Privacy

Definitions

  • Personal Information – Personal information means information about an identifiable individual, but does not include the name, title or business address or telephone number of an employee of an organization.
  • PIPEDA – All Canadian organizations engaged in commercial activities must comply with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (“PIPEDA”) and the Canadian Standards Association Model Code for the Protection of Personal Information incorporated by reference into PIPEDA.

​Collecting Personal Information

We collect personal information fairly and in accordance with the law. Generally, we collect your personal information directly from you. Such collection may be done at the start of our relationship or during the course of our engagement. We may collect information about your directors, officers, independent contractors and employees. We may collect personal information from candidates for employment to assess qualifications.

Sometimes we may obtain information about you from other sources including, for example:

  1. from a government agency or registry;
  2. your website and other public sources of information;
  3. other professionals who serve you;
  4. other parties or witnesses in the context of litigation; and
  5. other parties or participants in a commercial transaction.

Consent

In most cases, if we collect, use, or disclose your personal information, we will obtain your consent. Sometimes we will ask for your consent in writing, but in some cases we may accept your oral consent. Sometimes your consent may be implied through your conduct with us or the nature of our engagement. Should you withdraw your consent for us to collect, use or disclose your personal information, it may impact on our ability to serve you and to maintain our relationship.

Use of Personal Information

We use your personal information to provide advice and services to you, to administer our client (time and billing) databases, to build and to maintain our expertise and knowledge, and to include you in our information distribution and marketing activities. If you no longer wish to receive information about our services, you can ask us not to send any further material.

Disclosure of Personal Information

Southlea Group does not disclose your personal information to third parties to enable them to market their products and services.

Updating Your Information

It is important that the information be accurate and up-to-date. If, during the course of the engagement, any of your information changes, please inform us so that we can make any necessary changes. We may also periodically inquire of you whether your personal information is accurate and up-to-date.

Securing Personal Information

Among the steps taken to protect your personal information are:

  1. premises security;
  2. confidentiality policies as part of our professional obligations;
  3. training for our staff;
  4. deploying technological safeguards like security software and firewalls to prevent unauthorized computer access or “hacking”; and
  5. internal password and security policies.

E-mail

You should be aware that e-mail is not an entirely secure medium, and you should be aware of this when contacting us to send personal or confidential information.

Accessing Personal Information

You may ask for access to personal information we hold about you. Detailed requests that require archive or other retrieval costs may be subject to our normal professional and disbursement fees. Your rights to access your personal information are not absolute. There are a number of situations where we may deny access. If we deny your request for access to, or refuse a request to correct personal information, we will provide a reason or reasons for doing so.

Credit Bureaus

To help us make credit decisions about clients, to try to prevent fraud, and to check the identity of new clients, on occasion we may request information about you from the files of consumer reporting agencies.

Website

Our website contains links to other sites, which are not governed by this policy.

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. We may provide aggregated information to third parties, but these statistics do not include any identifiable personal information. Southlea Group does not use cookies or any electronic means to automatically collect personal information from you or your computer; however, web servers used by Southlea Group will automatically collect IP addresses and we may view our web server IP log from time to time to prevent fraudulent acts and possible network attacks.