Terms of Service

1. What BDAP is and what BDAP is not

Please read this section carefully. It is the most important part of these Terms.

1.1 BDAP is not a law firm. No one who runs, moderates, or administers this platform is acting as your lawyer or anyone else's lawyer.

1.2 Nothing on this site is legal advice. That includes the resource articles, the forum, the Live Lounge, the affidavit form, and anything an administrator or moderator says to you.

1.3 No attorney-client relationship. Using this site does not create an attorney-client relationship between you and BDAP, or between you and any other member.

1.4 Nothing you submit here is privileged. Because BDAP is not a law firm, ordinary legal privilege does not apply to your affidavit, your forum posts, your Live Lounge messages, or anything else you write here. Treat everything you write as something that could someday be read by someone outside this platform.

1.5 BDAP charges nothing, ever. We do not charge fees, ask for donations, or process payments of any kind. There is no payment system anywhere on this platform. Applying for Borrower Defense at studentaid.gov is always free. If anyone tells you they can speed up your application for a fee, they are running a scam, and they are not connected to BDAP.

1.6 No law firm has been retained. We may show an anonymized summary of member statements to law firms who might be willing to take on this kind of case (see Section 5). No firm has agreed to represent anyone. We do not promise that any firm will take your case, that any application will succeed, or that submitting a statement here will lead to any particular result.

1.7 BDAP is run by volunteers. We are not a law firm, a debt relief company, or a government agency, and we do not have paid staff.

2. Membership and real names

2.1 You must use your real legal name. Pseudonyms and fake names are not allowed. A sworn statement only means something if it comes from a real, identifiable person, so we ask for your real name at sign-up, and it appears on your affidavit, your forum posts, and anywhere else you post.

2.2 You must be 18 or older. You confirm this when you create an account. We currently rely on your word; we do not independently verify your age.

2.3 You are responsible for your account. Keep your password secure. If you turn on two-factor authentication, keep your authenticator app secure too. If you lose access to your authenticator, email hello@bdaproject.org and we will manually verify your identity before restoring access.

2.4 One person, one account. Do not create an account for someone else, or let someone else use your account.

3. Statements you submit

3.1 Your affidavit is a sworn statement. When you fill out the affidavit form, you are declaring, under penalty of perjury, that what you have written is true and correct to the best of your knowledge and recollection. See Section 8 for what happens if a statement turns out to be knowingly false.

3.2 You still own what you write. Submitting a statement does not transfer ownership of your words to BDAP.

3.3 You give us a limited license to use it. By submitting an affidavit, you give BDAP permission to: (a) store your statement and any documents you upload; (b) show it to BDAP administrators so they can review it; (c) show it, once approved, to other verified members inside the vault, under the terms of the Vault Confidentiality Agreement; and (d) include information drawn from it in the anonymized case package described in Section 5.

We do not have permission to do anything else with your statement, including publishing it publicly, without asking you first.

3.4 Do not include certain information. Do not put your Social Security number, bank account numbers, loan account numbers, credit card numbers, driver's license number, or date of birth into any text field or document you upload. Use approximate figures for loan amounts instead of pulling numbers directly off an account statement. If you upload a supporting document, black out or remove this information before uploading it.

3.5 Do not include other people's private information without their permission. If your narrative names another person, keep it to what is relevant to your own experience.

3.6 You can edit your statement. Editing an approved statement sends it back to administrator review, and it is temporarily out of the vault until it is re-approved.

3.7 You can withdraw your statement. Withdrawing removes it from the vault going forward. It does not undo anything already included in an anonymized case package released to a law firm before you withdrew. See Section 5.4.

4. The vault

4.1 The vault is reciprocal. To read anything in the vault, you must have your own approved affidavit on file and you must have signed the Vault Confidentiality Agreement. To read the notarized tier, your own statement must also be notarized and approved. This is the whole point of the vault: nobody reads without being read.

4.2 What other members can see. If your statement is approved, other qualifying members can see your school, program, full legal name, the date you signed, whether your statement is notarized, your stated and actual earnings, your loan balance, your narrative, and the rest of your affidavit. That is essentially the whole thing you wrote.

4.3 The vault cannot be downloaded, exported, printed, or copied. We disable copy-paste in the vault interface on purpose. This does not mean it is technically impossible for someone to get information out through a screenshot or by retyping it, which is exactly what the Vault Confidentiality Agreement prohibits.

4.4 Notarization is optional and never required. You do not have to pay for notarization if that would be a hardship. It only unlocks access to the notarized tier of the vault; it changes nothing else about your standing on the platform.

4.5 We can revoke vault access. If you violate the Vault Confidentiality Agreement or these Terms, we can revoke your access to the vault at any time, without advance notice.

5. The anonymized case package

5.1 What it is. From time to time, BDAP administrators prepare a case package to show a prospective law firm how many people are in this situation and how similar their experiences are. This is the mechanism by which information about members leaves this platform and reaches an outside party.

5.2 Who prepares it. Only BDAP administrators prepare the case package. No ordinary member has the ability to export or bulk-download vault content, and the package is never simply a copy of the vault.

5.3 What "anonymized" means here. The package is built to avoid identifying you to a firm that has not yet agreed to take anyone on. At a minimum, it leaves out your full legal name and any direct identifiers like your address, phone number, or account details. It may include your school, aggregate figures such as the number of members and the range and typical amount of the claims made to them, and paraphrased or grouped narrative themes. We will not include your name or other directly identifying details in a package released to a firm unless you separately and expressly agree to that, in writing, for that specific release.

5.4 Notice and the right to opt out. Before administrators release a case package to a specific firm, we will make a reasonable effort to post notice in the forum that a release is planned, and to give members a window to ask that their information be left out of that specific release. Once a package has been delivered to a firm, we cannot retract information from the copy that firm already has, even if you later withdraw your statement or delete your account.

5.5 Conditions on the firm. We ask any prospective firm receiving a case package to use it only to evaluate whether to take on this matter, and not to publish, sell, or further distribute it. We do not currently have a signed agreement in place with recipient firms confirming this. Until we do, treat this as our stated policy and intent rather than a guaranteed, enforced condition.

5.6 No firm is engaged by giving them the package. Sharing a case package with a firm does not mean that firm represents you, has agreed to take your case, or has agreed to take anyone's case.

6. Community conduct

6.1 This applies everywhere on the platform, including the forum and the Live Lounge.

6.2 Do not: (a) harass, threaten, or abuse other members; (b) post discriminatory or hateful content; (c) spam, or advertise goods or services; (d) offer or solicit paid legal help, paid application assistance, or any other paid service through the platform; (e) give other members legal advice - share your own experience instead, and let them draw their own conclusions; (f) impersonate anyone, or misrepresent your identity or affiliation; (g) post someone else's private information without their permission; (h) attempt to access another member's private information, including by circumventing the vault's reciprocity rules.

6.3 The Live Lounge has its own rules, shown in the room: real names only; you have five minutes to delete your own message after posting it; no Social Security numbers, account numbers, or other people's private details; nobody from BDAP will ever ask you for money, and you should report anyone who does; and Lounge history is not searchable, so anything important belongs in the forum instead.

6.4 Moderators and administrators can edit, remove, lock, or delete content, and can mute or suspend a member's ability to post, with a stated reason. A muted or suspended member can generally still read the platform but cannot post. We keep a record of moderation actions, including who took the action and why, and we will tell you if action is taken against your content or your standing.

6.5 Report anything that concerns you. Any member can report a post, thread, or Lounge message. A person reads every report; nothing is removed automatically by a report alone.

7. Intellectual property and copyright complaints

7.1 Our content. The BDAP name, the site design, and the text we write ourselves belong to BDAP. Your own affidavit and forum posts belong to you, subject to the license you give us in Section 3.3.

7.2 Copyright complaints. If you believe something posted on BDAP infringes your copyright, email hello@bdaproject.org with: a description of the copyrighted work, a description of and link to the material you believe infringes it, your contact information, and a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorized. We will review the complaint and may remove or restrict access to the material while we look into it.

7.3 Counter-notice. If your content was removed because of a complaint and you believe that was a mistake, email us at the same address and explain why.

8. False statements and perjury

8.1 Your affidavit is sworn. When you check the boxes and submit your affidavit, you are declaring under penalty of perjury that it is true and correct to the best of your knowledge and recollection. This is not a formality.

8.2 Consequences on the platform. If BDAP has reason to believe a statement was knowingly false, we can reject or remove it from the vault, remove it from any future case package, suspend or terminate the member's account, and refuse future membership.

8.3 Consequences beyond the platform. Submitting a knowingly false sworn statement can carry legal consequences outside of BDAP, separate from anything we do here. We are not your lawyer and this is not legal advice about what those consequences might be. If you are unsure whether something you want to write is accurate, say so in your narrative rather than guessing.

9. Account termination and data deletion

9.1 You can leave at any time. You can delete your own account from your profile settings.

9.2 What deleting your account does. When you delete your account: (a) your affidavit and its review history are removed; (b) the files and documents you uploaded are deleted from storage; (c) your profile is removed; (d) your Live Lounge messages, notifications, watched threads, membership standing record, vault agreement signature, and assigned role are removed; and (e) your login credentials are deleted, so you can no longer sign in.

9.3 Forum content. Threads and posts you started that nobody else replied to are removed. Where other members have already replied, the discussion is kept but your contribution is detached from your account and shown without your name, so a conversation other people took part in is not erased along with your account.

9.4 What we keep. We keep a minimal record where we need it for the integrity of the vault's audit trail, moderation history, or safety and legal reasons. Those records do not include your affidavit content or your uploaded documents.

9.5 If you want more removed. If you want us to remove additional information beyond what account deletion automatically removes, email hello@bdaproject.org and we will remove what we reasonably can, on a case-by-case basis, except where we need to keep a minimal record for audit, legal, or safety reasons.

9.6 We can terminate your account. We can suspend or terminate your account for violating these Terms, the Vault Confidentiality Agreement, or applicable law.

9.7 Effect on a released case package. Deleting your account, withdrawing your statement, or being terminated does not remove your information from any anonymized case package already delivered to a firm before that point. See Section 5.4.

10. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

10.1 The platform is provided "as is." We do not promise that the site will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure from every possible intrusion.

10.2 No promised outcome. We do not promise that submitting a statement, having it approved, having it notarized, having it included in a case package, or any law firm reviewing that package, will lead to any particular result, including any result on a Borrower Defense application or any lawsuit.

10.3 Limitation of liability. To the fullest extent the law allows, BDAP and its volunteers are not liable to you for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages arising from your use of the platform. The total liability of BDAP and its volunteers for any and all claims arising out of or related to your use of the platform shall not exceed the total amount you have paid to BDAP for access to the platform, which is zero dollars ($0) because BDAP does not charge fees. This limitation does not apply to liability that cannot be limited under applicable law, including liability for fraud, willful misconduct, or gross negligence.

10.4 Nothing in this section limits liability where the law does not allow it to be limited.

11. Governing law, venue, and dispute resolution

11.1 Governing law. These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, without regard to conflict-of-law rules.

11.2 Venue. You and BDAP agree that any dispute that is not resolved informally or by arbitration under Section 11.4 will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in New Castle County, Delaware, and you agree to submit to the personal jurisdiction of those courts for that purpose.

11.3 Try to resolve it informally first. Before filing an arbitration or a lawsuit, email hello@bdaproject.org with a description of the dispute. We will try to resolve it informally within ninety (90) days. If we cannot resolve it within that period, either party may proceed to arbitration under Section 11.4.

11.4 Arbitration and class-action waiver. Any dispute that is not resolved informally under Section 11.3 will be resolved by binding, individual arbitration rather than in court, except that either party may bring an individual action in small claims court or seek injunctive or other equitable relief in a court of competent jurisdiction to protect intellectual property or confidential information. The arbitration will be administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules (or, if those rules do not apply, its Commercial Arbitration Rules) and will take place in New Castle County, Delaware, or virtually if the parties agree. The arbitrator's award is final and binding, and judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction.

You and BDAP agree that each party may bring claims only in its individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class, consolidated, or representative action. No arbitration may be joined or consolidated with other arbitrations or proceed as a class arbitration, and the arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person's claims or preside over a representative or class proceeding. If a court decides that any part of this paragraph is unenforceable, the remainder of this Section 11.4 remains in effect, and if class procedures are available despite the waiver, they apply only to the extent the law requires.

12. Who may enforce the Vault Confidentiality Agreement

12.1 BDAP may enforce it. If you violate the Vault Confidentiality Agreement, BDAP can revoke your vault access and terminate your membership.

12.2 An affected member may also have their own claim. If your violation caused harm to another specific member, for example by exposing their statement outside the vault, that member may have a legal claim against you directly. BDAP enforcing the agreement against you administratively does not use up or replace an affected member's own right to pursue you.

13. The confidential section and the legal vault

13.1 It is separate from the vault. The affidavit form includes a confidential section. It is clearly labeled. Nothing in it is shown to other members, published in the vault, or included in the anonymized case package. It is stored separately, in the legal vault.

13.2 Who gets in. Access is granted one person at a time to attorneys the collective has vetted, and to the site owner who administers it. Being an administrator or a moderator does not grant access. Every attorney signs a counsel confidentiality agreement before the vault opens, and access can be withdrawn at any time, without notice.

13.3 What attorneys agree to. To keep it confidential, to not disclose it outside their firm without your written permission, to not solicit members for other matters, to not sell or publish it, to contact you directly only if you consented to contact, and to destroy or return every copy within thirty days of the end of their access or review. Every record opened is logged, and every export and printed packet carries a unique tracking number tied to the account that produced it.

13.4 No attorney-client relationship, again. An attorney reading your record does not become your lawyer. That happens only through a separate engagement you sign with that attorney. BDAP is not a party to that engagement, is not your lawyer, and is not responsible for the conduct, advice, fees, or results of any attorney you choose. Because no attorney-client relationship exists at the intake stage, what you write there is not protected by attorney-client privilege.

13.5 We are not paid, and we do not recommend. BDAP receives no fee, referral payment, commission, or share of any recovery from any lawyer or law firm, for vault access, for an introduction, or for anything else. BDAP does not recommend, endorse, or vouch for any particular lawyer or firm. Nothing on this platform is an advertisement for legal services, and no lawyer pays to appear here. Choosing a lawyer is your decision alone, and you should evaluate any lawyer independently.

13.6 You can withdraw your consent. You may remove your confidential section from the legal vault at any time, using the button on the affidavit page. It takes effect immediately, we delete the record within thirty days, and it does not affect your membership or your public statement.

14. Collective governance

14.1 Participation in governance. Members with an approved affidavit may submit proposals, endorse proposals, volunteer to serve as a representative, and, if seated, vote as part of the representative panel. Participation is voluntary and may be withdrawn at any time.

14.2 Your name and votes are visible to members. If you submit a proposal, endorse a proposal, serve as a representative, or cast a panel vote, your display name, the substance of your submission, your vote, and your written reason are visible to other signed-in members and are kept as a permanent record. Votes cannot be edited or deleted once cast. Do not include anything in a proposal, endorsement, or voting reason that you are not comfortable having other members see permanently.

14.3 What the panel can and cannot decide. The panel makes decisions about how this platform and this collective operate. The panel may not decide any matter that would amount to legal advice, any matter concerning an individual member's affidavit, intake, or eligibility, any fee, referral, or compensation arrangement with a lawyer or firm, any requirement that a member pay money to participate, any disclosure of confidential legal vault data outside vetted counsel, or anything conflicting with these Terms, the Privacy Policy, or applicable law. Decisions on such matters are void.

14.4 No representation, no agency. Representatives are volunteer members. They are not your lawyers, they do not represent you individually, and they cannot act or speak on your behalf in any legal matter. Nothing in the governance process creates an attorney-client relationship, a partnership, a joint venture, or an agency relationship among members.

14.5 Administrators as custodians. Administrators carry out passed proposals as custodians of the collective's decisions. Administrators may decline to implement a decision that is unlawful, unsafe, technically infeasible, outside the panel's authority, or that would expose the project or its members to material risk, and will publish the reason.

14.6 Conflicts and recusal. Representatives must recuse themselves from any vote in which they have a personal or financial stake. Failure to disclose a conflict is grounds for removal from the panel.

14.7 Changes to governance. Governance thresholds, voting windows, quorum, and panel size may be adjusted. Material changes will be posted in the members area.

15. Severability and entire agreement

15.1 If any part of these Terms is found unenforceable, the rest still stands.

15.2 These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and the Vault Confidentiality Agreement, are the entire agreement between you and BDAP about your use of the platform, and replace any earlier version of these documents.

16. Changes to these Terms

16.1 We can update these Terms. If we make a material change, we will announce it on the forum and update the date at the top of this page. Continuing to use the platform after a material change takes effect means you accept the update.

16.2 Contact. Questions about these Terms go to hello@bdaproject.org.