PRIVACY & COOKIE POLICY

We respect your rights to privacy and are dedicated to the protection of your information.

The purpose of this privacy notice is to provide a comprehensive overview and to explain how we collect and use any information and data that we may obtain from you or about you.

We may update our privacy policy from time to time. If we do so, we will communicate any changes to you and will publish the updated policy on our website. We do encourage you to visit our website regularly to stay informed of any changes.

1. Who we are

Nova Costs Limited is the controller and is responsible for your personal information (collectively referred to as “we”, “us”, “our”, or “the firm” in this policy).

Our registered office and principal address is located at No.1 Universal Square, Devonshire Street, Manchester M12 6JH. However, the privacy policy also applies to all of our satellite offices.

We have appointed a data protection officer (DPO) who is responsible for overseeing questions in relation to this privacy policy. If you have any questions about this privacy policy including any requests to exercise your legal rights please contact our DPO using the details below:

Mr Christopher Adams

Nova Costs Limited

No.1 Universal Square

Manchester

M12 6JH

Email: info@novacosts.com

Tel: 0161 276 2000

2. Information we collect about you

Personal information (or data) means any information about an individual from which that be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed which instead is known as anonymous data.

We collect and process a variety of information about you which we have grouped together as follows:

Identity information which includes your current full name.
Contact information which includes your current postal address, any previous addresses, your email address and your telephone number and copies of any documents we have obtained as proof of your address.
Financial information which includes bank account details for invoicing and payment purposes.
Service information which includes information about which services we provide you with and the services you have previously enquired with us about.
Marketing and communications information which includes your preferences in receiving marketing from us and your communication preferences.
Technical information and usage information which includes your IP address, geographical location, browser type and version, operating system, referral source, length of visit, page views, website navigation, metadata associated with sending information through our website and interaction with our website and our posts on various social media and other platforms.
Any other personal information that you choose to disclose to us.

We obtain, collect and process a variety of categories of personal information at the start, throughout and after your contractual or other relationship with us. Whilst we may hold a variety of information about you, we do try to limit the collection and processing of information to what is necessary to achieve one or more of the legitimate purposes as explained further in this policy.

3. How is your personal information collected

We obtain your personal information in a variety of way including:

Information that you give us whether it is whilst contacting us or throughout our contractual relationship.
Information we receive from third parties including any of our partners (where permitted by law)
Information we learn about you through our contractual relationship.
Information we gather publically available sources such as various public registers, online search engines and associated websites and any virtual or physical media.
Information we learn about you through attendance at meetings and/or events
Information that we gather from technology about how you access our services and you interactions with our various media posts such as via Google analytics and Facebook analytics as well as your Technical information and usage information.

4. How we use your personal information

Where we have entered or about to enter into a contract with you it will be necessary for us to process information in order to perform our obligations under the contract. This may include processing your personal information in the following ways:

Communicating with you about the matter or the service that you have received from us
Managing and maintaining our relationship with you and providing on-going customer service
Providing services and carrying out your instructions throughout our contractual relationship including preparing documentation and correspondence to you and on your behalf, executing your instructions, transferring funds on your behalf, contacting various third parties on your behalf and resolving any queries.
Disclosing your personal information to third parties such as counsel, court or other organisations where it is necessary to do so in order to carry out your instructions
Assessing your requirements and proposing a legal or other service in line with your requirements;
Confirming your identity.

5. Legitimate interests of the firm

We may also process your information where it is in our legitimate interest to do so as a firm. We will do this without prejudicing your fundamental rights and freedoms.

This may include processing your personal information in the following ways:

Ensuring that we are providing you with the service you require
Identifying any other services that we believe will be of interest to you and sending you marketing information in respect of these services
Identifying legal issues that may concern you and sending you newsletters in respect of these legal issues
Developing our relationship with you
Understanding your needs, actions, preferences and expectations in order to improve our service and to develop new services
Assessing the quality of service that we have provided and analysing any complaints that you have made in order to improve our service and to address any staff training needs
Compensating you for loss as a result of any regulatory or service level failures
Monitoring and processing your information in order to monitor and improve our business processes and information solutions to ensure business continuity information security
Performing financial, regulatory and general accounting and reporting

6. Sharing your personal information with third parties

We will not share your personal information with anyone outside the firm except:

Where we have express permission to do so
Sharing your information is contractually necessary for us to provide you with our services
We are legal obliged to share your personal information

In addition, as we operate a paperless office, we will share your information with the provider of our legal management system software that will retain your information for our exclusive use and access.

Our legal management system software provider will only store your information and will not use it for any other reason than to hold the information on our behalf.

7. Security of your personal information

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information being accidently lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal information to our employees. Any agents or third parties are provided with your personal information only on a need to know basis.

8. Retaining your personal information

We will not retain your personal information for any longer than is necessary for the purpose that it was obtained. Typically however we will retain your personal information for a period of six years after the conclusion of our contractual relationship.

9. Your rights in respect of your personal information

We want to ensure that you are fully informed about the rights that you have in relation to the personal information that we hold and process about you.

If you wish to exercise any of these rights, please contact the DPO using the contact details provided in this policy. We will aim to respond to you as soon as possible however in all cases within the time limits imposed by the legislation.

(1) Right of access

You have the right to access the information that we hold about you. Please contact the DPO if you would like a copy of your personal information.

(2) Right of rectification

If you have noticed that any of the information that we hold about you is inaccurate, you have the right to ask us to correct the information we hold. Please contact the DPO with the correct information.

(3) Right of erasure

You have the right to request that we erase the personal information that we hold about you. You should do so if you believe that we are not using your information in a lawful manner or we no longer need to process your information for the purposes for which it was provided or you wish to withdraw your consent to us retaining and processing your personal information. To make this request, please contact the DPO.

Please note that we may not be able to erase your information if:

It has been less than six years from the conclusion of our contractual relationship
We are currently involved in a dispute with you or there are any outstanding debts (whether disputed or not) from you to the firm

(4) Right of restriction

You have the right to limit the way we use the information we hold about you. Please contact the DPO to make your request.

(5) Right of objection

You have the right to object to us processing your personal information. To make this request, please contact the DPO.

(6) Right of objection to direct marketing / right to opt out

You have a right to object to us processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes and to opt out of any marketing material or newsletters being sent to you. To make this request, please contact the DPO.

(7) Right to withdraw consent

You have the right to withdraw your consent to processing your personal information where we rely on your consent to process your information for a specific purpose or in a particular manner. To make this request please contact the DPO.

(8) Right to lodge a complaint

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) who is the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues. We do however encourage you to contact our DPO in the first instance to resolve any issues.

10. Marketing information

Unless you have told us that you do not want to hear from us in relation to services that we consider are of interest to you, we will send you relevant marketing information by mail, phone, email and other forms of electronic communication.

If you no longer want us to contact you with marketing information, please contact the DPO with your request and we will immediately stop processing your information in this manner.

11. Cookies

Please note that our website uses cookies. A cookie is a file containing an identifier (a string of letters and numbers) that is sent by a web server to a web browser and is stored by the browser. The identifier is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.

Cookies may be either “persistent” or “session” cookies: a persistent cookie will be stored by a web browser and will remain valid until its set expiry date, unless deleted by the user before the expiry date; a session cookie on the other hand, will expire at the end of the user session, when the web browser is closed.

Cookies do not typically contain any information that personally identifies a user, but personal information that we store about you may be linked to the information stored in and obtained from cookies.

We use both session and persistent cookies on our website.

Most browsers will allow you to refuse to accept cookies; for example

In Internet Explorer (version 11) you can block cookies using the cookie handling override settings available by clicking Tools, Internet Options, Privacy and then Advanced.
In Firefox (version 44) you can block all cookies by clicking Tools, Options, Privacy, selecting Use custom settings for history from the drop down menu and then un-ticking accept cookies from sites.
In Chrome (version 48), you can block all cookies by accessing the Customise and control menu and clicking Settings, Show advanced settings and Content settings, and then selecting Block sites from setting any data under the Cookies heading.

Please note however that deleting cookies will have a negative impact on the usability of many websites.