Privacy Policy

To enable our Firm to comply with the GDPR and data protection legislation generally we require to provide you as a client with the following information due to the fact that our dealing with most types of business on your behalf will involve us holding personal data relative to you. The “controller” for the purposes of this notice is Smith Solicitors Stonehaven 9 Market Square, Stonehaven.

The Firm’s Data Protection Officer is Ronald Forbes, care of Smith Solicitors Stonehaven, 9 Market Square Stonehaven.

The purposes of our processing your data is to enable legal transactions to be dealt with on your behalf as per your instructions and to enable us to comply with our contractual obligations to you as a client.  The legal basis for our processing your data is to enable us to provide you with a legal service under contract, in terms of article 6b of the GDPR.  Additionally processing your data is necessary to enable us to meet legal obligations such as anti-money laundering requirements under Article 6c of the GDPR.

In relation to third parties, our Firm will rely on GDPR article 6f as it is in the Firm’s legitimate interests or in the legitimate interests of its clients, to process such data.

Our Firm may also handle special category data relating to you and if so it is relying on the basis that processing of this data is necessary for the establishment exercise or defence of legal claims or whenever Courts are acting in their judicial capacity.

In most instances your data will not leave our office but there are possible third parties to whom we may require to pass data relating to you – for example Solicitors on the other side where we are assisting you with a property purchase or sale, photographers, surveyors, the Scottish Government where we are making Tax payments on your behalf when acting for you in a property purchase, external banking systems where we are requiring to make payments to you, in addition to which your data may also be on our Firm’s computer systems backed up by i-cloud storage.

Copies of personal documents such as copy passports, bank statements etc will be erased /destroyed after a period of five years from completion of the transaction we are handling for you or after 10 years if Law Society Guidance to that effect so dictates or longer if Law society Guidance suggests a longer period.

In the event of you failing to provide us with information required by us to enable us to carry our the work requested by you, we may be prevented from carrying out the work required for you if the processing of the data required is based on a statutory or contractual requirement.

No automated decision making or profiling involving your data will be processed by our Firm.

You have the right to request access to, rectification of, erasure of, restriction of processing, or to object to the processing of your data.

You also have the right to “portability” of your data in the event of you requesting the same.

You have the right to withdraw consent to processing where processing is based on consent.

You have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioners Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF.