Privacy Policy
KYH Law Professional Corporation (herein referred to as “KYH Law”, “we”, or “us”) recognizes the importance of privacy and the sensitivity of personal information. As lawyers, we have a professional obligation to keep confidential all information we receive within a lawyer-client relationship. We are committed to protecting any personal information we hold. This Privacy Policy outlines how we manage your personal information and safeguard your privacy.
Your Privacy Rights
From January 1, 2004, all businesses engaged in commercial activities must comply with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). These obligations extend to lawyers and law firms, including KYH Law. The Act gives you rights concerning the privacy of your personal information.
KYH Law 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 on our policies and practices.
Why Does KYH Law Need Personal Information
KYH Law provides legal services and products to a wide range of clients. In doing so, it produces direct marketing materials concerning its services and developments in the law.
What Personal Information do we Collect?
Personal information is any information that identifies you, or by which your identity could be deduced.
If we did not collect and use your personal information, we could not provide you with legal services.
We collect information only by lawful and fair means, and not in an unreasonably intrusive way. Wherever possible, we collect your personal information directly from you, both at the start of a retainer and in the course of our representation.
Sometimes we may obtain information about you from other sources, for example:
- your insurance company;
- your real estate agent in a property transaction;
- from a government agency or registry;
- your employer, if we are acting for you, at its request; your accountant.
Consent
In most cases, we shall ask you to specifically consent, if we collect, use, or disclose your personal information. Normally, we ask for your consent in writing, but in some circumstances, we may accept your oral consent. Sometimes, your consent may be implied through your conduct with us.
Use and Disclosure of Your Personal Information
We use your personal information to provide services to you, to administer our client, and to include you in any direct marketing activities. If you tell us that you no longer wish to receive information about our services, or about new developments in the law, we will not send any further material.
KYH Law 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.
Under certain circumstances, KYH Law 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 requires us to give your information to third parties (for example a lender in a real estate mortgage transaction) your consent will be implied, unless you tell us otherwise;
- where it is necessary to establish or collect fees;
- if we engage a third party to provide administrative services to us (like computer back-up services or archival file storage) and the third party is bound by our privacy policy;
- if we engage expert witnesses on your behalf;
- if we retain other law firms at your request, and on your behalf;
- if the information is Publicly Available Personal Information, as it is defined under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.
Since we use your personal information to provide legal services to you, it is important that the information be accurate and up-to-date. If during the course of the retainer, any of your information changes, please inform us so that we can make any necessary changes.
Is My Personal Information Secure?
KYH Law takes all reasonable precautions to ensure that your personal information is kept safe from loss, unauthorized access, modification, or disclosure. The steps taken to protect your information are:
- premises security;
- restricted file access to personal information;
- deploying technological safeguards like security software and firewalls to prevent hacking or unauthorized computer access;
- internal password and security policies.
You may ask for access to any personal information we hold about you. Summary information is available on request. More detailed requests which require archive or other retrieval costs may be subject to our normal professional and disbursement fees. If KYH Law holds information about you and you can establish that it is not accurate, complete and up-to-date, KYH Law will take reasonable steps to correct it.
Your rights to access your personal information are not absolute. We may deny access when:
- it is required or authorized by law (for example, when a record containing personal information about you is protected by solicitor-client privilege);
- to do so would reveal confidential commercial information, and the personal information cannot be severed from the record;
- to do so could reasonably be expected to threaten the life or security of another individual, and the personal information cannot be severed from the record; or
- the information was generated in the course of a formal dispute resolution process.
If we deny your request for access to, or refuse a request to correct information, we shall explain why.
Whenever it is legal and practicable, we may offer the opportunity to deal with general inquiries without providing your name (for example, by accessing general information on our website). The Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act requires us to confirm the identity of all new clients. It may also require us to disclose information to FINTRAC in relation to certain large cash transactions.
Credit Bureaus
To help us make credit decisions about clients, prevent fraud, check the identity of new clients and prevent money-laundering, we may – with your consent – request information about you from the files of consumer reporting agencies.
Communicating With Us
You should be aware that e-mail is not a 100% secure medium, and you should be aware of this when contacting us to send personal or confidential information.
Changes to this Privacy Policy
Since KYH Law regularly reviews all of its policies and procedures, we may change our Privacy Policy from time to time. If you would like to request for access to your personal information, or if you have any questions, please write to our privacy contact at:
Privacy-Officer
905-305-0700
info@kyhlaw.com
If you are not satisfied with our response, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada can be reached at:
112 Kent Street
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 1H3
1-800-282-1376
Employment Inquiries
If you apply to KYH Law for a job, we need to consider your personal information, as part of our review process. We normally retain information from candidates after a decision has been made, unless you ask us not to retain the information. If we offer you a job, which you accept, the information will be retained in accordance with our privacy procedures for employee records.
Web Site
We are committed to the proper management of the personal information of our clients and others, and of all visitors to our website that we collect, use and disclose in the course of our business. Our website contains links to other sites, which are not governed by this privacy policy. On our website, like most other commercial websites, we may use cookie technology, monitor traffic patterns, server logs, site usage and related site information in order to optimize our web service. We may provide aggregated information to third parties, but these statistics do not include any identifiable personal information. Certain information about Internet users’ traffic patterns is passively and automatically collected and linked to users’ (“IP”) addresses. These unique IP addresses are assigned to all Web users by their ISPs, and are automatically logged by Internet servers. While the IP address itself does not identify an individual, it may, in appropriate circumstances such as an investigation of a security breach, be used with the cooperation of the ISP to locate and identify an individual using the website.