Your Privacy Rights
From January 1, 2004, all businesses engaged in commercial activities must comply with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (the “Act“) and the Canadian Standards Association Model Code for the protection of personal information, which it incorporates. These obligations extend to lawyers and law firms, including Lendor & Guest LLP. The Act gives you rights concerning the privacy of your personal information.
Lendor & Guest LLP is responsible for the personal information we collect and hold. To ensure this accountability, we have developed this policy and trained our lawyers and support staff about our policies and practices.
Purposes for Collection of Personal Information
Our firm collects personal information for the following limited purposes:
- to establish and maintain client lists;
- to represent you as our client; and
- for internal purposes including the professional development of firm lawyers and law clerks.
What Personal Information Do We Collect?
Personal information is any information that identifies you, or by which your identity could be deduced. We collect and use your personal information in order to provide you with legal services. Our firm restricts the collection of personal information only to that information that is necessary for the purposes noted above. We are committed to collecting personal information in a fair, open and lawful manner. Wherever possible, we collect your personal information directly from you at the start of a retainer and in the course of our representation.
In most cases, we shall ask you to specifically consent if we collect, use, or disclose your personal information. Sometimes, your consent may be implied through your conduct with us.
Use of Your Information
By retaining our firm, you have confirmed your trust in us. We are honoured by this trust and take pride in serving you.
We use your personal information to provide legal advice and services to you and to administer our client (time and billing) databases. We are obliged for legal purposes to retain our client files after the end of the retainer.
Lendor & Guest LLP does not disclose your personal information to any third party to enable them to market their products and services. For example, we do not provide our client mailing lists to other law firms.
Our firm stores and maintains personal information in conformity with the requirements of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act and the model code for the protection of personal information created and approved by the Canadian Standards Association.
Disclosure of Your Personal Information
Under certain circumstances, Lendor & Guest LLP will disclose your personal information:
- When we are required or authorized by law to do so, for example if a court issues a subpoena;
- When you have consented to the disclosure;
- When the legal services we are providing to you require us to give your information to third parties (for example, a professional retained to conduct a custody/access assessment or a mediation) your consent will be implied, unless you tell us otherwise;
- When it is necessary to establish or collect fees;
- If we engage a third party to provide administrative services to us (like computer backup services or archival file storage) and the third party is bound by our privacy policy;
- If we engage expert witnesses on your behalf;
- If the information is already publicly known.
