Privacy Policy

1. Controller

Solev UG (haftungsbeschränkt), Rienzistraße 18, 70597 Stuttgart, Germany ("Solev UG", "we", "us") is the controller responsible for the data processing described here. Contact: [email protected]. See our Imprint for full company details.

2. Overview

PatentFlow is software for patent law firms and IP departments that is installed and operated on the customer's own servers. Invention disclosures, files, drafts and all other data kept in the software stay exclusively on that infrastructure - we have no access to them (see §7). This policy therefore mainly concerns the data this website processes: what you submit through our contact form, standard technical logs generated by our hosting provider, and the analytics tool described in §6, which only runs with your consent.

3. Contact form

When you use the contact form, we process the name, email address, subject, and message you provide, in order to respond to your enquiry (Art. 6(1)(b) or (f) GDPR - pre-contractual enquiries or our legitimate interest in handling correspondence). Submissions are sent through a Cloudflare Worker to Postmark (Wildbit LLC), our transactional email provider, which delivers the message to our inbox. We retain contact form correspondence for as long as necessary to handle the enquiry and any follow-up, and delete it once it's no longer needed.

4. Spam protection (Cloudflare Turnstile)

The contact form uses Cloudflare Turnstile to distinguish human visitors from automated spam, without the tracking cookies a traditional CAPTCHA would use. Turnstile may process technical signals (such as your IP address and browser characteristics) for this purpose alone. See Cloudflare's privacy policy for details.

5. Hosting & server logs

This website is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Like any web server, Cloudflare's infrastructure automatically logs technical information for every request (IP address, timestamp, requested page, browser user agent) for security and operational purposes (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR - legitimate interest in operating and securing the site). See §6 below for the analytics tool we use with your consent, and our Cookie Policy for details on every cookie this site can set.

6. Web analytics (Google Analytics 4)

With your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR, § 25(1) TDDDG), which you give through the cookie banner Cloudflare Zaraz shows on your first visit, we use Google Analytics 4 (Google Ireland Limited) to understand how visitors use this website (pages viewed, session length, approximate location, device and browser type). Google Analytics only loads if you agree; if you decline, it never runs. Google may process data outside the European Economic Area on the basis of appropriate safeguards such as the EU Standard Contractual Clauses or the EU-US Data Privacy Framework; see Google's privacy policy. You can withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future via the "Cookie preferences" link in the footer of every page - see §9 for your other rights under the GDPR.

7. The PatentFlow software

PatentFlow is installed on and operated by the customer's own infrastructure. The customer, not Solev UG, is the controller for the personal data stored there - for example about inventors, clients and staff. The software sends no usage data, crash reports or telemetry to us and needs no account with us. It only connects to services the customer sets up or uses: their own mail server, the patent offices' interfaces (e.g. EPO Open Patent Services), the official fee pages for the weekly comparison of the fee tables, and - only when the customer configures it and allows it for a client - external AI providers. By default the data is processed by an AI model running on the customer's own server (see §8). If we are given access to an installation for support or maintenance, this happens only under a separate data processing agreement (Art. 28 GDPR).

8. Use of language models (AI) in the Software

The use of large language models in PatentFlow is optional; the Software can be run entirely without AI. A local language model is not required either: the Customer decides whether to switch AI off entirely, to run a local model on the application's server or on a separate server in its own network, or to connect external providers only. If a local model is set up, it processes the data on the Customer's infrastructure by default. Invention disclosures, drafts and other client data do not leave the firm: they are not transmitted to us or to third parties and are not used to train models.

The Customer can additionally connect external AI providers (such as cloud services) and allow them for individual clients; the Software logs every such use. Processing by an external provider is governed by that provider's privacy policy. The Customer decides on the connection as controller; it checks whether it is permissible, including professional secrecy and any consent required, and concludes the necessary contracts with the provider (e.g. a data processing agreement). Solev UG has no influence on this processing and assumes no responsibility for it; for liability see our Terms and Conditions.

9. Your rights

Under the GDPR, you have the right to access, rectify, or erase your personal data, to restrict or object to its processing, to data portability, and to withdraw consent at any time where processing is based on it (see §6 for analytics). You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority - in Germany, the competent authority for Baden-Württemberg is the Landesbeauftragte für den Datenschutz Baden-Württemberg. To exercise any of these rights, contact us at [email protected].

10. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy if how we handle data changes. The "last updated" date above reflects the current version.