Privacy Policy

PRACTICAL EDGE PRIVACY POLICY

Practical Edge Pty Ltd ACN 677 700 739 (“Practical Edge”) respects and values privacy and protects the personal information of others, including clients, customers, employees, contractors and other individuals, including visitors to our website. Practical Edge also understands that you value your privacy and wish to have your personal information kept secure. For these reasons, we place a high priority on the security of the personal information we hold. We have developed this policy to inform you of how we manage your personal information and maintain its integrity and security.

Practical Edge is bound by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (the “Privacy Act”), the Privacy Regulations 2013 (Cth) (the “Regulations”) and the Credit Reporting Privacy Code (the “CR Code”). We must comply with the Australian Privacy Principles and you can find more information about the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles at the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s website at: www.oaic.gov.au. As a legal firm operating within the jurisdiction of Western Australia we have additional obligations of privacy and confidentiality in accordance with the provisions of the Legal Profession Act 2008 (Western Australia) and associated legislation including the Legal Profession Conduct Rules 2010.

You acknowledge that the information you provide us and which we collect from you, is your own information or information which you have been authorised to provide to us.

While we believe in keeping your personal information highly secure, we also believe that you have the right to be informed about how we deal with that information. You may choose not to provide Practical Edge with any information about you, although this may affect our ability to provide the service to you. On reading this policy, you are unclear on any of the matters or simply want more information, please contact us by using the contact details provided below.

1. Information Collected

We aim to collect personal information only if it is reasonably necessary, or you would reasonably expect us to collect, to provide the service, product or information you have requested from us.

The type of personal information which we will ordinarily collect includes your name, business and personal contact details, email, job title and interests, and depending on the circumstances we may also collect details of your family members’ names, family history, health details, financial resources, assets and liabilities, and any other information required to perform our services. Where relevant, in order to perform our services we may ask you for other information, in particular, it may be necessary for us to collect bank account details, tax file numbers, superannuation details and details of directorships, shareholding or other investments.

We will not usually seek to collect sensitive information (e.g. race or ethnic origin, religious beliefs, criminal record, physical or mental health, or sexual orientation) from you. If it is necessary for us to collect sensitive information, we will obtain your explicit consent to collect and use such information.

For some of our professional legal services we may require you to verify your identity and will collect your personal information to enable verification of your identity, including information from your passport, driver’s licence, medicare and bank cards, birth certificates.

2. How We Collect Your Information

Invariably we will collect and hold a broad range of personal information gathered during the course of providing our products or services to you.

The main ways Practical Edge may collect your personal information are:

Directly from you, when you engage Practical Edge to undertake a professional service for you, or an affiliate or entity you are associated with or a family member, we will collect such information as is necessary for us to provide our services and including but not limited to email, business cards, letters, phone calls, meetings;
from our website, including but not limited to instruction sheets, enquiries or application forms;
sometimes it may be necessary for us to collect your personal information from a third party, or from a publicly available source (such as Landgate or ASIC);
from communications with Practical Edge or any member of our staff, whether by any form of online media, mail, email, facsimile, phone, website;
other professionals (accountants, financial planners, solcitors) or by any other of your agents;
from recruitment or employment agencies or referees when applying for employment with Practical Edge.

2.1 Use of Cookies / Website

You do not have to provide us with any personal information if you are a visitor to our website and you may choose to remain anonymous or to provide us with a pseudonym if you do not wish to reveal your identity.

However, you should be aware that by remaining anonymous, or in providing a pseudonym, we may be unable to properly provide services and advice to you; or the nature and extent of that advice may be limited. We may also be unable to properly respond to any request, particularly in the event that we may have a conflict of interest or concern in relation to the dissemination of information to an unknown party.

You may choose to provide us with personal information in some circumstances when you access our website, including whether you wish to subscribe to our newsletters, request services, ask us to respond to queries or correspondence, or apply for work.

Further, in accessing our website, we use cookies. These are small text files that are placed on your computer when you visit our website. We use cookies to monitor the traffic to the various pages on our website so that we can improve its relevance to our clients. Most of this information is aggregated and used for statistical purposes only. The information we collect in this manner, e.g. Internet provider, date and time, search phrases, or referring websites is not reasonably personally identifiable.

Most browsers are set up to accept cookies however if you do not wish to receive any cookies, you may be able to change the settings of your browser to give you greater control over this.

If you provide us with someone else’s personal information via the website, you should only do so if you have their authority or consent. You should also take reasonable steps to inform them of the matters set out in this Privacy Policy.

Further, we use third party provider for Google Adwords which may include a tracking cookie. Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user’s prior visits to your website. This allows us to make special offers, advertise efficiently and continue to market our services to those who have shown interest in our professional services in the past. Most of this information is aggregated and used for statistical purposes. The information we collect in this manner, e.g. Internet provider, date and time, search phrases, or referring websites is not reasonably personally identifiable.

As always, we respect your privacy and are not collecting any identifiable information through the use of Google’s or any other third party marketing or advertising system, however we are not responsible for the way these organisations collect, use, disclose or otherwise deal with your information.

Our Website also uses cookies to facilitate the sampled reporting of demographics and interests of its visitors within Google Analytics – our Website will not merge or facilitate the merging of personally-identifiable information with non-personally identifiable information previously collected from display advertising or divulge such information to any third parties. This data is used to provide better services and more relevant content to our users based on demographic and interest data.

2.2 Blogs, Forums, and Other Social Media

Our website may host various blogs, forums, and other social media applications or services that allow you to share personal information and content with other users (‘Social Media Applications’). Examples of these include but are not limited to affiliated companies, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Any personal information or content that you contribute to any Social Media Applications can be read, collected and used by other users over whom we may have no control. We are not responsible for any use, misuse or misappropriation by other users of any personal information or content that you contribute to any Social Media Applications.

Our website may include links to third party websites. If you access those websites (even via a link from our website) you will be subject to their privacy policy. You may wish to consider the privacy policy of the third party website providers, which Practical Edge will not be taken to endorse or accept by providing a link from our website.

3. How We Use the Information

We will only use your personal information to perform professional services, respond to your requests or to provide you with further information about Practical Edge.

We may use your information to:-

to provide legal services to you, to manage and account for legal services, and to enhance our legal services;
communication and contact purposes;
to transact with you;
for administration and management purposes;
to comply with our legal obligations or relevant laws;
market and keep you informed of our services we offer, including by email;
for recruitment and employment (including expressions of interest in working for us);
occasionally to send you news, information services, email alerts, newsletters, updates, invitations to events or seminars, current developments.

We will hold your personal information for only as long as is required to fulfil the purposes for which it was collected or as required by law.

From time to time we may share your personal information with third parties who we contact to assist us to provide the services requested by you. Those third parties may include service providers (accountants, financial planners, superannuation funds, bank managers etc) who assist us in performing our services or further professional advisers, experts who are contacted as part of your engagement or those who you authorise us to contact on your behalf or we recommend as part of our legal services, government or regulatory authorities, courts and tribunals. We require that these organisations protect your information in the same way we do, however we are not responsible for the way these organisations collect, use, disclose or otherwise deal with your information. We will never sell your personal information.

We may also store, process or back-up your personal information on computer servers or networks which are located within Australia or in ‘the cloud’, which are also located within Australia, notwithstanding they are in ‘the cloud’. Although rare, where your personal information is provided to overseas entities, we will notify you and seek authority directly and we will take all necessary steps to ensure that the security of the information is maintained and that it is used consistent with this policy and our obligations under the Privacy Act.

If you subscribe to our e-news and information services we may collect and use your name and email address even though you have not engaged Practical Edge to undertake legal services, but to provide you with content that is suitable to you or you affiliates, ensure our website and data base of information is current, customise and personalise our service and marketing to you.

4. Security of Your Information and Destruction of Information

We will take reasonable commercial measures to ensure the security of your personal information, whether kept in electronic form or hard copy.

We have established safeguards and use reasonable security measures to protect your personal information from unauthorised access, modification and disclosure. These include restricting physical access to our offices, maintaining a secure database system, passwords, encryption and firewalls. However, the internet is not secure and we cannot guarantee the security of any information sent to us from you via the internet.

Our employees, contractors, agents and service providers who provide services related to our information systems and storage of your information, are obliged to respect the confidentiality of any personal information held by us. We review and update our security measures in light of current technologies and advancement of those technologies.

We are bound to keep client records for 7 years and in some cases (for example wills and estate matters) indefinitely in accordance with the Legal Profession Act 2008 (Western Australia) and its associated legislation.

Archived documents relating to former matters and/or clients are stored either at our principal place of business or with an approved third party storage provider, within Western Australia.

5. How You Can Access Your Information

If you are a client of Practical Edge, in most cases you can access the personal information we hold about you by contacting the person who manages your file. Otherwise, you may contact the Directors using the contact details below. Requests will be dealt with as quickly as possible. In some circumstances we may refuse to give you access to personal information and in these circumstances we will explain why (e.g. it may be a conflict of interest to provide the information).

If you believe that any personal information which Practical Edge has collected about you is inaccurate, incomplete or not up-to-date, please contact us and we will take reasonable steps to correct it in accordance with the requirements of the Privacy Act.

Practical Edge works in a dynamic business environment and changing legal conditions often require us from time to time to review and amend our privacy policy.

You will always be able to find the current version of our privacy policy on our website.

In the event that any changes to our privacy policy will have an adverse effect on you, we will place a notice on our website.

6. Contact Us

For any queries or further information, contact the Director of Practical Edge on:

Email: info@practicaledge.com.au

Phone: (08) 6383 9833

Fax: (08) 6383 9855

Website: www.practicaledge.com.au

PRACTICAL EDGE CREDIT REPORTING POLICY

Where we provide services to you on credit (that is, you will pay for our services after we start providing them to you), we are a credit provider for the purposes of the Privacy Act, even though we are not, nor will we be, authorised or license to provide consumer credit for the purposes of the National Consumer Credit Protection Act 2009.

This Credit Reporting Policy describes how Practical Edge manages credit-related information about individuals (credit information). Practical Edge may modify or update its policy from time to time by publishing it on our website. This policy does not apply to the collection or use of credit related information about corporations.

Practical Edge will ensure that all personal information (including credit information) that it handles is managed in accordance with the Privacy Act and other applicable laws protecting privacy and our own privacy policy to which this credit reporting policy is attached. For more information on how Practical Edge deals with personal information, please refer to the Practical Edge Privacy Policy.

1. Collection of Credit Information

Please refer to paragraph 1 of the Privacy Policy for a detailed explanation of the information we collect and how we collect it. This information collected in certain circumstances also equates to information pertaining to credit information.

We may collect, hold and use certain credit-related information about you. We will generally only obtain this information from you. We will not collect or exchange information with credit reporting bodies and other credit providers unless you authorise us to do so. We use credit-related information to assist us in determining whether we will provide or continue to provide services to you on credit and to manage our relationship with you. Credit-related information includes your name and contact details, your credit history with us (including any repayments or late repayments you have made), any credit rating or credit assessment score that we calculate; and details of any credit-related court proceedings or insolvency applications that relate to you.

Generally speaking we only require this information for the purposes of transacting with you and in the purposes of providing our services to you. Where collection of any of your information differs from these purposes we will notify you and seek express consent to the use of the information for those purposes. We will securely store all credit-related information that we collect or hold about you in accordance with the procedures described in our Privacy Policy.

2. Disclosure of Credit Information

Unless otherwise required by law, we only disclose your credit-related information to third parties in limited circumstances, as permitted by the Privacy Act or authorised by you. We may disclose your credit-related information to parties that provide credit-related services to us such as debt collectors, credit management agencies and our agents. We may also disclose your credit-related information to a third party that you or we request in relation to any credit provided to you. We may disclose credit information about an individual to credit reporting bodies where that individual is in payment default. We will provide at least 14 days notice of our intention to disclose default information to a credit reporting body before making any such disclosure providing you with the opportunity to prevent of object to such disclosure.

Other circumstances where we may disclose your credit-related information includes using and disclosing credit-related information that we hold about you in relation to any access or correction requests that you make to us, any complaint that you make, as required by law or the order of a court or tribunal and where you otherwise expressly consent to the use or disclosure.

We are not likely to disclose information to overseas recipients and in general will not otherwise disclose information about you to overseas parties unless the disclosure is required or authorised by law, or you have consented to our disclosing the information about you.

3. Access and Corrections

You may request access to any credit-related information that we hold about you by contacting the staff member who handles your matters or, alternatively, the Directors of Practical Edge.

If you request that we correct any credit-related information that we hold about you, we will endeavour to respond to that request within 21 days (or such longer period as you may agree) and correct any credit-related information that we hold about you that we are satisfied is inaccurate, out-of-date, incomplete, irrelevant or misleading. Please provide us with written notification of the corrections that are required to be made.

If we correct credit-related information that we hold about you without you first making a correction request, we will take reasonable steps to notify that correction to you.

4. Complaints

You may complain about any failure by us to comply with Part IIIA of the Privacy Act or the CR Code. If your complaint relates to our failure to provide access to or to correct any credit-related information that we hold about you, you may lodge a complaint directly with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (for more information, please see www.oaic.gov.au).

If your complaint does not relate to these matters, you must first lodge a complaint with us by contacting us on our contact details provided below. A complaint may be lodged by contacting the staff member who manages your matter or by emailing the Directors who will address your complaint.

5. Contact Us

For any queries or further information, contact the Director of Practical Edge on:

Email: info@practicaledge.com.au

Phone: (08) 6383 9833

Fax: (08) 6383 9855

Website: www.practicaledge.com.au