Privacy Policy

We collect personal information about you in a number of scenarios, including when you visit our website (https://avid.legal/), engage us to provide legal services, apply for a job with us, or otherwise interact with us (via the website, email, on the phone or in person).  Information we collect may include your name, date of birth, email address, phone number, location information, billing address and billing information, IP address, browser information and interactions you have with our website and personnel. If you are applying for a job, we may collect information (from you and/or third parties) relating to you work history, academic records and criminal history.

We may also collect your personal information from publicly available sources to carry out due diligence or otherwise perform services for you.

We will not process your personal information, other than as outlined in this privacy policy, without having a lawful basis to do so.

We may process your personal information for the following purposes:

• to verify your identity and confirm or update your contact details;
• to represent and advise you, your employer or the client you are representing (as applicable);
• to carry out conflict checks;
• to undertake due diligence for the purposes of complying with our anti-money laundering and counter financing of terrorism obligations;
• for recruitment or employment purposes, where you apply to be employed or engaged by us;
• for internal business and administrative purposes (such as billing and staff training);
• where we have your consent, for promotional and marketing purposes (including for the purpose of requesting client testimonials, providing you with publications that may be of interest to you, and inviting you to seminars and functions). You can unsubscribe from these communications at any time;
• to communicate with you, and respond to communications from you (including complaints), relating to our website or services;
• to comply with laws; and
• as otherwise consented to by you from time to time.

We may disclose your personal information:

• to service providers and suppliers who provide necessary goods and/or services to us. These third parties do not have the right to use your personal information for their own use;
• to any business that supports our website or services, including hosting or maintaining any underlying IT system or data centre that we use to provide our website or services;
• where we are required to or permitted by law or the Law Society’s Rules of Professional Conduct to disclose your personal information; and
• to any other person or entity authorised by you.

If any of the disclosures specified above is to an overseas entity, we will take reasonable steps to ensure your personal information is processed in a secure manner and protected in a way that provides comparable safeguards to the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020.

We will keep your personal information:

• until we no longer have a valid reason for keeping it;
• until you request us to stop using it; or
• for as long as required by law (for example, we keep invoice information for 7 years to fulfil our tax obligations).

We may use various technologies to collect and store information when you use the website, and this may include using cookies and similar tracking technologies.

A cookie is a piece of information that our web server may send to your machine when you visit our website. The cookie is stored on your device, but does not identify you or give us any information about your device.

The length of time a cookie will stay on your browsing device depends on whether it is a persistent or session cookie. Session cookies will only stay on your device until you stop browsing. Persistent cookies will stay on your browsing device until they expire or are deleted.

With most internet browsers, you can erase cookies from your computer hard drive, block all cookies, or receive a warning before a cookie is stored. If you want to do this, refer to your browser instructions or help screen to learn more. If you reject the use of cookies, you will still be able to access our website but please note that some of its functions may not work as well as if cookies were enabled. To learn more about how to enable, edit, or disable cookies on your computer, please visit the aboutcookies.org website.

We use Google Analytics to collect information about use of our website, with the goal of improving our Website. Google Analytics collects information such as how often users visit the website, what pages they visit when they do so, and what other sites they used prior to coming to the site.

We take the protection of your personal information seriously and we will take reasonable steps to keep your personal information safe from loss, unauthorised activity, or other misuse.

While we take reasonable steps to maintain secure internet connections, if you provide us with personal information over the internet, the provision of that information is at your own risk.

You have the right to access your personal information that we hold about you, and to ask for it to be corrected if you think it is wrong.

If you are based in the European Union (including Switzerland and the United Kingdom) you also have the right, under the EU General Data Protection Regulation, to:

• in certain circumstances, have your personal information erased;
• restrict the processing of your personal information;
• move, copy or transfer your personal information easily for your own purposes across different services in a safe and secure way; and/or
• object to the processing of your personal information.

If you wish to exercise your rights under this privacy policy or any applicable data privacy laws, or you have any queries regarding this privacy policy, please email our Privacy Officer at Judith.harper@avid.legal. Your email should provide evidence of who you are and set out the details of your request (for example, the personal information, or the correction, that you are requesting).

From time to time we may make changes to this privacy policy.  Any change we make applies from the date the updated privacy policy is posted on our website.