Privacy Policy

CWD Law Incorporated recognizes the importance of privacy and the sensitivity of personal information. We have a professional obligation to keep confidential all information which we receive within a lawyer-client relationship and we are committed to protecting any personal information we hold.

This Privacy Policy outlines how we manage your personal information and safeguard your privacy. In this policy, ‘we’ and ‘us’ mean CWD Law Incorporated.

Your privacy rights

All businesses engaged in commercial activities must comply with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, and the Canadian Standards Association Model Code for the Protection of Personal Information, which it incorporates. The Act gives you rights concerning the privacy of your personal information and the obligations under the Act of such businesses apply to CWD Law Incorporated.

CWD Law Incorporated is responsible for the personal information we collect and hold. To ensure we properly satisfy our obligations, we have developed this policy, and trained any lawyer that works for us and our support staff about our policies and practices.

What is personal information and why do we collect it?

Personal information is any information that identifies you, or by which your identity could be deduced, including full name, address, birth date, social insurance number and other information. CWD Law Incorporated collects personal information which we are required to collect to meet our professional obligations with the Nova Scotia Barrister’s Society (such as client identification rules) or that we reasonably need to conduct our business in a responsible manner and to provide legal services to our clients to a standard expected of us. If we did not collect and use your personal information, we would not be able to provide you with legal services.

We may from time to time produce marketing materials concerning our services and developments in the law.

How do we collect your personal information?

We collect information only by lawful and fair means, and not in an unreasonably intrusive way. Wherever possible we collect your personal information directly from you, both at the start of a retainer and in the course of our representation of you and our provision of legal services to you.

Sometimes we may obtain information about you from other sources, if applicable in the circumstances, for example:
• your accountant;
• a government agency or registry;
• your employer;
• your real estate agent; and
• your insurance company.

Your consent

In some cases, we will ask you to specifically consent, if we collect, use, or disclose your personal information. We may ask for your consent in writing or we may accept your oral consent. Sometimes, your consent will be implied through your conduct with us, so please note that we do not always solicit your express written or oral consent.

Use of your information

We use your personal information to provide legal advice and services to you and to comply with our professional, regulatory and legal obligations. We also use your personal information to administer our client databases (for example, for time and billing) and to include you in any direct marketing activities or information bulletins or similar about any relevant legal developments that we may send to clients or prospective clients from time to time, if any. For the sake of clarity, please be aware that we may never send any such information to you and we are not obliged to inform you of new legal developments; rather we may, at our discretion, decide to do so from time to time, or not at all. If you tell us that you do not wish to receive from us information about our services or about new developments in the law, we will not send any further such information or material.

We do not use your Social Insurance Number as a way of identifying or organizing the information we hold upon you

We do not disclose your personal information to any third party for the purpose of enabling the said third party to market its products and services.

Disclosure of your information

Under certain circumstances, CWD Law Incorporated will disclose your personal information, such as:

  • when we are required or authorized by law to do so, for example if a court issues a subpoena;
  • when you have given your consent to disclosure;
  • when the legal services we are providing to you requires us give your information to third parties (for example, to the Registry of Joint Stock Companies when installing you as a director or officer of a company or to a lender in a transaction involving your borrowing) your consent will be implied, unless you tell us otherwise;
  • where it is necessary to establish or collect fees;
  • 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 an agent or a particular professional (such as an accountant, insurance advisor or environmental consultant) or an expert witnesses on your behalf pursuant to your specific or implicit direction as part of our services to you or in connection with any related matter;
  • if we retain another law firm at your request, and on your behalf; and
  • if the information is Publicly Available Personal Information, as it is defined under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.

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 during the course of the retainer, any of your information changes, please inform us so that we can make any necessary changes.
Safeguarding your information

CWD Law Incorporated takes all reasonable precautions to ensure that your personal information is kept safe from loss, unauthorized access, modification or disclosure. These are some of the tools and means that we use to protect your information:

• physical security at our offices such as door, cabinet and other locks and security guard services;
• internal policies and procedures which restrict access to personal information to a need-to-know basis; and
• passwords, encryption procedures, firewalls and security software.

Access to your information and, if necessary, correcting errors

You may ask for access to any personal information we hold about you. See our contact information below to reach our Privacy Contact at CWD Law Incorporated. A summary of your personal information is available from us upon receiving your written request, and after we take reasonable steps to establish that the said request is from you. More detailed requests which require archive or other retrieval costs may be subject to our normal professional and disbursement fees.

If CWD Law Incorporated holds information about you and you can establish that it is not accurate, complete and up-to-date, CWD Law Incorporated will take reasonable steps to correct it. Please remember that using email or any internet based communications to send us your personal information or corrections is not a 100% secure medium, and you should consider this when choosing to send us personal or confidential information.

Your rights to access your personal information are not absolute. We may deny access 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 will 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). However our professional obligations to the Nova Scotia Barrister’s Society and the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act require us to confirm the identity of all new clients. The latter may also require us disclose information to FINTRAC in relation to certain large cash transactions.

To help us make credit decisions about clients, prevent fraud, check the identity of new clients and prevent money-laundering, we may (with your consent) request information about you from the files of consumer reporting agencies.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

CWD Law Incorporated reviews and reconsiders all of its policies and procedures from time to time as business practices evolve and as laws change or to simply refresh its material as it considers reasonably appropriate. We therefore may, at any time and without giving you notice, change our Privacy Policy. Please check this page at any time to again re-examine our Privacy Policy as you wish.

Requests for access

If you have any questions, or wish to access your personal information, please write to our Privacy Contact at privacy@cwdlaw.ca.

If you are not satisfied with our response, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada can be reached at 112 Kent Street, Ottawa Ontario, K1A 1H3 (1-800-282-1376).
Other matters – employment inquiries and website visits

If you apply to CWD Law Incorporated 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.

Our website contains links to other sites, which are not governed by this privacy policy. On our website, like most other commercial websites, we may monitor traffic patterns, site usage and related site information in order to better serve visitors and optimize our web service. We may provide aggregated information to third parties, but these statistics do not include any identifiable personal information.