Privacy Notice

Meritus Legal is committed to protecting the privacy of your personal information in accordance with the Australian Privacy Principles under the Privacy Act 1988 (the ‘Act’), including personal information collected via our www.merituslegal.com.au (the ‘Website’) and in the course of dealing with our clients. 

This Privacy Notice (the ‘Notice’) sets out our policy as to how we collect, hold and disclose your personal information. In this Notice, ‘we’ and ‘us’ refers to Meritus Legal. We will only collect, use or disclose personal information in accordance with the Act and the Notice.

COLLECTION

Meritus Legal may collect and hold your personal information that you provide to us via our website.“Personal Information” is generally defined in the Act as any information that may identify you, or by which your identity might be reasonably identifiable. 

We may collect your personal information by various means, including when you:

  1. contact us; 
  2. give instructions to act for you; 
  3. submit an inquiry on our website. 

The personal information that we may collect are listed below: 

  1. your contact details such as your name, date and place of birth, address, email address, and contact details;
  2. your driver’s license, passport details or other identifying documents (s).
  3. information necessary for automatic payments of fees for services we provide, including credit card or banking details; 
  4. information and data related to statistical information regarding access, views, and use of our website and promotional emails; 
  5. any additional personal information you provide to us or authorise us to collect, as part of your interaction with Meritus.

USE AND DISCLOSURE 

Meritus Legal collects and uses personal information reasonably necessary to:

  1. respond to your enquiries; 
  2. provide legal services to you; 
  3. let you know about legal developments, our expertise and legal services that may be of interest to you. 

We disclose personal information: 

  1. for the purpose of providing information, products, services or marketing to you;
  2. subject to our duty of confidentiality towards our clients when providing legal services. 

We will also use and disclose your personal information for a secondary purpose that is related to a purpose for which we collected it, where you would reasonably expect us to use or disclose your personal information for that secondary purpose. 

Other instances when we may use and disclose your personal information include:

  1. where you have expressly or impliedly consented to the use or disclosure;
  2. in confidence, to other professional or third parties whom you authorise or consent in the course of or incidental to your legal matter; 
  3. in confidence, to parties related to a matter you have with us, government authorities and service providers as reasonably required to carry out your instructions; d. third party service providers who assist us with archival, auditing, accounting, legal, business consulting, website or technology services

SECURITY OF INFORMATION 

Meritus Legal stores information in physical files and in a secure electronic database. Personal information may be collected in physical documents and converted to electronic form for use or storage (with the original physical documents either archived or securely destroyed). Information in an electronic form is stored on cloud services, on which we rely on to ensure the security of the information and documents uploaded. 

We take reasonable steps to protect your personal information from misuse, interference and loss and from unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. For example, we maintain our files in our office and limit access to personal information to our staff on a need to know basis. 

We will not disclose your information to third parties without your consent unless it becomes necessary to lessen or prevent a serious and imminent threat to life, health or safety or unless we are otherwise compelled by law. 

Our websites do not necessarily use encryption or other technologies to ensure the secure transmission of information via the internet. Users of our websites are encouraged to exercise care in sending personal information via the internet. 

We take steps to destroy or de-identify information that we are not required to retain or store in accordance with statutory requirements.

ACCESS AND CHANGES

You have a right to request access to or correction of your personal information held by us. If you wish to access, correct or update any personal information we may hold about you, please contact us as set out in the contact details below. However, we may charge for providing access to this information and we may refuse access where the Act allows us to do so. If we refuse you to access or correct your information for a valid reason, we will advise of the reason(s) at the time of your request.

CHANGES TO THE PRIVACY NOTICE

We may change this Notice at our sole discretion. Any amendments will be notified to you by posting an updated version of the Notice on our website. If at any point we decide to use personal information in a manner materially different from that stated at the time it was collected, we will notify relevant persons by email and, where necessary, seek the prior consent of the relevant persons. By continuing to use the Website, or otherwise continuing to deal with us, you accept this Privacy Notice as it applies from time to time.

CONTACT US

Please direct any queries or feedback to info@merituslegal.com.au.