Settlement Notices

Terms of use

Updated

Settlement Notices is a free, independent information site for people in the United States who have received a class action settlement notice. Nothing is sold here, nothing is asked of you, and nothing on the site is legal advice. These terms identify the operator, set out what you may do with the content and say plainly what the site does not promise.

1. Who operates this site

Operator
Sergio Padilla, a natural person.
Country of residence, and the place from which the site is operated
Mexico. The operator has no establishment, office, branch or agent in the United States.
Contact
hello@settlementnotices.com. This is the site's only contact channel and the address for every communication, including those about privacy and about intellectual property.
Domain name
settlementnotices.com, registered with Cloudflare Registrar in the operator's name.
Hosting and network services
Cloudflare, Inc. (United States), which provides the hosting of this static site on Cloudflare Pages, the content delivery network, the DNS and the forwarding of the site's email. Messages sent to the contact address are answered from the editor's own mailbox, which is hosted by Google.
Readers
The site is written in American English for people in the United States who have received, or want to check, a class action settlement notice.
Activity
Free publication of information about how to check a settlement notice against the official record, what the usual options and deadlines are, and what the official sources say about named settlements and settlement administrators, with tools that run in the reader's own browser. No products or services are sold, no advice is given, no claim is filed for anyone, and nothing is arranged, referred or brokered.

The content of Settlement Notices is general information. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and it cannot replace advice about your own situation. The site reports what official sources say, with the source beside each fact and the day it was checked. Whether that applies to you, and what follows from your particular facts, is decided by someone else.

The editor is not a lawyer. Reading the site, using its tools and exchanging email with the contact address create no attorney-client relationship and no professional relationship of any kind.

The full statement, including who decides questions about a settlement and where to get help, is on its own page: Disclaimer.

3. Independence

Settlement Notices is not affiliated with any court, settlement administrator, law firm or company named on it. Names of courts, administrators, companies and cases appear as plain text for identification only, and no logo, brand color or screenshot of a notice or website is used. Linking to an official site does not mean that its owner has endorsed this one.

4. What the service is

Access to the site is free and open. There is no registration, no account, no newsletter, no comments and no form of any kind. You cannot file a claim, opt out or object to a settlement on this site; those steps are taken through the channels named in your notice.

The tools are part of the information, not a service. They run entirely inside your browser: what you type never leaves your device, it is not sent to any server, it is not stored anywhere and it does not appear in the page's address. Their results apply what the official sources say to what you type, and they bind no court, no settlement administrator, no company, no government office and no one else. A result is never a finding about your own notice.

The site is offered "as is." It may be unavailable at times, the operator may change, suspend or withdraw any part of it at any time, and technical errors are possible.

5. Acceptable use

By using this site you agree to use it lawfully, in good faith and in accordance with these terms, and in particular not to:

6. Intellectual property

The text, the structure, the design, the source code, the tools and the selection and arrangement of the content of Settlement Notices are the operator's own work and are protected by copyright. The name Settlement Notices and the domain settlementnotices.com belong to the operator.

What you may do without asking: read, print, save and share the pages for your own use; link to any page of the site; and quote short passages for information, teaching or research, as long as you name Settlement Notices as the source and link to the page the quotation came from.

What you may not do without written permission: reproduce or republish the content substantially on another site or in another medium, even with attribution; create derivative works from it; extract it systematically by automated means; or use the name of the site in a way that suggests a relationship, an endorsement or a partnership that does not exist.

What is not the operator's property: court rules, court orders, statutes, agency publications and the settlement notices and websites that the site reports on. Those documents belong to their authors or are public, and their origin is cited on every page and explained in How we check. What is the operator's own work is the checking, the organization, the explanation and the tools built on top of them.

Facts taken from a court record, a notice or a government page are restated in the site's own words, with the source linked. Official pages and documents are linked, not copied.

If you believe that content on this site infringes your rights, write to hello@settlementnotices.com identifying the content and the right affected. It will be reviewed and, where appropriate, removed.

This site links to third-party pages, especially to official sources: court websites and records, settlement websites, federal agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Internal Revenue Service, and the websites of settlement administrators. Those links exist so that you can check the fact for yourself.

The operator does not control those pages and is not responsible for their content, their availability, their terms of use or their privacy practices. When you follow one of those links you leave settlementnotices.com and the terms of the destination site apply to you. A settlement website may ask for personal information; what you give there is between you and its operator.

You may link to any page of this site without asking, as long as the link opens the page as it is, without framing it or reproducing it inside another page, and without suggesting a relationship, a sponsorship or an endorsement that does not exist.

8. No warranty

The site is provided "as is" and "as available." The operator does not warrant that the content is complete, that it is current at the moment you read it, that the site will be available without interruption, or that it is free of technical error. Deadlines are extended, settlement websites change and courts issue new orders, and there is always a gap between the day an official source changes and the day the site is corrected.

What the site does promise is method, not outcome: every fact is read in an official source and published with that source and the date it was checked. How that works is described in How we check.

9. Limitation of liability

The operator is not liable for the decisions you make on the basis of this site or for their consequences: filing or not filing a claim, opting out or not, objecting or not, missing a deadline, giving information to a website, or any other act or omission. The decisions are yours; legal advice about them comes from an attorney.

Nor is the operator liable for loss arising from errors or omissions in the content, from the site being unavailable, from a date being out of date between the change and its correction, or from the use you make of the results of the tools.

Nothing in these terms removes or limits any right you have as a consumer under the law of your state or under federal law. Consumer protection laws in the United States set out rights and remedies that a website's terms cannot waive, and this section applies only to the extent that the applicable law allows. It does not exclude liability for anything that cannot lawfully be excluded.

10. Governing law and disputes

The operator is a natural person resident in Mexico and this site is directed at readers in the United States. The operator does not ask you to accept the law or the courts of another country as a condition of reading the site, and these terms contain no arbitration clause, no class action waiver and no jury waiver.

Where the law of your state or federal law applies to you on mandatory terms, that law applies, and you keep the right to bring a matter before the courts of your own place of residence. Mexican law binds the operator because of the operator's residence, which is why the privacy page carries a second part written under that law. If any clause of these terms is held to be invalid, the remaining clauses stay in force.

11. Advertising

As of the site shows no advertising and earns nothing. What the operator intends and how any change would be handled are set out in section A.4 of the privacy policy.

12. Privacy and cookies

How personal information is handled is described in the privacy policy, which contains both the information for readers in the United States and the privacy notice required by the Mexican law that binds the operator. Cookies and similar storage are covered in the cookie policy.

What you type into the tools does not leave your browser: it is processed on your own device and is not sent to any server.

13. Changes to these terms

These terms may change to follow a change in the law, a change in how the site works, or the activation of advertising. Substantial changes are flagged visibly for a reasonable time, and the date of the last change to the site is shown on the What's new page.