Privacy Notice

Who we are?

We are Barnes Law Associates Ltd. Our registered office and place of business is at 7 Stratton Street, Mayfair, London, W1J 8LE. We are trading under the name of Barnes Law.

Our use of personal information

We are a law practice established to provide legal advice and related services to our clients. In the course of our business, we collect, use and share information, including personal information, in connection with providing our services and running our business.

This Privacy Notice

This is our main general Privacy Notice that applies across our business.

Updating this privacy notice

This notice may be updated from time to time.

Personal information

Personal information is information that relates to you or allows us to identify you. This includes things like your name, address and telephone number but can also include less obvious things like analysis of your use of our websites.

Our responsibility to you

We process your personal information in our capacity as a controller. This means that we are responsible for ensuring that we comply with relevant data protection laws when processing your personal information.

Data protection officer

We have a data protection officer. Her job is to oversee our data protection compliance. You can contact our data protection officer by sending an email to yulia@barnes-law.co.uk or a letter to 7 Stratton Street, Mayfair, London, W1J 8LE.

Why are we collecting personal information about you?

We only collect personal information about you in connection with providing our services and running our business. We will hold information about you if:

1. you are a client, a representative of a client, or the beneficial owner of a client;
2. you are a party or the representative of a party in a legal matter on which we are advising a client;
3. you are a witness, expert, investigator, judge, arbitrator, or mediator in a legal matter on which we are advising a client;
4. your information is provided to us by a client or others, or we otherwise obtain your information, in connection with our role as the legal representative of our clients;
5. you provide services to us (or you represent a company which provides services to us);
6. you represent a regulator, certification body or government body which has dealings with us;
7. you attend our seminars or events, receive our legal updates or visit our offices or website;
8. you are an applicant for a job with us.

What personal information do we collect about you?

The types of information we process about you may include:

1. name, address (including proof of address), other contact details (e.g. email and telephone numbers), gender, marital status, date and place of birth, nationality, employer, job title and employment history, and family details, including their relationship to you;
2. identification numbers issued by government bodies or agencies, such as your national insurance number, passport number, tax identification number and driving licence number;
3. bank account or payment card details, income or other financial information;
4. information about you which is relevant to a matter on which we are advising you or a client;
5. information received from various anti-fraud and sanctions databases relating to you;
6. information relating to your criminal convictions and offences;
7. information which can be traced back to you, such as an IP address, a website tracking code or electronic images of you.

Where do we collect your personal information from?

We collect your personal information from various sources, such as you, your employer, our clients and our service providers, other third parties such as witnesses, experts, solicitors and investigators, credit reference agencies, anti-fraud databases, sanctions lists, court judgements and other databases, government agencies and publicly accessible registers or sources of information, by actively obtaining your personal information ourselves, for example through the use of website tracking devices.

How do we use your personal information?

Know Your Client and other legal obligations

We obtain information about our clients, their representatives and beneficial owners and others to help us to comply with legislation on money laundering, terrorist financing, and sanctions. We also collect and disclose personal information under applicable legislation and under orders from courts and regulators. Our disclosures will be to those bodies and persons who are entitled to receive the required information.

Legal Advice

We obtain information about individuals where this is necessary or appropriate in order to advise our clients on their legal position and to represent them in contentious matters and proceedings. We disclose this information to our clients in connection with our role as legal advisers. We obtain information about individuals where this is necessary or appropriate in order to advise our clients on their legal position, to structure their agreements and transactions and on other non-contentious advisory matters.

Service providers

We collect information about you in connection with your provision of services to us or your position as a representative of a provider of services to us.

Seminars, events and legal updates

If you wish to attend our seminars or events or receive our updates, we ask you to provide us with a limited amount of information (normally your work contact details, your employer’s name, your job title, and the legal subjects/events of interest). We use this information in order to communicate with you about our seminars, events and updates, to ensure that you are an appropriate audience for them, and to conduct analysis for marketing purposes.

Marketing

Where we have an opportunity to pitch for work, we may obtain information about relevant decision makers in order to improve the prospects of our pitch being successful. This information may come from a variety of public databases. As part of our marketing analysis, we track how you interact with our marketing activities, in particular whether you click on any of the links with the legal updates we send you. We are able to record this information against your email address by placing ‘cookies’ on your device. You can control cookies through the settings or preferences of your browser.

Staff Recruitment

We ask you to provide personal information to us as part of your job application. We will also conduct checks in order to verify your identity and the information provided in your application and obtain further information about your suitability for a role within our firm. This may include obtaining information from regulators, the electoral role and the Disclosure and Barring Service.

Consent

We do not generally process your personal information based on your consent because we can usually rely on another legal basis. Where we do process your personal information based on your consent, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. To withdraw your consent please email us at yulia@barnes-law.co.uk or, to stop receiving our marketing emails or firm news, please click on the unsubscribe link in the relevant email you receive from us.

Information sharing

We do not sell your information nor make it generally available to others. However, we do share your information in the following circumstances:

1. if you are a client or you are a representative or beneficial owner of a client, then we might provide your relevant information to search companies so they can verify your identity;
2. in the course of providing our legal services, we may require the assistance of various external providers of professional services (such as barristers, accountants, and experts) and of support services (such as word processing, translation, document review, and photocopying). The use of these services might involve the service provider receiving your relevant information from us;
3. where we have collected your personal information in respect of a legal matter on which we are advising a client, we may provide your personal information to the client or to other parties involved in the matter – for example, another party’s legal advisers – where it is necessary for us to do so in relation to the matter;
4. we use the services of various external companies to help us run our business efficiently, particularly in relation to our IT systems. Some of these services (such as email hosting and data backups) involve the service provider holding and using your personal information;
5. where we use external companies to organise or host events for us, we may need to provide these service providers with your relevant information;
6. if we sell our business, then your information will be transferred to the new owner to enable the continuation of the business;
7. we share your personal information with other third parties, such as relevant regulators, where we are required to do so to comply with legal or regulatory requirements. In each case where we share your information with one of our service providers, the service provider is required to keep it safe and secure. They are also not permitted to use your information for their own purposes.

Keeping your personal information safe

We take security issues seriously. We implement appropriate steps to help maintain the security of our information systems and processes and prevent the accidental destruction, loss or unauthorised disclosure of the personal information we process.

Profiling and automated decision making

We do not use profiling or automated decision making.

How long do we keep your personal information?

We keep your personal information in accordance with our data retention policy which categorises all of the information held by us and specifies the appropriate retention period for each category of information. Those periods are based on the requirements of relevant data protection laws and the purpose for which the information is collected and used, taking into account legal and regulatory requirements to retain the information for a minimum period, limitation periods for taking legal action, good practice and our business purposes.

Cross border transfers of your personal information

Where we transfer your personal information across national boundaries, we will protect your personal information by ensuring that those transfers are made in compliance with all relevant data protection laws. Generally, this means where we transfer your personal information to a third party that is located in a country which does not have adequate privacy protection, we will put in place a contract with the third party that includes the standard international data transfer contractual terms approved by the European Commission.

Contacting us and your rights

If you have any questions in relation to our use of your personal information, please email us at yulia@barnes-law.co.uk.

Under certain conditions, you may have the right to require us to:

1. provide you with further details on the use we make of your personal information;
2. provide you with a copy of the personal information we hold about you;
3. update any inaccuracies in the personal information we hold about you;
4. delete any of your personal information that we no longer have a lawful ground to use;
5. where processing is based on consent, stop that particular processing by withdrawing your consent;
6. object to any processing based on our legitimate interests unless our reasons for undertaking that processing outweigh any prejudice to your data protection rights;
7. restrict how we use your personal information whilst a complaint is being investigated;
8. transfer your personal information to a third party in a standardised machinereadable format.

In certain circumstances, we may need to restrict your rights in order to safeguard the public interest (e.g. the prevention or detection of crime) and our interests (e.g. the maintenance of legal privilege).

We are obliged to keep your personal information accurate and up to date. Please help us to do this by advising us of any changes to your personal information.

Your right to complain

If you are not satisfied with our use of your personal information or our response to any request by you to exercise your rights, or if you think that we have breached any relevant data protection laws, then you have the right to complain to the authority that supervises our processing of your personal information. Our lead data protection supervisory authority is the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).