PRIVACY POLICY

How and why we use your personal information

Under data protection law we can only use your Personal Information if we have a proper reason for doing so. Such proper reasons include:

• to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations;
• for our legitimate interests (see below) or those of a third party;
• for the performance of our contracts with you or to take steps at your request before entering into a contract with you;
• you have given consent.

A legitimate interest is when we have a business or commercial reason to use your Personal Information, so long as this is not overridden by your rights and interests. We make sure we consider and balance any potential impact on you (both positive and negative) and your rights before we process your Personal Information for our legitimate interests. We do not use your Personal Information 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).

In general terms, we will collect Personal Information to:

• provide services to you;
• manage our relationship with you and to comply with our legal obligations arising from it;
• provide you with information about our business and the services we offer including relevant communications;
• help us improve our business and the services we offer.

The information above does not apply to any Special Category Personal Information which you may have provided to us or authorised us to obtain from a third party, and which we will usually only process with your explicit consent. However, in some circumstances in connection with a matter, we may receive Special Category Personal Information from third parties and we can lawfully process that information without your consent where it is necessary to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim or claims or whenever courts are acting in their judicial capacity.

Change of purpose

We will only use your Personal Information for the purposes for which we collected it unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If we need to use your Personal Information for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.

We may process your Personal Information without your knowledge or consent (in compliance with the above rules) where this is required or permitted by law.

Marketing communications

We may use your Personal Information to send you updates (by e-mail, telephone or post) about developments that might be of interest to you or information about our services, including new services.

We have a legitimate interest in processing your Personal Information for our business development purposes. This means we do not usually need your consent to send you updates and information about our services.

We will always treat your Personal Information with the utmost respect and we will never sell or share it with other organisations for marketing purposes.

You have the right to opt-out of receiving marketing communications at any time.

Whom we share your Personal Information with

We share Personal Information with:

• third parties whom we instruct on your behalf or refer you to (for example printers, photographers or other advisers);
• other third parties where necessary to carry out your instructions;
• our insurers and brokers;
• the audit of our accounts;
• our banks;
• external service suppliers, representatives and agents that we use to make our business more efficient (for example marketing agencies);
• where we have your consent to do so, with our external auditors concerning our ISO and other quality certifications.

Our IT support and service providers may also access your Personal Information as a consequence of them providing support to us.

We only allow our service providers to handle your Personal Information if we are satisfied they take appropriate measures to protect your Personal Information. We also impose contractual obligations on service providers to ensure they can only use your Personal Information to provide services to us and you.

We may disclose and exchange information with law enforcement agencies and regulatory bodies to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations.

We may also need to share some Personal Information with other parties. For example, if we, in the course of our business operations, sell or buy any business or assets we may disclose Personal Information held by us to the prospective seller or buyer of those businesses or assets.

Where possible, the information will be anonymised, but in any event, the recipient of the information will be bound by confidentiality obligations. If we are acquired, or substantially all of our assets are acquired, by a third party (or are subject to a reorganisation), Personal Information held by us will be one of the assets which are transferred.

Where your Personal Information is held

Information may be held at our offices, third party agencies, service providers, representatives and agents as described above. We also hold your Personal Information in secure data centres in the UK with all reasonable technological and operational measures put in place to safeguard it from unauthorised access.

Some of the third parties may be based outside the European Economic Area (EEA). 

Transferring your Personal Information out of the EEA

To deliver services to you, it may sometimes necessary for us to share your Personal Information outside the European Economic Area (EEA) for example:

• with your and our service providers located outside the EEA;
• if you are based outside the EEA;
• where there is an international dimension to the Matter about which we are advising you;
• if one of the members of our staff needs to access it remotely while they are travelling outside the EEA.

These transfers are subject to special rules under EU and UK data protection law. In those circumstances, we assess the level of protection in light of the circumstances surrounding the transfer. We will make sure that any transfers are not repetitive and only limited to the minimum amount of information possible and will always take steps to ensure that your Personal Information is adequately protected. In certain circumstances, we may need to seek your consent unless there is an overriding legal need to transfer the Personal Information.

Where necessary we have entered into standard European Commission approved model data protection clauses with our external service providers and business partners concerning the services they provide which may involve processing Personal Information for which we are the data controller from locations outside the EEA.

How long your Personal Information will be kept

We will only retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including to satisfy any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

When it is no longer necessary to retain your Personal Information, we will delete or anonymise it. In some circumstances, we may anonymise your Personal Information (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research or statistical purposes in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you.

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

In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data: see Your rights concerning your Personal Information.

Clients

We only keep your Personal Information about your Matter for as long as is necessary to:

• carry out our services for your Matter;
• respond to any questions, complaints or claims made by you or on your behalf;
• show that we treated you fairly;
• keep records required by law to comply with our legal obligations. In certain circumstances, anti-money laundering legislation requires us to retain records, documents and information relating to a Matter (including a copy of your identity documentation) for five years from conclusion of your Matter or when our business relationship with you ends.

We retain your Matter file (which may include your Personal Information) for up to 10 years from the date of your final bill although this may vary depending on the nature of your Matter.

Complaints or requests

If you are not a client of ours, but you complain to us about how we have processed your Personal Information or you seek to exercise a data protection right such as a data subject access request, we will retain details of your complaint or request. We will only use the Personal Information we collect to process the complaint or request, to audit the level of service we have provided and to provide information to our insurers.

We will keep information in connection with the complaint or request in line with our retention policy. In most cases, this means we will retain the information for seven years.

How we protect your Personal Information

Keeping information secure is a key part of data protection compliance. We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your Personal Information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. Also, we limit access to your Personal Information to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

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 or where we have otherwise agreed with you that we will.

If we have given you a username and password which allows you to access certain parts of your Matter through our systems, you are responsible for keeping it confidential.

How we maintain information security

We are committed to ensuring the security, availability and integrity of the information you entrust to us (including your data). We work hard to ensure our security arrangements remain robust and meet ever-changing challenges and threats so we will update this statement as we add new capabilities and make improvements to our systems.

Assurance

We maintain an assurance programme which is designed to proactively identify potential threats and opportunities to improve business security and integrity. We also run our internal audit programme to verify that our staff are familiar with and adhere to our policies and procedures.

Operational management

We have an established management framework to identify, assess and manage information security risks. This is supported by a suite of information security procedures including, data protection, business continuity plans, acceptable use (including remote access and social media) and breach reporting and response.

Our security measures also help us to prevent and manage any interruptions to the services we deliver to you.

Physical security

We have physical entry controls at all of our offices to restrict access to premises and equipment on a need to know basis.

User authentication

We have a process in place to manage our IT user accounts for authorised individuals and to restrict access as necessary. We have appropriate password security procedures and a process in place to log and monitor user and system activity which can be used to detect any unauthorised access or anomalous activity and to help prevent data breaches.

Change control and supplier management

Change initiatives are underpinned by due diligence and testing processes to verify integrity, ensure security and avoid business interruptions. Supplier relationships start with a robust due diligence process. We use certified and trusted suppliers to help us maintain and support the smooth running of our systems.

Data encryption, protection and back up

We routinely back-up electronic information to help restore information in the event of disaster or ransomware attack.

We run virus scans on all incoming e-mail correspondence (and any attached documents) and use malware protection software to scan our computers to detect and prevent threats.

We provide secure transmission methods to protect your information including encryption for e-mails (when requested by you) and options to use secure file transfer (SFTP) for bulk transfers of data and (the UK hosted) secure document storage and sharing.

Our boundary firewalls are designed to stop attacks before our network can be compromised and we use internet filtering to prevent our users accessing websites or other online services which we have assessed as presenting a threat or which we do not trust.

We have effective procedures for patch management and software updates. Our server certificates are issued by leading certificate vendors.

Your rights concerning your Personal Information

You are entitled at any time to ask us for a copy of Personal Information we hold about you, known as a data subject access request. You are also entitled to ask that any information we hold about you is supplemented, updated or rectified. You can make any of these requests free of charge by contacting us: info@egtip.nl

We will aim to respond to your request within one month once we have assessed how feasible your request is, taking into account the technical capability of the other organisation involved.

For further information, including the circumstances in which they apply, please contact us or see the Guidance from the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) on individuals’ rights under the General Data Protection Regulation.

We do not use your Personal Information for automated decision making.

How to complain

We hope that we can resolve any query or concern you may raise about our use of your information. If you want to complain about how we have handled your Personal Information, please follow the procedure below. We will investigate your complaint, but if you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are processing your Personal. The EU General Data Protection Regulation also gives you the right to complain about a supervisory authority, in particular in the European Union (or EEA) state where you work, normally live or where any alleged infringement of data protection laws occurred. The UK supervisory authority is the Information Commissioner’s Office.

If you have a complaint, you are encouraged in the first instance to either write or speak to the person who is dealing with your Matter or the account director responsible for our relationship with you (whose details will be found in your engagement letter). Full details of our complaints procedure are set out in our complaints policy which is provided to our clients. Please contact us if you would like us to send you a copy of the complaints policy.

If your complaint relates to a contract entered into online or by other electronic means, you may be able to submit your complaint to a certified alternative dispute resolution (often referred to as ADR) provider in the UK using the EU ODR platform. The ODR platform, which is available for cross-border and domestic disputes, is an interactive website offering a single point of entry to consumers and traders seeking to resolve disputes relating to online contracts for goods or services. The website address for the ODR platform is http://ec.europa.eu/odr.

Contact Information

Please contact us by post, e-mail or telephone if you have any questions about this privacy policy or the information we hold about you.

Our contact details

Web:

• EGTIP

Contact:

• Wiegerbruinlaan 73, 1422 CB Uithoorn, Nederland
• info@egtip.nl
• +31(0)297-269874