Our law firm collects personal information about our clients in order to serve them. We treat personal information responsibly and with great care. This Privacy Policy applies to any personal information that our firm collects, including through your use of this website. By accessing this website, you consent to the collection of the personal information about you that is available as a result.
What is Personal Information?
Personal information is information about an individual person’s personal characteristics, such as name, age, ethnic origin, marital status, religion, education, contact information including home address, telephone or fax number, and e-mail, and health information.
Our Use of Personal Information
As a law firm, we obtain, use, and disclose personal information in the course of providing legal services. We require personal information so that we can satisfy the Law Society of Upper Canada’s rules for the identification and verification of clients. We also require personal information to contact our clients, obtain information about their legal issues, and address those legal issues. On occasion, we need to obtain personal information from third parties, such as healthcare providers or insurers, to ensure that we have all necessary information. In the course of our representation, our firm only collects the personal information that is necessary to represent our clients. We don’t share any of the information you provide with others, unless we say so in this Privacy Policy, or when we believe in good faith that the law requires it.
Ways We Collect Personal Information
We generally obtain personal information either directly from our clients or with their consent. Sometimes we may obtain information about you from other sources, for example, from your insurance company, a government agency or registry, or your accountant. We may also obtain personal information from the other parties in a litigation matter, either directly or through their counsel.
We also collect personal information from the users of our website. We collect information about the users of this website in three ways: directly from the user, from our Web server logs and through cookies.
Web server logs: When you visit our website, we may track information about your visit and store that information in web server logs, which are records of the activities on our site. The servers automatically capture and save the information electronically. Examples of the information we may collect include: your unique Internet protocol address; the town/city, province/state and country from which you access our website; the date and time of your visit; the web page from which you arrived to our site; the pages you viewed on the site; and certain searches/queries that you conducted via our website.
The information we collect in web server logs helps us administer the site, analyze its usage, protect the website and its content from inappropriate use and improve the user experience.
Cookies: In order to offer and provide a customized and personal service, our website and applications may use cookies to store and help track information about you. Cookies are simply small pieces of data that are sent to your browser from a Web server and stored on your computer’s hard drive. We use cookies to help remind us who you are and to help you navigate our site during your visits. Cookies allow us to save passwords and preferences for you so you won’t have to re-enter them each time you visit.
The use of cookies is relatively standard. Most browsers are initially set up to accept cookies. However, if you prefer, you can set your browser to either notify you when you receive a cookie, or to refuse to accept cookies. You should understand that some features of many sites may not function properly if you don’t accept cookies.
How is Personal Information Protected?
We take certain appropriate security measures to help protect your personal information from accidental loss and from unauthorized access, use or disclosure. However, we cannot guarantee that unauthorized persons will always be unable to defeat our security measures.
Who has Access to the Information?
Our firm members as well as our contract employees such as administrative assistants, law clerks and lawyers, information technology consultants and/or contractors, website developers, contractors or consultants may have access to your personal information.
We will not sell, rent, or lease mailing lists or other user data to others, and we will not make your personal information available to any unaffiliated parties, except as follows:
- to agents, website vendors and/or contractors who may use it on our behalf or in connection with their relationship with us;
- if we are unable to assist with your matter, but know an unaffiliated lawyer or law firm that may be able to help you, we may refer you and share information you provided us with that party; and,
- as required by law, in a matter of public safety or policy, as needed in connection with the transfer of our business assets (for example, if we are acquired by another firm or if we are liquidated during bankruptcy proceedings), or if we believe in good faith that sharing the data is necessary to protect our rights or property.
Disclosure of Personal Information
Under certain circumstances, we will disclose your personal information, including:
- when we are required or authorized by law to do so, for example if a court issues a subpoena or summons;
- when you have consented to the disclosure;
- when the legal services we are providing to you require us to give your information to third parties (for example in a civil litigation matter, through production of documents or in answers to undertakings), your consent will be implied, unless you tell us otherwise;
- where it is necessary to establish or collect fees;
- if we engage a third party to provide administrative services to us (like computer back-up services or archival file storage);
- if we engage expert witnesses on your behalf;
- if we retain other law firms at your request, and on your behalf;
- if the information is Publicly Available Personal Information, as such information is defined under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.
Updating Your Personal Information and/or Opting Out of Future Communications
You may update or change your personal information or opt out of any future contact from us at any time. To do so, contact us via phone, fax or mail to request a summary of the personal information we have about you, to request a change to such information, or to opt out of any future contact from us.
Can You Be Denied Access to Your Personal Information?
Your rights to access your personal information are not absolute. We may deny access when:
- it is required or authorized by law (for example, when a record containing personal information about you is protected by solicitor-client privilege);
- to do so would reveal confidential commercial information, and the personal information cannot be severed from the record;
- to do so could reasonably be expected to threaten the life or security of another individual, and the personal information cannot be severed from the record; or,
- the information was generated in the course of a formal dispute resolution process.
If we deny your request for access to, or refuse a request to correct information, we will explain why we have done so.
Website
Our website may contain links to other sites, which are not governed by this Privacy Policy.
On our website, like most other commercial websites, we may monitor traffic patterns, site usage and related site information in order to optimize our web service. We may provide aggregated information to third parties, but these statistics do not include any identifiable personal information.
If you have any additional questions or concerns about this privacy policy, please contact us.