Privacy Policy

Introduction

This Data Privacy Notice “Notice” explains how Bowcock & Pursaill LLP (referred to as “we” or “us” in this Notice) protect and process personal data which we collect from you directly and/or through your use of our website and/or through our business dealings with or in relation to you.

We are committed to maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of information you provide to us.

Personal data, or personal information, means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified.

Please read this Notice carefully as it contains important information about who we are, how and why we collect, store, use and share personal information, your rights in relation to your personal information and on how to contact us and supervisory authorities in the event you have a complaint.

We collect, use and are responsible for certain personal information about you. When we do so we are regulated under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which applies across the European Union (including in the United Kingdom) and we are responsible as ‘controller’ of that personal information for the purposes of those laws.

This Notice does not form part of any contract we have with you and we may amend it from time to time.    As a result of ongoing changes in the law and the changing nature of technology or data protection practices may change from time to time. We therefore encourage you to check this page frequently.

Accountability

Data is collected, processed and stored by us.  We are the “data controller”, for the purposes of the GDPR or any other relevant data protection law.

We are a limited liability partnership registered in England under number OC342155.  If you wish to review our Data Protection Act registration the Information Commissioner’s Office reference is Z196685X.  Our VAT number is 278-357-221.  WE are authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulatory Authority.

You can contact the person responsible for our data protection by email at tw@bowcockpursaill.co.uk or by telephone on 01782 200007.

Who does this Notice apply to?

This Notice applies to everyone about whom we hold personal data who is not a current (or former) partner, employee worker or individual contract of ours or someone who has applied for a job with us.

The people to whom this Notice applies therefore include:

• Our clients and customers;
• Our suppliers and contractors;
• Other law firms, barrister experts and other people instructed by us in the course of our work for our clients;
• Individuals who use our website;
• Individuals emailing, telephoning, submitting an enquiry through our website or otherwise contacting us for any purpose which may include:
• About services to be provided to us;
• About services to be provided by us;
• Requests for press or media content;
• Individuals contacting us in the performance of their employment or other roles for another entity
• Individuals whose contact details have been made available to us for marketing purposes or for the purposes of future communication, e.g. the exchange of business cards; and
• Individuals whose personal data is provided to us by a third party, e.g. relating to a potential dispute or another matter on which we are advising, a lawyer acting or another party to a transaction.

Children

Our website and services are not aimed specifically at children because in legal work children are generally represented by their parents or guardians. If you are a child and need further advice or explanation about how we would use your data, please contact the person within our firm responsible for data protection, who may be able to assist.

What information do we hold about you?

The exact information we will request from you will depend on what you have asked us to do or what we are contracted to do.  We always keep requests for information to the minimum level required in order to complete the function for which the information is being requested.

We may collect, store and use some or all of the following categories of personal information about you:

• Personal contact details such as name, title, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses and business contact information;
• Date of birth
• Gender
• Marital status and dependants
• Bank account details
• Any personal information required for us to verify your identity to comply with our anti-money laundering checks, including identification documentation such as your passport or driving licence and utility bills.
• Information included on invoices provided by contractors and suppliers;
• Information about your use of information and communications systems;
• Photographs if you attend any of our events;
• Records of your attendance at any of our offices
• Any other information provided by you, or any third party, to us, in connection with any matter on which you or one of our clients has instructed us to act or advise.

We may also collect, store and use the following special categories of more sensitive personal information “Special Categories”:

• Information about your race or ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation and political opinions.
• Trade union membership
• Information about your health, including any medical condition, health and sickness records
• Information about criminal convictions and offences.

How is this information collected?

We collect personal information about you through:

• information which you provide directly to us either verbally, in writing (e.g. by letter, email or fax) or input through our website.You must have the authority to disclose personal data if it relates to someone else and all data disclosed should be complete, accurate and up-to-date;
• information collected automatically through our website or client portals;
• information about you provided to us by third parties including our clients, other people with whom we are communicating when we deal with any matter for our clients, PR agencies and databases to which we subscribe and other third parties.

 How do we use this information?

We use the personal information listed above to allow us to, as relevant:

• Perform our contract with you;
• Comply with legal obligations ; and
• Pursue legitimate interests of our own (for example, in furtherance of our own business) or third parties’ (such as our clients’) legitimate interests.

We may also use your personal information in the following situations:

• Where we need to protect your interests (or someone else’s interests)
• Where it is needed in the public interest or for any official purposes.

The types of situations in which we may process your personal information, depending upon the nature of your relationship with us, are listed below:

• To provide you with our services and other information, including your use of our website;
• To provide information about further legal work or services that could benefit you;
• To issue invoices, manage accounts and records, collect payments and debts or administer payments to you;
• To provide our services to our clients, including communicating with clients whilst we carry out instructions, providing clients with advice, carrying out litigation on behalf of you or your organisation’s behalf, preparing documents or completing transactions on yours or your organisation’s behalf;
• To seek advice from third parties in connection with your matter;
• Assisting you with the funding of your matter if it involves Legal Aid or “no win no fee”.
• To facilitate you providing your services to us;
• To contact you to inform you of our services or events and to send you updates on issues we think will be of interest to you and in relation to or arising from our events and publications;
• To respond to any query you have made of us, including providing information about our people and services where you have made a website enquiry;
• For marketing purposes and market research;
• To administer our website and help us improve our services;
• For press releases, invitation to meet our staff and management team, press events, to highlight any spokespeople;
• To comply with our legal obligations;
• Determining the terms on which we work with our clients and suppliers;
• Undertaking checks as to your identity, credit, immigration status and similar if we will be working together, including establishing the funding of any transaction you have asked us to carry out on your behalf. This may involve us asking about how you came to accumulate the funds that are being used in your transaction;
• In our business management and planning, including accounting and auditing and otherwise in the furtherance of our business, including resources management, planning of tasks/meetings, keeping records or sources of work and new enquiries and storage and archiving of files and documents;
• In conducting reviews of our relationship, including managing performance and expectations on either side and responding to any complaints;
• Gathering evidence and investigating any matter related to a concern or dispute including conducting any mediation, arbitration or litigation process;
• Making arrangements for the extension, re-contracting or termination of our working relationship;
• To prevent fraud;
• To ensure network and information security, including preventing unauthorised access to our computer and electronic communications systems and preventing malicious software distribution;
• To conduct data analytics studies relating to your use of our website;
• Complying with our obligations in respect of the Solicitor’s Regulatory Authority and related regulatory (including foreign regulatory) requirements;
• Complying with any request by you.

Some of the above grounds for processing will overlap and there may be several grounds which justify our use of your personal information.

Please note that we may process your personal information without your knowledge or consent in compliance with the above where this is required or permitted by law.

Disclosure of personal information

We do share your data with third parties, (including third-party service providers and our other entities) where required by law, where it is necessary to administer the working relationship with you or where we have another legitimate interest in doing so.

We do not share personal information with third parties unless we are required to do so.  The reasons for disclosure and the parties to whom disclosure takes place are described below.

If we do share data, we require third parties to take appropriate security measures and only process your data for specified purposes.

We never sell your personal information to third parties.

Which third-party service providers may process my personal information?

“Third parties” includes third-party service providers (including contractors and designated agents) and our other entities, including our nominee and trust companies.

We may share your personal information with the Solicitor’s Regulatory Authority and other regulators for regulatory purposes and to other governmental or similar authorities or as may otherwise be required by law, for example, in relation to taxation.

As part of our relationship we may also provide your personal data to third parties.  For example, the nature of the work we provide to our clients may require us to engage with and provide your personal data (as relevant to the matter) to third parties such as barristers, experts, translators and data-site or other document hosting services.  We may provide your personal data to third party event organisers or webinar hosts.

We may also provide your personal data to the third-party service providers we use in the course of administering our business, for example, word processing services, auditors, IT systems providers, lawyers and other professional advisors, insurers, credit and identity check providers.

Your personal information may also be provided to the press and other media sources as part of any agreed press release relating to any transaction we work on with you.

We may also disclose any personal information to comply with a legal requirement, for the administration of justice , interacting with anti-fraud databases, to protect your vital interests, to protect the security or integrity of our databases  or this website, to take precautions against legal liability in the event of a joint venture, collaboration, financing, sale, merger, reorganisation, change of legal form, dissolution or similar event including disclosure of your information to any successor of ours.

When we can use Special Categories of personal information

Special categories of personal information require higher levels of protection.  We may process such information in the following circumstances:

• With your explicit written consent;
• Processing is necessary for the purposes of, or in connection with, any legal proceedings (including prospective legal proceedings) for obtaining legal advice or otherwise necessary for the purposes of establishing, exercising or defending legal claims;
• Processing is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest;
• Processing is necessary for the purposes of preventive or occupational medicine or the assessment of working capacity;
• Where it is needed to protect your interests or some else’s interests and you are not capable of giving your consent; or
• Where you have already made the information public.

How we may use Special Categories of personal information

We may use Special Categories of personal information in the following ways:

• To provide our services and other information, including your use of our website, to you;
• To provide our services to one of our clients;
• To facilitate you providing your services to us;
• To respond to any query you have made of us, including providing information about our people and services where you have made a website inquiry;
• To comply with our legal obligations;
• Gathering evidence and investigating any matter related to a concern or dispute, including conducting any mediation, arbitration or litigation process;
• Complying with our obligations in respect of the SRA and related regulatory requirements; or
• Complying with any request by you.

Consent

We do not need your consent to process your personal data where we have another legal basis to do so, as set out above. However, if we do need to seek your consent to processing, we will provide you with reasonable details of the information that we would like and the reason we need it, so that you can carefully consider whether you wish to consent.

You should be aware that it is not a condition of your contract with us that you agree to any request for consent from us and, where you have given consent, this can be withdrawn at any time by contacting the person responsible our data protection.

How long we keep your information for?

Our intention is to retain your personal information for only as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes for which we collected it, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting or reporting requirements.

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.

We are currently undergoing a data retention review process and will be updating our Data Retention Policy as we update our systems and procedures.

Transfer of your information out of the EEA

Where possible your personal information will be processed with the European Economic Area (EEA).

We will ensure that if your data is transferred to a country or territory outside the UK or EEA that has not received a binding adequacy decision by the European Commission or a competent national data protection authority, then such transfer will be subject to appropriate safeguards that provide an adequate level of protection in accordance with GDPR and any subsequent UK enactment. Your rights

Close circuit television (CCTV)

For security and the detection of crime, we may use CCTV on our sites, including car parks.  When images are recorded, they are stored for a maximum of 180 days.  Copies of images may be provided to law enforcement and/or viewed by our staff.

Data collected through our website

When someone visits our websites we use cookiesand Google Analyticsto collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out things like the number of people who visit parts of the site.  This information is processed in a way that does not identify anyone.  We do not make, and do not allow Google to make, any attempt to find out the identities of those visiting our websites.  If we do want to collect personally identifiable information through our website, we will be transparent about it.  We will make it clear when we collect personal information and will explain what we intend to do with it.

Links to other websites

This website may contain hyperlinks to websites that are not operated by us.  These hyperlinks are provided for your reference and convenience only and do not imply any endorsement of the activities of such third party websites or any association with their operators.  We do not control these websites and are not responsible for their personal data practices.  We recommend you review any privacy notice posted on any site you visit before using the site or providing any personal data.

Your right in connection with personal information

Under certain circumstances, by law you have the right to:

• Request accessto your personal information (commonly known as a “Data subject access request”). THIs enables you to receive a copy of the personal data we hold about you and to be told about how that information has been collected and used.
• Request correctionof the personal data that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.
• Request erasureof your personal information.This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it.
• Object to processingof your personal information where we are relying on our own legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground.
• Request the restriction of processingof your personal information. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it.
• Request the transferof your personal information to another party.
• Withdraw consentfor the processing of your personal information. In the limited circumstances where you have provided our consent to the collection and processing of special category personal data you may wish to withdraw your consent.  If you notify us of such withdrawals we will no longer process that personal information unless we have another legitimate basis for doing so.

You will not usually have to pay a fee to access your personal information (or to exercise any of the other rights).  However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request for access is clearly unfounded or excessive.  Alternatively we may refuse to comply with the request in such circumstances.

If you would like to exercise any of those rights, please:

• email, call or write to the person responsible for our data protection;
• let us have enough information to identify you
• let us have proof of your identity and address (a copy of your driving licence or passport and a recent utility or credit card bill), and
• let us know the information to which your request relates.

Unsubscribe

If you have received an email or any other documentation from us with information about any of our services, events or legal updates, you are entitled to be removed from our electronic mailing list.  You can do this by eitherclicking the unsubscribe link in any of our emails or by contacting us at info@bowcockpursaill.co.uk or in writing to any of our office locations.

Keeping your personal information secure

We have appropriate security measures in place to prevent personal information from being accidentally lost,or used or accessed in an unauthorised way. We limit access to your personal information to those who have a genuine business need to know it. Those processing your information will do so only in an authorised manner and are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We also have procedures in place to deal with any suspected data security breach. We will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected data security breach where we are legally required to do so.

How to complain

We hope that we can resolve any query or concern you raise about our use of your information.

The GDPR also gives you right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority, in particular in the European Union (or European Economic Area) state where you work, normally live or where any alleged infringement of data protection laws occurred. The supervisory authority in the UK is the Information Commissioner who may be contacted at https://ico.org.uk/concerns/ or telephone: 0303 123 1113.

Changes to this privacy notice

This privacy notice was published on 18 February 2019 and last updated on 13 February 2019.

We may change this privacy notice from time to time and we may also notify you in other ways from time to time about the processing of your personal information.

How to contact us

Please contact us, if you have any questions about this privacy notice or the information we hold about you.

If you wish to contact us, please send an email to tw@bowcockpursaill.co.uk, write to Bowcock & Pursaill LLP, 2 Ridge House, Ridgehouse Drive, Festival Park, Stoke on Trent, ST1 5SJ or call 01782 200007.

Do you need extra help?

If you would like this notice in another format (for example: audio, large print, braille) please contact us (see ‘How to contact us’ above).

Jurisdiction and applicable law

The courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction