PRIVACY AND COOKIE POLICY

This Policy was last updated in July 2023.

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1.  Your privacy is important to us and this Privacy and Cookie Policy (“Policy”) provides important information about how we look after your personal data when you visit our website (regardless of where you visit it from) and tell you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you.

1.2.  Claimsmiths Law LLP is a data controller for the purposes of this Policy and responsible for your personal data (collectively referred to as “Claimsmiths”, “we”, “us” or “our” in this Policy).

1.3.  This Policy applies to any Claimsmiths website including http://www.claimsmiths.co.uk/ and any related pages, as well as any application, or service that links to it (collectively, our “Services”).

1.4. Please check back often for updates to this Policy. If we make changes we consider to be important, we may let you know by placing a notice on the relevant Services and/or contact you using other methods.

2. WHO WE ARE

2.1   We are a boutique law firm authorised by the Solicitors Regulatory Authority, SRA No: 8002134.

2.2.  We are registered in England and Wales under company number OC443644 and have our registered office at Floor 3 31 Princess Street, Manchester, Greater Manchester, M2 4EW, which is also our main trading address.

2.3. To contact us, please email info@claimsmiths.co.uk or call us on +44(0) 330460 9735.

3. DATA WE COLLECT

3.1.  Personal data, or personal information, means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymous data).

3.2. We may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal data about you which we have grouped together follows:

3.2.1.  Identity Data includes first name, maiden name, last name, username or similar identifier, marital status, title, date of birth and gender;

3.2.2.  Contact Data includes address, email address and telephone numbers;

3.2.3.  Technical Data includes internet protocol (IP) address, your login data, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform and other technology on the devices you use to access this website;

3.2.4.  Profile Data includes your username, password, and feedback and survey responses;

3.2.5.  Usage Data includes information about how you use our website and our Services; and

3.2.6.  Marketing and Communications Data includes your preferences in receiving marketing from us and our third parties and your communication preferences.

3.3.  We may also collect, use and share aggregated data such as statistical or demographic data for any purpose. Aggregated data may be derived from your personal data but is not considered personal data in law as this data does not directly or indirectly reveal your identity. For example, we may aggregate your usage data to calculate the percentage of users accessing a specific website feature. However, if we combine or connect aggregated data with your personal data so that it can directly or indirectly identify you, we treat the combined data as personal data which will be used in accordance with this privacy policy.

3.4.  We do not collect any special categories of Personal Data via our sites about you (this includes details about your race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, information about your health and genetic and biometric data). Nor do we collect any information about criminal convictions and offences.

3.5. This website is not intended for children and we do not knowingly collect data relating to children.

4. HOW IS YOUR PERSONAL DATA COLLECTED

4.1. We use different methods to collect data from and about you including through:

4.1.1. Direct Interactions. You may give us your Identity and Contact Data by filling in forms or by corresponding with us by post, phone, email or otherwise. This includes personal data you provide when you use our Services; create an account on our website;
subscribe to our service or publications; request marketing to be sent to you; enter a competition, promotion or survey.

4.1.2.  Automated Technologies or Interactions. As you interact with our website, we may automatically collect Technical Data about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this personal data by using cookies, server logs and other similar technologies. We may also receive Technical Data about you if you visit other websites employing our cookies. This Policy sets out specific details about our cookies further below.

4.1.3.  Third Parties or Publicly Available Sources. We may receive personal data about you from various third parties and public sources, for example, Technical Data from (i) analytics providers such as Google based outside the EU and (ii) advertising networks such as Google AdSense based outside the EU.

4.1.4. Identity and Contact Data from publicly availably sources such as Companies House and the Electoral Register based inside the EU.

HOW WE USE YOUR PERSONAL DATA

5.1. We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal data in the following circumstances:

5.1.1.  Where we need to perform the contract we are about to enter into or have entered into with you;

5.1.2.  Where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests. “Legitimate interests” means the interest of our business in conducting and managing our business to enable us to give you the best service/product and the best and most secure experience. We make sure we consider and balance any potential impact on you (both positive and negative) and your rights before we process your personal data for our legitimate interests. We do not use your personal data for activities where our interests are overridden by the impact on you (unless we have your consent or are otherwise required or permitted to by law). You can obtain further information about how we assess our legitimate interests against any potential impact on you in respect of specific activities by contacting us; or

5.1.3. Where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation.

PURPOSES FOR WHICH WE WILL USE YOUR PERSONAL DATA

6.1. We may use your data for the following purposes:

6.1.1.  Account Setup and Administration: Where applicable, we use personal data such as your name, email address, phone number, and information about your device to set up and administer your account, and/or verify your identity.

6.1.2. Personalisation: We may use personal data to deliver and suggest tailored content.

6.1.3.  Research and Development: We may use personal data for internal research and development purposes and to improve and test the features and functions of our Services.

6.1.4.  Analytics: We may use personal data for data analytics to improve our website, products/services, marketing, customer relationships and experiences.

6.1.5.  Marketing and Advertising: We may use personal data to deliver relevant website content and advertisements to you and measure or understand the effectiveness of the advertising we serve to you.

6.1.6.  Website Administration: We may use personal data to administer and protect our business and this website (including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting of data).

6.1.7. Legal Obligations: We may be required to use and retain personal data for legal and compliance reasons. We may also use personal data to meet our internal and external audit requirements, information security purposes, and as we otherwise believe to be necessary or appropriate: (a) under applicable law, which may include laws outside your country of residence; (b) to respond to requests from courts, law enforcement agencies, regulatory agencies, and other public and government authorities, which may include such authorities outside your country of residence; (c) to enforce our terms and conditions; and (d) to protect our rights, privacy, safety, or property, or those of other persons.

7. DISCLOSURE OF YOUR PERSONAL DATA

7.1. We may have to share your personal data with the parties set out below for the purposes set out above in order to deliver our Services.

7.1.1.  Our Business Partners: We may partner with other organisations to deliver our Services. As part of these arrangements, you may interact with both Claimsmiths and our partners, and we and our partners may collect and share information about you. We will handle personal data in accordance with this Policy, and we encourage you to review the privacy policies of our partners to learn more about how they collect, use, and share personal data.

7.1.2.  Our Third-Party Service Providers: We may partner with or may be supported by service providers around the world. Personal data may be made available to these parties only when necessary to fulfil the services they provide to us. Our third-party service providers are not permitted to share or use personal data we make available to them for any other purpose than to provide services to us.

7.1.3.  Third parties for legal reasons: We may share personal data when we believe it is required, such as:

7.1.3.1. to comply with legal obligations and respond to requests from government agencies, including law enforcement and other public authorities, which may include such authorities outside your country of residence;

7.1.3.2. in the event of a merger, sale, restructure, acquisition, joint venture, assignment, transfer, or other disposition of all or any portion of our business, assets, or stock (including in connection with any bankruptcy or similar proceedings); or

7.1.3.3. to protect our rights, users, systems, and Services.

8. WHERE WE STORE AND PROCESS PERSONAL DATA

8.1.  Whilst we endeavour to process all your personal data within the United Kingdom, for some of our Services, your personal data may be stored and/or processed outside of the United Kingdom. Some of our external third parties may be based outside the European Economic Area (EEA) so their processing of your personal data may involve a transfer of data outside the EEA.

8.2.  Whenever we transfer your personal data out of the EEA, we ensure a similar degree of protection is afforded to it by ensuring at least one of the following safeguards is implemented:

8.2.1. We will only transfer your personal data to countries that have been deemed to provide an adequate level of protection for personal data by the European Commission; or
8.2.2. Where we use certain service providers, we may use specific contracts approved by the European Commission which give personal data the same protection it has in Europe.

9. DATA SECURITY

9.1.  We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

9.2.  We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.

9.3.  Our information security policies and procedures are closely aligned with widely accepted standards and are reviewed and updated as necessary to meet our business needs, changes in technology, and regulatory requirements. For example:

9.3.1.  We have measures in place to protect against accidental loss and unauthorised access, use, destruction, or disclosure of data;

9.3.2.  We place appropriate restrictions on access to personal data; and

9.3.3. We implement appropriate measures and controls, including monitoring and physical measures, to store and transfer data securely.

10. DATA RETENTION

10.1.  We retain personal information for as long as we reasonably require it for legal or business purposes.

10.2. To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

11. YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS

11.1. We respect your right to access and control your personal data, and we will respond to requests for information and, where applicable, will correct, amend, or delete your personal data. Under applicable data protection laws you may have the right to:

11.1.1. Request Access to your personal data (commonly known as a “data subject access request”). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal data we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
11.1.2.  Request Correction of the personal data that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate data we hold about you corrected, though we may need to verify the accuracy of the new data you provide to us.

11.1.3.  Request Erasure of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal data where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal data where you have successfully exercised your right to object to processing (see below), where we may have processed your information unlawfully or where we are required to erase your personal data to comply with local law. Note, however, that we may not always be able to comply with your request of erasure for specific legal reasons which will be notified to you, if applicable, at the time of your request.

11.1.4.  Object to Processing of your personal data where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground as you feel it impacts on your fundamental rights and freedoms. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal data for direct marketing purposes. In some cases, we may demonstrate that we have compelling legitimate grounds to process your information which override your rights and freedoms.

11.1.5.  Request Restriction of Processing of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of your personal data in the following scenarios: (i) if you want us to establish the data’s accuracy; (ii) where our use of the data is unlawful but you do not want us to erase it; (iii) where you need us to hold the data even if we no longer require it as you need it to establish, exercise or defend legal claims; or (iv) you have objected to our use of your data but we need to verify whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it.

11.1.6.  Request the Transfer of your personal data to you or to a third party. We will provide to you, or a third party you have chosen, your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format. Note that this right only applies to automated information which you initially provided consent for us to use or where we used the information to perform a contract with you.

11.1.7.  Withdraw Consent at any time where we are relying on consent to process your personal data. However, this will not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before you withdraw your consent. If you withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide certain products or services to you. We will advise you if this is the case at the time you withdraw your consent.

11.2.  If you would like to know more about your rights or if you are not satisfied with how we manage your personal data, please contact your applicable data protection regulator. A list of National Data Protection Authorities can be found here: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/ data-protection/bodies/authorities/index_en.htm.

11.3.  If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please get in touch via our contact information above.

11.4.  You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.

11.5.  We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.

11.6. We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.

12. COOKIES AND SIMILAR TECHNOLOGIES

Claimsmiths and our third-party providers set and use cookies and similar technologies to store and manage user preferences, deliver targeted advertising, enable content, and gather analytic and usage data, for example. The use of cookies and other tracking technologies is standard across websites and applications through which information is collected about your online activities across applications, websites, or other services. More information about how we use cookies and similar technologies and how you can control and manage them is below.

13. WHAT IS A COOKIE?

A cookie is a small text file that is placed on a computer or other device and is used to identify the user or device and to collect information. Cookies are typically assigned to one of four categories, depending on their function and intended purpose: absolutely necessary cookies, performance cookies, functional cookies, and cookies for marketing purposes.

14. TYPES OF COOKIES AND WHY WE USE THEM

14.1.  Absolutely Necessary Cookies: These cookies are essential to enable you to move around a website and use its features. Without these cookies particular services cannot be properly provided.

14.2.  Performance Cookies: These cookies collect information about how you use our websites. Information collected includes, for example, the Internet browsers and operating systems used, the domain name of the website previously visited, the number of visits, average duration of visit, and pages viewed. These cookies do not collect information that personally identifies you and only collect aggregated and anonymous information. Performance cookies are used to improve the user-friendliness of a website and enhance your experience.

14.3.  Functionality Cookies: These cookies allow the website to remember choices you make and provide enhanced, more personal features. These cookies can also be used to remember changes you have made to text size, fonts, and other customisable parts of web pages. They may also be used to provide services you have asked for, such as watching a video or commenting on a post. The information these cookies collect may be anonymised, and they cannot track your browsing activity on other websites.

14.4.  Targeting and Advertising Cookies: These cookies track browsing habits and are used to deliver targeted (interest-based) advertising. They are also used to limit the number of times you see an ad and to measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. They are usually placed by advertising networks with the website operator’s permission. They remember that you have visited a website and this information is shared with other organisations, such as advertisers.

14.5. You can find more information about the individual cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them in the table below:

Cookies

Functionality
Our content management systems use many cookies to make our website work. These include cookies that customise your experience, recognise you when you return to our site, allow you to log in, move information from page to page as you navigate our website and generally improve your user experience.

Analytics
Cookies collect information and report website usage statistics without personally identifying individual visitors to Google. The main cookie used by Google Analytics is the ‘__ga’ cookie. In addition to reporting website usage statistics, Google Analytics can also be used, together with some of the advertising cookies described below, to help show more relevant ads on Google properties (like Google Search) and across the web and to measure interactions with the ads we show.

Advertising
We may use cookies to make advertising more engaging to users and more valuable to publishers and advertisers. Some common applications of cookies are to select advertising based on what’s relevant to a user; to improve reporting on campaign performance; and to avoid showing ads the user has already seen.

Google uses cookies like NID and SID to help customize ads on Google properties, like Google Search. For example, we use such cookies to remember your most recent searches, your previous interactions with an advertiser’s ads or search results, and your visits to an advertiser’s website. This helps us to show you customized ads on Google.

Sometimes advertising cookies may be set on the domain of the site you’re visiting. In the case of advertising we serve across the web, cookies named ‘__gads’ or ‘__gac’ may be set on the domain of the site you’re visiting. Unlike cookies that are set on Google’s own domains, these cookies can’t be read by Google when you’re on a site other than the one on which they were set. They serve purposes such as measuring interactions with the ads on that domain and preventing the same ads from being shown to you too many times.

Google also uses conversion cookies, whose main purpose is to help advertisers determine how many times people who click on their ads end up purchasing their products. These cookies allow Google and the advertiser to determine that you clicked the ad and later visited the advertiser’s site. Conversion cookies are not used by Google for personalized ad targeting and persist for a limited time only. A cookie named ‘Conversion‘ is dedicated to this purpose. It’s generally set in the googleadservices.com domain or the google.com domain (you can find a list of domains we use for advertising cookies at the foot of this page). Some of our other cookies may be used to measure conversion events as well. For example, DoubleClick and Google Analytics cookies may also be used for this purpose.

14.6. Please note that third parties (including, for example, advertising networks and providers of external services like web traffic analysis services) may also use cookies, over which we have no control. These cookies are likely to be analytical/performance cookies or targeting cookies.

15. MANAGING COOKIES

15.1. You can manage website cookies in your browser settings, and you always have the choice to change these settings by accepting, rejecting, or deleting cookies. If you choose to change your settings, you may find that certain functions and features will not work as intended on the Services. All browser settings are slightly different, so to manage cookies, you should refer to the relevant settings within your browser.

15.2.  We understand that you may want to know more about cookies. Here are some useful resources that provide detailed information about types of cookies, how they are used, and how you can manage your cookie preferences: www.aboutcookies.org or www.allaboutcookies.org.

15.3.  Please click below for detailed information on how to disable and delete cookies in some commonly used browsers:

Mozilla Firefox®
Microsoft® Internet Explorer
Google ChromeTM
Safari®