Edinburgh 0131 200 1200
Aberdeen 01224 49 80 80

Privacy and Cookies

Balfour + Manson LLP is a limited liability partnership incorporated in Scotland with registered number SO301386. Our registered office address is 56-66 Frederick Street, Edinburgh EH2 1LS.

We respect your privacy and take the matter of protecting your personal information very seriously. This privacy policy explains how we handle your personal data when you visit our website (www.balfour-manson.co.uk) and how we use cookies on our website. Please note we may amend this policy from time to time.

The data we collect about you

You are able to make an enquiry via the ‘contact us’ section of our website. We ask for your name and contact details in order that we can identify you and respond to your enquiry. You might provide additional personal data in describing the nature of your enquiry.

How we use your personal data

Personal data means any information about you from which you can be identified. We may use your personal data (a) in order to assess how we might assist you, (b) to make contact with you, and (c) if appropriate, to take steps to enter into a contract with you.

We may also use your personal data where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation, for example in seeking to comply with anti-money laundering regulations and checking for conflicts of interest.

From time to time we might wish to send you legal updates and invitations to our seminars and events, but we will only do this if you have previously consented to receive such communications, or if we feel we have a legitimate interest in sending such communications to you and you do not object to it. If you wish to opt in or out of our marketing communications please just let us know by emailing marketing.preferences@balfour-manson.co.uk.

Disclosure of your personal data

We might share your personal data with our insurance brokers, insurers, professional advisers and other agents whom we use to perform certain functions on our behalf, for example law accountants or company registration agents. Please be assured we will only provide a third party with your personal data if it is required by them in order to perform a task we have asked them to undertake.

External links

Once you have used a link on our website to access any 3rd party site, you should note that we do not have any control over what the external site may collect or do with your data.

Data security

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. When we engage third party data processors (such as IT consultants, document storage and document shredding contractors) they will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality. We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and we will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.

International transfers

Our backup servers may be located outside the United Kingdom. If we transfer your personal data outside the United Kingdom we will ensure a similar degree of protection is afforded to the data by dealing only with reputable parties.

Data retention

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collect it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting or regulatory requirements. If we carry out legal work on your behalf this will be subject to our terms of business, which set out our policy in relation to file retention and destruction.

Your legal rights

Under certain circumstances you have the following legal rights in relation to your personal data:

The right to request access to your personal data

The right to request correction of your personal data

The right to request erasure of your personal data

The right to object to processing of your personal data

The right to request restriction of our processing of your personal data

The right to request transfer of your personal data to a third party

The right to withdraw consent (insofar as we may be relying on your consent for processing).

If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above please write to us at info@balfour-manson.co.uk or 56-66 Frederick Street, Edinburgh EH2 1LS. You will not usually have to pay a fee to access your personal data, or to exercise any of the other rights listed above. However, we may charge a reasonable fee if we consider your request is unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to act on your request in these circumstances.

Please bear in mind we may need to request specific information from you to help us to confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data, or to exercise any of your other rights. This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to a person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.

We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than one month if your request is particularly complex or if you have made a number of requests within a short period of time. In such case we will notify you and keep you updated.

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk). We would however appreciate the chance to deal with any concerns before you approach the ICO, so please contact us in the first instance.

If at any time during the course of our dealings you provide us with any personal data relating to a third party, you must, prior to disclosing it to us, ensure that all consents required by relevant data protection legislation have been obtained or, where such disclosure is otherwise permissible under the relevant legislation, that the relevant requirements have been met.

Cookies

What are they?

‘Cookies’ are small text files that are stored by your browser on your computer’s hard drive, mobile telephone or other device you use to access the web. They store information about your browsing preferences and the configuration of your computer. More information on cookies can be found at aboutcookies.org.

When you use our website for the first time, a banner will be shown at the top of your screen, explaining that we use cookies. By continuing to use our website, you agree to the use of cookies on your device as set out in this policy.

What cookies does Balfour+Manson use on its site?

For site functionality These cookies are essential to the running of our website. Our Content Management System (the software we use to update the content on our site) uses one cookie to authenticate website administrators. It is not used by Balfour+Manson LLP for any monitoring purposes.

Google analytics

We use four cookies from Google Analytics. They provide us with a wide range of information, including how many unique browsers we have had during a given period, how often people visit our site, where and when they tend to come in, and which pages they were looking at before they left. We use this information to understand which content is most helpful and relevant to users, and to improve their experience on our website. We do not use cookies to collect information that identifies you personally. For this reason these cookies are often called ‘anonymous analytics cookies’, or ‘performance cookies’.

You can find out more about cookie use by Google Analytics here. Should you wish to opt out of this type of data being collected from your device, please see the Browser Add-On at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. The longest lifespan of these cookies is two years.

We have no means of tracking your surfing behaviour on other websites before or after you visit the Balfour+Manson LLP site.

Social sharing cookies

We use a social sharing tool from www.sharethis.com that allows you to share news content from our site with other sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. These are known as ‘third party cookies’ because they are set by third parties to improve user experience and functionality. The tool may set a cookie when you visit the ‘news’ section of our site.

We also have social media accounts, profiles or pages on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. Throughout the pages on our website we provide links to these various social media sites. If you have accounts on those social media sites, third party cookies may be used on your device to assist your sharing experience.

We do not have control over third party cookies. The third party controls how the cookie is used. If you do not want these cookies to be set on your device, you should follow the guidance below on managing cookies. We would also suggest that you look at the relevant social media site’s privacy and/or cookies policy.

The table below sets out our purposes for using these different types of cookie:

Cookie     

Name      

Purpose

More Information

Google   Analytics

_utma  

_utmb 

_utmc      

_utmz

These cookies are used to collect information about how visitors use our site.

We use the information to compile reports and to help us improve the site. The cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors to the site, where the visitors have come to the site from and the pages they visited.

Click here for an overview of privacy at Google

Content   Management System

ASP.NET_SessionId

This cookie is set by our content management system upon arrival to the b+m site. It is not used by b+m for any purpose. This cookie is deleted when a user  closes their browser.

 

ShareThis

_utmz

We use various social sharing buttons (such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube) provided by www.sharethis.com, in the ‘news’ section of our site in order to make it easier for you to share content with your friends and contacts. There is an opt-out button within the link.

Click here for an overview of privacy at ShareThis

How to manage cookies on your device

We recognise and respect that you may not wish for particular cookies to be set on your device. If you would like to use our website, but do not consent to any or all cookies being set, you can configure your web browser accordingly. This is commonly known as ‘opting out’.

You can configure your web browser to disable and/or refuse all cookies. However, doing so may affect your browsing experience on our website. Certain web browsers may vary in how they handle cookies, but assistance can usually be found via the ‘Help’, ‘Tools’ or ‘Settings’ options on your browser. Please note that disabling a cookie does not delete it from your device. You can do this manually within your own browser.

Other matters

Confidentiality and security safeguards
Balfour+Manson LLP takes technical, contractual, administrative and physical steps to protect against unauthorised access to, and disclosure of, individually identifiable information. These steps include firewalls, secure socket layers, password verification, as well as other security measures.

Forums

Some Balfour+Manson LLP sites may now, or in the future, make use of forums, chat rooms, or message boards that are open to our clients, and in some cases, the public. Any information that you post in these areas becomes publicly available information; you should exercise caution when deciding whether to disclose your personal information.

External links

Balfour+Manson LLP is not responsible for the privacy policies or any other aspect of web sites to which a Balfour+Manson LLP web site may link or for those of any downstream linkages.