PRIVACY STATEMENT

Introduction

NOT respects your right to privacy and protecting your personal information. We are bound by the National Privacy Principles in the Privacy Act 1988 (Commonwealth). Our staff are trained to respect your privacy in accordance with our standards, policies and procedures.

About This Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy outlines how we manage your personal information.

It also describes generally the sorts of personal information held and for what purposes, and how that information is collected, held, used and disclosed.

The information we collect

Personal information is information or an opinion that can be used to identify you, whether true or not. The types of personal information we collect can be found in the questions we ask and in the forms we provide for you to complete.

We may receive personal information about you in a number of situations. For example, we could collect that information over the telephone, in correspondence (fax, letters, e-mail), in person, or, occasionally, through our dealings with third parties.

We do not collect information about your political or religious beliefs, or ethnic background unless it is required for a purpose specifically disclosed to you at the time of collection.

If we collect your personal information from other sources, we will take reasonable steps to let you know that we have the information. This may include asking the person who gave us your information to let you know that we have it.

If you provide incomplete or inaccurate information

We only collect personal information about you that is necessary to perform our functions and activities. If you do not provide this information or provide incomplete or inaccurate information, we may not deal with you or otherwise we may not be able to provide you with the products or services you are seeking.

How that information is used

We collect personal information to provide you or our clients or another organisation with legal services or we may do so in the course of making an offer of employment to you.

The information may also be used to:

• tell you about services we provide;
• maintain your relationship with us; and
• comply with legislative and regulatory requirements – this may include making certain records available for inspection by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority, Australian Taxation Office or other governmental agencies.

Disclosing to third parties

We only disclose your personal information to third parties with your express or implied consent, or where we are otherwise entitled or required to do so by law, or for the delivery of the service requested by you. The circumstances in which we may disclose your personal information to include:

• where doing so is necessary in the course of our providing legal services (subject to our overriding duty of confidentiality to our clients);
• within our firm;
• on a confidential basis to external service providers;
• if we are permitted or required to so by law; and
• in other cases where you have first consented to the disclosure.

Keeping information up-to-date

Our aim is to ensure that the personal information we hold is accurate, complete and up-to-date. Please tell us if any of your details change. Please also tell us if you believe that the information we have about you is not accurate, complete or up-to-date.

Keeping information secure

We take all reasonable steps to protect your personal information from misuse and loss and from unauthorised access, modification or disclosure.

We have physical, electronic and procedural safeguards to protect your information that is held by us. For example your personal information is stored in secured office premises, in electronic databases requiring logins and passwords for access and at secured offsite storage facilities. Access to information stored electronically is restricted to staff whose job requires access.

We destroy information we no longer need

We will destroy personal information if it is no longer needed:

• for the purposes for which it was collected; or
• for the purposes of meeting legal requirements.

We will properly dispose of all paper files, letters, correspondence and any other hardcopy documents that contain personal information that is no longer needed.

We use secure methods to destroy or de-identify any personal information as soon as the law permits, provided the information is no longer needed by us for any purpose. All information stored in electronic form that is no longer required will be deleted from our systems.

You can request details about your information

You can ask us to give you access to the personal information we hold about you.

We are permitted under the Privacy Act to deny or limit access in certain circumstances, but if this happens we will give you the reasons why we have not given the access to you.

We may charge a fee for processing your request if we spend time on locating, collating and explaining the information, or incur copying costs or out-of-pocket expenses such as freight or travelling costs to obtain the information. This fee will enable us to recover our costs.

Queries and complaints

If you have any other query or complaint in relation to the way in which we collect, use or disclose personal information, please contact us. We will use our best efforts to respond to your query or request as quickly as reasonably possible.

Changes to our privacy and information handling practices

We may amend our privacy and information handling practices from time to time. We will notify you of any of the changes to our policy that requires your consent before being implemented.