Privacy

We collect, hold, use and disclose personal information for the primary purpose of providing legal services to our clients, complying with regulatory and insurance obligations and operating our legal practice.

Secondary purposes include financial management, system improvement, enforcement of our right to payment and managing the relationship between our firm and former clients once the retainer has concluded. This includes:

• providing legal advice and representation to you or to our client(s);
• managing client matters and files;
• conducting legal research and investigations;
• preparing and reviewing legal documents;
• communicating with you and other parties;
• billing and collecting fees, including pursuit of our rights under a Costs Agreement or retainer;
• complying with our legal, professional and insurance obligations; and
• administering and managing our firm.

We may also use and disclose personal information for secondary purposes that are related to our primary purposes, including:

• maintaining and developing our relationship with you;
• quality assurance and improvement of our services, including training our AI models or those of our AI providers (subject to our obligations of confidentiality to you);
• training and professional development;
• ongoing Customer Due Diligence as required by the AML/CTF;
• training AI or automated systems including AI development by our vendors with appropriate confidentiality safeguards in place;
• enforcement of our right to payment of fees;
• internal reporting and analysis; and
• risk management and insurance purposes.

We may disclose personal information to third parties to facilitate the purposes of collection noted above. These purposes include disclosure to parties to proceedings or transactions and their representatives, to Courts, government and regulatory agencies as may be necessary or appropriate to establish legal rights and to progress transactions in which we are instructed. We also disclose information to third parties (such as data storage or archiving companies, our regulators or our insurers) who hold or process information for us.

• Your personal information and confidential data is held by us subject to our duty of confidentiality under the Australian Solicitor’s Conduct Rules (ASCR) and any applicable undertakings or court rules. We may disclose personal information to third parties subject to those obligations and for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy, including:
• to discharge our professional obligations to you or to our clients or in the reasonable execution of our instructions;
• to comply with our legal obligations or in answer to a compulsory notice such as a subpoena or warrant, or to disclose information under the AML/CTF Act, Criminal Code(s), Legal Profession Act or other relevant legislation;
• to barristers, mediators, expert witnesses, investigators and consultants and other legal practitioners engaged to act for you (and/or our client) or in relation to the matter;
• other parties to legal proceedings or transactions as instructed, reasonably necessary or required by law;
• courts, tribunals, government agencies and regulators;
• our professional indemnity insurers;
• a Costs Assessor in the event that an assessment is ordered or reasonably necessary.
• service providers who assist us to operate our business (including IT providers, AI providers, document management providers, and marketing service providers);
• related entities;
• as permitted under the ASCR confidentiality exceptions; and
• any person you expressly or impliedly authorise us to disclose information to.

We will disclose information to overseas recipients where this is reasonably necessary to progress our instructions (dealing with a company with an overseas office, for example).

We may disclose personal information to recipients located outside Australia where reasonably necessary or convenient to facilitate the purposes of collection, holding, use and disclosure of information stated in this Privacy Policy.

It is not possible for us to specify the countries that might be recipients of your personal information. We regularly deal with foreign advisers in the United Kingdom, United States, New Zealand, South Africa and countries in the European Union, but there may be other countries where we need to work with other advisers.

We hold your personal information using a system designed to protect against data breaches, however like all data security systems, risks may only be mitigated but not eliminated. It is our practice to require our storage service providers to be reputable.

We retain personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes for which it was collected, to comply with our legal and professional obligations and to ensure that pertinent evidence remains available if reasonably required.

Our website may contain links to third party websites, such as payment processors. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of those websites, and we encourage you to read their privacy policies.