PRIVACY POLICY

Overview

Modern Family Law LLP 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.  Our relationship with you is founded on trust and we are committed to maintain that trust. We are committed to protecting any personal information we hold.

This Policy Statement has been prepared to affirm our commitment to maintaining the privacy of our clients and others and to inform you of our practices concerning the collection, use and disclosure of Personal Information collected by Modern Family Law LLP. 

A professional relationship develops when Modern Family Law LLP agrees to be retained to provide services to a particular individual. In order to protect their own interests, individuals should not send confidential information to Modern Family Law LLP until they have had a direct discussion with a professional at the firm regarding the retention of Modern Family Law LLP to provide legal services.

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 this Firm.  The Act gives you rights concerning the privacy of your personal information.

Modern Family Law 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.

Why we collect personal information

Modern Family Law LLP collects your personal information for the following limited purposes:

1. To establish and maintain client lists;
2. To represent you as our client;
3. For internal purposes including the professional development of firm lawyers and staff; and
4. For direct marketing purposes, from time to time.

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.

Your provision of personal information to Modern Family Law LLP means that you agree and consent that we may collect, use and disclose your personal information in accordance with this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree with these terms, you are requested not to provide any personal information to Modern Family Law LLP. Unfortunately, certain services can only be offered if you provide personal information to Modern Family Law LLP. Consequently, if you choose not provide us with any required personal information, Modern Family Law LLP may not be able to offer you those services.

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, to administer our client (time and billing) databases and to include you in any direct marketing activities.  We are obliged for legal purposes to retain our client files after the end of the retainer. 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.

Modern Family Law 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.

Modern Family Law LLP 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, Modern Family Law 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 requires us 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;
• when Modern Family Law LLP believes, upon reasonable grounds, that it is necessary to protect the rights, privacy, safety or property of an identifiable person or group;
• 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 or professionals at your request and/or on your behalf;
• if the information is already publicly known 

Updating your information

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 you are aware of changes to the personal information you have given to us, please inform us so that we can update our records accordingly and make any necessary changes. 

Retention 

Modern Family Law LLP keeps Personal Information only as long as it is required for the reasons it was collected. The length of time we retain information varies, depending on the product or service and the nature of the information. This period may extend beyond the end of a person’s relationship with us but it will be only for so long as it is necessary for us to have sufficient information to respond to any issues that may arise at a later date. When your personal information is no longer required for Modern Family Law LLPs’ purposes, we have procedures to destroy, delete, erase or convert it into an anonymous form.

Is my personal information secure?

Modern Family Law LLP takes all reasonable precautions to ensure that your personal information is kept safe from loss, unauthorized access, modification or disclosure.  Among 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.

We ensure that any of our employees who deal with personal information are properly trained and are aware of the necessary and appropriate measures required to protect personal information.

Request for Access

We are pleased to answer any questions that you may have regarding the collection and maintenance of personal information.

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.

Can I be denied access to my personal information?

Your rights to access your personal information are not absolute.  We may deny access including 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. 

 

Can I request anonymity?

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 disclose information to FINTRAC in relation to certain large cash transactions.

Communicating with Modern Family Law LLP 

You should be aware that e-mail is not a 100% secure medium.  In addition, mail, telephone calls, faxes and transmissions over the Internet are all susceptible to possible loss, misrouting, interception and misuse of the information being communicated or transmitted. You should be aware of this when contacting us to send personal or confidential information.

As do many organizations, Modern Family Law LLP attempts to strike a reasonable balance between security and convenience. In communicating with clients and others, Modern Family Law LLP often requests the right to use a method of communication that is less secure than some of its less convenient alternatives. An example of this is e-mail. At this time, when we use e-mail, it may be sent as unencrypted plain text. We do this because Modern Family Law LLP believes that many of our clients and others cannot readily process encrypted e-mail. This is done for their convenience but has the security concern that, if misrouted or intercepted, it could be read more easily than encrypted e-mail.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

Since Modern Family Law LLP regularly reviews all of its policies and procedures, we may change our Privacy Policy from time to time.

Requests for Access

If you have any questions or wish to access your person information, please write to us at Modern Family Law LLP, 1810 Avenue Road, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario M5M 3Z2.  

Employment Inquiries

If you apply to Modern Family Law LLP 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.

External Links

Our website, www.modernfamilylaw.ca contains links to other sites, which are not governed by this privacy policy. Modern Family Law LLP is not responsible for the contents or security of those sites or the collection, use and disclosure of your personal information on those sites.

Google Advertising

Modern Family Law LLP uses remarketing with Google Analytics to advertise online.

Third-party vendors, including Google, may show your ads on sites across the Internet.

Modern Family Law LLP and third-party vendors, including Google, use first-party cookies (such as the Google Analytics cookie) and third-party cookies (such as the DoubleClick cookie) together to inform, optimize, and serve ads based on someone’s past visits to your website.

Modern Family Law LLP and third-party vendors, including Google, use first-party cookies (such as the Google Analytics cookies) and third-party cookies (such as the DoubleClick cookie) together to report how your ad impressions, other uses of ad services, and interactions with these ad impressions and ad services are related to visits to your site.

Modern Family Law LLP uses data from Google’s Interest-based advertising or 3rd-party audience data (such as age, gender, and interests) with Google Analytics to optimize ads and improve website usability for our target audience.

By using the following Ads Settings (https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated), users can opt-out of Google Analytics for Display Advertising and customize Google Display Network ads. Users are also able to opt-out of sharing data with Google Analytics with the following browser add on: browser opt-outs (https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout/).

Website Statistics

On our website, like most other commercial websites, we may monitor traffic patterns, site usage and related site information in order to optimize our web service.

When you visit www.modernfamilylaw.ca, your IP address may be collected, as well as which pages you visit and for how long, how you arrived at or were directed to our website, a general location of your IP address, what kind of OS you run, and whether you use a smartphone or tablet to access our website.

The information collected gives anonymous statistics about how visitors use the website. This information is then used to manage our website and to ensure that the site technology is sufficient to meet your needs. We may provide aggregated information to third parties, but these statistics do not include any identifiable personal information.