Terms of use — Munnodi (முன்னோடி)

Version 2, 20 September 2026. These terms are also the page at /terms in the app, and they are written to be read by the advocate relying on them, not around them.

0. The short version

Munnodi is research assistance, not advice. Everything you do with what it gives you is your own professional act, done on your own judgement and at your own risk. Check every judgment before you rely on it. The person who built and runs Munnodi accepts no responsibility for any outcome of your use of it — see §10, which is not boilerplate and is meant exactly as it reads.

1. What Munnodi is

Munnodi searches judgments of the Madras High Court and the Supreme Court of India that are held on the machine it runs on, and answers questions about civil and family matters from them. Every sentence of an answer is checked against the judgment it comes from before you see it. What cannot be checked is not said.

Munnodi informs your judgement. It does not substitute for it. It will tell you what judgments hold and what their holdings depend on. It will not tell you what to do, what to file, or how your case will turn out, and you should not treat anything it produces as advice. The professional responsibility for the matter stays entirely with you.

2. What Munnodi is not

• Not legal advice, and no advocate–client relationship arises from using it.
• Not a complete picture of the law. It knows the judgments in its corpus and nothing else. Unreported orders, district court decisions, tribunal decisions, statutes it has not ingested and judgments it never fetched are outside what it can see.
• Not a check on your opponent. "No judgment in the corpus addresses this" is a statement about the corpus, not about the law.
• Not a drafting tool. It does not write pleadings, notices or submissions.

3. What "verified" means

A verified answer (VALID) means grounded in the evidence Munnodi holds — every claim points at a passage of a real judgment, every quotation is the court's own words, and every provision it names is stated in a passage it cites.

It does not mean correct as a matter of law. A judgment may have been overruled by a decision not in the corpus; a passage may be obiter; a rule may not survive your facts. Munnodi flags what it can see — that an authority was overruled, that a judgment followed an authority since overruled, that a section has been repealed — and it cannot flag what it cannot see.

Read the judgment before you rely on it. Every authority in an answer links to its full text for exactly that reason.

4. Confidentiality and what leaves this machine

Searching, ranking and verification happen on the machine Munnodi runs on. One thing goes out to a third party: the text of your question, which is sent to Anthropic's Claude API to draft the answer.

Before that happens:

• Names, places, phone numbers, email addresses, Aadhaar and PAN numbers, account numbers, door and survey numbers and case numbers are replaced with placeholders.
• You are shown exactly what will be sent and can edit it before it goes.
• The replacement is a rule. It does not catch everything, and it sometimes replaces something it need not. The preview is the control, not the rule — read it.

The words you typed are never written to disk. Only the text you approved is stored.

Keep in mind that a legal question can carry privileged material even with every name removed. Do not enter client-identifying detail, and do not enter anything you would not be willing to have processed by a third-party service in the United States.

5. What is stored, and who can see it

The person who runs this copy of Munnodi can see all of it, including your questions in their de-identified form. There is no other recipient. The audit record cannot be edited or deleted, by them or by anyone: it is chained and checked.

Anthropic's own handling of the text sent to it is governed by their terms, not by these.

6. Your account

Invite only. An admin creates an invite addressed to one email address, and only that address can use it; it works once. You sign in with that address and a password you choose.

• The account is yours alone. Do not share it, your password, your invite code or a reset code. Anything done through your account is treated as done by you.
• Your questions are yours. No other advocate using this copy of Munnodi can see your questions, your answers, your history or your quota, and the application does not offer any way for them to try. The admin can — see §5.
• Your quota is yours. A daily limit on questions, because answers cost money from a shared and finite budget. The admin sets it and can change it.
• Forgotten passwords are handled by a person. Munnodi sends no email. The admin issues a one-time reset code, good for a day, and hands it to you. Anyone holding that code can take your account, so treat it like a password.
• The admin can suspend or close an account at any time, for any reason or none, with no notice. This is a small private tool, not a service you are entitled to.

7. What Munnodi refuses

Munnodi answers questions about the law, including the law about concealment, evasion of service, destruction of evidence and perjury, and including when those allegations are made against your client. It refuses to help carry out such an act — a question asking how to hide property from a claim, how to keep a summons from being served, how to destroy or fabricate a document, or how to get a witness to say something untrue is refused, and the refusal is recorded.

This is a narrow, mechanical line, and it is not a claim that Munnodi can tell a good purpose from a bad one. It cannot. The law is public and the questions are identical.

8. Source data and warranty

Judgment text and citation data come from public records: open Supreme Court and High Court data, and in part the Indian Kanoon API, whose logo appears above the results it contributes to.

Powered by IKanoon. Indian Kanoon supplies its data as is, with no warranty of accuracy, reliability, completeness or fitness for any purpose. That disclaimer is passed through to you here, unchanged. Munnodi adds no warranty of its own: it is provided as is, and neither the author nor Indian Kanoon is liable for any loss arising from its use.

Indian Kanoon does not endorse Munnodi, is not associated with it, and did not write its answers.

9. No fee, and no promise of service

Munnodi is not sold, licensed or charged for. If a contribution towards its running costs is ever invited, it is voluntary, it buys nothing, it creates no contract and it changes no one's access or quota.

There is no service level of any kind. It runs on one person's machine, it will be unavailable without warning, it may lose your history, and it may stop existing. Answers stop entirely when the shared budget runs out, which is a number set by a person and not an entitlement of yours.

10. No warranty, and no liability — read this one

No warranty. Munnodi is provided as is and as available, with no warranty of any kind, express or implied — including any implied warranty of accuracy, completeness, currency, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. Nobody warrants that it is correct, that its corpus is complete, that an answer reflects the current state of the law, or that it will be available at all.

Your use is your own act. You are a professional exercising your own judgement. Every filing, submission, advice, omission or decision you make after reading a Munnodi answer is your professional act, for which you are responsible to your client, to the court and to your Bar Council. Munnodi neither practises law nor supervises anyone who does.

No liability. To the fullest extent permitted by law, the author and operator of Munnodi accept no liability of any kind for anything arising out of or connected with your use of it, or your inability to use it. That includes, without limitation: a wrong, incomplete, outdated or misleading answer; an authority that was overruled, distinguished or simply absent from the corpus; a missed limitation period, a dismissed suit, a lost appeal, costs, damages, or professional consequences of any kind; lost or corrupted history or data; and any act of any third-party service used to produce an answer. This applies whether the claim is framed in contract, tort, negligence, statute or otherwise, and whether or not the possibility of the loss was pointed out in advance.

You accept the risk. By using Munnodi you accept that a legal research tool can be wrong, that only you can tell whether an answer fits your matter, and that the responsibility for checking it before you act is yours alone.

What cannot be excluded. Some liability cannot be excluded by agreement — for example liability for fraud, or anything else Indian law does not permit to be excluded. Nothing here attempts to exclude that; the rest of this section stands on its own even if part of it is held to be unenforceable, and each sentence of it is severable.

No relationship. Using Munnodi creates no advocate–client relationship, no partnership, no agency and no duty of care between you and its author, and nothing it produces is a substitute for the advice of a practising advocate instructed on your facts.

11. Changes, and stopping

These terms may change; the version at the top says which set you accepted, and the page at /terms is always the current one. Continuing to use Munnodi after a change is how you accept it.

Ask for your account to be closed at any time, and it will be — your questions and answers go with it. The append-only audit record of what was answered, and when, stays, because it cannot be edited or deleted by design (§5).

Munnodi is built and run by one person for a small number of advocates. If something in here is not what you understood, say so before you rely on it — and if you do not accept §10, do not use it.