We are committed to protecting your privacy when you access or our website, make an enquiry, or instruct us as a client. This privacy notice provides important information on how and why we collect, store, use and share your personal information. It also explains your rights in relation to your personal information and what do if you have any concerns.
Rook Irwin Sweeney LLP is registered with the Information Commissioners and our Reference number is ZA733440. Our Data Protection Officer is Polly Sweeney, Partner who can be contacted by email – polly.sweeney@rislaw.co.uk
Making an Enquiry
When you contact us to make an enquiry, whether through our website, by telephone or in writing, we will store the information you provide us and the outcome of your enquiry for the following purposes:
- To be able to respond to your enquiry;
- To comply with regulatory requirements in relation to prospective clients.
We will not use this information for any other purpose, including marketing.
When using the Contact Form on our website, no information will be stored on the website and your IP address will not be stored. The information will be stored on our cloud based secure case management system.
We will store this information on our system for one year, following which it will be destroyed. If you would like further information about this please contact us.
Our Clients
If you are a client, we store and use the information you provide primarily for the provision of legal services to you and in order to comply with our contractual obligations as set out in our Retainer Letter. This will include using your data for related purposes including:
- addressing correspondence and related documents to other parties and opponents in any litigation, as well as other agencies such as the courts or Government agencies where relevant to the work we are doing for you
- maintaining the financial and other personal information we are required to keep on clients under the professional rules we are subject to and by law including our obligations to HMRC.
Our use of that information is subject to your instructions, the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2018 and our professional duty of confidentiality.
Our work for you may require us to give information to third parties such as expert witnesses, other professional advisers such as accountants and costs draftsman, consultants, our regulators and our bank if they wish to ascertain the source of monies held in our client account.
The primary legal bases which are relevant to the work we undertake for you are in order that we can satisfactorily perform the contract we have with you and also so that we can protect the interests of our professional indemnity insurers through maintaining suitable records. We are required by law to retain certain data including identity and address details in order that we can comply with the Government’s anti-money laundering controls.
Your personal data will be stored using a cloud-based case management software called LEAP. You should be aware that LEAP’s infrastructure is maintained by cloud-platform provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) and your data may be held outside of the UK and EU. LEAP uses multiple layers of security controls (software, physical and process based) to protect our client data. Further information about LEAP’s security and agreement with AWS is available on request.
You have a number of rights as a data subject including the rights to:
- be informed of the data we hold on you
- have any incorrect or out of date data rectified
- cease to receive certain forms of communication or to restrict processing,
- take your data elsewhere (“portability”)
- object to our use of data.
We do not involve ourselves in automated decision making and profiling.
You also have a right of access under data protection legislation to the personal data that we hold about you. If you would like to make a request to know about the personal data we hold on you please let us know, preferably in writing and addressed to Polly Sweeney, Partner by email polly.sweeney@rislaw.co.uk or by post to Rook Irwin Sweeney LLP, 107-111 Fleet Street, London EC4A 2AB stating “data subject access request”.
If you are unhappy about the way we are managing your data you have a right to object to the Information Commissioner at Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF (tel: 0303 123 1113). Please also see your rights to complain as explained in our Complaints Policy.
