Your Privacy

G.S. Jameson & Company and our affiliates ("GSJ & Co", "we", "us", "our") are committed to protecting your privacy through our compliance with this policy, applicable legislation, and in accordance with our professional obligations.

This policy applies to Personal Information we collect, use, or disclose in the course of operating our law firm and providing legal or consultative services (“Services”) to our clients (prospective, current and past), users of gsjameson.com and its subdomains (collectively, the “Site”), and other individuals (“you”). This Privacy Policy is intended to supplement our professional obligations set out by the Law Society of Ontario.

By submitting Personal Information to GSJ & Co, you understand, accept, and consent to the practices described in this Privacy Policy.

Personal Information

Canadian privacy legislation defines “Personal Information” as information about an identifiable individual. However, Personal Information generally does not include business contact information, such as an individual’s name, position name or title, work address, work telephone number, work fax number, or work e-mail address.

The types of Personal Information GSJ & Co may collect about you include name, home address, date of birth, telephone number, personal e-mail address, billing and account information, details of your government issued identification, and other information incidental to the provision of our Services. We may also collect Personal Information from you about other individuals, including, but not limited to, family members, beneficiaries, directors, officers, employees, shareholders, actual and potential investors, customers, witnesses, adverse parties, competitors, or professional advisors. When you provide us with Personal Information regarding third-parties, you represent that you have obtained the relevant party’s prior consent to do so.

We collect this information from you directly when you contact us or retain our Services. Until we specifically agree to act for you on a matter, you should not provide us with any unsolicited confidential information or material. Unsolicited information and material will not be treated as confidential and will not be protected by any lawyer-client privilege.

We may also collect information from you automatically when you access and navigate through our Site. Information collected automatically may include usage details, IP addresses, information collected through cookies, and other tracking technologies.

Purposes for which your Information is Collected

Generally, we collect, use, and disclose your Personal Information in order to operate our law firm and provide our clients with our Services. This includes:

A.    Provision of Services

When you retain our Services, we collect Personal Information necessary and incidental to the provision of those Services. For example, we collect, use, and disclose your information in order to conduct conflict checks, perform client identification and verification, manage client relationships, provide legal advice, perform legal services, fulfil legal duties, invoice and collect payment for services rendered, administer accounts, and comply with our professional obligations.

B.    Communications with GSJ & CO

We may collect, use, or disclose your Personal Information for the purposes of contacting or communicating with you, electronic or otherwise.

C.    Website Statistics

When you access or use our Site, we may collect, use, or disclose information about your IP address, operating system, website navigation and visit, the general location of your IP address, and the device you use to access the website. The information collected gives anonymous statistics about how visitors use the Site. This information is then used to manage the website and optimize user experience.

We do not collect any other Personal Information about users of our Site.

Disclosure and Transfer of Data

Subject to our professional and ethical obligations (including solicitor-client privilege), we may disclose or transfer Personal Information that we collect or that you provide as described in this Privacy Policy to our subsidiaries and affiliates, contractors, service providers, and other third parties we use to support our business or as required in the provision of our Services. These third-parties may independently collect, use, and disclose your Personal Information in accordance with their own privacy policies (and not this Privacy Policy). They may use this information in order to support the provision of our Services, optimize our online platforms and electronic communications, and/or as otherwise permitted in their privacy policies. For instance, we use Dropbox, Inc. to house our firm’s files, including our clients’ files. We also use Iridesco, LLC d/b/a Harvest for time docketing and billing.

We (or our third-party service providers) may process, store, and transfer your personal information in and to a foreign country, with different privacy laws that may or may not be as comprehensive as Canadian law. In these circumstances, the governments, courts, law enforcement, or regulatory agencies of that country may be able to obtain access to your personal information through the laws of the foreign country.

We may also share your Personal Information to comply with applicable laws and regulations, to respond to a subpoena, search warrant or other lawful request for information we receive, or to otherwise protect our rights.

Minors

The Site is not intended for individuals under the age of 18. We do not intentionally collect Personal Information from children. If you are the parent or guardian and believe your child has provided us with Personal Information, please contact us at info@gsjameson.com.

Social Media

When posting information to other social networking sites (e.g. “liking” or commenting on a post on GSJ & Co’s Linkedin or Twitter pages), the Personal Information that you post or share in connection with these third-party sites is visible to other persons and can be read, collected, used, and disclosed by other persons. Any information provided to such third-party social networking sites and other sites is outside of our control and is not governed by this Privacy Policy.

Links and Embedded Content

This Site may include links and embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.) from third-party websites. Embedded content from third-party websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the third-party website.    

If you follow a link to a third-party website or engage a third-party plugin, please note that these third parties have their own privacy policies and we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. These third-party websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

We do not control these third-party websites, and we encourage you to read the privacy policy of every website you visit.  

Data Retention

Except as otherwise permitted or required by applicable law or regulation, we will only retain your Personal Information for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. Under some circumstances we may anonymize your Personal Information so that it can no longer be associated with you. We reserve the right to use such anonymous and de-identified data for any legitimate business purpose without further notice to you or your consent.

Safeguards

We use appropriate security safeguards to protect your Personal Information against loss, theft, and unauthorized access, including password protection, physically secure facilities, training of our personnel, and defined internal policies and practices. We store our client files using Dropbox, an encrypted file storage service.

Your Rights

It is important that the Personal Information we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your Personal Information changes. By law you have the right to request access to and to correct the Personal Information that we hold about you. If you want to access, review, verify, or correct the use of your Personal Information, you may send us an email at info@gsjameson.com.

You can also request that we erase any Personal Information we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where you have provided your consent to the collection, use, and transfer of your Personal Information, you may have the legal right to withdraw your consent under certain circumstances. To withdraw your consent, if applicable, contact us at info@gsjameson.com

Please note that if you withdraw your consent or request erasure of your Personal Information, we may not be able to provide you with our Services or access to this Site.

Changes to our Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes to our Privacy Policy, we will notify you through a notice on the Site home page. You are responsible for periodically visiting our Site and this Privacy Policy to check for any changes. Your continued use of this Site following the posting of changes to this Privacy Policy will mean you accept those changes.

Contact

For more information about our privacy practices, if you have questions, or if you would like to make a complaint, please contact us by e-mail at info@gsjameson.com

Last updated: 16 November 2020