Privacy notice

1. INTRODUCTION

We respect your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal information provided to us or collected by us during the course of our business as well as the personal information we receive from visitors to our website.

Axial Legal is the data controller of any personal information provided to us when you use our services as set out in section 2 below.

We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) under registration number ZA900955.

This privacy notice explains how we may collect and use information that we obtain about you, and your rights in relation to that information.

Please do not send us any of your information if you do not want it to be used in the ways described in this privacy notice.

We may provide you with additional privacy notices where it is appropriate to do so. Those additional privacy notices supplement and should be read together with this privacy notice.

Our contact details are set out at section 10 below.                                                  

2. WHEN DOES THIS PRIVACY NOTICE APPLY?

This privacy notice applies when we receive any personal information from you, our clients or other third-parties, including in the following circumstances:

  • when you request information from us or provide information to us;
  • when you or the organisation you work for engages our legal and other services;
  • when you or the organisation you work for are a counterparty, or provide services to a counterparty, of one or more of our clients;
  • as a result of your relationship with one or more of our clients, including when you or the organisation you work for is a regulator, government agency, court, tribunal or other law enforcement agency;
  • when you complete an enquiry form on our website;
  • when you attend our seminars or other hosted events;
  • when we conduct open source searches on you in connection with our business acceptance or business development processes;
  • when you apply for a role or work placement opportunity with us;
  • when you visit our website and online services; and
  • when you are entered onto our mailing lists to receive publications and other marketing emails (please see section 4 for more information).

We use cookies on our website. Please see our cookies notice for details.

3. WHAT INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT ABOUT YOU AND WHY?

General

We will collect personal information directly from you, from our clients or their counterparties and authorised representatives.

We may also collect personal information from third parties such as regulatory authorities, your employer, other organisations with whom you have dealings, government agencies, credit reporting agencies, recruitment agencies, information or service providers, publicly available records and the third parties described in section 5: ‘Who we share your information with’ below.

We may collect current and past personal information including your name (including name prefix or title), contact details (such as your postal address, email address and phone number(s)), nationality, identification, gender, organisation, business interests, employment, positions held, special categories of data (such as race and ethnicity, trade union membership, information about health or information, political opinions or religious beliefs), billing and financial information (such as billing address, bank account and payment information) and enquiry/complaint details. We may also collect personal information about your other dealings with us and our clients, including any contact we have with you in person, by telephone, email or online.

We ask our clients and enquirers to only send us personal information which is appropriate and to make sure that they have a legal means of sending that information to us which allows us to legally use it.

Website

When you use our website, we may collect the following:

  • information you provide by completing our online forms, for example when you submit material or request further services;
  • information you provide if you contact us, for example to report a problem with our website or raise a query or comment; and
  • details of visits made to our website such as the volume of traffic received, logs (including, the internet protocol (IP) address and location of the device connecting to our website and other identifiers about the device and the nature of the visit) and the resources accessed.

Applying for a job

If you are applying for a job or work placement, or you are a staff member of the firm, a different privacy notice will apply, which will be provided to you.

4. HOW WE USE YOUR INFORMATION

We may use your personal information if:

  • it is necessary for the performance of a contract with you or the organisation you work for;
  • it is necessary in connection with a legal or regulatory obligation;
  • you have provided your consent (where necessary) to such use or the organisation that you work for has obtained your consent (where necessary);
  • we (or a third-party) have a legitimate interest which is not overridden by your interests or your rights and freedoms; or
  • we are otherwise required or authorised by law.

We may use your information to:

  • fulfil our legal, regulatory (including in relation to anti-money laundering or sanction requirements), accounting, reporting, risk management or professional obligations;
  • if you are a client, deliver legal services to you and/or the organisation you work for;
  • provide and improve our services and products to you or the organisation you work for (including auditing, recording and monitoring use of those services and products);
  • maintain and develop our relationship with you and our clients;
  • monitor and analyse our business;
  • facilitate our internal business operations;
  • identify services you may be interested in;
  • send you legal updates, publications, marketing and details of events (please see this section below under ‘Marketing’ for more information);
  • protect, establish, exercise or defend legal rights; and
  • process and respond to requests, enquiries or complaints received from you.

We may not be able to do these things without your personal information.

Marketing

We use a third party service provider to manage the firm’s contact database and deliver emails to inform you about our services, legal developments and updates (e.g. in the form of a newsletter or similar).

If you do not wish to receive marketing emails relating to our services, you can unsubscribe at any time by using the “Unsubscribe” option on the email footer or by contacting privacy@axiallegal.co.uk.

We will not share your personal information with third parties for their marketing purposes without your consent.

Retention

We will only retain your personal information for as long as is reasonably necessary in the circumstances. Personal information provided in connection with the provision of our legal services will be retained in accordance with the firm’s retention policies unless we agree otherwise with you, in writing.

Generally speaking client files are retained for 7 years from the end of a particular matter. Certain original documents or files may need to be kept longer if there is a significant risk of destroying something which is needed. We will also always keep a small amount of information after file closure to do conflicts of interest searches in the future to comply with our professional duties.

If you wish to know more about the firm’s retention policies or any of the firm’s different retention periods, please contact privacy@axiallegal.co.uk.

5. WHO WE SHARE YOUR INFORMATION WITH

We may share your information with third parties including:

  • our clients, your professional advisers and your employers or place of business;
  • third parties involved in the provisions of services to clients including lawyers acting for the other side, barristers, local counsel and other professional advisers;
  • our professional advisers, auditors and insurers;
  • third party service providers to whom we outsource services, for example archival, auditing, reference checking, professional advisory (including legal, compliance, accounting, financial and business consulting), IT support, mailing house, delivery,  website, social media, research, banking, payment, client contact, data processing, insurance, forensic, litigation support, data room, marketing and security services;
  • third party technology organisations, including cloud service providers, such as data storage platforms;
  • third parties with whom we have co-promotional arrangements (such as jointly sponsored events);
  • third parties who carry out research and analyses of our services and products on our behalf; or
  • regulatory authorities, courts, tribunals, government agencies, law enforcement agencies and other third parties.

International transfers

To enable us to provide the services set out in this privacy notice, it is likely that we will transfer your personal information to countries outside the jurisdiction where you provided it or where we collected it, for example information that we collect through cookies or through your completion of our website forms. Therefore, if you are based in the UK, your information may be transferred to the European Economic Area (EEA) or to countries outside the EEA, and, if you are based outside the UK (for example, in the EEA), your information may be transferred to the UK and other third countries as set out below. 

Your personal information may be accessed by third parties in countries whose laws provide varying levels of protection for personal information.

Some of your personal information may be stored in a cloud located within or outside of the UK or the EEA and managed by a third party service provider. 

Where we transfer your personal information outside the UK or the EEA we will take reasonable steps to ensure that your information is treated securely and the means of transfer provide adequate safeguards. 

If you have any questions in relation to the transfer of your personal information, please contact us at privacy@axiallegal.co.uk. 

Sale or transfer of our business

If, in the future, we re-organise or transfer all or part of our business, we may need to transfer your information to new entities or third parties through which our business will be carried out.

6. SECURITY

We have put in place security procedures and technical and organisational measures designed to help safeguard your personal information. We will use what we consider to be reasonable efforts to safeguard your personal information. However, you should be aware that the use of the internet (and VOIP) is not entirely secure and for this reason we cannot guarantee the security or integrity of any personal information which is transferred from you or to you.

Despite the measures taken by us and any third parties we engage, the internet is not secure and as a result others may intercept or access private transmissions or data. If you ask us to share information with third party sites their servers may also not be secure.

7. THIRD PARTY SITES

Our website contains links to other sites which are controlled by third parties. You should consult these other sites’ privacy policies. We do not accept any responsibility for the information you provide on those sites or their collection and use of your personal information.

8. YOUR RIGHTS

You have rights that you can exercise under certain circumstances in relation to the personal information that we hold. These rights are to:

  • request access to your personal information (known as a subject access request) and request certain information in relation to its processing;
  • request rectification of your personal information;
  • request the erasure of your personal information;
  • request that we restrict the processing of your personal information; and
  • object to the processing of your personal information.

In the limited circumstances where you have provided your consent to the collection, processing and transfer of your personal information for a specific purpose, you have the rights to withdraw your consent for that specific processing at any time.

If you would like to request a copy of your personal information, or would like to take steps to exercise any of your rights please contact us in writing as set out in section 10 below. 

You will not 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 or refuse your request, if your request is unfounded, repetitive or excessive.

Updating and correcting your information

Information we hold about you should be up-to-date and accurate. If any of the information that you have provided to us changes, for example if you change your email address or name, please let us know the correct details by writing to us using the contact details set out in section 10 below. You may ask us, or we may ask you, to correct information you or we think is inaccurate or not up to date, and you may also ask us to remove information which is inaccurate.

9. CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY NOTICE

We review this privacy notice regularly. If we change any part of it we will post the changes on this page and, where appropriate, notify you by email.

10. CONTACT AND FURTHER INFORMATION

If you have any questions about this privacy notice, please contact the firm’s privacy officer in writing by emailing privacy@axiallegal.co.uk or by letter to:

Privacy Officer
Axial Legal
10 Haddon Road
Chorleywood
Hertfordshire
WD3 5AN

We hope that our privacy officer can resolve any query or concern you raise about our use of your personal information. If you feel we have not handled your query or concern to your satisfaction you can contact the ICO, the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues at ico.org.uk/concerns or telephone 0303 123 1113.

Updated: March 2021