Prentice Family Law Limited respects the privacy and legal rights of the individuals and organisations we deal with.

THIS NOTICE

This Privacy Notice and our terms and conditions and any other documents referred to in it explains how we use the personal data we collect and use personal date about you.

You can access our website without giving us your personal information. However, you may choose to provide us with your personal information on some pages of the website, for instance by completing the contact us form. By submitting your personal information, you consent to our use of the information as set out in this privacy policy. If you or your organisation is one of our clients, further information will be found in our engagement letter.

PRENTICE FAMILY LAW LIMITED

Prentice Family Law is a trading name of Prentice Family Law Limited, a company registered in England & Wales with Registered Company No. 11327331. Our registered office address is 3000 Cathedral Hill, Guildford, GU2 7YB. Prentice Family Law Limited is regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Firm ID 648475and are subject to the Solicitors’ Code of Conduct 2011 (“Code”).

For the purpose of the Data Protection Act 1998 (“DPA”) and the General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) (“the GDPR – Effective 25 May 2018”), we are the data controller. We are responsible for deciding how we hold and use your personal data.

HOW WE COLLECT YOUR PERSONAL DATA

In dealing with clients, other legal professionals and other parties in the course of our business, we generally collect personal data. This may include the following,

  • Name
  • Postal address
  • Email address
  • Phone number
  • Date of birth
  • Marital status
  • Financial information necessary to provide you with advice
  • Details of services you have received from us
  • Our correspondence and communications with you
  • Information obtained from third parties, who may include your employer, accountancy professionals and their firms, insolvency practitioners, courts, professional regulators, public bodies, and other entities, including credit reference agencies and providers of analysis, screening and database services who have a right to disclose this information to us.

We may obtain personal data from you when

  • you contact us by phone, email, post or social media
  • your visit our office
  • you contact us via our website
  • contact us with a question or enquiry;

HOW CAN WE USE THIS INFORMATION?

We may use any personal data we obtain for a number of purposes, as set out below.

  • Internal record keeping
  • to carry out our obligations arising from any agreement with you
  • to carry out our obligations arising from any agreement entered into between our clients and us
  • to seek your thoughts on our services we provide
  • to notify you of any changes to our services
  • to perform a contract with the person about whom we hold data (we will keep your data for so long as is necessary for the contract and then as required for legal and compliance purposes);
  • to deal with enquiries or requests or to contact people on behalf of our clients (we’ll keep your data for so long as is necessary to deal with the enquiry or request);
  • to protect or pursue our legitimate interests or those of our clients, the courts or anyone else we provide personal data to, after taking into account the legitimate interests of the person the data is about;
  • to comply with the law – for example, when performing or money laundering checks
  • to assess the financial resources of an individual or organisation in relation to legal rights, claims and defences as part of our work as legal professionals (
  • In any other way which we consider necessary and appropriate in order to conduct our business as a law firm, including to fulfil our professional, regulatory and legal obligations to our clients, the courts or other persons

We will not retain personal data for longer than is necessary. We assess the period of retention taking into consideration,

  • The requirements of our business and services we provide
  • Any statutory or legal obligations
  • The purposes for which we originally collected the data
  • The type of data collected
  • The category of your personal data

WHO HAS ACCESS TO YOUR PERSONAL DATA

We limit access to your personal data to employees, contractors, agents and other third parties who have a business need to know.

They will only process your data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We will not sell or rent your information to third parties. We will not share your information with third parties for marketing purposes.

Generally, we will only use your information within Prentice Family Law Limited.  However, there may be circumstances, in carrying out your legal work, where we may need to disclose some information to third parties; for example:

  • HM Land Registry to register a property
  • HM Revenue & Customs; e.g. for Stamp Duty Liability
  • Court or Tribunal
  • Solicitors acting on the other side
  • Asking an independent Barrister or Counsel for advice; or to represent you
  • Non-legal experts to obtain advice or assistance
  • Translation Agencies
  • Contracted Suppliers
  • External auditors or our Regulator; e.g. Lexcel, SRA, ICO etc.
  • Bank or Building Society; or other financial institutions
  • Insurance Companies
  • Providers of identity verification
  • Any disclosure required by law or regulation; such as the prevention of financial crime and terrorism
  • If there is an emergency and we think you or others are at risk

In the event any of your information is shared with the aforementioned third parties, we ensure that they comply, strictly and confidentially, with our instructions and they do not use your personal information for their own purposes unless you have explicitly consented to them doing so.

There may be some uses of personal data that may require your specific consent. If this is the case we will contact you separately to ask for your consent which you are free to withdraw at any time.

DATA SECURITY

We have put in place commercially reasonable and appropriate security measures to prevent your personal date from being lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way.

PERSONAL DATA WE MAY OBTAIN FROM OUR WEBSITE

We do not collect IP addresses (static or dynamic) and other technical information relating to the virtual or physical location of a visitor and their means of access.

We may track how visitors use the website, including dates and times and any details of how and for what duration particular resources are viewed or used. We may also track click data, including where users navigate to our site to and from and any searches you have made on or relating to our site.

We will use this data to:

  • run our website and ensure it works properly;
  • maintain the site’s security and that of our visitors

COOKIES

An HTTP cookie is a piece of data sent on behalf of a website and stored on the user’s computer by the user’s web browser while the user is browsing

We may use third-party analysis services which use cookies to collect information on site usage and behaviour patterns.  We do this to find out information such as the number of visitors to the various parts of our website and improve it.  We may also share website usage data with service providers for benchmarking and site rating purposes.

We do not use cookies in a way which allows us to identify site users.

You can block cookies via your web browser and can screen out certain cookies using browser add-ons or other software.  This may prevent you from accessing the entirety of our website.

DIRECT MARKETING

We do not currently undertake direct marketing. However, should we decide that the practice will commence with this, we will write to you and ask your permission.

YOUR RIGHTS

Under the DPA, you have the following rights in relation to your own personal data:

  • to prevent us using your data for direct marketing;
  • to have (in certain circumstances) inaccurate personal data corrected, blocked or destroyed;
  • to access a copy of the information comprised in your personal data that is undergoing processing (this is called “subject access rights” or “SAR”);
  • to object to automated decisions (we do not, however, use automated decision making);
  • to obtain compensation through legal proceedings for damage caused by a breach of the DPA
  • a right to object to processing that is likely to cause or is causing damage or distress.

OTHER WEBSITES

Our website may contain links to other websites.   We do not accept any responsibility or liability for third party websites.

CONTACT US

If you have any questions please contact our Data Protection Officer , Paul Prentice,  who can be contacted on 01483 237 989.

You may also complain to the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office)

Building 2,
Ground Floor,
Guildford Business Park,
Guildford,
GU2 8XH