Privacy Policy

Tingen Law, PLLC is an immigration law firm in Richmond, Virginia. This Privacy Policy explains what personal information we collect, how we use it, who we share it with, and the choices you have. It covers our website at https://tingen.law and its subdomains and pages, including the client portal at tingen.law/portal.

We wrote this policy in plain English so you can understand it. As lawyers, we owe our clients a duty of confidentiality under the Virginia Rules of Professional Conduct. That duty comes first. If anything in this policy seems to conflict with it, the rules control.

Our Terms of Service also apply when you use our website or portal.

1. What Changed in This Version

Here is a plain-language summary of what is new in this version of the policy:

It now covers only tingen.law, its subdomains, and its pages, including the client portal.
It lists every type of information we collect, and the types we do not collect.
It explains that our website analytics tool reports your approximate location (country and region) but does not store your IP address.
It names each company that helps us run the firm and explains what each one does with your information.
It explains how we check the status of USCIS cases using the USCIS Case Status API.
It tells you that phone calls with the firm may be recorded.
It explains how to ask us to delete your information and how quickly we do it (within 30 days).
It explains how to close your portal account.
It explains what happens to your information if the firm is sold, merged, or closed.
It explains how we will tell you about a data breach.
It commits us to getting your active consent for important changes to this policy. We will post a summary, email it to portal users and active clients (people with a signed engagement agreement and an open matter), and ask portal users to accept the new version at their next login. Continued use of the website no longer counts as consent.
It removes tools we no longer use: Google Analytics, Confido Legal, PayPal, Klarna, Brevo, and WhatsApp.
It updates our fax number and removes an old phone number.

2. Who We Are and How to Reach Us

This policy is issued by Tingen Law, PLLC.

Address: 1503 Santa Rosa Road, Suite 120, Richmond, VA 23229
Phone: (804) 477-1720
Fax: (804) 597-0097
Contact form: https://tingen.law/contactus

Jacob Tingen, our managing attorney, is the person responsible for privacy at the firm. Use the contact form or the phone number above for any privacy request, deletion request, question about a data breach, or notice under this policy.

3. Information We Collect

What we collect depends on how you interact with us. This section describes each situation.

3.1 Website Visitors

When you browse tingen.law, we use Plausible, a privacy-focused analytics tool. Plausible collects aggregate data only, such as which pages are viewed, how visitors arrive at the site, and the general type of browser and device used. It also reports your approximate location by country and region. It works this out from your IP address, and it does not store the IP address.

Plausible does not use cookies, does not collect personal identifiers, and does not track you across other websites. We cannot identify you from this data. We do not collect your precise geolocation (see Section 3.6).

We do not use Google Analytics, advertising pixels, or any other advertising trackers.

3.2 Contact Forms and the Eligibility Quiz

When you fill out the contact form or the eligibility quiz at tingen.law/eligibility, we collect:

Your first name
Your email address
Your phone number (optional)
Your answers to questions about your immigration situation
A short description of your situation, in your own words (optional)
Marketing attribution codes (called UTM codes) that show which ad, search result, or link brought you to our site

Your submission creates a lead or contact record in our case management system so we can follow up with you. The quiz is scored by our own software. No outside company or artificial intelligence vendor scores it. A quiz result is a first look at your situation, not legal advice.

Sending us a form does not make you our client. You become a client only when you sign an engagement agreement with the firm. We still treat what you send us as confidential.

3.3 Client Portal Accounts

To use the client portal, you provide your name, your email address, and a password. We store your password in hashed form, which means we cannot read it. We also keep login session data so the portal knows you are signed in.

The portal shows you information from your client file, including:

Your cases and their progress
Messages between you and the firm
Invoices, payments, and your trust account balance
Payment plans and subscriptions
Documents you upload and documents we share with you
Your personal, contact, and immigration information

Portal accounts have roles (client, staff, or admin). Each role can see only what it needs to see. We may update the portal over time, and this policy covers new versions of it.

3.4 Client File Information

If you hire us, your client file will hold the information needed for your immigration matter. Depending on your case, this can include:

Identity and contact details: your name, date of birth, address, phone number, email, photographs, and identity documents such as a passport or alien registration number
Immigration history: past entries, current status, prior applications, USCIS receipt numbers, notices, and immigration court hearing dates
Family information: details about your spouse, children, parents, petitioners, or sponsors
Financial information, only when your matter requires it (for example, income and tax records for an affidavit of support)
Medical information, only when your matter requires it (for example, the medical exam required for a green card)
Court, police, or other background records, when they matter to your case
Documents you give us, plus the text versions and translations we create from them
Our communications with you, including emails, portal messages, text messages, call logs, and call recordings
Billing records, including invoices, payments, and trust account transactions

3.5 Phone Calls

Aircall handles our phone system. Calls with the firm may be recorded and stored. We record calls to keep your file accurate, to check the quality of our service, and to train our staff. Aircall also keeps call logs, which include the caller's number, the time and length of the call, and any notes our staff record.

We treat call recordings as confidential client information. Aircall stores them for us as a service provider and may not use them for any other purpose.

3.6 Information We Do Not Collect

We do not collect:

Precise geolocation (your exact physical location)
Biometric data, such as fingerprints or face scans
The contents of your phone's contact list

We collect medical information and financial information only when they are part of your immigration matter, as described above. We do not ask for them for any other reason.

3.7 Information About Family Members and Other People

Immigration matters almost always involve other people. To handle your case, we may need information about your spouse, children, parents, a petitioner, or a sponsor. That information becomes part of your client file and is protected in the same way as your own.

Because of this, what you share with us can affect those people. See Section 7 for more on how sharing affects others.

3.8 Information About Minors

Our website and services are intended for adults 18 and older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18 through our website. If we learn that a minor has sent us information without a parent's or guardian's consent, we will delete it.

We do represent minors in immigration matters. In those cases, a parent or guardian provides the minor's information, and it becomes part of the client file.

4. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

Answer your questions and follow up on your inquiry
Screen whether we may be able to help with your immigration situation
Provide legal services, including preparing and filing applications and representing you before agencies and courts
Communicate with you about your case by email, portal message, text message, and phone
Send invoices, process payments, and keep trust account records
Check the status of your USCIS cases (see Section 6.4)
Run, protect, and improve our website and portal
Send you newsletters and other marketing messages, but only with your consent
Understand which ads and links bring visitors to our site
Meet our legal, tax, and professional obligations

4.1 Automated Tools We Use on Your Information

Our own software creates a shared folder for each client, converts uploaded documents into searchable text, and drafts English translations of Spanish-language documents using Google Vertex AI (Gemini). A bilingual staff member reviews and certifies every translation before we use it. Google provides this service under its enterprise data terms, which do not allow Google to use our data to train its models.

4.2 De-identified and Anonymized Data

We do not share de-identified, anonymized, or pseudonymized data with anyone. The aggregate website statistics we get from Plausible are used only inside the firm to understand how our site is used.

5. Cookies

Our website uses only essential cookies. These are the cookies needed to keep you signed in to the portal and to protect the site from attacks. We do not use advertising cookies, tracking cookies, or any other non-essential cookies. Because of this, we do not show a cookie consent banner.

You can block cookies in your browser settings. If you do, you will not be able to sign in to the portal.

6.1 We Do Not Sell Your Information

We do not sell your personal information. We do not trade it for money or for anything else of value. We do not share it with data brokers or advertisers. This applies to everyone who uses our website and to all of our clients.

6.2 Service Providers That Help Us Run the Firm

We rely on a small number of companies to run the firm. Each one handles data only to provide its service to us. Here is who they are and what they do:

Google Cloud hosts our website, our content management system, our automated document tools, and the portal database.
Google Workspace and Google Drive provide our staff email and store client files. Google Vertex AI drafts translations as described in Section 4.1.
Odoo is our case management and billing system. It holds contacts, cases, USCIS filings, immigration court hearings, invoices, trust accounting records, documents, and messages. It runs on Vultr servers managed by Cloudpepper, a managed Odoo hosting provider.
Stripe and LawPay process online payments, recurring payment plans, and trust deposits. We do not store full card numbers. Both companies follow the PCI DSS payment security standard.
Mailjet sends our transactional emails (such as case notifications) and our marketing emails.
Twilio delivers our text messages.
Aircall runs our phone system and stores call logs and call recordings.
Plausible provides aggregate website analytics with no personal identifiers.

These companies are service providers, sometimes called processors. Under our contracts with them, they may use your information only to provide their service to us. They must keep it confidential, and they must follow the same limits set out in this policy. They may not use or disclose your information for their own purposes.

6.3 Government Agencies and Courts

When you hire us, we share information with government agencies and courts as part of your legal matter. This includes U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the immigration courts, the Department of State, and other agencies involved in your case. We do this with your knowledge, as part of representing you.

Once an agency receives your information, that agency's own privacy rules apply to it. We do not control how a government agency uses the information you file with it.

6.4 USCIS Case Status Checks

We use the official USCIS Case Status API to keep track of your USCIS filings. Here is how it works:

For each USCIS filing we handle, our system sends the filing's USCIS receipt number to USCIS.
We send only the receipt number. We send no other information.
USCIS returns the current case status and a short description of it.
Our system does this automatically each night for all filings, and also when a staff member requests a check.
We store the returned status on the filing record in our case management system, where our staff can see it.

Today, this status is not shown in the client portal. We may show it to you in the portal in the future. USCIS is a federal agency that already holds your case, and its own privacy rules apply to it.

Our credentials for this service are stored securely and are never placed in our software code. USCIS does not return a status for certain privacy-protected case types, such as VAWA, T visa, and U visa cases.

6.5 When the Law Requires It

We may have to disclose information to comply with a law, a subpoena, or a court order. Before we do, we consider our duty of confidentiality to you under the Virginia Rules of Professional Conduct. We disclose only what the law requires.

For anything not listed above, we share your information only with your active consent. For example, if you ask us to send information to another lawyer or to a family member, we will do so.

6.7 Rules That Bind Third Parties

Any third party that receives your information from us is prohibited from using or disclosing it for any reason without your active consent. This includes de-identified, anonymized, and pseudonymized data. Our service providers are bound by contract to the terms of this policy. Government agencies are not our service providers and follow their own legal rules.

7.1 Your Choices

You decide what you share with us. In particular:

You choose what to include in a contact form or the eligibility quiz. You can leave optional fields blank.
Marketing emails and text messages are optional. You can opt out at any time (see Section 13).
Using the portal is optional. You can also work with us by phone, email, or in person.
You can ask to see, correct, or delete the information we hold about you (see Section 10).

Complete and accurate information lets us give you sound advice, prepare strong applications, meet deadlines, and keep you informed. Missing or incorrect information can delay your case or lead to a denial.

7.3 Risks and Limits

Sharing information also carries risks you should know about:

Information we file with a government agency is out of our control once filed. The agency uses it under its own rules.
No online system is completely secure. Email and text messages in particular can be read by others if your device or account is compromised.
If you leave information out of a form, our quiz result and our first advice may be less accurate.

Immigration filings often include information about family members, such as a spouse's or parent's immigration status, address, or history. When you share that information, it becomes part of your file and may be filed with the government. This can affect those people. Please share only what your matter needs, and tell family members what you have shared when you can.

8. How We Protect Your Information

We use administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to protect your information. These include:

Encrypted connections (HTTPS) between your device and our website and portal
Role-based access, so staff and clients see only what they need
Hashed passwords for portal accounts
Secure storage of our USCIS Case Status API credentials, which are never placed in our software code
PCI DSS compliant payment processors, so we never store full card numbers
Contracts with every service provider that require confidentiality

No method of storing or sending data is completely secure. We cannot promise absolute security, but we work hard to protect your information, and we will tell you if a breach affects you (see Section 11).

9. How Long We Keep Your Information

9.1 Client Files

We keep client files for the period required by the Virginia Rules of Professional Conduct and by your engagement agreement. After that period, we may securely destroy the file.

9.2 Trust Account and Financial Records

We keep trust account records for at least five years after your matter ends, as Virginia Rule of Professional Conduct 1.15 requires. We keep tax and accounting records for as long as tax law requires.

9.3 Portal Accounts, Including Dormant Accounts

We do not automatically delete portal accounts that go unused. Your account and its data stay in place until you ask us to close the account or delete your data.

9.4 Contact Form and Quiz Submissions

We keep contact form and quiz submissions so we can follow up with you and, if you hire us, add them to your file. We keep them until you ask us to delete them.

9.5 Records Needed for a Legal Matter or Dispute

We keep records that are needed for an ongoing legal matter, claim, or dispute until that matter is resolved.

10. Your Rights and How to Use Them

10.1 Your Rights

No matter where you live, you can ask us to:

Tell you what personal information we hold about you and give you a copy
Correct information that is wrong or out of date
Permanently delete your personal information (see Section 10.2)
Stop sending you marketing emails or text messages
Close your portal account (see Section 10.3)
Give you your client file, as the Virginia Rules of Professional Conduct require

10.2 How to Request Permanent Deletion

You can ask us to permanently delete your data at any time. To do so:

Use the contact form at https://tingen.law/contactus, or
Call us at (804) 477-1720.

Tell us your name and the email address or phone number you used with us. We may ask you to confirm your identity so we do not delete someone else's data by mistake.

We complete deletion within 30 days of your request. The one exception is information we must keep to meet our legal and professional duties. That includes:

Client file records we must keep under the Virginia Rules of Professional Conduct
Trust account records, which we must keep for at least five years under Rule 1.15
Tax and accounting records
Records needed for an ongoing legal matter, claim, or dispute

If we keep anything, we will tell you what we kept and why. Everything else is deleted.

This deletion process covers information we hold. It cannot remove information we have already filed with a government agency or court as part of your matter (see Section 7.3).

10.3 How to Close Your Portal Account

To close your portal account, use the contact form or call us at (804) 477-1720. We close the account within 30 days. Closing your account does not delete your client file. We keep the file under the retention rules in Section 9 unless you also ask us to delete your data.

10.4 California and Virginia Privacy Laws

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) does not apply to our firm because we do not meet that law's size and revenue thresholds. The Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act does not apply for the same reason. Even so, we honor the rights in this section for everyone, no matter which state or country you live in.

11. Data Breaches

If a data breach affects your personal information, we will notify you without unreasonable delay, consistent with Virginia Code Section 18.2-186.6. Our notice will:

Explain what happened
Tell you what information was involved
Give you plain steps you can take, such as changing your passwords, watching your financial accounts, or contacting us with questions

We will also notify government regulators where the law requires. If you have a question about a possible breach, contact us through the contact form or at (804) 477-1720.

12. If the Firm Is Sold, Merged, or Closes

If Tingen Law is sold, merged with another firm, or closes, we will notify our clients in advance. Under Virginia Rule of Professional Conduct 1.17, any successor must honor this policy and our duty of confidentiality to you.

You will also have a choice. Instead of letting the successor take over your file, you can:

Take your file with you, by downloading it or having it transferred to another lawyer, or
Ask us to securely destroy your data

Both choices are subject to the retention duties in Section 9. We will notify all users of any change in ownership of the firm.

13. Marketing Emails and Text Messages

13.1 Marketing Emails

We send newsletters and other marketing emails only with your consent. Every marketing email includes an unsubscribe link. Mailjet sends these messages for us. We also use Mailjet for transactional emails, such as case notifications, which are part of our service and not marketing.

13.2 Text Messages (SMS)

By giving us your phone number and checking the opt-in box on our forms, you give express consent to receive text messages from Tingen Law, PLLC. We use these messages for appointment reminders, case updates, document requests, and support. Twilio delivers them for us.

Message frequency varies.
Message and data rates may apply.
Reply STOP at any time to opt out. Reply HELP for help, or call us at (804) 477-1720.
Consent to text messages is not a condition of receiving legal services from us.

We never share, sell, rent, or disclose your mobile phone number or your SMS consent to third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes.

14. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time. When we make a material change, we will:

Post a plain-language "What changed" summary at the top of this policy
Email the summary to every portal account holder and every active client (a person who has a signed engagement agreement with us and an open matter)
Ask portal users to actively accept the new version at their next login before continuing

For active clients who do not use the portal, the emailed summary is the notice. Continued use of our website alone never counts as consent to a material change. For minor changes, such as fixing typos, updating contact details, or changing formatting, we simply post the updated policy with a new date.

Until a portal user accepts a material change, the version they most recently accepted keeps applying to their use of the website and portal. If you are not a portal user or an active client, the version posted on the website at the time of your visit applies to that visit.

15. Contact Us

If you have any question about this policy or about how we handle your information, please contact us:

Contact form: https://tingen.law/contactus
Phone: (804) 477-1720
Fax: (804) 597-0097
Mail: Tingen Law, PLLC, 1503 Santa Rosa Road, Suite 120, Richmond, VA 23229