Privacy Policy

What is this Privacy Notice about?

Thompson and Jackson Solicitors are committed to maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of information you provide to us. This Privacy Notice describes our current policies and practices with regard to your 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.

Personal data, or personal information, means any information about you from which you can be identified. Personal data includes special category personal data (as defined by law and further described below).

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

The people to whom this Privacy Notice applies therefore include:

Clients and customers;
Our supplies and contractors
Other law firms, barristers, experts and other people instructed by us in the court of our work for our clients;
Individuals who use our website;
Individuals emailing, telephoning or otherwise contacting us for any purpose which may include services to be provided by us, or individuals contacting us for any purpose which may include services to be provided by us, or individuals contacting us in the performance of their employment or other roles for another entity;
Individuals whose personal data is provided to us by a third party, for example, relating to a potential dispute or another matter on which we are advising, or a trust beneficiary or a lawyer acting for another party to a transaction;
Individuals with whom we deal or whose personal data is provided to us as part of any other activities that we undertake.

This Privacy Notice does not form part of any contract we have with you and we amend it from time to time. We are continually improving our methods of communication and adding new functionality and features to this website and our existing services and administrative processes. Because of these ongoing changes, changes in the law and the changing nature of technology our Data Protection practices will change from time to time. We encourage you to check this page frequently.

What Information Do We Hold About You?

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

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 dependence;
Bank account details;
Any other personal information required by us to verify your identity for our “know your client” and 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 our information and communication systems;
Records of your attendance at our office;
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 sensitive personal information (special categories):

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

How Is This Information Collected?

We collect personal information about you through:

Information which you provide directly to us;
Information collected automatically through our website or our client instruction papers;
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, any agencies and databases to which we subscribe in other third parties.

How Do We Use This Information?

Our Legal Basis for Using Your Personal Information

We use the categories of information in the list above to allow us to, as relevant:

It is necessary to perform our contract with you;
It is necessary to comply with legal obligations; and
It is in order to pursue legitimate interest 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 circumstances:

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

How We May Use Your Personal Information

The types of situation 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 websites;
To issue invoices, manage accounts and records, collect payments and debts or administer payments to you;
To provide our services to 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 enquiry;
To administer our website and help us improve our services;
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 and immigration status; In our business management and planning, including accounting and auditing and otherwise in the furtherance of our business;
In conducting reviews of our relationship, including managing performance and expectations on either side;
Gathering evidence and investigating any matter related to a concern or dispute including contacting any mediation, arbitration or litigation process;
Making arrangements for the extension, re-contracting or termination of our working relationships;
To prevent fraud;
To ensure network and information security, including preventing unauthorised access to our computer and electronic communications systems and preventing malicious software distributions;
Complying with our obligations in respect of the Solicitors Regulatory Authority and related regulatory requirements;
In our emergency contact and business continuity procedures;
And 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.

Special Categories of Personal Information

When we can use it

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

With your explicit written consent;
Processing as necessary for the purpose 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 preventative or occupational medicine, of the assessment of working capacity;
Where it is needed to protect your interests (or someone else’s interest) and you are not capable of giving your consents;
Or where you have already made the information public.

How We May Use It

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 enquiry;
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 Solicitors Regulatory Authority and related regulatory requirements;
And complying with any requests 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 compliance officer.

Data Sharing

Why might you share my personal information with third parties?

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

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

Which third party service providers process my personal information?

“Third Parties” includes third party service providers (including contractors and designated agents).

We may share your personal information with the Solicitors Regulatory Authority and other foreign regulators for regulatory purposes and to other governmental or similar authority’s 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, social and welfare organisations or courts and tribunals.

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

We may also disclose any personal information to comply with our legal requirement, for the administration of justice, interacting with anti-fraud data bases, to protect your vital interests, to protect the security or integrity of our data bases or this website, to take precautions against legal liability or 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.

Transferring information outside of the EU

If you provide us with any personal data while using data we may use it to provide you with any information or services who have requested it.

We may also use it for any other purpose for which you give your consent. For example, we may send you additional information about the firm or its services, if you have consented to us doing so.

We will not normally send such data outside the European Economic Area (EEA). We may sometimes send such data to a recipient in a country outside the EEA which has been designated by the EU Commission as providing adequate data protection. If we need to send the data to a country outside the EEA that has not been so designated we will have appropriate contract clauses agreed with the recipient placed to protect the data.

Data Security

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. We hold the Law Society Lexcel Practice Management Standard.

We have a Data Protection Policy with which our staff are required to comply and we have provided training to our staff regarding their obligations in insuring the security of your personal data and staff are aware that miss use of personal data may be grounds for disciplinary action against them.

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

Data Retention

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 an authorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through over means, and the applicable legal or regulatory requirements.

Rights of Access, Correction, Erasure and Restriction

Your rights in connection with personal information

Under circumstances, by law you have the right to:

Request access to 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 correction of the personal data that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information that we hold about you correct;
Request erasure of 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 the processing of your personal information where we are relying on our own legitimate interest (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 processing of 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 transfer of your personal information to another party;
Withdrawing consent for the processing of your personal information. In the limited circumstances where you have provided your consent to the collection and processing of special category personal data you may wish to withdraw your consent. If you notify us of such withdrawal 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.

Any request in relation to the above rights should be directed to the firm’s Information Management Partner ("IMP") being Jonathan Petch who can be contacted on the following enquiries@thompsonandjackson.co.uk

What we may need from you

We may need to request specific information from you to help us to confirm your identity and ensure your right to access the information (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is another appropriate security measure to ensure that personal information is not disclosed to any person who does not have the right to receive it.

Data collected through this website, Cookies and similar technologies

In addition to the personal information we collect as described above, we use technology to collect anonymous information about the use of our website. We use Google Analytics to monitor how our website is being used so that we can make improvements. Our use of Google Analytics requires us to pass to Google your IP Address (but no other information). Google uses this information to prepare site usage reports for us, but Google may also share this information with other Google services. In particular, Google may use the data collected to contextualise and personalise the ads of its own advertising network. Related information can be obtained by Google’s privacy policy and also how Google uses this information.

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.

Further Questions, feedback or complaints

If you have any questions or feedback about this Privacy Notice or how we handle your personal information, please contact the IMP, Jonathan Petch, at enquiries@thompsonandjackson.co.uk or by writing to the compliance officer, Thompson & Jackson Solicitors, Hyder House, 680 Budshead Road, Plymouth, PL6 5XR.

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the information commissioner’s office, the UK Supervisor Authority for Data Protection issues or your local equivalent regulator. For further information about the information commissioner’s office you will find more information about how to complain using the website: https://ico.org.uk/concerns/

Changes to this Privacy Notice

We reserve the right to update this Privacy Notice at any time we may also notify you in other ways from time to time about the processing of your personal information.

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