The case room and the document vault

The case room is a private, matter-scoped workspace for the parties to a matter. 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 lawyer 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 itself 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.

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 in a review or on a profile.
• 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 service — 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 what it 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 will tell you when its confidence is low.
• It will not predict how a case would be decided, and will not compare advocates or forecast outcomes.
• It is bilingual, returning an English answer with an Urdu summary drawn from the same sources.

Coverage at launch

At launch the corpus is statutes only. Case law — Supreme Court and every High Court — is deferred until a licensed source covering those courts is in place, and the assistant will tell you so if you ask a case-law question. The assistant's coverage page lists exactly what is currently held.

Your responsibility when using it

• 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 to keep it available. Do not attempt to circumvent those limits or to script access to it.

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 service.
• Use the platform to solicit in a way that breaches the advertising rules applicable to advocates.

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

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

Availability, changes and termination

• The service 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 AI assistant and its coverage.
• You can close your account at any time. Section 7 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.

Disclaimers and liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Wakalat is provided without warranties of any kind, express or implied. In particular we do not warrant the quality, competence or conduct of any advocate or firm listed, the accuracy or completeness of any AI assistant answer, or that the service will be error-free.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Wakalat is not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for loss of profit, business or data, for the acts or omissions of any advocate or client, or for any decision you take in reliance on an assistant answer. Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and the courts of Pakistan have jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of them.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The effective date above will change, and where an update materially affects your rights we will tell you in the product or by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use Wakalat after that means you accept the updated terms.