Terms of Service

1. This agreement

These terms are an agreement between Tessera Systems, LLC ("Hand & Seal", "we", "us"), PO Box 7221, Laguna Niguel, CA 92607-7221, and you — the notary, or the business you sign up for ("you"). If you sign up for a business, you confirm that you may agree to these terms for it. By creating an account or using Hand & Seal you accept these terms and our Privacy Policy.

2. What Hand & Seal is

Hand & Seal is software for mobile notaries, the businesses they work in, and the assistants who help them: jobs and a calendar, a booking page and order link for your clients and the companies that send you work, invoices and card payments, a mileage log recorded by the phone app, an index of your notary journal, your books and tax set-aside estimates, and a directory where people can find you. It is a tool for running your business. It is not a notary, a signing service, a law firm or a tax advisor, and it does not perform notarial acts.

3. Your account

• You must be 18 or over, and give accurate information — including your commission details — and keep it up to date. If you are a notary, you confirm that you hold the commission you enter, and any business licence your city, county or state requires for the work you take through Hand & Seal.
• Keep your login private. You are responsible for what happens in your account, and for the people you invite to your business and what they do there. Tell us at once at support@handandseal.app if you think someone else has used it.
• One person, one login: accounts may not be shared.
• An account may be one notary's, or a business with several notaries in it. A business shares its clients, jobs, invoices, books, prices and calendar, and puts one name on every invoice.
• Who can do what in a business. Its owners — its partners, as many as there are, all equal — see and manage everything in it, the books and its billing included, and add or remove people. An owner may add partners, employees (notaries who see only the jobs handed to them and those jobs' clients) and assistants (who help with bookings and invoices, and are not there as notaries). Everyone is invited at their own email address, and only that address can accept.
• What stays each notary's own. A notary's journal index, mileage log and login are always theirs: nobody else in the business can read them. Their commission, bond and E&O are theirs too; the business's owners can see those, because the business answers for the notaries it sends. They keep all of it if they leave.
• What a business's owners see of its notaries. The jobs the business gives each notary, with each job's timeline — when the notary set out, arrived and finished — and the proof photos taken, with where each was taken. Never a notary's drives or routes.
• When someone leaves a business. A partner may leave at any time. As they leave, they may take a copy of the business's records up to that day, and copies of the clients they choose, into an account of their own; by adding a partner, a business's owners agree to this. Another owner can remove a partner only with 14 days' notice, during which the partner keeps full access; any other owner may withdraw the notice. An employee or an assistant may leave at any time, or be removed at once, and takes no copy of the business's records. The business's past records stay with the business: nothing is merged when someone joins, and nothing is divided when they leave. The last owner cannot leave; they close the account instead — and a notary's journal, mileage log, W-9, public page and reviews from it are never deleted with it: they go to that notary's own account.

4. Plans, trial and payment

• One plan. Hand & Seal has one plan, paid monthly or yearly for each notary in the account: $19 a month per notary — or $15 a month, billed yearly ($180 a year). Assistants are free. A company's desk is free. Prices do not include taxes. Where the law requires us to collect sales tax or a similar tax on Hand & Seal, we add it to your bill and show it on your receipt.
• The free trial. A new account starts with 14 days free, and no card is needed to start. Nothing is charged during the trial. We email the account's owners three days before the trial ends, and again the day before. To carry on after it, an owner subscribes in Settings → Billing; subscribe during the trial and the first charge comes on the day the trial ends (or, in about its last two days, on the day you subscribe). We email you when you subscribe, and again seven days and three days before that first charge, each time with the amount, the date and how to cancel. If nobody subscribes, nothing is deleted: your records stay readable and ready to download, and work already booked can still be finished; new work, your public page and your place in the directory wait until you subscribe.
• Month to month, or yearly. A subscription renews by itself each month — or each year, if you choose yearly, which costs about 20% less — and is billed in advance through Stripe. Before you subscribe you are shown the price, the total for a year, how it renews and how to cancel, and you tick a box agreeing that it renews by itself; we confirm it by email. There is no contract: a yearly plan is the only commitment, and only if you choose it. We email the account's owners about five weeks before a yearly plan renews, and again about three weeks before, each time with the date, the amount and how to cancel or change to monthly. An owner can switch between monthly and yearly at any time; the difference is charged or credited at once.
• Cancel any time. An owner cancels in Settings → Billing. The subscription runs to the end of the period already paid for and you are not charged again; the part of a period already paid for is not refunded. Closing your account cancels it too.
• When a notary joins a business with a subscription, the business is charged for them at once for the rest of the current period; if that charge is declined, they are not added. When a notary leaves, the unused part of their period is credited toward the business's next bill. Any owner may manage the subscription, and every owner receives its receipts.
• If our price changes. A new price is for subscriptions that start after it. A subscription that is running keeps the price it started at — Settings → Billing and every receipt say what yours is — unless you switch it between monthly and yearly, which takes the price shown to you then. We can change the price of a running subscription only by emailing the account's owners at least 30 days ahead, with how to cancel; the new price then applies from your next renewal after those 30 days, and not before.

5. Payments from your clients

Card payments you take — deposits, invoices, payments in person — are processed by Stripe, under your own Stripe account and Stripe's own terms. Hand & Seal is not a party to those payments, never holds the money, and takes no share of it. Refunds, disputes and chargebacks are between you, your client and Stripe; Hand & Seal gives you the tools to handle them.

6. Your notarial practice

• You alone are responsible for your notarial acts and for following your state's laws and your commission's terms — the fees you may charge, identification, your journal, thumbprints, and notarization by video where your state allows it.
• Hand & Seal's state rules — fee limits, journal fields, identification and thumbprint prompts, when a signing by video is allowed — are aids, drafted from each state's statutes and checked against their text on the date Settings → Rules shows. No attorney has reviewed them. They may be incomplete or out of date, they are not legal advice, and they are not a substitute for the advice of an attorney. When they and the law differ, follow the law, and please tell us.
• Your page is your advertisement. What it says is yours to keep true and lawful. Where your state requires a statement on a notary's advertising, Hand & Seal puts it on your page in English; if you write your page, or offer your services, in another language, your state may require the statement in that language too, and adding it is yours to do. Do not call yourself a "notario", an immigration consultant or anything else your state does not allow a notary to be called.
• What you offer beside notarizing — fingerprinting, I-9 forms, vehicle papers, loan signings, anything else — may need a licence, an attorney's supervision or a registration in your state, or be closed to notaries there. Hand & Seal shows what it has found; holding what your state requires is yours. Hand & Seal never chooses a notarial act or a certificate for a document, and neither may you for a signer.
• The license scan. Use the phone's ID scan only as your state allows; where your state has the signer asked first, ask.
• Your journal — or, for a signing by video, the record your platform keeps — is the official record; Hand & Seal keeps an index of it. Hand & Seal does not store pictures of IDs or thumbprints; do not put them into Hand & Seal. Loan documents are kept on Hand & Seal only as sealed packages sent by the ordering company, which we cannot read and which are deleted 72 hours after the signing is done (and never kept more than 14 days); do not upload them otherwise. One path carries them unsealed without keeping them: an order email you forward with documents attached is scanned by the mail service, read once for the order's words and deleted within a day; the attachments are never stored — only their names.
• If you notarize by video, you must use an audio-video platform and identity proofing that meet your state's requirements. Hand & Seal schedules, prices and keeps the records of those jobs; it does not provide the video session or the identity proofing.

7. Your data

• Your records are yours. You give us permission to host, copy, process and display them only as needed to provide Hand & Seal to you, and as our Privacy Policy describes.
• You are responsible for having the right to put your clients' information into Hand & Seal and to contact them through it. We process it on your behalf, as your service provider, under the data processing terms in Schedule A, at the end of these terms.
• You can download your information at any time (Settings → Your data → My data), and any owner of a business all of its records (Settings → Download everything); a partner leaving a business takes a copy as section 3 says. If you close your account, everything in it is deleted 30 days later, except what the Privacy Policy says is kept; signing in before then keeps it, so you can still download your records.
• If someone in your records asks to see, correct or delete their information, you answer them; Hand & Seal gives you the tools (Settings → Privacy) and we will help. You keep what the law requires you to keep, such as your journal.

8. Messages sent for you

Invoices, reminders, receipts and other messages go out under your business's name, with replies going to you. You are responsible for what they say and for having your clients' permission where the law requires it. Do not use them to advertise to people who have not asked. Text messages go only to clients who ticked the box agreeing to them on your page, under the text message terms near the end of this page; replying STOP (or QUIT, END, REVOKE, OPT OUT, CANCEL or UNSUBSCRIBE) ends them, and so does a client asking you or us — if a client tells you to stop, tell us at once. Replying HELP brings help.

9. Companies that send orders

If you use Hand & Seal for a company — a title, escrow, lending or law office, or a signing service — to send orders to notaries, these terms apply to you too, with "your records" meaning your company's orders and messages. A company's desk is free. The notary you send an order to is independent of Hand & Seal and responsible for the signing. Documents you send are sealed on your computer for the notary's devices; you are responsible for sending them only to the notary doing the signing. We process the borrowers' and signers' information in your orders on your behalf, as your service provider, under the data processing terms in Schedule A.

• Choosing a notary is yours. Hand & Seal does not screen, vet or background-check notaries for you. It shows what each notary states about themselves and, where a state publishes a list a program may check, whether their commission is on it — and it says which is which. Any vetting your own rules require is yours to do.
• What notaries see of your company. Notaries who take your orders see how quickly your company has paid and how often it has called a signing off late, worked out from the notaries' own records once there are enough of them. If a figure is wrong, tell us through Contact support and we will look into it.
• Inviting a notary or a colleague. An invitation you send through Hand & Seal — to a notary, to take your orders, or to a colleague, to join your desk — says how to stop such emails, and an address that has asked for no more cannot be invited again by email. You can still hand the person a link yourself.

10. Public pages and reviews

If you publish a page, it and your directory listing are public. The directory lists notaries with a current commission who are on a trial or a plan; its order rests on facts about each notary — how near they are, when they are free, the badges they have earned — and nobody can pay to be placed higher. We may remove content that is unlawful, misleading, abusive, or breaks these terms.

Reviews. A review comes only from someone who asked for a signing through your page that was completed here, and everyone who does and gave an email address is asked — once, by email, whatever they thought of it, unless they have told us not to ask. You may reply to a review, and report one to us. You may not write one, have anyone in your business or your family write one, offer anything for one, threaten or accuse a reviewer, or ask a client to agree not to leave one. We remove a review only when its writer asks, the law requires it, it is not from a client of yours, it is abusive or unlawful, or it gives personal information about someone — and we apply those reasons the same way whatever its stars.

11. Using Hand & Seal properly

You agree not to: break the law or anyone's rights using Hand & Seal; send spam; pretend to be someone else, or a notary when you are not one; upload malware; try to get into accounts or systems that are not yours; copy, scrape or resell the directory or the service; or reverse-engineer it except where the law allows.

12. Other companies' services

Parts of Hand & Seal work with services run by others — Stripe, Google (Sign in with Google, Google Calendar), Apple, Amazon. When you connect one, its own terms also apply, and we are not responsible for it.

13. Changes to Hand & Seal

We improve Hand & Seal all the time, and may add, change or retire features. We will give reasonable notice before removing something you rely on. Features marked as a preview may change or end sooner. We do not promise that Hand & Seal will always be available or free of errors, but we work to keep it so.

14. Ending this agreement

You can stop using Hand & Seal and close your account at any time. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms or leaves a bill unpaid, telling you why unless the law or someone's safety prevents it. Sections 5, 6, 7 (downloading your records), 15, 16, 17 and 18 continue after the agreement ends.

15. Disclaimers

Hand & Seal is provided "as is". To the extent the law allows, we disclaim every warranty not stated in these terms, including fitness for a particular purpose. Mileage figures, tax estimates and state rules are estimates and aids: check them before you rely on them for a return or an official act.

16. Limits on liability

To the extent the law allows: neither of us is liable for indirect or consequential losses, or lost profits; and our total liability under these terms is limited to what you paid Hand & Seal in the 12 months before the claim, or $100 if that is more. Nothing in these terms limits liability that the law does not allow to be limited, such as for fraud or harm done on purpose.

17. Indemnity

You will defend us against claims arising from your notarial acts, the content you publish or send through Hand & Seal, or your breach of these terms, and cover the resulting costs.

18. The law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Before either of us starts a case, we will try for 30 days to settle the dispute by email, starting from a written notice that says what it is about (yours to support@handandseal.app). A dispute not settled that way will be decided only in the state courts of Orange County, California, or the federal court for the Central District of California, and each of us agrees to those courts' jurisdiction. Either of us may instead take a claim that qualifies to small claims court, in Orange County or in the county where you work.

19. Changes to these terms

We will post changes here and tell you by email or in the app at least 30 days before an important change takes effect. Using Hand & Seal after that means you accept the new terms.

20. Contact

Tessera Systems, LLC — Hand & Seal, PO Box 7221, Laguna Niguel, CA 92607-7221 — support@handandseal.app

Copyright

What you put on Hand & Seal — your page's words, your photo, your logo — stays yours, and by putting it there you confirm that you have the right to.

If you believe something on Hand & Seal copies your work without permission, send a notice to our designated agent for copyright notices, who is registered with the U.S. Copyright Office: Copyright Agent, Tessera Systems, LLC, PO Box 7221, Laguna Niguel, CA 92607-7221; telephone (415) 964-0745; email support@handandseal.app, with the subject "Copyright". A notice needs: your signature (typed is fine); the work you say was copied; what on Hand & Seal copies it, and where it is; your name, address, telephone number and email address; a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorized by the owner, its agent or the law; and a statement, under penalty of perjury, that your notice is accurate and that you are the owner or may act for the owner.

We take the material down and tell whoever posted it. They may answer with a counter-notice; if it is a proper one, we put the material back 10 to 14 business days later unless you tell us you have gone to court. An account that keeps infringing is closed.

Text message terms

These are for anyone who ticks the box to be texted when asking a notary for a signing through Hand & Seal. The program is called Hand & Seal appointment texts.

• What you get. Texts about the one signing you asked for, sent by Hand & Seal for the notary you asked: that your request arrived; that the notary confirmed, declined or cancelled it; a reminder the day before; and that the notary is on the way. At most 6 texts for each request, and never marketing.
• It is optional. Your request is sent whether or not you tick the box, and its own page shows the same news.
• Cost. We charge nothing for them. Message and data rates may apply, as your mobile plan sets them.
• Stopping, and help. Reply STOP to any text and no more are sent. QUIT, END, REVOKE, OPT OUT, CANCEL and UNSUBSCRIBE do the same, and so does telling the notary or writing to support@handandseal.app; every text says how. Reply HELP for help.
• Delivery. Texts go to United States mobile numbers. Mobile carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages.
• Your number. It is used for these texts and nothing else. Your number and your agreement to be texted are never sold, and never shared with anyone for marketing; our Privacy Policy says what is kept and for how long.

Schedule A — Data processing terms

What this covers. When you put information about other people into Hand & Seal — your clients and signers, their witnesses, the people who book, pay or follow a request on your page, and the borrowers and signers in a company's orders — you decide what is kept and why, and we process it for you. This schedule is our agreement with you about that information ("your clients' information"). It applies to notaries' businesses and to companies alike, it is part of these terms, and where the two differ about your clients' information, this schedule wins.

Our role. For your clients' information we are your service provider: your processor, or contractor, in the words other state laws use. You decide; we act only for you. The few things we decide for ourselves — reviews shown on public pages, the directory, the early-access list and our security records — are described in our Privacy Policy and are not covered here.

What it is, and for how long. Names, contact details and addresses; appointments, orders and their details — a loan's number and its lender among them; invoices and payments; messages; journal index entries (the kind of identification shown and the last four digits of its number, never a picture of it); and photos you choose to keep. We process it for as long as you use Hand & Seal, and then as "When you leave" says.

What we use it for, and nothing else. We process your clients' information only to provide Hand & Seal to you as these terms and our Privacy Policy describe: keeping your records, showing your pages, sending the messages you send through it, taking payments through Stripe, syncing your calendar, passing orders between companies and notaries, keeping the service secure, answering you when you ask for help, and meeting the law. Your use of Hand & Seal, and what you ask of us in writing, are your instructions. We may count and total it in ways that identify no one, to run and improve Hand & Seal. We do not:

• sell it, or share it for advertising;
• keep, use or disclose it for any other purpose, or outside our relationship with you;
• combine it with information we receive from anyone else, except where the law allows a service provider to, such as to detect fraud or keep the service secure;
• use it to provide a service to anyone else, or to build a profile of anyone.

We understand these limits and will keep them. If a law requires us to disclose your clients' information, we tell you first unless the law forbids it.

Our people. Only the people who need it to run Hand & Seal can reach your clients' information, and they are bound to keep it confidential. Every look and every action they take through our support tools is recorded, and none of them can sign in as you. The few people who administer our hosting can reach the database itself; connections to it are logged.

Security. We keep an information security program, with administrative, technical and physical safeguards suited to our size and to how sensitive this information is, and we keep it up to date. Among them: HTTPS only; encryption at rest, with the most sensitive items sealed again with a key of our own; each business's records kept apart in the database itself; documents a company sends sealed so that we cannot read them; two-step sign-in for our staff, and two-step sign-in and passkeys offered to every account; a written incident response plan; and daily backups kept 35 days. Where a company's orders carry nonpublic personal information under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, these are the safeguards we keep for it, as the Federal Trade Commission's Safeguards Rule asks a company to require of the service providers it uses; we use and disclose that information only to carry out the orders it came with.

If something goes wrong. If we discover, or have reason to believe, that your clients' information was acquired or reached by someone not authorized, we tell the account's owners at once — and never later than 72 hours after — by email: what happened so far as we know, when, what information, which of your clients so far as we can tell, what we have done about it, and who to contact. We do not wait until everything is confirmed, and we keep telling you as we learn more. We then help with the notices the law asks of you — a company's notice to the Federal Trade Commission, for example, for which we give you the kinds of information, the dates and the number of people — and with anything the people in your records ask.

Companies we use. The companies that help us run Hand & Seal are listed under "Who else handles it" in our Privacy Policy. Where one of them handles your clients' information for us, it does so under its written terms with us, which require it to protect that information and use it only to provide its service — with one exception, said plainly: OpenFreeMap, which draws the maps, is a free public service with no agreement, and sees only the IP address of whoever is looking at a map and the area shown, never a name or a record. Before a new company starts handling your clients' information, we update that list and tell the account's owners by email at least 30 days ahead; if you object, you may close your account, and we refund the unused part of the period you paid for.

Where it is kept. In the United States: Oregon, with backup copies in Ohio. Our content network's access logs — the IP address, browser and page of each request, and none of your records — are kept in Virginia.

Requests from the people in your records. For a notary's business, Settings → Privacy finds the records that name a person — clients, jobs, requests, orders forwarded by email, journal lines, messages — and takes them out, and says what stays. Six things do: the core of a line in the journal index — who signed, the act, the date, the document, the kind of ID and its last four digits — which is corrected by an amendment and never rewritten; where a drive ended, in the mileage log; a client's name on an invoice already issued, on the lines of the books for what they paid, and in a note on that invoice; a proof photo's picture, without where it was taken or its caption; the town a signing was in, though not its address; and a review the person wrote on your page, without their name or town on it — one whose own words name them we remove if they ask us. What your state has you keep is yours to know; this is what Hand & Seal keeps. A company asks us, and we take the person out of its orders within 10 days — except from an order whose signing is still ahead, which keeps who is signing and where until it is done or cancelled. We help you answer anything this does not cover, and if a person writes to us directly about your records, we tell you and help you answer them.

When you leave. You can download your records at any time. When you close your account, your clients' information is deleted 30 days later and is gone from our backups within 35 days after that, unless the law requires us to keep something; we then keep only that, only as long as required, and still under this schedule. Two things outlive it without a law requiring them, and neither holds a client's name, number or address. The proof that a client agreed to texts — the words they agreed to and when, whether they replied STOP, which texts were sent and for which business, with a one-way code of the number, which nobody without our key can turn back into it — is kept four years after the last text (or after they agreed, when none was sent), because that is how long the law allows a text to be questioned. And the one-way codes of the addresses that asked for no more invitations or requests for a review are kept for as long as such letters are sent: keeping that promise takes it.

Showing that we keep our word. Once a year, and after a breach, we answer a reasonable written security questionnaire, and we give you the information you need to show that your own handling of the information meets the law. Where the law or a regulator requires an audit beyond that, it is at your cost, on reasonable notice, and arranged so that no other business's records are seen.

If we cannot keep these promises, we tell you. You may then stop us processing your clients' information — by asking us, or by closing your account — and take reasonable steps to stop and put right any use of it that breaks this schedule.

Liability. This schedule is subject to section 16, the limits on liability.