unlawfulcharges.comPrivacy Policy
Effective date: July 31, 2026
This privacy policy describes how Maginnis Law, PLLC, doing business as Maginnis Howard ("we," "us," or "the Firm"), collects, uses, shares, and protects personal information submitted through unlawfulcharges.com (the "Site").
About this Site and your relationship with the Firm
This Site is attorney advertising. It exists so that consumers can find out whether they may have a claim against a company we are investigating, and sign up for us to pursue that claim.
Submitting information through this Site does not by itself create an attorney-client relationship. An attorney-client relationship is formed only when you sign a written engagement agreement with the Firm and we accept your matter.
Even before that, the information you send us as a prospective client is treated as confidential. We do not disclose it except as described in this policy or as the rules of professional conduct governing lawyers permit or require.
Information we collect
Information you give us. When you use the eligibility form or sign up, we collect your name and email address, and — if you choose to provide them — your telephone number and mailing address; your answers to the eligibility questions for the investigation you are responding to; your description of the charges or conduct at issue; and your state or region of residence.
Information you give us later. If you become a client, we collect the documents and account records you send to support your claim — receipts, invoices, billing and account statements, subscription and cancellation confirmations, loan or credit documents, correspondence with the company, and similar materials — along with your electronic signature on your engagement agreement.
Information collected automatically. When you visit the Site we collect your IP address, browser and device type, the pages you view, and the referring page or advertisement that brought you here.
Sensitive information
Some of our investigations concern data breaches. If a breach involved health information, government identification numbers, or similar sensitive categories, you may choose to tell us about it so that we can evaluate your claim. We ask for sensitive information only where it is relevant to the claim you are asking us to pursue, we process it only with your consent, and you may decline to provide it.
How we use your information
We use your information to determine whether you are eligible for an investigation; to evaluate, prepare, file, and pursue your claim; to prepare and deliver your engagement agreement for signature; to communicate with you about your claim; to tell you about other investigations, matters, or claims that may be relevant to you; to operate, secure, and improve the Site; and to comply with our legal and professional obligations.
How we share your information
We do not sell your personal information. We do not license or trade it, and we do not share your telephone number with third parties for their marketing purposes.
We share your information only as follows:
Within the Firm. With our attorneys and staff who need it to evaluate or handle your claim.
With co-counsel. Your engagement agreement permits us to associate with other law firms on your matter. Co-counsel are bound by the same duties of confidentiality that bind us.
To pursue your claim. With arbitration forums, courts, and the company your claim is against, and with vendors we use to prepare and file claims — because a claim cannot be brought without identifying the claimant.
With service providers. With the vendors that run the Site and our communications on our behalf — website hosting, email delivery and email-list management, electronic signature, text messaging, and website analytics. They may use your information only to perform those services for us.
When the law requires it. In response to a subpoena, court order, or other legal process, or where disclosure is required or permitted by the rules of professional conduct.
Text messages
If you give us your mobile number, you may receive text messages from us about your claim — requests for documents or information, confirmations, signing links, case updates, and appointment reminders. The telephone number you provide as part of the text-message consent process will not be shared with third parties for marketing purposes.
Message frequency varies. Message and data rates may apply; your carrier may charge you for sending or receiving a message depending on your plan.
Reply STOP to any message to opt out. You will receive no further text messages from us after you do. Reply START to opt back in. Reply HELP, or email us at unlawfulcharges@carolinalaw.com, for assistance.
We send email about your claim — confirmation that we received your submission, your signing link, reminders if you have not signed, and updates. We may also send email about other investigations that may be relevant to you.
Every email includes a link to manage your preferences. You can stop the marketing email and continue to receive essential messages about your existing claim, or stop all email from us.
If you do not qualify
If your answers show that you are not eligible for the investigation you responded to, we keep your contact information and may email you about other investigations you may be eligible for. Many people who do not qualify for one investigation do qualify for another.
You can stop these emails at any time using the link in any email we send, or by emailing us. If you would prefer that we delete your information entirely rather than keep you on the list, say so and we will.
How long we keep your information
Detailed website-visitor records are kept for 120 days, then reduced to summary statistics and deleted.
If you sign an engagement agreement, we keep your file for at least six years after the matter concludes, as our engagement agreement provides and as our professional obligations require.
If you submit information but do not become a client, we keep it to document that we evaluated your inquiry, to check for conflicts of interest, and — unless you tell us to stop — to let you know about other investigations you may be eligible for.
Your privacy rights
Virginia residents have rights under the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act. Subject to the exceptions that law allows, you may:
- Confirm whether we are processing your personal information, and get access to it - Correct inaccuracies in it - Ask us to delete it - Get a copy of it in a portable and readily usable format - Opt out of its use for targeted advertising, for sale, or for profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects for you
Residents of other states may have similar rights under their own state's law. We will honor a request from a resident of any state where the law gives them these rights.
How to exercise your rights. Email us at unlawfulcharges@carolinalaw.com. Tell us which right you are exercising. We may need to verify your identity before we act, and we will not use the information you give us for verification for any other purpose.
We will respond within 45 days. If we need more time, we may extend that once by another 45 days, and we will tell you why before the first period runs out. There is no charge for your first request in a twelve-month period.
If we deny your request. You may appeal. Email unlawfulcharges@carolinalaw.com with "Privacy Appeal" in the subject line, within a reasonable time of our decision. We will respond in writing within 60 days and explain the reasons for our decision. If we deny the appeal, you may submit a complaint to the Virginia Attorney General at oag.state.va.us.
Your right to delete, and its limits. If you ask us to delete your personal information, we will honor that request. Where we cannot remove a record outright, we anonymize it: we strip out the information that identifies you and keep only the de-identified remainder for our own record-keeping and conflict-checking.
One exception matters most. If you have an arbitration or other claim actively pending with us, that claim places a hold on deletion for as long as it remains pending. We cannot pursue a claim on your behalf and at the same time erase the record of who you are and what happened to you, and the rules governing the preservation of evidence in a pending matter require us to keep the file. Once the matter concludes, the anonymize-and-retain approach above applies, subject to the file-retention period set out in your engagement agreement.
If we cannot act on a deletion request in full, we will tell you what we are keeping and why.
Children
The Site is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has given us information, email us and we will delete it.
Advertising and analytics
We advertise our investigations online, including on social media platforms such as Meta (Facebook and Instagram).
To measure whether those advertisements work, we tell the advertising platform when someone who saw one of our advertisements later signed up. So that the platform can match that sign-up to the right person, we share your email address, telephone number, first and last name, and your city, state and ZIP code — each of these in hashed form — together with your IP address and browser type, which are not hashed, and which company's investigation you signed up for. We also share a reference number we use for you internally, in hashed form, and — if you reached us by clicking one of our advertisements — the identifier the platform itself placed on that click, so it can tell which advertisement brought you here.
If you arrive at one of our pages by clicking one of our advertisements, we may also tell the platform that the visit happened, so that we can show follow-up advertisements to people who read about an investigation but did not sign up. For a visit, we share far less than for a sign-up: only the identifier the platform itself placed on that click, which investigation page the click led to, and when the visit happened — never your name, your email address, your IP address, or your browser type. If you did not arrive by clicking one of our advertisements, no visit is reported at all.
Hashing scrambles a value into a string of characters, so the platform does not receive your email address or your name as you typed them. It is how the platform matches you to an advertisement it showed you. It is a matching technique rather than a way of making you anonymous, and you should assume the platform can identify you from it.
We do not send the platform your description of the charges, your documents, your account records, or anything else you tell us about your claim.
You can opt out of this. Email us at unlawfulcharges@carolinalaw.com and ask us to stop using your information for advertising measurement, and we will.
You can also opt out directly in your browser, without giving us your name or email address. Visit unlawfulcharges.com/ad-preferences and choose to opt out; we will set a cookie in your browser, and while it is present we will not report anything from that browser to the advertising platform — not visits, and not sign-ups or signatures either. We also honor the Global Privacy Control signal: if your browser sends it, we treat it exactly like the opt-out above, with nothing for you to click. Be aware of this opt-out's honest limit: because it lives in a cookie, it applies only to the browser and device you set it on, and clearing your cookies removes it — on another device, or after clearing cookies, you would need to opt out again. Visiting our pages while opted out renews the cookie automatically.
We also use website analytics to understand how people find and use the Site. Some of this is our own software, running on our own servers, and that information stays with us.
We also use Google Analytics. This means Google receives information about your visit — the pages you view, the approximate location your internet connection reports, and the type of device and browser you use. We do not send Google your name, your email address, your telephone number, or your answers about your claim.
The sign-up form is protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, a service that tells real visitors apart from automated ones. To do that, Cloudflare receives your IP address and basic technical information about your browser.
How we protect your information
Personal information is encrypted in transit and at rest. Access is limited to the Firm's attorneys and staff and to the service providers described above. No system is perfectly secure, but we maintain reasonable safeguards appropriate to the sensitivity of the information we hold.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy we will post the updated version here and change the effective date above. If a change is significant, we will make reasonable efforts to notify you.
Contact us
Maginnis Howard
7706 Six Forks Road, Suite 101 Raleigh, NC 27615 (919) 526-0450 unlawfulcharges@carolinalaw.com
Contact
Maginnis Howard
For questions about this privacy policy or your personal data, contact us at unlawfulcharges@carolinalaw.com.