Privacy policy

Please read this important notice carefully as it affects your privacy and how we use information about you.

Haddletons is the trading style of Haddleton and Co Ltd a company registered in England and Wales (No. 10728134) and its registered office is at Windsor House, Cornwall Road, Harrogate HG1 2PW.

Haddletons takes data protection seriously and safeguarding your privacy is important to us.

This Privacy Policy and (for our clients) our Terms of Business explain how we use any Personal Data we collect.

This Privacy Policy also explains how to contact us if you have any queries about how we use your Personal Data. By using our website or by registering for any of the specific services we offer through it, you are indicating that you understand and accept that your Personal Data may be used by us as described below.

Our client confidentiality obligations are not addressed by this Privacy Policy but are described in our terms of engagement.

We review our policies regularly and any changes will be posted on this page.

What is Personal Data?

Personal Data includes name, address, telephone number, email address and any other information which identifies a living person.

Links with other websites

This Privacy Policy only relates to Haddletons and we cannot control the use of your Personal Data by external websites.

How we collect Personal Data:

When you access, or subscribe to, any of Haddletons’ services we may collect Personal Data about you in a number of circumstances, including when you seek legal advice from us; when you use any on-line client services; when you make an enquiry on any area of the website; when you attend a seminar or other event provided by us; when you sign up to receive information from us, including training, newsletters and bulletins; when you apply for or accept employment or consultancy position with us; or when you offer to provide or provide services to us.

If you do not provide information requested by us from time to time, we may not be able to provide services to you or otherwise fulfil the purpose for which we have requested the information.

In some circumstances, we collect Personal Data about you from a third-party source. For example, we may collect Personal Data from a company for whom you work, other organisations with whom you have dealings, government agencies, a credit reporting agency, a recruitment agency, an information or service provider or from a publicly available record.

How we use Personal data

We, our subsidiaries, employees, agents, consultants and sub-contractors, may use your Personal Data and disclose it on a confidential basis to third parties, such as Quill, Integral IT, Cognia Law, barristers, experts, our consultants) for the following purposes:

the provision of our services to you including to provide you with legal advice or information;
disclosure to other third-party advisers working for you on the same matter;
on-line or legal technology services or solutions;
to send you information on news, publications, seminars and events;
to improve our services and communications to you;
for the purposes of employment, partnership or the supply or retention of services;
to send you invoices or reminder notices;
for fraud prevention, anti-money laundering purposes, anti-bribery purposes and/or generally for the prevention or detection of crime, which may include disclosure to relevant third parties (here our lawful purpose might be either legitimate interest or to comply with a legal obligation);
to ensure the safety and security of our people and premises (where we may also use CCTV) which may include disclosure to relevant third parties;
to process your requests of, and applications to, us;
for disclosures to our auditors, our own legal and other professional advisors, our insurers and insurance brokers;
to administer your account with us, including credit and conflict searches, providing e-billing services at your request and tracing and collecting any debts, which may include disclosure to relevant third parties;
to conduct specific tests on our existing or new systems, networks, applications or software, which may include disclosure to relevant third parties;
auditing usage of our website;
for advertising, marketing and public relations, including sending you direct marketing communications;
providing you with further information about our products and services;
to manage our business performance, to assess client satisfaction (such as by asking you to participate in surveys) and generally to help improve our services, which may include disclosure to relevant third parties;
where Haddletons or its subsidiaries is/are the subject of a merger or acquisition (M&A) bid in whole or in part, whether an asset or share sale and whether or not the M&A bid completes. If the M&A bid completes the Personal Data will be owned by the merging or acquiring party;
as otherwise required by law;
where you have given written consent to such disclosure (our lawful purpose here is consent);
where we are permitted by law to do so. This includes circumstances where you have expressly or impliedly consented to such use and;
or any other purpose for which this information was provided to us or for any purpose related or ancillary to any of the above.

We will not sell, resell, lease or license your Personal Data to any third parties.

Where your information is stored and keeping information it secure

Your information is generally stored on servers and filing systems in the European Economic Area which includes the UK. We will take appropriate technical and organisational measures to keep your information confidential and secure in accordance with our internal procedures covering the storage, access and disclosure of information. Information may be kept on our information technology systems or in paper files.

From time to time it may be stored in or accessed from countries outside the EEA. Where this may happen, we always make sure that there are appropriate safeguards in place, such as the model contract clauses, binding corporate rules or the EU-US Privacy Shield, to guarantee that your information – and your rights – are protected to the same high standard as under UK law.

Lawful Purpose for Processing Personal Data

We consider that the processing of Personal Data as described above is necessary for the legitimate interests of Haddletons’ business except where we expressly state otherwise: In deciding this:

We understand our responsibility to protect your individual interests.
We only use your Personal Data in ways you would reasonably expect (described above).
We are not using Personal Data in ways you would find intrusive or which could cause them harm.
We have considered safeguards to reduce the impact where possible
We have considered whether we can offer an opt out (see Your Rights below).

Cookies

Our website uses cookies. A cookie is a text-only string of information that a website transfers to the cookie file of the browser on your computer’s hard disk so that the website can remember who you are. A cookie will typically contain the name of the domain from which the cookie has come, the “lifetime” of the cookie, and a value, usually a randomly generated unique number. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and allows us to improve our site and services.

We may use cookies in the following ways:

Where they are essential to make our site work
To enable the personalisation features on our site (which give you the ability to recall recently viewed pages and see information which you have input online)
To compile anonymous, aggregated statistics that allow us to understand how users use our site and to help us improve the structure of our site. We cannot identify you personally in this way.

For detailed information about cookies and how they are used on our website, see our Cookie Policy

Disabling/enabling cookies

You can accept or decline cookies by modifying the settings in your browser. However, you may not be able to use all the interactive features of our site if cookies are disabled. For further information about disabling or blocking cookies, please see ‘Can I withdraw my consent?’ in our Cookie Policy

Relevant and Useful Information

Occasionally we may contact you with information we think may be of interest to you and you would expect to receive from a law firm such as legal updates, and details of legal services. If you prefer not to receive this material from us, please email us at info@haddletonlegal.com.

Marketing

Occasionally we may contact you with details of marketing events or competitions hosted by the Haddletons. If you prefer not to receive promotional material from us, please email us at the address below (Contact Information).

We reserve the right to utilise any feedback given to advance our business needs and to help deliver services including and not limited to marketing, promotional materials and website content and formulation.

Security

As stated above, Haddletons has policies and technical measures in place to safeguard and protect your Personal Data against unauthorised access, accidental loss, improper use and disclosure. However, the internet and Information Systems are not completely secure and although we will do our best to protect your Personal Data the transmission of your data to us is done so at your own risk.

How long do we keep your information for?

We only keep your information for as long as is necessary. We have a Document Retention Policy which we refer to decide how long is necessary.

Your rights

Under the data protection rules, you have several rights in respect of your information, which include the right to:

access your information
withdraw your consent to the processing of your information at any time
ask us to make changes to the information we hold about you to make sure that it is accurate and up to date
delete or erase your information (sometimes called the right to be forgotten)
stop or restrict our processing of your information
object to our processing your information
not be subject to automated decision-making and
request the transfer of some of the information we hold about you (known as data portability).

If you would like to exercise any of your rights, please contact us at the address below (Contact Information). Please note that an archive copy of any information provided to us may be retained by us for our records and for audit purposes.

You have the right to request a copy of the information we hold about you by sending your request in writing to us at the above address.

You can unsubscribe from our marketing emails at any time by sending us an email to info@haddletonlegal.com with your name and the word “UNSUBSCRIBE” in the heading of the email.

In other instances, we will review the lawful purpose for processing your information which we may be required to hold by law. If we process it for our legitimate interests, we will check that the processing is necessary and there is no less intrusive way to achieve the same result. We will also conduct a balancing test to decide whether your interests do not override our legitimate interests.

Access requests should be put in writing and addressed to the contact details below (Contact Information).

Contact Information

If you wish to unsubscribe from marketing information and/or have any comments or questions about our data protection and privacy practices, please send an email to info@haddletonlegal.com or send a letter to our risk and compliance team at Windsor House, Cornwall Road Harrogate HG1 2PW.

If you have a complaint about how your Personal Data is used, you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office www.ico.org.uk

Version 2: Last reviewed Jan 2020