Privacy Policy

Volister & Co Legal is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Notice ("Notice"), together with our website terms of use and any other documents referred to in it, sets out the types of personal information we collect, how we collect and process that information, who we share it with in relation to the services we provide and certain rights and options that you have in this respect.

Personal data we collect

We collect and process the following personal data from you:

Identity and Contact Data, including your name, address, telephone number and other personal data concerning your preferences relevant to our services;

Financial and Payment Data, including your bank account and other data necessary for processing payments and fraud prevention, including credit/debit card numbers, security code numbers and other related billing information;

Business Information, including information provided in the course of the contractual or client relationship between you or your organisation and Bird & Bird, or otherwise voluntarily provided by you or your organisation;

Information relevant to our legal advice, including personal data relevant to any dispute, grievance, investigation, arbitration, or other legal advice we have been asked to provide to our client;

Profile and Usage Data, including passwords to Bird & Bird websites or password protected platforms or services, your preferences in receiving marketing information from us, your communication preferences and information about how you use our websites(s), including the services you viewed or searched for, page response times, download errors, length of visits and page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs).

Technical Data, including information collected during your visits to our website(s), the Internet Protocol (IP) address, login data, browser type and version, device type, time zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform.

Physical Access Data, relating to details of your visits to our premises;

Sensitive personal data: In the course of our client services, we may represent you and/or your organisation in legal matters that require us to collect and use sensitive personal information relating to you (that is, information about your racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs, trade union activities, physical or mental health, sexual life and sexual orientation or details of criminal offences, or genetic or biometric data).

For example, if we represent you in a criminal case, we will collect information about the alleged offences and any related criminal history. In some employment representations, such as disputes involving alleged discrimination, information about medical conditions, race, religion and/or sexual orientation may be relevant to the representation. Similarly, representations in tax or social security matters may

also require us to collect sensitive personal information, such as if we are advising on whether certain disabilities qualify for social security or tax benefits. Where we process sensitive personal information in the course of these and other similar client services, we do so to assist you and/or your organisation to establish, exercise or defend legal claims or to assist you and/or your organisation in fulfilling the rights and obligations of applicable employment or social security laws.

Information about other people

If you provide information to us about any person other than yourself, your employees, counterparties, your advisers or your suppliers, you must ensure that they understand how their information will be used, and that they have given their permission for you to disclose it to us and for you to allow us, and our outsourced service providers, to use it.

How do we collect your personal data?

The circumstances in which we can collect personal data about you include:

• when you or your organisation seek legal advice from us or use any of our online client services;
• when it is provided to us by a third party because you are the subject of, or your data is otherwise included in, legal advice we are asked to provide to that third party client (for example, where we are asked to provide advice in an employment dispute, or where you are the subject of an investigation we are asked to conduct)
• when you or your organisation offer to provide, or provides, services to us;
• when you correspond with us by phone, email or other electronic means, or in writing, or when you provide other information directly to us, including in conversation with our lawyers, consultants and staff;
• when you or your organisation browse, complete a form or make an enquiry or otherwise interact on our website or other online platforms;
• when you attend our seminars or other events or sign up to receive personal data from us, including training;
• by making enquiries from your organisation, other organisations with whom you have dealings such as former employers and educational institutions, or from third party sources such as government agencies, a credit reporting agency, information service providers or from publicly available records.

If you fail to provide personal data

Where we need to collect personal data by law or in order to process your instructions or perform a contract we have with you and you fail to provide that data when requested, we may not be able to carry out your instructions or perform the contract we have or are trying to enter into with you. In this case, we may have to cancel our engagement or contract you have with us, but we will notify you if this is the case at the time.

How will we use your personal data?

We use your personal data only for the following purposes:

• To fulfil a contract, or take steps linked to a contract, with you or your organisation. This includes:
  
  
  1. to register you as a client of Volister & Co Legal
  2. to provide and administer legal services or other services or solutions, as instructed by you or your organisation;
  3. to process payments, billing and collection; and
  4. to process applications for employment.
  
  
• As required by Volister & Co Legal to conduct our business and pursue our legitimate interests, in particular:
  
  
  1. to administer and manage our relationship with you, including accounting, auditing, and taking other steps linked to the performance of our business relationship
  2. to carry out background checks, where permitted;
  3. to analyse and improve our services and communications and to monitor compliance with our policies and standards;
  4. to manage access to our premises and for security purposes;
  5. to protect the security of our communications and other systems and to prevent and detect security threats, frauds or other criminal or malicious activities;
  6. for insurance purposes;
  7. to exercise or defend our legal rights or to comply with court orders;
  8. to provide legal advice and legal services to our clients; and
  9. to communicate with you to keep you up-to-date on the latest developments, announcements, and other information about our services and solutions (including briefings, newsletters and other information), events and initiatives; to send you details of client surveys, marketing campaigns, market analysis, or other promotional activities; and
  10. to collect information about your preferences to personalise and improve the quality of our communications with you.
  
  

  Please note that we will only provide you with marketing related information when we have a previous contractual relationship or a business relationship with you and provided you do not opt-out to receive those communications. You have the opportunity to opt-out at any time as explained in the "Right to withdraw consent" section of this Notice.

• For purposes required by law, including maintaining records, compliance checks or screening and recording (e.g. anti-money laundering, financial and credit checks, fraud and crime prevention and detection, trade sanctions and embargo laws). This can include automated checks of personal data you provide about your identity against relevant databases and contacting you to confirm your identity, or making records of our communications with you for compliance purposes. We will not use your personal data for taking any automated decisions affecting or creating profiles other than as described above.

Disclosure of your personal data

We share your personal data, in the following circumstances:

• with our subsidiary undertakings and/or affiliates for the purposes of providing you with our services as described in this Privacy Notice.
• with third parties including certain service providers we have retained in connection with the legal services we provide, such as barristers, consultants, mediators, or experts and other legal specialists such as law firms for obtaining specialist or foreign legal advice, translators, education evaluation services, couriers, or other necessary entities;
• if we have collected your personal data in the course of providing legal services to any of our clients, we may disclose it to that client, and where permitted by law to others for the purpose of providing those services;
• on a confidential basis with third parties for the purposes of collecting your feedback on the firm’s service provision, to help us measure our performance and to improve and promote our services;
• with companies providing services for money laundering and terrorist financing checks, credit risk reduction and other fraud and crime prevention purposes and companies providing similar services, including financial institutions, credit reference agencies and regulatory bodies with whom such personal data is shared;
• with courts, law enforcement authorities, regulators, government officials or attorneys or other parties where it is reasonably necessary for the establishment, exercise or defence of a legal or equitable claim, or for the purposes of a confidential alternative dispute resolution process;
• with service providers who we engage within or outside of Volister & Co Legal, domestically or abroad, e.g. shared service centres, to process personal data for any of the purposes listed above on our behalf and in accordance with our instructions only;
• if we sell or buy any business or assets, in which case we may disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets to whom we assign or novate any of our rights and obligations.

Your Rights

You have various rights with respect to our use of your personal data:

Access: You have the right to request a copy of the personal data that we hold about you. There are exceptions to this right, so that access may be denied if, for example, making the information available to you would reveal personal data about another person, or if we are legally prevented from disclosing such information. You are entitled to see the personal data held about you. If you wish to do this, please contact us using the contact details provided below.

Accuracy: We aim to keep your personal data accurate, current, and complete. We encourage you to contact us using our contact form to let us know if any of your personal data is not accurate or changes, so that we can keep your personal data up-to-date.

Objecting: In certain circumstances, you also have the right to object to processing of your personal data and to ask us to block, erase and restrict your personal data. If you would like us to stop using your personal data, please contact us using our contact form.

Porting: You have the right to request that some of your personal data is provided to you, or to another data controller, in a commonly used, machine-readable format.

Erasure: You have the right to [ask/require] us to erase your personal data when the personal data is no longer necessary for the purposes for which it was collected, or when, among other things, your personal data have been unlawfully processed.

Complaints: If you believe that your data protection rights may have been breached, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the applicable supervisory authority, or to seek a remedy through the courts. You may, at any time, exercise any of the above rights, by using our contact form together with a proof of your identity, i.e. a copy of your ID card, or passport, or any other valid identifying document.

How long we keep your personal data

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements and, where required for Volister & Co Legal to assert or defend against legal claims, until the end of the relevant retention period or until the claims in question have been settled.

Upon expiry of the applicable retention period we will securely destroy your personal data in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.

Changes to our Privacy Notice

We reserve the right to update and change this Notice from time to time in order to reflect any changes to the way in which we process your personal data or changing legal requirements. Any changes we may make to our Notice in the future will be posted on this page and, where appropriate, notified to you by email. Please check back frequently to see any updates or changes to our Notice.