Data Privacy Notice
We take your privacy very seriously and we ask that you read this privacy notice carefully as it contains important information on who we are, how and why we collect, store, use and share personal data, your rights in relation to your personal data and on how to contact us and supervisory authorities in the event you have a complaint.
Who we are
Adviser Legal Limited are a company registered in England and Wales under company number 16202029, registered at Premier House, 1-5 Argyle Way, Stevenage, SG1 2AD.
We are authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA). Our SRA number is 8012224.
We are not required by law to appoint a Data Protection Officer, however our compliance officer manages our Data Protection policies and procedures and can assist with any enquiries relating to our Data Privacy Policy. Email: Vidisha.Joshi@adviserlegal.com.
Adviser Legal Limited collects, uses and is responsible for certain personal data about you. When we do so we are required to comply with data protection regulation, and we are responsible for the purposes of those laws.
The personal data we collect and use
In the course of providing our service to you we may collect the following personal data when you provide it to us:
- Contact information: including your title, full name, email address, home and mobile telephone numbers, correspondence address, marital status and gender
- Identity information: including your date of birth, Identification documents (e.g. copies of passport or driving licence), national insurance number, nationality, tax residency
- Financial information: including bank details, financial information, card details, mortgage/investment information, pension information
- Welfare information: including health information, details of any vulnerabilities, grievance and disciplinary information, details of any criminal convictions or offences, religious information
- Usage Data: including information on how you use our website and services
- Marketing Data: including your preferences on receiving marketing material from us and your communication preferences
- Any Other Data: including any data that we require to enable us to carry out your instructions and to comply with regulations.
If you are providing information about another person, we expect you to ensure that they know you are doing so and are content with their information being provided to us. You might find it helpful to show them this privacy notice and if they have any concerns, please contact us in one of the ways described below
Information collected from other sources
We will generally collect your personal information from you directly. We also obtain personal data from other sources in the course of providing our services. Where we obtain this information from another party it is their responsibility to make sure they explain that they will be sharing personal data with us and, where necessary, ask permission before sharing information with us.
The personal data we obtain from other sources may include identification and verification agencies who will collect identity information and sanction check this information, third parties with your consent such as banks and other financial institutions, professional advisers, your employer, pension administrators, companies house, the electoral register, analytics providers or search information providers, our IT systems and our call logs.
How we use your personal data
We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to and most often for the following reasons:
- To enable us to carry out your instructions
- Where there is a legitimate interest and fundamental rights and freedoms do not override those interests
- Where we are required to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation (e.g. anti money laundering)
- In order to protect your (or someone else’s) vital interests.
The below table sets out how we use your personal data.
Reason for processing information |
Lawful basis for processing information |
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For prospective clients who are enquiring about our services in order to provide legal professional services to you. Collecting data for the purpose of deciding if we can provide a service to yourself. To provide prospective clients with information on our products and services provided. |
Contract: where we use your personal information prior to the provision of our services for the purpose of establishing your service and advice requirements and where it is necessary to meet the lawful basis of the contract between you and us. Consent: During our initial meetings with you when enquiring about our services, we may gather information from you which may also include collecting any sensitive personal data. |
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To provide legal professional services to you and to provide you with information on advice and services provided. To comply with our regulatory obligations including due diligence onboarding checks, conflict checks, anti-money laundering checks and any other request from our regulators. In order to carry out our contractual obligations on the above we may routinely share personal data with third parties where necessary.
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Contract: Where we use your personal information for the purposes of providing services, advice or assistance to you on the basis it is necessary to meet the requirements of the contract between us and the client. Consent: We may gather sensitive information about your circumstances in order to provide a service to you. Legitimate Interests Legal Obligation: We may collect data in line with our legal obligations such as monitoring and quality purposes in order to comply with a legal obligation. We may use third party IT case management systems, online data room hosting providers and communication service providers. |
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Anti-money laundering requirements To verify identity of clients. To verify address of clients. |
Legal obligation: we may collect data in line with our legal obligations such as, monitoring and quality purposes in order to comply with a legal obligation. |
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To carry out administration and accounting in relation to your matter. |
Contract: We may gather data from you in order to perform our contact with you or to enter into a contract with you. Consent: We may use third party accounting systems, practice management systems, payroll and marketing preference service providers. |
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Carry out bankruptcy checks. |
Contract: To comply with our legal and regulatory obligations. |
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Manage payments, fees and charges and collect and recover money due to us. |
Contract: To enable us to carry out credit control and to ensure you will be able to pay for our services in a way that is proportionate and not detrimental to you. |
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To manage client relationships with us To check client instructions. To update client records. To comply with all of our policies and procedures and all regulatory obligations. In order to carry out our contractual obligations on the above we may routinely share personal data with product providers where necessary. |
Contract: Where we use your personal information for the purposes of providing services, advice or assistance to you on the basis it is necessary to meet the requirements of the contract between us and the client. Consent: If we have gathered sensitive information about your circumstances in order to provide a service to you. Legitimate Interests Legal Obligation: We may collect data in line with our legal obligations such as monitoring and quality purposes in order to comply with a legal obligation. |
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Monitoring of your personal data To monitor activities where we are required to do so by law. To fulfil our regulatory obligation to record certain types of telephone calls. To monitor and review data for training and monitoring purposes . |
Legal Obligation: We may collect data in line with our legal obligations such as monitoring and quality purposes in order to comply with a legal obligation. Legitimate Interests: to monitor quality and to take action on complaints or for training. |
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Collecting and processing data in line with our legal and regulatory requirements, such as providing information to our supervisory bodies and collecting data in line with our legal obligations, for example; Anti Money Laundering regulations. |
Legal Obligation: We may collect data in line with our legal obligations such as monitoring and quality purposes we do in order to comply with our legal obligations. |
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Marketing To contact clients with details of services offered by Adviser Legal and to make recommendations about services that may be of interest to you. Provide you with updates and newsletters. Administer and protect our business and website to include data analysis, system maintenance and testing, reporting, hosting data, CCTV and call recording. |
Consent: If we have gathered sensitive information about your circumstances to provide a service to you or retain your explicit consent for marketing preferences. We may use third party IT, hosting, practice management and marketing service providers. Legitimate Interest: our legal basis for using your personal information captured via CCTV for security reasons and employee safety or to verify information. |
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Conduct Client Services Surveys and Webinar Feedback Surveys. To monitor quality and assurance with the levels of service provided to you. To monitor and review data for any complaints and for training and monitoring purposes. |
Consent: We will gain consent before submitting a survey and if you have provided sensitive personal data about your circumstances. Legitimate Interests: To monitor quality and to take action on complaints or for training and monitoring purposes. To also provide better services and support to our clients and attendees of webinars who have provided feedback. |
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Processing special category data such as health, criminal data, lifestyle data or if you are a vulnerable client. |
Consent: If we have gathered sensitive information about your circumstances in order to provide a service to you. Vital interest: In line with the legislation we will collect or share data if we believe this meets the criteria to cover only the interests that are essential for someone’s life. |
Special category data
Certain types of personal data are considered more sensitive and so are subject to additional levels of protection under data protection legislation. These are known as ‘special categories of data’ and include data concerning your health, racial or ethnic origin, genetic data and sexual orientation. Data relating to criminal convictions or offences is also subject to additional levels of protection.
In some circumstances we may process your data to protect the vital interests of a person or for a substantial public interest under laws that apply to us where this helps us to meet our broader social obligations or safeguard others, such as processing of special categories of personal data such as about your health or if you are a vulnerable customer.
We may share your personal information with other people and organisations, such as your relatives, social services, your carer, the person who has control of your affairs e.g. power of attorney, court appointed deputy, someone with parental responsibility, if they need to know that you are a vulnerable customer, and we may share your personal information with other organisations to help prevent and detect fraud or financial crime.
Marketing
We may use personal data we hold about you to provide you with details of products and services from us that may be of interest to you. We will only do so where we have obtained your consent and will do so in accordance with any marketing preferences you have provided to us.
How and when can you withdraw your consent?
Much of what we do with your personal information is not based on your consent, instead it is based on other legal grounds as outlined above. For processing that is based on your consent, you have the right to take back that consent for future processing at any time. You can do this by contacting us using the details below. It is important to remember, when withdrawing consent that you will not receive any marketing from us or any data may not be processed if we are using consent for the legal basis for processing. If you wish to withdraw your consent, please contact us.
In addition, where you provided your consent, we may provide you with details of products and services of third parties where they may be of interest to you.
You can opt out of receiving marketing at any time. If you wish to amend your marketing preferences, please contact us.
By phone: 01438 250900
By email: Vidisha.Joshi@adviserlegal.com
By post: Adviser Legal, Premier House, 1-5 Argyle Way, Stevenage, SG1 2AD
Cookies
When you visit the Adviser Legal website, we may use a short text file called a ‘cookie’ which is downloaded to your computer. Many websites do this, because cookies facilitate useful features such as the ability to identify whether a user has successfully logged into the site or to find out whether the computer (and probably its user) has visited the website before.
During the course of your visit, we (and our service providers) may use cookies and other technologies to automatically collect the following information:
Technical information, including your IP address, your login information, browser type and version, device identifier, location and time zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform, page response times and download errors;
Information about your visit, including the websites you visit before our website and the components of our website you viewed during your visit; the number of visits, length of visits to certain pages, pages viewed, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks and mouseovers) and methods used to browse away from the page; and similar information for additional content that can be accessed from website pages, such as opening or printing pages or documents.
Your personal information is important to us and will be used solely by us. Under no circumstances will your personal informational be sold or used by any other organisation.
If you wish to find out further information on how we process your data please see our cookie policy.
Whether information has to be provided by you and how we share your information
We will tell you if providing some personal data is optional, including if we ask for your consent to process it. In all other cases, you must provide your personal data in order for us to provide you with our services.
In order to provide you with our services and comply with our legal obligations, we may need to share your personal data with others. We have listed examples above, of who we need to share your personal information with and why this is necessary. Whenever we share your data, we require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. The third-party service providers that we use are not allowed to use your data for their own purposes and may only process your data for specified purposes in accordance with our instructions.
If we sell, transfer or merge our business or acquire another business, your personal data may only be processed in accordance with this privacy notice.
How long your personal data will be kept
We will only retain your personal data for as long as it is necessary in order to fulfil the purpose for which it was collected and processed and to fulfil our legal, accounting and reporting obligations.
We will consider the amount of data, the nature of the data, the sensitivity of the data and the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of data when determining the appropriate period of retention.
In order to comply with our legal and regulatory requirement, we may have to retain your data for a period of up to seven years from the point at which Adviser Legal are no longer providing services for you.
Transfer of your information out of the EEA
We are based in the UK but sometimes your personal information may be transferred outside of the European Economic Area (EEA). Some third parties that we deal with may be based outside the EEA. Such countries do not have the same data protection laws as the United Kingdom and EEA and we will, therefore, conduct due diligence on such suppliers to ensure your privacy rights are protected.
You have a right to ask us for more information about the suppliers and safeguards we have put in place as mentioned above.
What should you do if your personal information changes?
You should tell us without delay, so that we can update our records. So that we can maintain accurate records of your personal data. We are unable to provide you with our services, without accurate records of your personal information. Your personal information is required before you can enter into the relevant contract with us, or it is required during the life of that contract, or it is required by laws that apply to us.
Your rights
You have legal rights under data protection regulation in relation to your personal data. These are set out under the below headings:
- To access personal data
- To correct/erase personal data
- To restrict how we use personal data
- To object to how we use personal data
- To ask us to transfer personal data to another organisation
- To object to automated decisions
- To understand how we protect information transferred outside Europe
- To find out more about how we use personal data.
We may ask you for proof of identity when making a request to exercise any of these rights. We do this to ensure we only disclose information or change your details where we know we are dealing with the right individual.
We will not ask for a fee other than in exceptional circumstances.
We aim to respond to all valid requests as quickly as possible. We will always let you know if we think a response will take an extended period of time. To speed up our response, we may ask you to provide more detail about what you want to receive or are concerned about.
We may not always be able to fully address your request, for example, if it would impact the duty of confidentiality we owe to others, or if we are otherwise legally entitled to deal with the request in a different way.
To access personal data
You can ask us to confirm whether or not we have and are using your personal data. You can also ask to get a copy of your personal data from us and for information on how we process it.
To rectify/erase personal data
You can ask that we rectify any information about you which is incorrect. We will be happy to rectify such information but would need to verify the accuracy of the information first.
You can ask that we erase your personal data if you think we no longer need to use it for the purpose we collected it from you.
You can also ask that we erase your personal data if you have either withdrawn your consent to us using your information (if we originally asked for your consent to use your information), or exercised your right to object to further legitimate use of your information, or where we have used it unlawfully or where we are subject to a legal obligation to erase your personal data.
We may not always be able to comply with your request, for example where we need to keep using your personal data in order to comply with our legal obligation or where we need to use your personal data to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.
To restrict our use of personal data
You can ask that we restrict our use of your personal data in certain circumstances, for example:
- where you think the information is inaccurate and we need to verify it
- where our use of your personal data is not lawful, but you do not want us to erase it
- where the information is no longer required for the purposes for which it was collected but we need it to establish, exercise or defend legal claims; or
- where you have objected to our use of your personal data, but we still need to verify if we have overriding grounds to use it.
We can continue to use your personal data following a request for restriction where we have your consent to use it; or we need to use it to establish, exercise or defend legal claims, or we need to use it to protect the rights of another individual or a company.
To object to use of personal data
You have the right to ask us to review and explain our legitimate interests to you where we are collecting, storing and using your personal data on a legitimate interest basis, including where we are collecting, storing and using for profiling or by automated means.
You have the right to object to our legitimate interests and that collection, storage and use unless we can demonstrate that we have compelling legitimate interests to use the personal data. You also have the right to object to us sending you marketing communications as stated above.
To request a transfer of personal data
You can ask us to provide your personal data to you in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, or you can ask to have it transferred directly to another data controller (e.g. another company).
You may only exercise this right where we use your personal data in order to perform a contract with you, or where we asked for your consent to use your personal data. This right does not apply to any personal data which we hold or process outside automated means.
Security and Data Privacy
We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. You can ask for a copy of, or reference to, the safeguards we have put in place when your personal data is transferred outside of the European Economic Area. We are not required to share details of these safeguards where sharing such details would affect our commercial position or create a security risk.
Some of the measures we use are:
- ensuring all IT facilities are protected
- ensuring security of our website and portals
- training and procedures are provided to staff, ensuring that understanding and responsibility of our staff to protect the confidentiality of personal data and how they handle the information
- ensuring appropriate procedures and policies are in place to support staff with handling personal data and how to handle suspected data security breaches.
Use of Artificial Intelligence and advancing technologies
With the ever-changing advancements in technology and the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI), we continually explore new avenues of innovation to enhance our services and operations for our clients. Our commitment to adopting cutting edge tools is balanced by a rigorous approach to data protection and privacy.
We investigate a broad range of advancing technologies, which may include:
- machine learning and predictive analytics
- natural language processing and conversational agents
- automated decision-making systems
- process automation and intelligent workflows.
All evaluation and deployment of these technologies adhere to UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018. Prior to introduction any new system that processes personal data, we carry out a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) to identify and mitigate privacy risks.
Where a new technology entails high risk processing, we will seek your explicit consent or rely on another legal basis for processing under UK GDPR and this will be detailed in our privacy notice.
We regularly review our use of emerging technologies, updating this privacy notice and our internal policies to reflect legal developments and best practices. If you have any questions on how we handle your personal data in connection with AI, please contact our Data Protection Officer.
You can contact us for more information
If you are not satisfied with the level of information provided in this privacy notice, you can ask us about what personal data we have about you, what we use your information for, who we disclose your information to, whether we transfer it abroad, how we protect it, how long we keep it for, what rights you have, how you can make a complaint, where we got your data from and whether we have carried out any automated decision making using your personal data.
If you would like to exercise any of the above rights, please contact us:
By phone: 01438 250900
By email: Vidisha.Joshi@adviserlegal.com
By post: Adviser Legal, Premier House, 1-5 Argyle Way, Stevenage, SG1 2AD
Please provide us with enough information to identify you, e.g. name, address, date of birth, let us have proof of your identity and address (a copy of your driving licence or passport and a recent utility bill or bank statement); and let us know the information to which your request relates.
Do we do any monitoring that involves processing of your personal information?
We may monitor where permitted by law and we will do this where the law requires it.
Some of our monitoring may be to comply with regulatory rules, self-regulatory practices or procedures relevant to our business, to prevent or detect crime, in the interests of protecting the security of our communications systems and procedures and for quality control and staff training purposes.
Keeping your personal data secure
We have appropriate security measures in place to prevent personal data from being accidentally lost or used or accessed in an unauthorised way. We limit access to your personal data to those who have a genuine business need to know it. Those processing your information will do so only in an authorised manner and are subject to a duty of confidentiality.
We also have procedures in place to deal with any suspected data security breach. We will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected data security breach where we are legally required to do so.
Our supervisory authority
If you are not happy with the way we are handling your information, you have a right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioners Office (ICO). It has enforcement powers and can investigate compliance with data protection regulation (ico.org.uk).
We would, however, appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO and so, if you are happy to do so, please contact us in the first instance and we will try to resolve your complaint.
How to contact us
If you have any questions about this privacy notice or the information we hold about you, please contact us:
By phone: 01438 250900
By email: Vidisha.Joshi@adviserlegal.com
By post: Adviser Legal, Premier House, 1-5 Argyle Way, Stevenage, SG1 2AD
Date of issue: Updated November 2025