JUDGEYOURLAWYER.COM.AU STATEMENT OF ONLINE PRIVACY PRACTICES

SCOPE

Your privacy is important to JudgeYourLawyer.com.au, and we go to great lengths to protect it. This Privacy Statement applies to the online collection of personal information via websites operated by JudgeYourLawyer.com.au and its worldwide affiliated companies and subsidiaries. This Statement does not apply to information collected in any other way, including offline.

This website may contain links to sites maintained by others. This Privacy Statement does not reflect the privacy practices of those sites.

HIGHLIGHTS

What personal information is collected and how is that information used?

  • We collect information about our users in three ways: directly from the user (for example, when submitting profile information as part of the selection process, ordering a product, registering an account or signing up for a newsletter), from our web server logs and through cookies.
  • We use the information primarily to provide you with a personalised Internet experience that delivers the information, resources and services that are most relevant and helpful to you.
  • We do not share with others any of the information you provide, unless we say so in this Privacy Statement, or when we believe in good faith that the law requires it.

How is my personal information protected?

  • We have implemented certain appropriate security measures to help protect your personal information from accidental loss and from unauthorised access, use or disclosure.
  • We store the information about you in a data centre with restricted access and appropriate monitoring.
  • We use intrusion detection and virus protection software.
  • Despite these measures, we cannot guarantee that unauthorised persons will always be unable to defeat our security measures.

Who has access to the personal information?

  • We will not sell, rent or lease mailing lists or other customer data to others, and we will not make your personal information available to any unaffiliated parties, except our approved agents and contractors, or as otherwise described in this Privacy Statement.
  • We rely on some of our affiliates for support of the products and services we offer, and we share some of our back-office functions; our affiliates are all required to preserve the confidentiality of any personal information they may access.
  • We will not disclose any personal information or information about your usage of our websites or mobile applications to unaffiliated third parties, except as necessary to service the account, to enforce the terms of use, to meet our obligations to content and technology providers or as required by law.

How may I correct, amend or delete my personal information, or update my preferences?

  • You may cancel your registration or update your preferences at any time.
  • If you do not want to receive information about our products or services, please update your account preferences (where available), check the appropriate box when registering and/or utilise the “unsubscribe” mechanism within the communications that you receive from us.
  • If you have any additional questions or concerns related to this Privacy Statement and/or our practices, e-mail us.

FULL PRIVACY STATEMENT

WHAT PERSONAL INFORMATION DOES JudgeYourLawyer.com.au COLLECT AND HOW DO WE USE IT?

We collect information about our users in three ways: directly from the user, from our web server logs and through cookies. We use the information primarily to provide you with a personalised Internet experience that delivers the information, resources and services that are most relevant and helpful to you. We don’t share any of the information you provide with others, unless we say so in this Privacy Statement, or when we believe in good faith that the law requires it.

User-Supplied Information

Users of the website may provide personally identifiable information in connection with compiling profile information as part of the JudgeYourLawyer.com.au selection process. We may also obtain personally identifiable information from third parties. The personally identifiable information may include e-mail addresses, work postcode, educational background, professional information, disciplinary actions, criminal history or other similar information, the access code and password used by you to access the website and individual profile information. We may use personally identifiable information, whether provided by you or independently obtained by JudgeYourLawyer.com.au, (i) in the course of the research, voting and selection process for JudgeYourLawyer.com.au; (ii) to evaluate attorneys as part of the JudgeYourLawyer.com.au selection process; and (iii) in connection with the sale of profiles, advertisements, plaques, certificates or other items or services.

Additionally, when you enter profile information, register for our services or order products via our site, we ask you to provide some personal information, for example, your name, address, phone number, email address, payment card information, and/or certain additional categories of information resulting from use of our websites and services, such as research requests. We keep this information in a contact database for future reference, as needed. We may send you the following types of communications: invitations to nominate; requests to verify data; announcements of magazine launches; and invitations to networking events. We may use certain information you provide to offer you products and services that we believe may be of interest to you. If you don’t wish to receive such offers and e-mail communications, you may check the appropriate box in the data verification process or opt out (unsubscribe) as described below.

If you contact us for customer support, we may ask you to provide information about your computer or about the issues you are trying to resolve. This information is necessary to help us answer your questions. We may record your requests and our responses for quality control purposes.

Our website may include areas in which users may post content and information, including personal and business profile data, messages, comments and other information. You should exercise caution when disclosing personal information in any public areas. Please do not post any confidential, proprietary or sensitive personally identifiable information (e.g. Social Security Number; date of birth; drivers license number; or credit card, bank account or other financial information) (collectively, “Sensitive Information”) on public areas of the site. If you post any Sensitive Information, you do so at your own risk and we will not be liable to you or responsible for consequences of your submission.

Web Server Logs

When you visit our website, we may track information about your visit and store that information in web server logs, which are records of the activities on our sites. Our servers automatically capture and save the information electronically. Examples of the information we may collect include:

  • Your unique Internet protocol address
  • The name of your unique Internet service provider
  • The city, state and country from which you access our website
  • The kind of browser or computer you use
  • The number of links you click within the site
  • The date and time of your visit
  • The web page from which you arrived to our site
  • The pages you viewed on the site
  • Certain searches/queries that you conducted via our website(s)
  • The information we collect in web server logs helps us administer the site, analyse its usage, protect the website and its content from inappropriate use and improve the user’s experience.

Cookies

In order to offer and provide a customized and personal service, we may use cookies to store and help track information about you. Cookies are simply small pieces of data that are sent to your browser from a web server and stored on your computer’s hard drive. We use cookies to help remind us who you are and to help you navigate our sites during your visits. Cookies allow us to save passwords and preferences for you so you won’t have to reenter them each time you visit.

The use of cookies is relatively standard. Most browsers are initially set up to accept cookies. However, if you prefer, you can set your browser to either notify you when you receive a cookie or to refuse to accept cookies. You should understand that some features of many sites may not function properly if you don’t accept cookies.

Third Party Services

We may use services hosted by third parties, such as Google Analytics, to assist in providing our services and to help us understand our customers’ use of our products. These services may collect information sent by your browser as part of a web page request, including your IP address or cookies. If these third party services collect information, they do so anonymously and in the aggregate to provide information helpful to us such as website trends, without identifying individual visitors. Please see “Cookies” in the section above for information on how you can control the use of cookies on your computer.

HOW DOES JudgeYourLawyer.com.au PROTECT THE PERSONAL INFORMATION THAT IT COLLECTS?

We have implemented certain appropriate security measures to help protect your personal information from accidental loss and from unauthorised access, use or disclosure. For example, some of our websites are protected with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology. Also, we store the information about you in a data centre with restricted access and appropriate monitoring, and we use a variety of technical security measures to secure your data. In addition, we use intrusion detection and virus protection software. However, please note that we cannot guarantee that unauthorised persons will always be unable to defeat our security measures.

Also, please note that we may store and process your personal information in systems located outside of your home country. However, regardless of where storage and processing may occur, we take appropriate steps to ensure that your information is protected, consistent with the principles set forth under this statement.

WHO HAS ACCESS TO THE PERSONAL INFORMATION?

We will not sell, rent or lease mailing lists or other customer data to others, and we will not make your personal information available to any unaffiliated parties, except as follows:

  • To agents and/or contractors who may use it on our behalf or in connection with their relationship with us (for example, we may use third parties to help us with promotional campaigns or assist us in managing and maintaining our customer information or website) or as part of a professional profile published in connection with any JudgeYourLawyer.com.au publication or listing. At no time will we authorise those parties to use your information for any other purpose.
  • As required by law; in a matter of public safety or policy; in connection with billing information for any purchases or other transactions made with a credit card, debit card, or similar instrument; as needed in connection with the transfer of our business assets (for example, if we are acquired by another company or if we are liquidated during bankruptcy proceedings); or if we believe in good faith that sharing the data is necessary to protect our rights or property.

We also rely on some of our affiliates for support of the products and services we offer. We may disclose personally identifiable information from time to time to our affiliates to assist in our marketing efforts. Our affiliates are all required to preserve the confidentiality of any personal information they may access.

We may share, rent or sell to third parties aggregate, non-personally identifiable information about visitors to the website, such as how many users clicked on a particular advertisement. Such information does not identify individual users. We will not disseminate personally identifiable information to unaffiliated third parties except as set forth in this Privacy Statement. In addition, we will not disclose any information about your usage to unaffiliated third parties, except as necessary to service the account, to enforce the terms of use, to meet our obligations to content and technology providers or as required by law. We may also use statistics regarding usage for product development purposes, but we only use those statistics in the aggregate and they don’t include any personally identifiable information about individual users.

Your access to some of our services and content may be password protected. We recommend that you refrain from disclosing your username(s) and password(s) to anyone. We also recommend that you sign out of your account or service at the end of each session. You may also wish to close your browser window when you have finished your work, especially if you share a computer with someone else or if you are using a computer in a public place like a library or Internet cafe.