Personal data, or personal information, means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. This includes where a person can be identified directly, such as a person’s name and address, but can also be information where a person is identified in other ways, such as their place of work and job title. As part of our business relationship with you, we may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal data about you as follows:
As part of our service to you, if we need to collect data about children, we will explain to their parent(s) or guardian(s) why we need to collect this personal information and how it will be used. Where we need to collect personal data by law, or under our terms of service with you and you fail to provide that data when requested, we may not be able to provide our legal services to you. We will notify you if this is the case.
We collect data and information about you in a number of ways to include:
Please note that when you supply third party’s personal information, you confirm that you have the permission and authority to do so and that you are compliant with data protection law.
We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal data in the following circumstances:
Note that we may process your personal data for more than one lawful ground depending on the specific purpose for which we are using your data.
If we process any special categories of information i.e. information revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs or trade union membership, genetic data, processing of biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying individuals, health data, or data concerning your sex life or sexual orientation, we must have a further lawful basis for the processing. This may include:
If we process any information relating to your criminal convictions or offences, we will only do so in compliance with data protection legislation. Typically we rely on one of the following lawful bases:
We will use your information for the purpose it has been provided to us. However, we may reasonably consider that we need to use your information for another reason if that reason is compatible with the original purpose. We may collect your personal information for the following reasons:
We may use your personal data to form a view on what we think may be of interest to you. You will receive marketing communications from us if you have requested information from us or are an existing or previous client and, in each case, you have not opted out of receiving that marketing.
However, if we need your permission to send you marketing emails, we will contact you separately. We will get your express opt-in consent before we share your personal data with any company outside the firm for marketing purposes.
We strive to provide you with choices regarding certain personal data uses, particularly around marketing and advertising. You can ask us or third parties to stop sending you marketing messages at any time by following the opt-out links on any marketing message sent to you at any time.
You can set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies, or to alert you when websites set or access cookies. If you disable or refuse cookies, please note that some parts of this website may become inaccessible or not function properly.
We may have to share your personal data with the parties set out below:
We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes and only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.
Your information will be held at our offices, by our service providers and in our IT providers data centres. In order for us to provide our legal services to you, from time to time we may have to share your personal data outside the European Economic Area (EEA). This could include where our service providers are based outside the EEA (for example our IT cloud services), if you are based outside the EEA, if there is an international element to the legal services we are providing or if one of our solicitors or employees need to access our data remotely from outside the EEA.
Whenever we transfer your personal data out of the EEA, we ensure a similar degree of protection is afforded to it by ensuring at least one of the following safeguards is implemented:
We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.
We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.
We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. Typically, this is 6 years. However, as part of our legal services to you we may retain records for a longer period, for example if you have asked us to store your deeds or will on your behalf.
To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.
When your data is no longer required we will delete it. In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal data (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research or statistical purposes in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you.
Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data. You are entitled to:
We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.
From time to time it may not be possible to delete some of your data as we may have to keep some of your details in order for us to fulfil a regulatory or legal requirement. An example of this is our duty to conduct conflict checks as required by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please contact Jamie Magill.
If you have any queries or concerns about the way we process your personal data then please contact Jamie Magill on the contact details at the beginning of this notice. We hope that we can resolve any concerns for you, but if you wish to take your complaint further you can contact the Information Commissioners Office (ICO). Further information can be found on the ICO website www.ico.org.uk.