Privacy Notice
Privacy Policy in Brief
Gales Solicitors collects data from visitors throughout the website experience. This is largely to provide interactive functionality that would otherwise be impossible without collecting the minimum amount of data. Some data is also used to analyse your experience anonymously to improve the website experience.
Gales Solicitors respects your privacy so we will not sell your data to third parties, allow any access to the data that isn’t necessary to honour any other contracts we have in place or store excessive amounts of data we no longer need.
Gales Solicitors will comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU May 25th 2018).
Privacy Policy in Detail
Definitions
Data Subject – any living person.
Third Party – another company who Gales Solicitors works with to provide services to the Data Subject.
Personally Identifiable Information – data belonging to the Data Subject that can be used to uniquely identify them.
Data Controller – any organisation that stores Personally Identifiable Information, E.g. Gales Solicitors.
Data Processor – any organisation that works on (processes) Personally Identifiable Information.
How we obtain your data
Gales Solicitors collects data from the Data Subject during the usage of this website. Some of that data may be Personally Identifiable Information. This may be entered into web forms or provided to the website by the browser (such as IP address).
Gales Solicitors may also obtain Personally Identifiable Information about the Data Subject from a Third Party as part of a contract to work with that data.
How we use your data
Gales Solicitors primarily uses data from the Data Subject either to serve a contract between Gales Solicitors and the Data Subject, or to provide necessary functionality on this website.
Gales Solicitors may also collect additional data to satisfy other legal requirements, such as is required for e-commerce.
Third Parties which have access to the data collected
Gales Solicitors works with several Third Parties to provide the service the Data Subject receives.
In all cases there is either an explicit contract in place between Gales Solicitors and the Third Party, Terms and Conditions or another legally binding relationship.
The data will likely be shared with:
Intergage Ltd – website host/provider.
The data is also rarely shared with the following:
Mobile phones – our staff may enter your contact number into their phones for the purpose of a meeting away from the office or phone lines been down and will then erase the number after use.
Marketing
Gales Solicitors does not share your data with any Third Parties for marketing purposes unless the Data Subject has explicitly opted in.
Third Party Cookies
Gales Solicitors can largely operate without the use of third party cookies. However, in many cases third party cookies improve the website experience.
Gales Solicitors will not add social sharing buttons to the page unless the Data Subject has explicitly opted in to social cookies.
Gales Solicitors will not include any tracking systems unless the Data Subject has explicitly opted in to tracking cookies.
Gales Solicitors will allow Google Analytics to operate on this website in order to provide necessary anonymous analytical data. This may result in a small amount of Personally Identifiable Information being collected but this is only used as statistics and not for identification purposes.
Data Security and Storage
Gales Solicitors will store data for only as long as necessary to fulfil the purpose for which it was obtained. Some data may be held for longer if it is either held on other systems that have not been updated, in backup data that has not expired or because of another lawful basis.
Gales Solicitors takes security seriously and makes use of technology where feasible to secure data and protect against breaches.
Personal data protection principles
We adhere to the principles relating to processing of Personal Data set out in the GDPR (as follows) which require Personal Data to be:
Processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner (Lawfulness, Fairness and Transparency)
Collected only for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes (Purpose Limitation)
Adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which it is processed (Data Minimisation)
Accurate and where necessary kept up to date (Accuracy)
Not kept in a form which permits identification of Data Subjects for longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the data is processed (Storage Limitation)
Processed in a manner that ensures its security using appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental loss, destruction or damage (Security, Integrity and Confidentiality)
Not transferred to another country without appropriate safeguards being in place (Transfer Limitation)
Made available to Data Subjects and Data Subjects allowed to exercise certain rights in relation to their Personal Data (Data Subject's Rights and Requests).
Data Subject's rights and requests
Data Subjects have rights when it comes to how Gales Solicitors handles their Personal Data. These include rights to:
Withdraw consent to processing at any time
Receive certain information about the Data Controller's Processing activities
Request access to their personal data that we hold
Prevent our use of their personal data for direct marketing purposes
Ask us to erase personal data if it is no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which it was collected or processed or to rectify inaccurate data or to complete incomplete data
Restrict processing in specific circumstances
Challenge processing which has been justified on the basis of our legitimate interests or in the public interest
Object to decisions based solely on automated processing, including profiling (ADM)
Prevent processing that is likely to cause damage or distress to the Data Subject or anyone else
Be notified of a personal data breach which is likely to result in high risk to their rights and freedoms
Make a complaint to the supervisory authority
Receive or ask for their personal data to be transferred to a third party in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format.
Updates to our Privacy Notice
This Privacy Notice will be reviewed regularly and this page will be updated with changes.
Contacting the Data Protection Representative
If you have any concerns about how Personally Identifiable Information is used by Gales Solicitors please contact the Data Protection Representative:
Sarah England
138 – 140 Tuckton Road Tuckton Dorset BH6 3JX
sarah@gales-solicitors.co.uk
01202 422622
Our Complaints Policy
We are committed to providing a high-qualify legal service to all our Clients. When something goes wrong we need you to tell us about it. This will help us to improve our standards.
Our Complaints Procedure
If you have a complaint, contact us with the details.
What Will Happen Next?
We will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint and asking you to confirm or explain the details set out. We will also let you know the name of the person who will be dealing with your complaint. You can expect to receive our letter within five days of us receiving your complaint.
We will record your complaint in our Central Register and open a separate file for your complaint. We will do this within a day of receiving your complaint.
We will then start to investigate your complaint. This will normally involve the following steps:-
We will pass your complaint to Matthew Moore, our Client Care partner.
He will ask the member of staff who acted for you to reply to him in respect of your complaint. He will also discuss the complaint with the member of staff as may be appropriate.
He will then examine their reply and the information in your complaint file.
Matthew Moore will then write to you in respect of your complaint and, if appropriate, will then invite you to a meeting and discuss, and hopefully resolve, your complaint. He will do this within twenty-eight days of acknowledging your complaint.
If there is such a meeting, within three days of the meeting, Matthew Moore will write to you to confirm what took place and any solutions he has agreed with you.
If you do not want a meeting or it is not possible, Matthew Moore will send you a detailed reply to your complaint. This will include his suggestions for resolving the matter if not already dealt with in the letter to you as above. He will do this within seven days of completing the investigation.
If at any stage it is considered that a telephone conversation may assist in resolving your complaint, he may call you.
At this stage, if you are still not satisfied, you contact us again. We will then arrange to review our decision. This will happen in one of the following ways:-
Another partner of the firm will review Matthew Moore’s decision within ten days.
We will ask our local Law Society or another local firm of Solicitors to review your complaint within seven days. We will let you know how long this process will take.
We will invite you to agree to independent mediation within seven days. We will let you know how long this process will take.
We will let you know the result of the review within seven days of the end of the review. At this time we will write to you confirming our final position on your complaint and explaining our reasons.
If we have to change any of the timescales above, we will let you know and explain why.
Depending upon the type of complaint or the person about whom you are complaining your complaint may be dealt with by Sarah England (who is a partner) but that will be confirmed to you at the time of receipt of your complaint.
Legal Ombudsman
If you are still not satisfied, you can contact the Legal Ombudsman. The Legal Ombudsman expect complaints to be made to them within 1 year of the date of the act or ommision about which you are concered or within 1 year of you realising there was such a concern.You must also refer your concerns to the Legal Ombudsman within 6 months of our final response to you.
0300 555 0333 Monday to Friday 9 – 5pm
Legal Ombudsman
PO Box 6167
Slough
SL1 0EH
Solicitors Regulation Authority
www.sra.org.uk
0370 606 2555 Monday – Friday 9 – 5pm
The Cube
99 Wharfside Street
Birmingham
B1 1RN
contactcentre@sra.org.uk