PRIVACY POLICY
As you may be aware, early in 2018 the Australian Government introduced legislation seeking to provide data protection privacy in light of the growing challenges the electronic age presents for all of us.
As part of our compliance with the legislative requirements, you should be aware of the following matters:-
During the course of our representation of you, we will be required to obtain a significant level of personal information about you. This information will be sourced not only from yourself but, also may come into our possession from information provided by your former spouses’ lawyers, information obtained from various government agencies as well as information obtained from people and organisation with whom you may have had dealings.
The material we obtain will include information which would normally be considered entirely confidential or private as well as information which forms part of the public record. Examples of the former will be personal bank records, personal medical records and financial advice you obtain from accountants, financial planners and the like. Examples of the latter will be Medicare records, tax returns, Court documents relating to litigation in which you may have been involved and, of course, Police records.
As a general rule, only that information which is relevant to the matter at hand will ever be sought by us, but it is inevitable that some information will come into our possession which will have little, if any, bearing on the particular matter in which you have instructed us.
All information we receive is covered by what is known as legal professional privilege. As such, we are not normally obliged to release any of that information to anybody without your express consent. Obviously, where information needs to be included in Affidavits which are lodged with the Family Court or Federal Circuit Court, the information will no longer be covered by legal professional privilege. You should appreciate, however, there is a specific provision in the Family Law Act precluding the publication of any information relating to Family Law proceeding which is intended to stop members of the public being able to identify the person or persons to whom that information applies.
All information obtained by us is kept in your file in our office. When your matter is completed, our usual policy will be to return most, if not all, of our file to you and to securely destroy any excess documents. For instance, we would normally forward to you originals of all Court Order or Financial Agreements or Child Support Agreement, but we would destroy drafts of documents and/or duplicates of various documents.
Information which is produced to the Court in response to Subpoena will, at the completion of your case, be returned by the Court to us or to the person producing the documentation. In the event it is returned to us, we would normally forward this to or return it to the person producing the documents or, with their agreement, arrange for the documents to be destroyed. Where copy documents only are produced to the Court by third parties (such as your Bank), they would normally notify the Court that they consent to the documentation being destroyed rather than be returned.
It is our usual practice that at the expiry of seven (7) years after the closure of a file the contents will be destroyed but, any original documentation would be returned to you (assuming we are in a position to contact you).
The type of personal information we may collect includes, but is not limited to the following:
Your name.
Your mailing and/or street address.
Your email address.
Your telephone contact numbers.
Your facsimile number, if relevant.
Your age and/or birth date.
Your profession, occupation and job title.
Sensitive information as defined by the privacy legislation, such as information about your ethnicity, political opinions, religious belief, sexual preferences and the like.
Photographic images and/or pictorial representations (such as copies of passports or drivers’ licenses).
The products and services your have purchased or made enquiries about.
Electronic data including information about websites visited and the like.
The personal information which we hold is, as noted above, kept with your file. In most cases, our general practice is to keep both a hard copy of documents and information received, as well as keeping it in electronic form.
Our electronic information is stored on the cloud. We use Leap Accounting and Leap Document software (one of only a few such services authorised by the Law Society of NSW). We also have our own security service responsible for cyber protection and, naturally, do everything we possibility can to ensure that none of your personal information is accessible to third parties. Only that information which is relevant to the matter at hand is disclosed to third parties such as the Federal Circuit Court or the Family Court of Australia, the legal representatives for other parties, including those acting for your former spouse and Independent Children’s Lawyers, if relevant. All of our employees (both legal and non legal staff) are subject to stringent obligations of confidentiality and are clearly instructed not to discuss your matter or any details of it outside of the office and certainly not in a way as to provide any possible identification of you or members of your family to the public.
Naturally, should you have any concerns at all in relation to our treatment of your personal information, you should contact us to discuss those concerns immediately they arise.