The Law Cottage Privacy Notice
The Law Cottage will be a “controller” of the personal information which you provide to us
when you instruct us to act on your behalf (and also in some other circumstances set out in
this privacy notice), unless otherwise stated in this privacy notice.
What we need
Clients / Prospective Clients
When you submit an enquiry to us about legal services or become a client of The Law
Cottage, we shall collect, store and use the personal information which you provide to us in
your approach to us or in your instructions to us and during the course of our solicitor/client
relationship. We may ask you for additional personal information during the course of our
solicitor/client relationship, which will be collected, stored and used in accordance with this
privacy notice.
When you become our client we also collect, store and use personal information relating to
you from third parties (for example, but not limited to, information regarding your financial
position from financial advisers, identity / credit checks from credit reference agencies and
medical information from medical practitioners).
Other Parties
Sometimes even when you are not our client, we shall collect, store and use the personal
information provided to us by our clients or by other parties, for example, but not limited to,
from financial institutions.
This might be when, for example, but not limited to, we are preparing Wills for clients,
preparing Powers of Attorney for clients or when you are providing funding in a transaction
for one of our clients. This may include, but is not limited to, your name, address, date of
birth and financial information.
Why we need your personal information
Clients / Prospective Clients
We need to collect your personal information so that we may take steps to enter into a
contract with you, act for you and carry out your instructions to us in accordance with our
Letter of Engagement. We shall use your personal information to:
- provide you with legal advice, including by, for example, but not limited to,
communicating with you by email, letter and/or telephone; - represent you as your solicitors in connection with any matter in which you
have instructed us; and - respond to and communicate with you regarding your questions,
comments, support needs or complaints, concerns or allegations in relation
to, for example, but not limited to, complaints and disciplinary procedures.
For example, we may use your personal information to investigate your
complaint, take disciplinary action, etc.;
If you do not provide us with all of the personal information which we need to collect then this
may affect our ability to provide you with legal advice and / or represent you as your
solicitors.
- We also process your personal information in pursuit of our legitimate interests to:
promote our services by sending you communications with information for
upcoming events and legal updates; and - invite you as guests to our events.
Where we process your personal information in pursuit of our legitimate interests, you have
the right to object to us using your personal information for the above purposes. If you wish
to object to any of the above processing, please contact us at The Law Cottage, The
Cottage, Orange Bank, Wyndham Road, Innellan, Dunoon, Argyll PA23 7SH or telephone
01369 830007 or email law@lawcottage.co.uk. If we comply with your objection, this may
affect our ability to undertake the tasks above for the benefit of you as a client.
We are under a legal obligation to process certain personal information relating to you for the
purposes of complying with our obligations including, but not limited to, those required under:
- the Law Society of Scotland requirements for solicitors; and
- regulations governing anti-money laundering, including the Money
Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information on the
Payer) Regulations 2017.
Other Parties
We may need to process personal information of other parties in order to comply with our
regulatory requirements as solicitors for example for, but not limited to, regulations governing
anti-money laundering and where we or our client has a legitimate interest to ensure our
clients’ instructions to us can be carried out for example, but not limited to, in preparing and
storing Wills and Powers of Attorney, in the administration of an executry or trust estate and
in checking details in financial transactions where you are providing funding to a client.
Where we process your personal information in pursuit of legitimate interests, you have the
right to object to us using your personal information for the above purposes. If you wish to
object to any of the above processing, please contact us at The Law Cottage, The Cottage,
Orange Bank, Wyndham Road, Innellan, Dunoon, Argyll PA23 7SH or telephone 01369
830007 or email law@lawcottage.co.uk. If we comply with your objection, this may affect our
ability to undertake the tasks above for the benefit of you as a client.
Other uses of your personal information
We may ask you if we can process your personal information for additional purposes. Where
we do so, we will provide you with an additional privacy notice with information on how we
will use your information for these additional purposes.
Who we share your personal information with
We may be required to share personal information with statutory or regulatory authorities and
organisations to comply with statutory obligations. Such organisations include, for example,
but are not limited to, the Law Society of Scotland, HMRC, the Office of the Public Guardian
(Scotland) and Registers of Scotland.
Where we are acting for our clients in certain transactions, for example, the purchase and/or
sale of a property, we may share your personal information with third parties, including estate
agents and/or financial institutions as necessary for the purposes of completing the relevant
transaction.
Where you are a third party in certain transactions, we may be required to share your
personal information for the purposes of the transaction. For example, if you are a
beneficiary in an executry or trust estate, we may share your personal information with third
parties, such financial institutions, as necessary for the purposes of transferring or realising
assets. We may also share your personal data with third parties, for example, financial
institutions or searching firms in order to verify or disclose the source of funds and carry out
necessary searches where you are providing a deposit for a client’s house purchase.
We may also share personal data with our professional advisors for the purposes of taking
advice or in the event of any claims against the Law Cottage and other solicitors for the
purposes of undertaking legal services as set out above.
The Law Cottage employs third party suppliers to provide services, including, but not limited
to, IT service providers (including cloud computing services), software suppliers, legal
searchers, accounting and auditing services. These suppliers may process personal data on
our behalf as “processors” and are subject to written contractual conditions only to process
that personal data under our instructions and protect it.
In the event that we do share personal data with external third parties, we shall only share
such personal data strictly required for the specific purposes and take reasonable steps to
ensure that recipients will only process the disclosed personal data in accordance with those
purposes.
How we protect your personal information
Your personal information is stored on our paper files, electronic filing system and servers
based in the UK / EU, and is accessed by The Law Cottage and our IT service providers and
software providers for the purposes set out above.
We employ a number of security measures including, but not limited to password protection,
encryption and cyber security measures, in order to keep your personal information secure.
How long we keep your personal information
As solicitors, we abide by the Law Society of Scotland guidance on retention of client files.
We keep our clients’ personal data for a minimum period of ten years. We shall review and
possibly delete your personal information following a period of at least ten years after the
matter in which we were instructed has been concluded.
Where your personal information is contained within a deed or document we are under a
regulatory requirement to retain such information indefinitely or until our client instructs
otherwise.
Your rights
You can exercise any of the following rights by writing to us at The Law Cottage, The
Cottage, Orange Bank, Wyndham Road, Innellan, Dunoon, Argyll PA23 7SH or emailing us
at law@lawcottage.co.uk.
Your rights in relation to your personal information are:
- you have a right to request access to the personal information which we
hold about you by making a “subject access request”; - if you believe that any of the personal information which we hold about you
is inaccurate or incomplete, you have a right to request that we correct or
complete your personal information; - you have a right to object to or request that we restrict the processing of
your personal information for specific purposes; - if you wish us to delete your personal information, you may request that we
do so; and - you have a right to obtain and reuse the personal information which we
hold about you for your own purposes in certain circumstances.
Any requests received by The Law Cottage will be considered under applicable data
protection legislation. If you remain dissatisfied, you have a right to raise a complaint with
the Information Commissioner’s Office at www.ico.org.uk