Terms of Service & Subscription Agreement

Scout Agent - Lane & Associates

Effective Date: July 4, 2026. Version: launch-2026-07-04.

1. Agreement Overview

These Terms of Service and Subscription Agreement ("Agreement") constitute a legally binding contract between Lane & Associates ("Company," "we," "us," or "our") and the individual or entity accessing or using Scout Agent ("User," "you," or "your").

By accessing Scout Agent, creating an account, or processing any submission through the platform, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by this Agreement in its entirety. If you do not agree, you must immediately cease all use of the platform.

This Agreement governs all use of Scout Agent, including the web application, API access, generated reports, and any related services provided by Lane & Associates.

Scout Agent is offered for business use by insurance and underwriting professionals. You may use Scout Agent only if you are at least 18 years old and have authority to accept this Agreement for yourself and, if applicable, the company or organization you represent.

If you create or administer an account for a company, you represent that you are authorized to do so for that company and that the information you provide, including the company name and work email domain, is accurate.

2. Description of Service

Scout Agent is an underwriting workflow assistance platform that processes ACORD insurance submission documents (PDF and XML formats) and produces structured location intelligence reports. The Service is designed to assist insurance professionals by:

  • Parsing and extracting data from ACORD 125, 823, and 140 submissions
  • Geocoding and verifying insured premises addresses via third-party mapping services
  • Providing links to publicly available crime and risk reference data for submitted locations
  • Generating structured Location Intelligence Reports in DOCX format

Scout Agent is an underwriting support and workflow efficiency tool. It does not constitute underwriting advice, risk analysis, binding authority, or insurance coverage of any kind.

Accounts may be created by invitation or, when public sign-up is enabled, by a verified work email for a new company account. Public sign-up requires email verification before the account is activated. Free or personal mailbox domains are not eligible for public sign-up, and public sign-up does not automatically join a user into an existing company account.

3. Disclaimer of Underwriting Authority

THIS IS CRITICAL. PLEASE READ CAREFULLY.

Scout Agent is a software tool designed to assist underwriting professionals. It does NOT:

  • Make underwriting decisions or recommendations
  • Approve, decline, or bind insurance coverage
  • Guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or fitness of any report output
  • Replace the judgment of a licensed underwriter or insurance professional
  • Constitute legal, financial, regulatory, or professional advice of any kind

All outputs generated by Scout Agent are informational only. Users are solely responsible for independently verifying all report data and for any underwriting, business, or coverage decisions made in connection with Scout Agent outputs. Lane & Associates expressly disclaims all liability arising from reliance on Scout Agent reports without independent verification.

4. Accuracy and Data Disclaimer

Scout Agent relies on third-party data sources including but not limited to Google Maps, geocoding services, and publicly available crime and risk databases. Lane & Associates makes no representations or warranties regarding:

  • The accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of third-party data
  • The accuracy of address resolution or geocoding results
  • The reliability of crime and risk reference data from external providers
  • The successful parsing of all ACORD submission formats
  • The completeness of field extraction from any given submission

Report outputs may contain errors, omissions, or inaccuracies. Users must independently verify all material information before relying on any Scout Agent output for any purpose.

Scout Agent is not a consumer reporting agency and Scout Agent outputs are not consumer reports. You must not use Scout Agent as the sole basis for any legally regulated eligibility, adverse-action, pricing, coverage, employment, housing, credit, or similar decision. You are responsible for applying your own professional review, carrier guidelines, regulatory duties, and fair-use obligations before taking any action based on a report.

5. Subscription Terms and Billing

5.1 Subscription Plans

Scout Agent may be offered on a trial, invite-only, beta, subscription, written order, or other paid access basis. The plan, price, included usage, and features for your account are the terms shown in Scout Agent, published by Lane & Associates, or agreed in a separate written order or agreement.

5.2 Payment

If your account is on a paid plan, fees are due according to the applicable order, invoice, checkout, or payment terms. All fees are charged in U.S. dollars unless stated otherwise. If online card billing is enabled, payment may be processed through Stripe or another payment processor, and you authorize the applicable recurring or one-time charges presented at checkout or in the order terms.

5.3 Failed Payments

If payment is required and not received when due, Lane & Associates may suspend, downgrade, limit, or terminate access until all outstanding amounts are paid. We may also decline to renew, expand, or restore access for accounts with chronic payment failures or disputed charges.

5.4 Refunds

Subscription fees are non-refundable except as required by applicable law or as expressly agreed in writing by Lane & Associates. Partial-month refunds are not provided upon cancellation.

5.5 Cancellation

You may cancel a paid subscription or request account closure by contacting Lane & Associates. Unless a separate written order says otherwise, cancellation takes effect at the end of the current paid period and does not entitle you to a partial-period refund.

6. Usage Limits, Fair Use, and Account Suspension

6.1 Usage Limits

Each subscription tier includes defined usage limits (submissions processed per month, API calls, or equivalent metric as specified in the applicable plan). Usage limits are reset at the start of each billing cycle.

6.2 Excessive Usage

Lane & Associates reserves the right to throttle, suspend, or terminate access for any account that:

  • Exceeds the usage limits of the applicable subscription tier
  • Generates excessive API costs, compute load, or third-party service charges disproportionate to the subscription level
  • Uses automated scripts, bots, or bulk submission processes not consistent with normal human-operated use
  • Attempts to circumvent usage limits through multiple accounts or other means

In cases of excessive usage, Lane & Associates will make reasonable efforts to notify the User before suspension and may offer an upgraded plan as an alternative.

6.3 Immediate Suspension Rights

Notwithstanding the above, Lane & Associates reserves the right to immediately suspend or terminate any account, without prior notice, for:

  • Non-payment or chargeback of subscription fees
  • Violation of any provision of this Agreement
  • Suspected fraudulent, abusive, or illegal activity
  • Any use of Scout Agent that creates legal, regulatory, or reputational risk for Lane & Associates
  • Breach of confidentiality obligations
  • Unauthorized sharing of account credentials

Lane & Associates will provide written notice of suspension or termination and the reason therefor as promptly as practicable. Suspended accounts may appeal by contacting Lane & Associates directly.

7. Acceptable Use Policy

Users agree to use Scout Agent solely for lawful, legitimate insurance underwriting workflow purposes. The following are expressly prohibited:

  • Processing submissions for which you do not have lawful authorization
  • Uploading files containing malware, viruses, or malicious code
  • Uploading information you are not authorized to process or information that is not reasonably necessary for the underwriting workflow you are performing
  • Attempting to reverse engineer, decompile, or extract Scout Agent's source code or pipeline logic
  • Attempting to probe, scan, bypass, or test Scout Agent security controls without prior written authorization from Lane & Associates
  • Reselling, sublicensing, or providing Scout Agent access to unauthorized third parties
  • Using Scout Agent outputs to build competing products or services
  • Scraping, bulk-downloading, or harvesting report outputs beyond normal business use
  • Submitting false, fabricated, or fraudulent insurance submissions
  • Creating accounts, invites, or companies using false identity information, domains you do not control, or email addresses you are not authorized to use
  • Sharing login credentials or allowing multiple people to use one individual account
  • Interfering with or disrupting Scout Agent's servers, infrastructure, or other users

8. Data Handling and Confidentiality

8.1 Submission Data and Retention

Scout Agent processes submission files transiently. Uploaded submission files, intermediate processing files, and generated reports are removed by an automated cleanup process, normally within about two hours of processing. Scout Agent does not maintain a long-term database of submission content.

Scout Agent retains limited content-free operational run metadata - such as a job identifier, user identifier, company identifier, file type and count, processing status and stage, location count, building count, an extraction-method indicator, a flag for whether AI assistance was used, error category, timestamps, and duration. This operational metadata contains no submission content: no insured names, addresses, policy data, filenames, or raw error text.

8.2 Account, Invite, Signup, and Communications Data

Scout Agent retains account and company records needed to operate the Service, including usernames, email addresses, company names, roles, account status, company status, plan or quota tier, Terms acceptance version and timestamp, email-verification status, and related timestamps. Passwords are stored only as one-way hashes.

Invitation and public-signup flows may store invitee email addresses, invited roles, company names, verification status, token hashes, and timestamps. Plaintext invite and verification tokens are not stored. When transactional email is enabled, Scout uses email delivery providers to send account, invite, and verification messages.

8.3 Confidentiality and Service Providers

Lane & Associates treats all submission data processed through Scout Agent as confidential business information. We will not:

  • Share submission data with third parties except with the service providers necessary to operate the Service, as described below
  • Use submission data to train machine learning models
  • Retain submission content beyond the operational window described in Section 8.1

To operate Scout Agent, limited data is shared with the following service providers as needed for hosting, account operation, report generation, backups, communications, monitoring, and payment processing if billing is active:

  • Render - hosts and runs the Scout Agent application.
  • Cloudflare - provides DNS, custom-domain routing, and off-disk backup storage through Cloudflare R2 for database backup objects.
  • Postmark - when email delivery is enabled, receives the recipient email address, company or team display name, invited or signup-related role/context, and one-time account link needed to deliver transactional account emails. Postmark does not receive uploaded documents, submission content, generated reports, insured names, or property addresses solely because it sends email.
  • Google Maps Platform - receives premises address or location information for geocoding, map links, and Street View imagery.
  • Anthropic (Claude commercial API) - may receive selected ACORD text or rendered page images when Scout Agent's deterministic (rule-based / form-field) extraction cannot read a submission on its own, such as scanned, image-based, garbled, or atypically formatted PDFs. For typical machine-readable submissions, no content is sent to Anthropic. This is a commercial API; the provider does not use the submitted data to train its models absent an express opt-in, and Scout Agent has not opted in.
  • BestPlaces - link-only. Scout Agent builds a public crime-information reference URL for inclusion in the report; it does not transmit submission documents to BestPlaces.
  • Healthchecks.io and similar monitoring endpoints - may receive content-free operational health or backup-success pings, not submission content.
  • Stripe or another payment processor - only if billing is active for your account, receives payment and billing information needed to process charges and manage subscriptions.

Users acknowledge that address and location data is necessarily transmitted to third-party geocoding and mapping services as part of core pipeline functionality, and that the conditional AI-assisted processing described above may transmit selected submission text or page images to the AI service provider for documents its deterministic extraction cannot read on its own.

8.4 Security

Lane & Associates implements reasonable technical safeguards including encrypted transmission (HTTPS/TLS), hashed credential storage, protected session cookies (Secure, HTTP-only, with SameSite restrictions), login throttling and account soft-lockout against credential-guessing, and per-account access controls that scope each user to their own jobs and reports. Users are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of their account credentials and for all activity occurring under their account.

If Scout Agent identifies a security incident affecting customer data, Lane & Associates will notify affected customers and provide information reasonably needed for their own compliance and notification obligations.

8.5 User Responsibility

Users are solely responsible for ensuring they have all necessary rights, consents, and authorizations to upload and process submission data through Scout Agent. Users represent that their use of Scout Agent complies with all applicable privacy laws, carrier agreements, broker obligations, customer confidentiality obligations, and internal authorization rules.

8.6 Data Requests, Deletion, and Backups

Uploaded files and generated reports are automatically deleted after the temporary processing window described in Section 8.1. Account records and operational metadata may be reviewed, exported, disabled, removed, or pruned through Lane & Associates' operational processes, subject to legal, operational, security, fraud-prevention, audit, and compliance needs.

Removal of an account may erase direct account identifiers while retaining content-free operational and audit metadata by numeric ID. Database backups may retain prior account or operational state until those backups rotate or are otherwise deleted under the applicable backup lifecycle. Lane & Associates will not represent that data has disappeared from all backups immediately upon an account removal request.

9. Intellectual Property

Scout Agent, including its pipeline logic, report templates, code, design, and all related intellectual property, is owned exclusively by Lane & Associates. Nothing in this Agreement transfers any ownership rights to the User.

Users retain ownership of the submission data they upload. Users are granted a limited, non-exclusive license to use Scout Agent reports generated from their own submissions for internal business purposes only.

10. Limitation of Liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, LANE & ASSOCIATES SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO YOUR USE OF SCOUT AGENT, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOST PROFITS, LOST DATA, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, OR ERRORS IN REPORT OUTPUTS.

IN NO EVENT SHALL LANE & ASSOCIATES' TOTAL CUMULATIVE LIABILITY TO ANY USER EXCEED THE GREATER OF ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS ($100) OR THE TOTAL FEES PAID BY THAT USER FOR SCOUT AGENT IN THE THREE (3) MONTHS IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING THE CLAIM.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or limitations on liability. In such jurisdictions, the above limitations apply to the fullest extent permitted by law.

11. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Lane & Associates and its officers, directors, employees, and agents from and against any claims, damages, losses, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising from:

  • Your use of Scout Agent in violation of this Agreement
  • Your violation of any applicable law or regulation
  • Your submission of data you were not authorized to process
  • Any underwriting or business decision made in reliance on Scout Agent outputs
  • Your infringement of any third-party intellectual property or privacy rights

12. Service Availability and Modifications

Lane & Associates will make reasonable efforts to maintain Scout Agent availability but does not guarantee uninterrupted service. Scheduled maintenance, third-party API outages, or infrastructure issues may result in temporary unavailability. Lane & Associates shall not be liable for any losses arising from service interruptions.

Lane & Associates reserves the right to modify, update, or discontinue Scout Agent features at any time. Material changes to core functionality will be communicated to active subscribers with reasonable advance notice.

13. Third-Party Services

Scout Agent depends on third-party services for hosting, DNS, backup storage, monitoring, email delivery, payment processing if active, geocoding, Street View imagery, conditional AI-assisted extraction, and link-only public reference data. These services may include Render, Cloudflare, Healthchecks.io, Postmark, Stripe, Google Maps Platform, Anthropic, and BestPlaces, depending on the feature being used and the configuration enabled at the time.

Use of Scout Agent is subject to the applicable terms and policies of these third-party providers. Lane & Associates is not responsible for the availability, accuracy, or conduct of third-party services. Disruption of third-party services may affect Scout Agent functionality.

14. Governing Law and Disputes

This Agreement shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Louisiana, without regard to its conflict of law provisions. Any dispute arising under this Agreement shall be resolved exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Louisiana, and each party consents to personal jurisdiction in such courts.

Prior to initiating any legal proceeding, the parties agree to attempt good-faith resolution of any dispute through direct negotiation for a period of thirty (30) days following written notice of the dispute.

15. Modifications to This Agreement

Lane & Associates reserves the right to modify this Agreement at any time. Updated terms will be posted to the Scout Agent website with the revised effective date. For material changes, Lane & Associates will provide at least thirty (30) days advance notice to active subscribers via email. Continued use of Scout Agent after the effective date of any modification constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.

16. Termination

Either party may terminate this Agreement at any time. Upon termination:

  • User access to Scout Agent will be immediately revoked
  • No refunds will be issued for the remaining subscription period except as required by law
  • Any outstanding amounts owed by User remain due and payable
  • Sections 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 14 of this Agreement survive termination

17. Entire Agreement

This Agreement, together with any applicable Order Form or separate written agreement executed by both parties, constitutes the entire agreement between the parties with respect to Scout Agent and supersedes all prior discussions, representations, and agreements. If any provision of this Agreement is found unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in full force and effect.

18. Contact Information

For questions regarding this Agreement, billing, account suspension, or data handling, contact:

Lane & Associates
Scout Agent Support
app.tryscoutagent.com
Notice / support email: hlandry@gotolane.com

(c) 2026 Lane & Associates. All rights reserved. Scout Agent is a proprietary product of Lane & Associates.