Privacy
If you submit enquiries via our website, your personal data will be used to enable us to respond to your enquiry. We will treat this information in confidence and will not pass it on to a third party without your permission, unless we are required to do so by law. Our full privacy policy is as follows:
1 Introduction
1.1 Slee Blackwell LLP, is committed to respecting and protecting your privacy. This
Privacy Policy (the “Policy”) explains how we will collect, store and use any personal
data you provide via our website, email or networking with our people and when you
otherwise communicate with us (including in the course of the legal services we provide
or the running of our business).
1.2 Our details are as follows:
- Data controller: Slee Blackwell LLP, 10 Cross Street, Barnstaple, Devon, EX31 1 BA
- ICO registration number: ZA176057
1.3 This Policy may change from time to time and, if it does, the up-to-date version will
always be available on our website and becomes effective immediately.
1.4 Please take the time to read this Policy, which contains important information
about the way in which we process personal data.
1.5 For the purposes of this Policy, “European Data Protection Legislation” is
defined as, for the periods in which they are in force, the European Data Protection
Directive 95/46/EC, all laws giving effect or purporting to give effect to the European
Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC (such as the Data Protection Act 1998) or otherwise
relating to data protection (to the extent the same apply) and, from 25 May 2018, the
General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/670) (“GDPR”) or any
equivalent legislation amending, supplementing or replacing the GDPR.
2 Information we may collect about you
2.1 We may collect and process information about you through various means, including:
- in the course of carrying out work for you (or your business)
- via our website (e.g. on our `Contact Us’ page or via our Helpline or if you apply for a position with us
- by email or other electronic correspondence
- by telephone
- via networking events
- otherwise through providing our legal services or operating our business.
2.2 The personal data you give to us may include:
- your name and title
- contact information, including telephone number, postal address and email address
- information relating to your location, preferences and / or interests
- employment and job application details, e.g. date of birth, employment history, qualifications, equality monitoring information
- photographic identification and video footage
- in certain circumstances, your and others’ signature(s), National Insurance number(s), financial details such as bank account details and details of any relevant sanctions or similar restrictions
- in certain circumstances, data relating to health (including disabilities), ethnicity, race, religious beliefs, trade union membership and other `special category personal data’
- the content of any enquiry submitted over our website
- any other personal data we collect (such as the client reference number which may be assigned to you) in the context of our work for our clients or in the course of operating our business.
2.3 Each time you visit our website, we may automatically collect the following information:
- Web usage information (e.g. IP address), your login information, browser type and version, time zone setting, operating system and platform.
- Information about your visit, including the full Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) clickstream to, through and from our website (including date and time); time on page, page response times, download errors, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks and mouse-overs).
- Location, device and demographic information (Google Analytics provides age range and gender information. Find out more about how Google collects demographic data).
2.4 We may ask you for information when you report a problem with our website.
2.5 If you contact us, we may keep a record of that correspondence.
2.6 The personal data described above may relate to any of the following categories of person:
- our clients
- our prospective employees, work experience students or other job applicants
- those emergency contacts whose details have been provided to us by our people
- third parties with whom we have contact by virtue of providing legal services
- our contractors and suppliers
2.7 Any personal data relating to children that we hold will have been provided to us by the child’s parents or guardian or as part of any legal process involving the children.
3 Cookie Policy
3.1 Our website uses cookies to distinguish you from other users, to improve your
experience on our website, and, to recommend content that may be of interest to you.
For full details on how we use cookies, please see our Cookie Policy.
4 How we will use your information
4.1 We may use your information for the following purposes:
- a) to respond to any query that you may submit to us
- b) to manage our relationship with you (and/or your business), including by maintaining our database of clients and other third parties for administration, and accounting and relationship management purposes
- c) to complete our contractual obligations to you, or otherwise taking steps as described in our engagement terms and/or our Terms of Business (including any associated administration)
- d) to carry out any relevant conflict checks, anti-money laundering and sanctions checks and fulfilling our obligations under any relevant anti-money laundering law or regulation (including under The Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information on the Payer) Regulations 2017)
- e) to send you any relevant information on our services and events that may be of interest to you using the email and/or postal address which you have provided, but only if you have given us your consent to do so or we are otherwise able to do so in accordance with applicable European Data Protection Legislation
- f) to process any job application you (or your representative) has submitted
- g) to ensure that our website’s content is presented in the most effective manner for you and your device
- h) to customise our website according to your interests
- i) to administer our website and for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research, statistical and survey responses
- j) to allow you to participate in interactive features on our website when you choose to do so
- k) as part of our efforts to keep our website safe and secure
- 1) to measure or understand the effectiveness of advertising we send to you and others, and to deliver relevant advertising to you
- m) to ensure we appropriately administer any attendance /visits to our offices
- n) to comply with any other professional, legal and regulatory obligations which apply to us or policies that we have in place
- o) as we feel is necessary to prevent illegal activity or to protect our interests.
5 Legal grounds for processing your information
5.1 We will rely on the following legal bases under European Data Protection Legislation for processing your personal data:
- a) Performance of, or entry into, a contract. The personal data that we are required to collect in order to comply with any other professional, legal and regulatory obligations which apply to us must be provided to us in order for us to perform this contract — we would not be able to act for you without this personal data.
- b) Compliance with a legal obligation to which we are subject.
- c) We have a legitimate interest in doing so as a legal services provider (and where our legitimate interests are not overridden by your (or the relevant individual’s) own interests or fundamental rights or freedoms). These legitimate interests will include our interests in managing our relationship with our clients, administering visits to our offices and ascertaining achievement of proper standards/ compliance with policies, practices or procedures.
- d) Where processing of `special category data’ is necessary in the context of the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims.
- e) in certain circumstances, such as those described in paragraph 4.1(e) above or where we need to process `special category data’ in the context of our legal work but outside the scope of paragraph 5.1(d) above, where we have obtained your express consent to do so. As we will explain at the time we collect your consent, you may withdraw it at any time in accordance with the information we provide to you at that time.
6 Sharing your information
6.1 We may share your details with carefully selected third parties. These may include service providers, support services and organisations that help us to market our services and third parties instructed to enable us to fulfill our contractual obligations to you and/or our clients in the course of business.
6.2 If we share your information with third parties they will process your information as either a data controller or as our data processor and this will depend on the purposes of our sharing your personal data. We will only share your personal data in compliance with the European Data Protection Legislation.
6.3 We may disclose your information to third parties when: you specifically request this or it is necessary to provide our legal services to you (e.g. when we need to instruct lawyers in another jurisdiction to provide advice which you have requested) we feel other companies’ products and services may interest you if we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation or to protect the rights, property or safety of our website, our customers, or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction.
6.4 The third parties include:
- our bank (including as permitted by The Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information on the Payer) Regulations 2017 which, for the purposes of preventing money laundering or terrorist financing, may require us to disclose your personal data on request to our bank from time to time where we hold monies in our pooled Client Account on your behalf
- our insurers
- our auditors, including external accreditation bodies
- other professional advisors or third parties (including counsel, overseas lawyers, accountants, expert witnesses or costs draftsmen) with whom we engage as part of our work for our clients or who our clients separately engage in the same context
- our regulator, the Solicitors Regulation Authority
- our data processors providing catering, security, email security, data governance, archiving and other IT and business support services
- our email marketing platform provider and our website platform provider
- selected partner digital agencies and online job application provider
- analytics and search engine providers that assist us in the improvement and optimisation of our website
- any third party you ask us to share your data with.
6.5 Our website may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of
advertisers and partners. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that
these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any
responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you
submit any personal data to these websites.
6.6 We will not rent or sell our users’ or other contacts’ details to any other organisation
or individual.
7 Storage and retention of your personal data
7.1 We follow strict security procedures as to how your personal information is stored
and used, and who sees it, to help stop any unauthorised person getting hold of it. All
personal information you register on our website will be located behind a firewall. Once
we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features
to try to prevent unauthorised access. Unfortunately, the transmission of information
via the Internet is not completely secure and although we do our best to protect your
personal data, we cannot absolutely guarantee the security of your data.
7.2 We will keep your information stored on our systems for as long as it takes to
provide the services to you and in accordance with our Terms of Business. We may
keep your data for longer than our stated retention period if we cannot delete it for legal,
regulatory or technical reasons. We may also keep it for research, preventing conflicts
of interests or statistical purposes. If we do, we will ensure that appropriate safeguards
are in place to protect your privacy and only used for those purposes.
7.3 Any contact details stored on our client database will be removed from our mailing
lists if they do not interact with our emails (i.e. open emails or click on links within
them) for a certain period following which they will be moved to an archive folder
before being deleted permanently.
7.4 The third parties we engage to provide services on our behalf will keep your data
stored on their systems for as long as is necessary to provide the services to you.
7.5 We will, subject to paragraph 7.2, not store your information for longer than is
reasonably necessary or required by law.
8 Sending your information outside of the EEA
8.1 If we need to share your personal data with a recipient outside the European
Economic Area (“EEA”) (e.g. a professional advisor or third party engaged by us or
you as part of our work under an engagement letter) we will ensure we do so in
compliance with European Data Protection Legislation, including where applicable by
ensuring that the transfer is necessary to perform a contract in place with you or a
contract entered into in your interests. As part of this, we will ensure we have a set of
EU-approved Model Clauses (or other approved protection mechanism) in place with
our practice management system provider located in the US (and to the extent New
Zealand no longer benefits from an EU `adequacy finding’, in New Zealand) and with
our recruitment portal provider in Australia. If these transfers affect you, you may
contact us to obtain more precise information and a copy of relevant documentation.
8.2 Our people may access our systems remotely when working abroad (including from
jurisdictions outside the European Economic Area). Where they do so, they are required
to use our systems and access any personal data in accordance with all the usual policies
and procedures.
9 Withdrawal of consent
9.1 Where we process your personal data we do so on the basis that you have provided
your consent for us to do so for the purposes set out in this Policy when you submitted
your personal data to us. You may withdraw your consent to this processing at any time
by contacting us at [email protected]
9.2 If you do withdraw your consent, we may still be able to process some of the data
that you have provided to us on other grounds and will notify you of these at such time.
10 Your information rights
10.1 European Data Protection Legislation gives you the right to access information
held about you. You are entitled to be told by us whether we or someone else on our
behalf is processing your personal information; what personal information we hold;
details of the purposes for the processing of your personal information; and details of
any third party with whom your personal information has been shared.
10.2 You can access the personal information we hold on you by writing to us at: FAO:
Data Protection Officer, Slee Blackwell LLP, 10 Cross Street, Barnstaple, Devon,
EX31 1 BA. You can also contact us by email at [email protected]
10.3 We will ask you to provide proof of identity before we show you your personal
information —this is so we can prevent unauthorised access and any request may be subject
to a fee of £10.00 to meet our costs in providing you with details of the information we hold
about you.
10.4 You have the additional rights to request rectification and erasure of your personal
data and to request restriction of, and to otherwise object to, our processing of your
personal data and you can exercise these rights at any time by contacting
11 Complaints
1 1.1 If you consent to us contacting you, we will always aim to be respectful, relevant
and appropriate. If at any time you do not think that we have complied with this, please
contact us straight away to let us know.
1 1.2 You also have the right to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s
Office. For more details please visit the ICO website.
12 Contact
Questions, comments and requests regarding this Policy should be addressed to the following:
Name: Data Protection Officer
Address: 10 Cross Street, Barnstaple, Devon, EX31 1BA.
Email address: [email protected]
Telephone number: +44 (01271 349959).
Cookies
We respect your privacy and endeavour to ensure that our use of cookies is not intrusive. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you agree to us using cookies.
A “cookie” is a small data text file that is placed in your browser and allows Slee Blackwell Solicitors LLP to recognize you each time you visit this site (customisation etc). Cookies themselves do not contain any personal information, and we do not use cookies to collect personal information. Cookies may also be used by 3rd party content providers such as newsfeeds. Find out more about cookies here.
We use Google Analytics which is a service provided by Google. It gathers anonymous data of how people are using this site and provide us with visitor statistics, details of page views etc. You can opt-out of being tracked by Google Analytics here.
You can also disable and delete cookies via your Browser settings. Find out more here.
We cannot guarantee the security of any information that you transmit to Slee Blackwell Solicitors LLP and you are solely responsible for maintaining the secrecy of any passwords or other account information. In addition other websites or internet services that may be accessible through this website have separate data and privacy practices independent of us, and therefore we disclaim any responsibility or liability for their policies or actions. Please contact those third parties direct if you have any questions about their privacy policies.
For any other information use the contact form to contact us.