Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how CHORD Legal Limited ("we", "our", "us") handles personal data you provide to us, including through www.chord.legal (our "Site"). We are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. If we process your personal data, this Privacy Policy applies to you.

1. Our Role

When we use personal data in connection with promoting and running our business and providing our services, we do so as data controller.

The data controller is CHORD Legal Limited, a company incorporated and registered in England and Wales with number 14820174, whose registered office is 124 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under registration number ZC64670.

2. Your Role

It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and up to date. Please let us know if your personal data changes.

3. Contact Details

We are not required to appoint a Data Protection Officer under data protection law. If you have any questions about this policy or how we handle your personal data, please email cam@chord.legal.

4. The Personal Data We Collect

Personal data means any information about a living individual from which that person can be identified, directly or indirectly. We may collect personal data about you when you interact with us through the Site, social media, email, telephone, post or in person. We may also receive it from third parties, for example from a publicly available source or from someone who has recommended us to you and given us your contact details. It falls into the following categories:

• Identity Data, such as your name and job title.
• Contact Data, such as your email address, telephone number and business address.
• Enquiry Data, such as the details of your enquiry about our services, including your company name and website.
• Correspondence Data, such as any correspondence between us about an enquiry.
• Technical Data, such as your IP address, operating system, browser type and version, approximate location and information about how you use our Site.
• Tracking Data, such as information collected through cookies and similar technologies, where you have consented to them.

We may also use anonymised, aggregated data, such as the percentage of visitors who use a particular page of the Site. Aggregated data is not personal data because it does not identify you. If we ever combine it with your personal data so that it could identify you, we will treat the combined data as personal data under this policy.

We do not usually collect special categories of personal data about you, such as information about your health, ethnicity, religious or political beliefs, or sexual orientation. Please do not include this kind of information in an enquiry. Unless we are required to by law, or it is an integral part of providing legal services to you, we do not collect personal data relating to criminal convictions or offences.

5. How We Use Your Personal Data

We use personal data to promote and run our business, to provide our services and to meet our legal obligations. We will only use your personal data where the law allows us to, most commonly:

• To perform a contract we are about to enter into, or have entered into, with you, for example an engagement for us to provide legal services.
• For our legitimate interests, where your interests and fundamental rights do not override them, for example to respond to your enquiry, keep records of our correspondence, and keep our IT systems secure.
• To comply with a legal or regulatory obligation, for example professional obligations that apply to us as solicitors, or rules requiring us to verify a client's identity.
• With your consent, for example to set analytics cookies on your device. You can withdraw your consent at any time.

We may rely on more than one lawful basis, depending on the specific purpose for which we are using your data.

We do not sell your personal data, and we do not use it for automated decision-making.

6. Who We Share Your Personal Data With

We share personal data only where we need to, and only with:

• Service providers who help us run our business, such as our website host (Wix), analytics provider (Google), email and IT providers (our email is run on Google Workspace), and business administration services.
• Our professional advisers, for example our accountants, insurers or legal advisers, or in the context of a dispute.
• Regulators and authorities, including the Information Commissioner's Office and the Solicitors Regulation Authority, where we are required or permitted to by law.

Whenever we share your personal data with a third party, we require them to respect your privacy and treat your data in accordance with the law. We only allow our service providers to process your personal data for specified purposes and on our instructions, and we do not allow them to use it for their own purposes.

7. Cookies and Analytics

Our Site uses cookies. Some are essential for the Site to work. Others, such as analytics cookies, help us understand how visitors use the Site so we can improve it. We only set non-essential cookies with your consent. For more information, including how to change your choices, please see our Cookie Policy.

8. International Data Transfers

Some of our service providers may process personal data outside the UK. Where this happens, we make sure the transfer complies with UK data protection law and that your data receives a similar level of protection to that in the UK. We do this by relying on UK adequacy regulations, which confirm that a country provides an adequate level of protection, or by using the International Data Transfer Agreement or the International Data Transfer Addendum approved for use in the UK.

9. Keeping Your Data Secure

We have put appropriate technical and organisational measures in place to protect your personal data from loss, misuse and unauthorised access. Confidential information is only handled using systems with appropriate security, and is never used to train external AI models.

10. How Long We Keep Your Data

We only keep your personal data for as long as we need it for the purposes we collected it for, including to meet any legal, regulatory, accounting or reporting requirements.

To decide the right retention period, we consider the amount, nature and sensitivity of the data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure, the purposes for which we process it and whether we can achieve those purposes by other means, and the legal requirements that apply. As a guide, enquiries that do not lead to an engagement are kept for 24 months. Website visitor data collected through analytics is kept for 14 months. Client records are kept for as long as our professional obligations require, as set out in our engagement terms.

11. Your Rights

Under UK data protection law, you have the right to:

• ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
• ask us to correct personal data that is inaccurate or incomplete;
• ask us to delete your personal data;
• ask us to restrict how we use your personal data;
• object to us using your personal data where we rely on our legitimate interests;
• ask us to transfer your personal data to you or another organisation; and
• withdraw your consent at any time, where we rely on consent.

To use any of these rights, please email cam@chord.legal. We will usually respond free of charge within one month. We will need to verify your identity before we can discuss your personal data with you.

If you are a client and we are providing services to you on an ongoing basis, we may still need to contact you about those services.

12. Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal data, please contact us first so we can try to put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

13. Third-Party Links

Our Site may include links to third-party websites, such as LinkedIn. Clicking on those links may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control those websites and are not responsible for their privacy practices, so please read their privacy policies.

14. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time. The latest version will always be available on this page.