Privacy Policy

Welcome to Legally Minded, a web property of the American Bar Association. The American Bar Association has created this privacy statement in order to demonstrate our firm commitment to privacy for our website users and our membership. The following paragraphs disclose our information gathering and dissemination practices. The privacy statement may change at any time; any changes will be posted on this page. Should you have additional questions, comments or concerns please contact us:

Our postal address is:
American Bar Association
Customer Service/Correspondence
321 North Clark Street
Chicago, IL 0654-7598

• We can be reached via e-mail at: service@abanet.org
• You can reach us by telephone at 1-800-285-2221

E-Mail Privacy

Are you interested in ABA events and updates from your Sections? Would you like to hear about ABA member benefits and services? Please click here to send us your e-mail address and we will send you the latest in legal resources through e-mails designed to meet your needs.

Your e-mail address will only be used within the ABA and its entities. We do not sell or rent e-mail addresses to anyone outside the ABA. If you wish to be removed from our e-mail mailings, please click here and complete the form to remove your e-mail address from our list or call our Service Center at 1-800-285-2221.

E-mail Information Gathered by the ABA

For some e-mails distributed by the ABA and its Sections, specific information on recipient response is collected. For example, we sometimes review how many recipients open and subsequently choose to click through to links provided in an e-mail. We use this information only for the purposes of analyzing areas of interest, improving our products and enhancing the usefulness of our website for ABA members and other visitors. None of this information is sold or distributed outside of the ABA in any manner.

The ABA's Support Level Agreement

The ABA is committed to providing 100 percent availability of its Internet site(s). We have implemented safeguards and alarms to notify us in the event of loss of Internet connectivity to the backbone and of hardware failures. Even with these safeguards in place, loss of connectivity or hardware failure can still occur. For this reason, the ABA cannot "guarantee" its Internet connectivity, nor can we be responsible for lost or delayed requests, email, or content.

For questions regarding our website being down or any related service outage, please send an email to help@abanet.org.

Use of Cookies and IP addresses

We use your IP address to help diagnose problems with our server, and to administer our website. Our site uses cookies to keep track of your shopping cart and to make sure you don't see the same ad repeatedly. We also use cookies to maintain user session identity, and, in some non-member areas, to store your username and password locally for ease of access.

• "Cookies" are small pieces of information that are stored by your browser on your computer's hard drive. Most Web browsers automatically accept cookies, but if you prefer, you can edit your browser options to block them in the future.
• A unique number called an IP address identifies every computer on the Internet. Each time you connect to the Internet your machine is assigned an IP address. An IP address is a number that identifies each sender or receiver of information that is sent in packets across the Internet.

ABANET.ORG Site/Membership Registration Forms

Our site's registration forms require users to give us contact information (like name and email address), method of payment, and demographic information. We use customer contact information from the registration forms to send the user information about our association. The customer's contact information is also used to contact the visitor when necessary. Information regarding method of payment is collected for member enrollment, registration and to process orders for products and services.

External Links

ABANET.ORG contains links to other external websites that do not fall under the ABANET.ORG domain. ABANET.ORG is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of such external websites.

E-Commerce

Our site uses an order form for customers to request information, products, and services. We collect visitor's contact information (like email address) and method of payment. Contact information from the order form is used to process orders and to send information about our association. User payment information that is collected is used to check the users' qualifications and bill the user for products and services.

Surveys

Our online surveys ask respondents for contact information (like email address) and demographic information (like zip code, age). We also may use contact data from our surveys to send the user information about our association.

Contest

We run contests on some sections of our site in which we ask visitors for contact information (like email address) and demographic information. The customer's contact information is also used to contact the visitor when necessary.

Advertising

We use an outside ad company to display ads on our site. These ads may contain cookies. While we use cookies in other parts of our website, cookies received with banner ads are collected by our ad company and are used for advertisement banner rotation purposes only.

Public Forums

This site makes chat rooms, forums, List Serves and message boards available to its users. Please remember that any information that is disclosed in these areas becomes public information and you should exercise caution when deciding to disclose your personal information. Although ABANET.ORG tries to protect your personal information when using these public forums, ABANET.ORG cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk. It is also not the ABANET.ORG's responsibility for maintaining the secrecy of any passwords you set up and/or any account information you have disclosed.

Security

This site has security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control.

Children's Guidelines

We at the ABA are concerned about protecting children's privacy and follow these guidelines:

ABANET.ORG DOES NOT:

• Collect online contact information without prior parental consent or parental notification, which will include an opportunity for the parent to prevent use of the information and participation in the activity. Without prior parental consent, online information will only be used to respond directly to the child's request and will not be used for other purposes without prior parental consent
  
  
• Collect personally identifiable offline contact information without prior parental consent
  
  
• Distribute to third parties any personally identifiable information with out prior parental consent
  
  
• Give the ability to publicly post or otherwise distribute personally identifiable contact information without prior parental consent
  
  
• Entice by the prospect of a special game, prize or other activity, to divulge more information than is needed to participate in the activity