Mandell Pinder LLP takes the protection of your personal data seriously. We are committed to protecting personal information that we collect, use and disclose in the course of providing legal services and to complying with all applicable privacy laws, regulatory requirements and our professional obligations. This privacy policy (“Policy”) is meant to help you understand how we collect, use, disclose and manage personal information of clients and potential clients, whether that information is collected via our website www.mandellpinder.com (“Website”) and through our provision of legal services (“the “Services”). In this Policy, the terms “you”, “user” and “your” refer to a visitor of our Website or user of the Services and the terms “we”, “us” and “our” refer to Mandell Pinder LLP.
In this Policy, “personal information” means information about an identifiable individual, such as your name, home address or contact information (including home telephone number and personal e-mail address). Notably, not all information that you share with us is considered personal information: for example, business contact information is not considered personal information.
Collection and Use of Personal Information
Mandell Pinder LLP may collect your personal information at various times, in the course of providing Services and through the use of our Website. We will only use the personal information collected for the purposes described in this Policy, or for other purposes which are disclosed to you and to which you consent.
We collect and use personal information from clients and potential clients based on the information and services requested. For example, we may collect the following:
• name, address, contact details (including phone numbers and email addresses), bank account or other financial details for our accounts and other incidental information relating to the Services we provide;
• details regarding legal issues, which will vary based on the type of issue for which you seek advice and may include financial, employment, or tax information (as examples), and any other information that we may request or that you may provide when we act on your behalf;
• while acting for clients, we may collect information about employees of clients, and other parties, such as adverse parties, other counsel, witnesses and potential witnesses, advisors and consultants; and
• other information that we may collect with your consent or as permitted or required by law.
We use this information:
• to establish and manage our business relationship with you, including:
• to offer and provide legal services or legal information to you (including sending you newsletters or other communications regarding general legal issues);
• to issue and collect accounts; and
• to fulfill our ethical and professional obligations;
• for potential clients, to confirm whether we can act for you, having regard to our professional and ethical obligations regarding conflicts of interest;
• as allowed or required by law; and
• for other purposes where you have provided consent.
In addition, we may collect and use personal information (or other information) from users of our Website in a variety of ways, including the following:
• to share information about us, our Website and other products and services with you;
• to communicate with you regarding inquiries for information or other requests submitted through our Website;
• to distribute newsletters and other information that you have requested, including through third party marketing and email platforms; and
• for other purposes for which you have provided your consent.
If you apply or inquire about an employment opportunity with us, we may use personal information you provide to process and respond to your application or inquiry.
Please note that by submitting personal information to us, you consent to us collecting your personal information.
Collection Through External Tools
Mandell Pinder LLP may also collect aggregate information which tells us about visitors to our Website, but not the identity of those visitors. For example, we may collect information about the date, time and duration of visits and which pages of our Website are most commonly accessed. The purpose of collecting this aggregate information is to help us administer and improve our Website. We reserve the right to provide our analyses based on such anonymous and aggregated data to third parties.
In particular, our Website uses the analytical tracking tool Google Analytics, a website analysis service, which collects, records and analyzes data regarding the behaviour of visitors to websites. This may include data about which website led a user to the Website, which pages of the Website a user accessed and how often and how long a user viewed a page. Website analysis is used mainly for the optimization of use of the Website.
Google Inc., of 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA, is the operator of Google Analytics.
How We Disclose and Share Your Personal Information
We disclose personal information only as described in this Policy, with your consent, or as otherwise permitted or required by law. In the provision of legal services, we may sometimes be required to disclose our clients’ personal information to third parties, including foreign agents and government or regulatory agencies. We may disclose personal information:
• to third parties, where disclosure is necessary to provide legal services to you, including agents or law firms retained to act on your behalf, experts, consultants or as part of a proposed or actual transaction, such as a financing or other business transaction;
• to our service providers, inside or outside of Canada, who assist us with marketing or other services, including mailing or payment processing services. We use reasonable measures to require our service providers to use your personal information only to perform the applicable services;
• where we are required or authorized by law to do so, for example, where the rules of court require us to provide personal information to the opposite side and the court in a litigation matter or where a court issues a subpoena or order;
• to third parties, where it is necessary to collect fees, for instance, to a financial institution or collection agent;
• to anyone who we reasonably believe is your agent;
• to third parties where you have instructed us to disclose your personal information to such parties;
• to our insurers or regulatory agencies (including our governing law societies) to comply with our professional and ethical obligations related to the practice of law; and
• where you consent or as permitted or required by law.
Consent
Mandell Pinder LLP commits to only collecting, using or disclosing your personal information where we have your consent to do so or as provided in this Policy. Depending on the sensitivity of the personal information, we will consider that you have given consent in the following circumstances:
• you provide express consent (either orally, electronically or in writing);
• you provide implied consent, which can be reasonably inferred from your action or inaction; or
• we assume consent in the event that you do not exercise an opt-out mechanism offered to you.
Please note that if you choose to provide any personal information to us, we assume that you consent to the collection, use and disclosure of your personal information as outlined in this Policy.
Consent to the collection, use and disclosure of personal information by us may be implied by the fact that you have engaged us to provide legal services, where the collection, use and disclosure of personal information relates to the performance of those services. If you provide personal information about another person to us, we assume you have the consent of that individual to enable us to collect, use or disclose their information as described in this Policy.
If you do not consent, please do not provide your personal information or, where applicable, exercise the opt-in or opt-out options offered. Mandell Pinder LLP acknowledges that you may change or withdraw your consent at any time, subject to legal or contractual restrictions and reasonable notice, by contacting our Privacy Officer by email or one of the other means listed below under the heading “Contacting Us” set out below. In the even that you withdraw your consent to certain uses of your personal information, it may be that we are no longer be able to provide some or all of our Services.
We may also collect, use or disclose your personal information without your consent, for example, to collect a debt you owe to us or to comply with applicable laws or court orders.
We assume, unless you advise us otherwise, that by receiving a copy of this Policy or by continuing to deal with us, you have consented to the collection, use and disclosure of your personal information as explained in this Policy.
Legal Basis – EEA
To the extent we conduct commercial activities in the European Economic Area (EEA), the legal basis for processing your personal information would depend on the circumstances for which it was collected.
In many circumstances, we would seek consent to process your personal information for specific purposes. In those instances, we would not process your personal information other than for those identified purposes without your prior consent or as otherwise permitted by law. However, we may also rely on one or more of the following legal bases (as applicable) to process your personal information:
• to enter into contracts and comply with our contractual commitments to you;
• to pursue our legitimate business interests, including to provide our Services to you and to manage our business relationship; and
• to protect our legal rights and interests and comply with our legal obligations.
Where We Keep Your Personal Information
Personal information we collect is stored and processed by us primarily in Canada, regardless of your country of residence. We may also use third party service providers, including payment processors and technology partners, to provide the infrastructure required to provide our Services. Those service providers may store and process personal information in Canada, the United States and other jurisdictions. Personal information provided to third parties outside of Canada is subject to the laws of those jurisdictions and may not be afforded the same legal protections that are available in Canada. In those cases, we will put appropriate contractual and other controls to protect your personal information, as required by applicable laws.
If you are located in the EEA, we will take steps to ensure that adequate protections and appropriate safeguards are in place for your personal information that is processed or stored outside of the EEA. This may include reliance on the adequacy status of the country’s data protection laws (in the case of personal information processed in Canada), the incorporation of standard data protection clauses in our agreements with third parties or reliance on an EU-US or Swiss-US Privacy Shield registration.
By providing us with your personal information, you consent to the transmission, processing and storage of your personal information in these countries.
Security
We have implemented reasonable physical, organization and technological security processes designed to protect the personal information in our control. Technological and operational policies and procedures are in place to protect personal information from misuse, loss and unauthorized modification or disclosure. We will dispose of personal information where it is no longer necessary to fulfil the purposes for which the information was collected, in accordance with our documented retention policy or as required by law.
Unfortunately, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed as completely secure. While we strive to protect such information, we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information transmitted to us over our Website.
Cookies and similar technologies
When you visit our Website, a cookie may be placed within the memory of your internet access device. We may use permanent cookies or server-side artifacts to help us track use of our Website by users, including casual visitors to our Website—such as the number and frequency of visits to our pages and which parts of our Website are visited. This information provides us with constructive feedback about our Website so that we can identify the most effective areas and improve the less popular ones.
Cookies cannot determine the identity of individual users. It is a feature of your internet browser which you can disable at any time. However, if you refuse or disable cookies, you may be limited in some areas of our Website.
Similarly, we may also collect information regarding the type of device, your operating system, the browser you use, your internet service provider, your domain name, your internet protocol (IP) address, the date and time that you accessed our service, the website that referred you to our Website, the web pages you requested and the subject of the ads you click or scroll over, and use such information to evaluate service performance and service quality and to optimize the user’s experience of our Website. To collect this information, we use cookies, web beacons and similar technologies. As discussed above, Google Analytics uses these technologies to tailor the performance of our Website to each unique visitor by tracking the date and time you visit the Website, which pages you visit, and whether you have visited before.
Third parties have their own policies about cookie usage and information collection. We suggest that you review any such third party policies to help you understand what data this organization holds about you and what they do with it. Here are the links for Google Analytics’ cookie policy and privacy policy.
Most web browsers accept cookies as a default. However, it is possible to block cookies by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse some or all cookies. Please note that if you use your browser settings to block all cookies, our Website may not function as intended.
Direct Communications
We are committed to complying with Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation.
Where we have your consent or it is lawful to do so, we may provide you with direct communications about general legal issues which may be of interest to you. Such information may be sent to you by email or post.
If you do not wish to receive further materials about our Services and legal developments or if you do not wish to receive further invitations to seminars and functions, you may unsubscribe or ask us not to contact you for these purposes by contacting our Privacy Officer by email or by one of the other means listed below under the heading “Contacting Us”.
Access, Corrections and Other Rights
It is your right to know what personal information we have about you and to correct any inaccuracies. While Mandell Pinder LLP also takes reasonable steps to ensure your personal information remains accurate for the purposes for which we use it, including to provide you with Services, please inform us if there has been a change in your personal information as soon as possible to ensure our records are up to date.
There are certain circumstances in which you may have additional rights, including under applicable data protection laws, to:
• request a copy of your personal information;
• request further information about how we use your personal information;
• request us to restrict our use or disclosure of your personal information;
• object to our use or disclosure of your personal information; and
• request us to delete the personal information we hold about you.
Please direct any such requests by email to our Privacy Officer or by one of the other means listed below under the heading “Contacting Us”, so that we may investigate your request and get back to you as soon as possible.
Data Retention
We may retain your personal information as long as is necessary in order to manage our relationship with you (or fulfill the purposes for which it was collected), in accordance with our documented retention policy or as otherwise permitted by law. The length of time we retain personal information varies and may extend beyond the end of your relationship with us.
Links to other Websites
Our Website may contain links to the websites of other organizations which may be of interest to you. Similarly, you may be directed to the websites of other organizations to perform certain functions provided on our Website. Linked websites are responsible for their own privacy practices and you should check those websites for their respective privacy policies.
Changes to the Policy
We reserve the right to change this Policy at any time and will take reasonable steps to advise affected individuals of any material changes, if necessary. You should review this Policy from time to time to ensure that you are aware of and accept any changes made.
Contacting Us
If you have any questions or comments about this Policy, your information, our third-party disclosure practices or your consent choices, please contact our Privacy Officer at hr@mandellpinder.com. You may also contact us at:
Mandell Pinder LLP
422-1080 Mainland Street
Vancouver, BC V6B 2T4