Lysias

Privacy Policy

Effective September 1, 2026

Lysias is a writing tool, and what you write is yours. Your briefs, memos, authorities, and settings live in files on your Mac. Lysias has no accounts, no analytics, no telemetry, and no servers of its own. We never see your documents, and we never see you.

What Lysias does not do

• It does not collect, transmit, or store any personal information.
• It does not include analytics, crash reporting, advertising, or tracking of any kind.
• It does not require an account, and there is nothing to sign in to.
• It does not sell or share data with anyone — there is no data to sell or share.

What stays on your Mac

Everything. Your projects are ordinary files you choose where to keep. Snapshots of your drafts, the text of authorities you fetch, your styles, your dictionary, and your preferences are all stored locally. If you enter an API key for a legal-data service (see below), it is kept in the app's private container on your Mac and sent only to that service.

When Lysias talks to the internet

Lysias contacts the network in exactly one situation: when you ask it to fetch the text of a legal authority. Those requests go directly from your Mac to public legal-data services, and they carry only the citation being looked up — never your documents, never anything about you beyond what any web request discloses (such as your IP address, which those services handle under their own policies):

• CourtListener (Free Law Project) — court opinions and citation lookup, with an API token you supply if you choose to.
• The Caselaw Access Project — citation lookup in its public archive.
• The Office of the Law Revision Counsel — the United States Code.
• Cornell's Legal Information Institute — the Uniform Commercial Code.
• New York State Senate OpenLegislation — New York statutes, with an API key you supply.
• Virginia's Legislative Information System — the Code of Virginia.
• The Massachusetts General Court — the Massachusetts General Laws.
• The Kansas Legislature — the Kansas Statutes.
• The South Dakota Legislative Research Council — the South Dakota Codified Laws.
• The Washington State Legislature — the Revised Code of Washington.
• The Minnesota Revisor of Statutes — the Minnesota Statutes.
• Ohio's Legislative Service Commission — the Ohio Revised Code.
• The Michigan Legislature — the Michigan Compiled Laws.
• California's Legislative Counsel — California's codes.
• The Alabama Legislature — the Code of Alabama.
• The West Virginia Legislature — the West Virginia Code.
• The North Carolina General Assembly — the North Carolina General Statutes.
• The Nebraska Legislature — the Nebraska Revised Statutes.
• The Missouri Revisor of Statutes — the Revised Statutes of Missouri.
• Maine's Revisor of Statutes — the Maine Revised Statutes.
• The Council of the District of Columbia — the Code of the District of Columbia.
• The Rhode Island General Assembly — the Rhode Island General Laws.
• The Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau — the Wisconsin Statutes.
• The Arizona Legislature — the Arizona Revised Statutes.
• The South Carolina State House — the South Carolina Code of Laws.
• Nevada's Legislative Counsel Bureau — the Nevada Revised Statutes.
• The Oregon Legislature — the Oregon Revised Statutes.
• The Idaho Legislature — the Idaho Code.
• The Maryland General Assembly — the Maryland Code.
• The New Hampshire General Court — the New Hampshire Revised Statutes.
• The Montana Legislature — the Montana Code Annotated.
• The Connecticut General Assembly — the Connecticut General Statutes.
• The Vermont General Assembly — the Vermont Statutes Annotated.
• The Delaware General Assembly — the Delaware Code.

Fifteen state codes are published where the app can't go and get them — through LexisNexis, as PDFs, or behind a wall that answers a browser and refuses a program. For those, Lysias offers a link and a box to paste the text into. The link opens in your browser, and Lysias is not part of that visit: it makes no request to those sites, and it is not told what you read there. Pasted text is your own text, kept in your project like any other source, and sent nowhere.

The same is true of anything else you have and we can't fetch — a case the archive doesn't carry, a page of the record, a passage of an article. You can paste it in, and whatever the text counts for itself is read out of it: a reporter's star pagination, a transcript's page and line. Nothing about that text reaches us.

If you never fetch an authority, Lysias never makes a network request. The United States Constitution ships inside the app, so citing it needs no network at all.

Purchases

The one-time unlock is processed entirely by Apple through the Mac App Store. Apple's payment system tells Lysias only that this copy is unlocked; we receive no name, no payment details, and no personal information of any kind. Apple's handling of your purchase is governed by Apple's privacy policy.

Links that open in your browser

Lysias can hand a citation to Westlaw, Lexis, or Google Scholar as a convenience. Those open in your web browser, outside the app, and are governed by those services' own policies.

Changes

If this policy ever changes, the change will be posted on this page with a new effective date. Since Lysias collects nothing, we expect it to stay short.

Contact

Questions about this policy: support@lysiasapp.com.