OpenVerdict
Enter the CourtRoom

For institutions

What your campus needs from us.

Everything a procurement, privacy or IT review normally asks for, on one page. If something you need is missing, ask and we will add it here rather than answer one committee privately.

What the service is

OpenVerdict for Education is a set of web tools from OpenVerdict Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. It runs in a browser: nothing to install and no integration to configure. There are two tools, and everything on this page applies to both unless it says otherwise.

  • The hypothetical chain. In class, the instructor puts a hypothetical on the screen. Every student answers on a phone or laptop (a result and a one-line reason), the instructor changes one fact, and students answer again. The instructor’s laptop shows every answer with the student’s name; the projector shows a separate room screen that never receives a name. Afterwards each student sees their own answers and the instructor’s notes. Students join with a code and no account. An instructor can group sessions into a course with a class list, which adds up each student’s answers across the term, and can share a course with a teaching assistant or a view-only reader such as an academic success office.
  • Cases and assignments. An instructor picks a real court case from our library (docket cases link to the public court record and are written by our editorial team) or writes one, assigns it to a class or posts a one-off link, and students read the record, cast a verdict, write why, and answer the strongest argument against them. The instructor gets a report of who took part, what they wrote, who changed their mind, and a gradebook they can export.

Data handling

A student on a one-off link gives a first name and nothing else. No email, no password, no account. An enrolled student signs in with an email address and types the name their instructor will see. Real names live in two tables and are readable by exactly two parties: the student and their instructor. Coursework, marks and feedback are readable by the same two. On cases, votes count into the public tally under a juror number that is never linked to a name in public. We hold no student ID numbers, no dates of birth and no addresses.

In a hypothetical chain nothing is public and there is no tally. A student types a name (or none, if the instructor turns names off), then each answer stores the choice, the reason, whether they ticked “OK to call on me”, whether text was pasted into the reason box, how many seconds the answer took, and whether they asked for more time. The pasted-text mark comes from the student’s own browser and is shown to the instructor as a prompt, not as proof of anything. Students read none of this directly: their phone receives the current facts and, after class, their own answers and the instructor’s notes. Only the instructor, and anyone they share a course with, sees answers with names.

How long it is kept. A chain session is deleted 30 days after class, automatically, unless the instructor keeps it or puts it in a course with a keep-until date (for a term record); then it is deleted after that date. Page views on the session pages, which carry an IP address, go at 30 days too. An instructor can delete any session at any time.

The student data page lists every item we store, names who can read each one, and gives the deletion paths. It is the document to send to a privacy office.

Security

Where it runs

Hosting on Vercel and the database and authentication on Supabase, both in United States regions. Those are our only two subprocessors that touch student data.

Row-level security everywhere

Every table holding personal data has row-level security enabled, and access is decided by a policy in the database rather than by the page. A request that should not see a row is refused by Postgres, whatever the browser asks for.

Authorization inside the functions

Privileged operations run as database functions that check who is calling before they do anything. Deleting an assignment checks ownership, granting a role checks for an administrator, creating a class checks for an instructor. None of those checks can be skipped by calling the API directly.

Deadlines are enforced in the database

A locked assignment past its deadline refuses the submission in Postgres, not in the form. Editing the page in a browser does not buy a student extra time.

Transport

HTTPS everywhere, with HTTP Strict Transport Security set to two years on the domain, so a browser that has visited once will not try plain HTTP again.

Audit log

Privileged actions by administrators and editors are written to an append-only audit table by the database itself. There is no update or delete path through the API, so an account cannot erase its own trail.

No third-party scripts run on the education pages, the live session pages, or a case opened under an assignment. There is no advertising network, no tag manager, no session recorder and no analytics SDK there; page counting is first-party and written to our own database. Web fonts are served as a stylesheet from Google Fonts, which means Google sees the request for the font files, and that is the only outside request an education page makes. On the public site, outside the education layer, we run Google's conversion tag for our Google Ad Grants account. It records that a public visitor voted, opened a case, or clicked to donate, and nothing else; it builds no advertising audiences, and it does not load for a browser that sends a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal.

The agreement we sign

Ask us for our data processing agreement template at team@openverdict.net (official contact) and we will send it as a document. It is a starting point for your counsel, not a take-it-or-leave-it form, and we will work from your institution's paper instead if that is easier.

  • Designation of OpenVerdict Inc. as a school official with a legitimate educational interest under FERPA.
  • Use of student data only to provide the service, and for nothing else.
  • No redisclosure to anyone outside the named subprocessors.
  • The subprocessor list, with notice before it changes.
  • The security measures described above.
  • Notice of a confirmed breach to the institution within 72 hours.
  • Deletion of the institution's student data within 30 days of termination, on request.
  • The institution's right to access, correct and delete its students' records at any time.
  • No advertising, no sale of personal information, and no use of student work to train models.

If OpenVerdict stops

We are a small nonprofit, and a review should ask what happens if we stop. Your data is never locked in: an instructor can download every session, the term record, the results by learning outcome and the gradebook as spreadsheets at any time, without asking us.

If OpenVerdict ever stops running the service, we will tell every institution with an agreement in advance, keep the service running long enough for instructors to download what they need, and then delete the student data rather than sell or transfer it.

Accessibility

Our accessibility statement says what we test, what conforms and what does not yet. It names the known gaps rather than claiming a level we have not measured. If a student on your campus cannot use something here, tell us and we will treat it as a defect.

Support and incidents

One address for everything: team@openverdict.net (official contact). Questions, data requests, bug reports and security reports all go there, and we reply within five business days. We have no paid staff and no phone line, and we would rather say that than advertise a service level we cannot hold.

Security researchers are welcome. Report a vulnerability to the same address and we will confirm receipt, tell you what we found, and credit you if you want to be credited. Please do not test against other people's classes.

Current status: no known incidents. Any confirmed incident affecting student data will be posted in this section with the date, what happened and what we did, and institutions with an agreement in place will be told directly within 72 hours of confirmation.

What an instructor needs to start

  • An academic email address, which opens classes and assignments straight away. Anyone else can request instructor access at the classes page and we approve it by hand.
  • Nothing to install, no extension, no plugin, no LMS integration, no single sign-on yet.
  • No accounts for students. A link and a first name is the whole of it.

A short note for instructors

  • Ask for first names. Do not put student ID numbers, full legal names or anything else your registrar treats as protected into the name field. A first name and a last initial is enough for you to mark from.
  • Tell students what is public. Their votes count in the public tally and their arguments appear on the floor, both under a juror number and never under their name. Their written reasoning and their marks are seen by you alone. If you would rather the class argued only among itself, tick the private option when you assign the case.
  • Delete at the end of term. When the marks are in your gradebook, delete the class here. That removes the roster, the assignments, the students' verdicts and reasoning on those cases, the marks and the extensions in one action. Export the gradebook first, because deletion cannot be undone.
  • Point students at the detail. A student who asks what is kept should be sent to the student data page, which also carries the button that deletes everything they wrote.

OpenVerdict Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit incorporated in Tennessee, EIN 41-4726223. Our registered mailing address, the IRS determination letter and the certificate of incorporation are on the verification page or available on request. Funding and spending are on the financials page.

Last updated October 12, 2026.