Representing 10,000 solicitors across Westminster & Holborn, providing a forum of networking and promoting professional legal services in the 21st Century.
©Copyright 2024 Westminster & Holborn Law Society, thank you to all our sponsors - Privacy Notice.
Website Benham Publishing all images used with kind permission from contributors, Pixabay and Unsplash, email website manager.
THE CITY OF WESTMINSTER AND HOLBORN LAW SOCIETY PRIVACY NOTICE
1. Introduction
This privacy notice (Notice) explains how The City of Westminster and Holborn Law Society (a company limited by guarantee and registered in England and Wales with company number 05467334) (WHLS, we, us) processes your personal data, and your rights in relation to the personal data we hold.
This Notice may be updated from time to time; however, any major changes will be notified directly to those affected wherever practicable and published on our website https://www.cwhls.org.uk. This Notice is effective from 8 March 2021, when it was last updated.
2. Data controller and contact details
WHLS is the data controller of your personal data, if you have any questions about how WHLS uses your personal data, whom we share it with, or if you wish to exercise any of the rights set out in this Notice, please contact us using the following email address whls.data@gmail.com.
3. How we collect your information
We may collect your personal data in a number of ways, for example:
- Directly from you, for example, when you apply for WHLS membership, book and attend our events, participate in a survey; enter a competition and when you interact with us in various other ways including by phone, post or email or other online platforms;
- Indirectly if the organisation you work for includes you in a booking for one of our events or from an individual or organisation which nominates you for one of our awards;
- From the information you provide to us when you meet with one of our officers, members or representatives;
- When you make enquiries or sign up for our newsletter via our Website; and
- We may receive information on potential sponsors and partners from third parties, or through open source research conducted as part of our due diligence on you or your organisation with a view to working together.
4. The types of information we collect
We may collect the following categories of personal data about you:
- Where you have applied for membership, we will collect your name and the name of the organisation you work for, the area of law you practice in, date of admission as a professional lawyer; place of study, contact information and any other personal information that has been included in the application form;
- Your phone number if we need to contact you concerning our events or our activities.
- Your name and email address when you sign up to our newsletter or marketing emails; your contact data, such as billing and delivery address;
- Image data, photographs, sound recordings and videos (if we have taken them at our events or activities and you have not objected to us doing so);
- Information concerning your engagement with us, including records of communications between you and us and your attendance at our events and meetings;
- Demographic information such as age group, gender, race and ethnicity, health, interests and geographic location where this information is provided by you in our surveys;
- Professional details around your work history (for example, where we are required to carry out due diligence on prospective partners or suppliers);
- Your opinion and feedback that you provide on our events;
- Technical information gained from your use of our Website, including your internet protocol (IP) address, cookie identifier, browser type and version, time zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform; and
- Information about your Website visit (such as which pages you visited, how you navigated to our Website, and how long you spent browsing our Website).
Special category data (e.g. data concerning health and race/ethnicity). From time to time, we will process special category data for the following purposes:
- We may conduct surveys that provide an option to declare your race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or disability. We use this information to better understand the diversity of our members. We will only process this information for the purposes of identifying or keeping under review the existence of equality of opportunity or treatment with a view to promoting equality, or with your explicit consent.
- We also process data concerning health and allergies where this is provided to us in connection to an event with your explicit consent.
5. The legal bases for processing your data, how we use that data and with whom we share it
We will only process your data on a lawful basis. The lawful bases include:
Where we have a contractual relationship with you
We may process your personal data because it is necessary for the performance of a contract with you, or to take steps at your request prior to entering into such a contract. For example, we need to process personal data in order to comply with the terms and conditions of WHLS’ membership and the terms and conditions applicable to the use of our Website. In this respect we use your personal data for the following: WHLS Privacy Notice
- To process membership applications and enquires in respect to membership;
- To administer your attendance at meetings and events (unless an event is free to attend in which case the legal basis will be our legitimate interests); and
- To provide you with communications of general interest and relevance and updates under the terms of your membership.
In this respect, we may provide your personal data to the following:
- The WHLS administrator, officers, secretary and Committee members;
- Our IT support, including website host, cloud storage provider, our email and mail service providers, and direct marketing agency we instruct to manage our marketing database; and
- Third party suppliers, for example venue and catering providers, publishers of our magazine.
Legitimate interests
We may process your personal data because it is necessary for our or a third party's legitimate interests. Our legitimate interests include pursuing our mission to increase participation in WHLS and to represent solicitors within our geographic scope in a way that promotes and safeguards the integrity of the profession. Our interests will always be weighed against your rights, interests and expectations. In this respect, we use your personal data for the following:
- To run hustings, hold meetings and elect members to positions within WHLS;
- To administer our activities as a local law society including providing networking, social events and training;
- To administer surveys in connection to WHLS’ activities and events;
- To conduct due diligence on potential sponsors and partners;
- To use your likeness (including video and sound recordings), or an attributed quote in our newsletters, on our Website or in other materials that promote our work (except where it is appropriate to seek your consent);
- To conduct marketing about our events and activities (except where it is appropriate to gain your consent); and
- To process any enquiries in relation to WHLS’ activities.
In this respect, in addition to the recipients named in the section above, we provide your personal data to the following:
- Our professional advisers where it is necessary to obtain their advice or assistance.
Legal obligations
In some cases, we may need process your personal data in order to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations. In this respect we may use your personal data to comply with subject access requests of others, tax legislation, for the prevention and detection of crime, and to assist the police and other competent authorities with investigations (including criminal investigations).
Consent
In some circumstances we may seek your specific consent to process your personal data: for example, we will obtain your consent to send you our newsletters or other marketing emails where it is appropriate to do so.
If you have given your consent and you wish to withdraw it, please contact us using the contact details above or, in the case of marketing emails, click on the unsubscribe link within the marketing email.
6. International transfers
Our direct marketing provider holds information on servers based in the USA. Personal information will only be transferred outside of the UK if an appropriate gateway and safeguards (such as an adequacy decision in respect to the recipient country’s data protection regime or the approved Standard Contractual Clauses) are in place.
We may also transfer your personal data outside the UK in respect to international events. In such cases we will ensure that such transfers are conducted in compliance with data protection legislation.
7. How do we protect your data?
WHLS takes the protection of your data very seriously. We use appropriate technical and organisational precautions to keep your data safe and secure. We limit access to your personal information to ensure it is processed in an authorised manner. However, please note that transmission of information on the internet is not completely secure and we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to us. Once received, we take all reasonable steps and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.
8. Retention of your data
We will only retain your personal data for as long as is necessary to fulfil the purposes set out in this Notice and for our legitimate business purposes after the termination of your relationship with us. On expiry of the relevant retention period, your personal data will be deleted, suppressed or anonymised, as applicable.
If you are a member we may keep your membership details throughout your period of membership and 12 months after membership has ceased (to allow us to contact you following the initial lapse) and then limited to retain your name and last date of membership noting you are no longer a member.
9. Cookies
Cookies are small data files that are sent to and stored on your computer or mobile device from our Website. WHLS may use cookies to improve the functionality of our Website. We do not currently use cookies for analytical or advertising purposes. Your browser software should however enable you to block cookies if you wish to.
10. Your rights
You have the following rights concerning your personal data:
- To obtain access to, and copies of, the personal data that we hold about you;
- To request that we erase your personal data;
- To request that we restrict our data processing activities;
- To receive from us the personal data we hold about you which you have provided to us, in a commonly used format specified by you, including in certain circumstances for the purpose of you transmitting that personal data to another data controller; and
- To require us to correct the personal data we hold about you if it is inaccurate. We want to ensure that the personal data we hold is accurate. Please tell us about any changes. It is your responsibility to ensure you send accurate information and to update us if the information changes.
Please note that the above rights are not absolute, and we may be entitled to refuse requests where exceptions apply, for example, if we have reason to believe the personal data we hold is accurate or we can show our processing is necessary for a lawful purpose set out in this Notice.
If you are unhappy with how we are processing your personal data please contact us, you can also make a complaint to the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) (www.ico.org.uk), although the ICO advises that you should first try and resolve any issues with us first.