Privacy Policy

Last Updated: January 1, 2024

Last Reviewed: January 1, 2024

This Privacy Policy applies to LSC Law Professional Corporation and its affiliates (collectively, “LSC Law” or “we” or “us”) in respect of activities that are subject to federal and Ontario privacy legislation. To the extent inconsistent with our lawyers’ professional obligations established by the Law Society of Ontario, this Privacy Policy is superseded by such obligations.

This Privacy Policy addresses information about identifiable individuals who are our clients, third party service providers and suppliers, users of our website (the “Site”) and other individuals with whom we may engage or transact (“Personal Information”) except for:

business contact information;
information that is publicly available and recognized as such under applicable privacy legislation; and
information that does not otherwise fall within the meaning of Personal Information under applicable Canadian federal and Ontario law.

For greater certainty, this Privacy Policy does not apply to information collected, used or disclosed with respect to corporate or commercial entities, or Personal Information of LSC Law’s employees (which is governed by a separate LSC Law Employee Privacy Policy).

By providing us with your Personal Information and/or using our Site, you accept this Privacy Policy and consent to its terms, as well as any other terms that are described to you when your Personal Information is collected and in our engagement arrangements with you. If you do not consent, please do not use the Site or otherwise provide your Personal Information to us.

LSC Law reserves the right to modify or amend this Privacy Policy from time to time. Please refer back to this Privacy Policy regularly to ensure you know our then-current Privacy Policy.

Collection of Information

Personal Information

We collect Personal Information verbally or by written correspondence, including in person, faxes, emails and telephone inquiries. Often Personal Information is collected directly from our clients. Personal Information may also be obtained from other sources such as:

insurance companies;
investigators;
real estate agents in a property transaction;
witnesses in litigation matters;
other parties to a transaction or file you have retained us to work on;
government agencies or registries; and
accountants and other consultants.

We may collect the following types of Personal Information about you:

your contact information, such as your name, your residential address, telephone number, fax number and email address; and
any Personal Information that is included in your comments, questions and inquiries.

In addition, our clients implicitly consent to the collection of information about them that is useful for the purpose of our retainer.

To the extent that you provide to LSC Law Personal Information about another individual you represent that you have the necessary consent or authority to permit us to collect, use and disclose such Personal Information for the purposes set out in this Policy.

Technical Information

We may use the following technologies and collect the following information that is automatically generated by your use of the Site and recorded by the standard operation of our Internet servers (collectively, “Technical Information”). Technical Information is generally used on an aggregate and anonymized basis that it is not linked to an identifiable individual. If we do use such information to identify an individual, we will treat it as Personal Information in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

Log Files: Log files make a record of each visit to the Site and log a number of details, including: your operating system; the date, time and duration of the visit; the pages and documents accessed; and the previous site accessed by you (such as, the search engine that referred you to the Site). Such information is collected for aggregated statistical purposes only, such as to track the number of visits to the Site, the number of views to particular pages, time-based traffic patterns, and the proportion of visitors using certain devices. LSC Law will not attempt to identify users according to their browsing activity through such records.
Device Identifiers: A device identifier, such as an IP address, is a distinctive number associated with a device. We may use your device identifier to identify you when you visit the Site to determine repeat visitors and detect and prevent fraudulent activity. By using device identifiers to approximate geographic location (to a city level), we can determine your approximate time zone, and better understand the locations of users.
Cookies: Cookies are small text files stored on your computer that identify your IP address to our computers each time you visit the Site. We may use both session cookies (which expire once you close your web browser) and persistent cookies (which stay on your computer until you delete them). We may use cookies to collect and store certain information that details your preferences, in order to facilitate a more personalized browsing experience. We may also use cookies to collect aggregated statistical information, similar to that collected through log files. You can disable or block cookies by following the instructions on your web browser. While you do not need to enable cookies to visit the Site, certain features of the Site depend on the use of cookies. Accordingly, if you choose to block cookies you may not be able to use those features or may lose preferences based on those cookies.
Web Beacons: We may use web beacons, also known as pixel tags, clear GIFs or other similar technologies in connection with some of the Site pages and HTML-formatted email messages. This allows us to track the actions of users and email recipients, and compile statistics about our Site and email response rates. These technologies usually work in conjunction with cookies. If you do not want your cookie information to be associated with your visits to these pages, you can disable or block cookies as noted above. If you turn off cookies, web beacons (or similar technologies) will still detect visits to these pages, but the notices they generate cannot be associated with other cookie information and are disregarded.
Analytics: We use Google Analytics to provide statistics about the visitors to the Site. Google Analytics tracks and analyzes non-personally identifiable statistical information, including, without limitation, search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents. For more information about Google Analytics, including instructions on how to control the information collected by Google, see: https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites

On an aggregate basis and in a non-personally identifiable form, Technical Information is used for the following purposes: (a) for Site and system administration purposes; (b) to improve the Site; (c) to conduct internal reviews of the number of visitors to the Site; (d) to help us better understand visitors’ use of our Site; (e) to respond to specific requests from our visitors; and (f) to protect the security or integrity of our Site when necessary.

Limits on Collection of Personal Information

We will not collect Personal Information indiscriminately or for no reason, and we will limit the collection of Personal Information to the purposes to which you have consented through this Privacy Policy or otherwise. As noted above, LSC Law also collects Personal Information as authorized or required by law, by the Rules of Professional Conduct and By-Laws of the Law Society of Ontario, and by our insurers.

The Site and our legal services are intended for and directed to individuals who are the age of majority or older in their jurisdiction of residence. We do not knowingly collect Personal Information of minors. However, if a minor (as defined by applicable law) provides us with their Personal Information without parental or legal guardian consent, we encourage the parent or legal guardian to contact us to have this Personal Information removed from our records.

Purposes of Collection Use and Disclosure of Personal Information

LSC Law’s professionals (including lawyers, law clerks, articling students and students-at-law) and their support staff, as well as our management and administrative staff, collect, use and disclose Personal Information for purposes authorized or required by applicable Canadian federal and Ontario privacy legislation and, specifically, for the following purposes:

to provide our legal services and advice and to facilitate the provision of anticipated future legal services and advice;
to establish, maintain and enhance our client and supplier relationships, including providing legal updates which we believe to be of relevance to our clients and sending holiday cards, professional development or other event invitations, alumni newsletters and other greetings from the firm;
to fulfill our obligations under the Rules of Professional Conduct of the Law Society of Ontario and to avoid conflicts of interest;
to carry out our client identification and verification obligations mandated by the Law Society of Ontario;
to satisfy our records retention requirements as mandated by the Law Society of Ontario and our insurers;
to share information with third parties for the purpose of providing our legal services and advice, including data and information technology service providers, registry agents, cloud-based service providers, agents in other jurisdictions retained on our clients’ behalf, other suppliers of products and services ancillary to the provision of our legal services and, in the case of litigation, opposing counsel, foreign counsel, witnesses and experts;
to manage and develop our business, operations and strategic planning;
to detect and protect LSC Law, our clients, you and others from error, negligence, fraud or other illegal activity, which may include providing Personal Information to insurers, auditors, investigators or regulatory authorities;
to issue invoices, process payments and collect debts owed to us; and
to comply with other legal and regulatory requirements.

The above collections, uses and disclosures are a necessary part of our relationship with our clients and our third party service providers and suppliers.

Disclosure of Personal Information

Subject to our professional obligations to keep all our clients’ information confidential, under certain circumstances, LSC Law will disclose Personal Information to a third party without express consent, such as when required or authorized by law (if permitted with disclosure to you) (for example, if a court issues a subpoena), or where the legal services you have retained us to provide require us to give Personal Information to a third party (for example, to a lender in a real estate mortgage transaction, or to a governmental agency for permit applications, consents, regulatory filings etc.). LSC Law will also disclose Personal Information with the consent of the affected individual or consent of another person authorized to provide that consent.

Safeguarding Your Personal Information

LSC Law takes all reasonable precautions to ensure that Personal Information is safe from loss or theft, and from unauthorized copying, use, access, modification or disclosure. Such measures, which may necessarily evolve over time as the availability and effectiveness of methods vary, include physical, organizational and technological safeguards, such as:

restricting access to certain but not all Personal Information to a limited set of our professionals, staff and third party service providers and suppliers who need such information in order to facilitate the use of the information, and who are required to abide by this Privacy Policy and our privacy and security policies;
restricting access to our systems, electronic databases or other electronic formats that may contain Personal Information through password protection and internal security policies; and
implementing technical security measures such as firewall technology, anti-malware screening and data encryption technology.

We may exchange electronic versions of documents and emails with you and may maintain and process Personal Information using commercially available software and electronic systems. Unfortunately, the available technology is vulnerable to attack by viruses and other destructive electronic programs and may be intercepted or interfered with by third parties. We cannot guarantee that all electronic communications and documents will always reach the intended recipient, will always be virus free, and will never be intercepted or interfered with by third parties, and we make no representation or warranty with respect to any electronic communications or documents. You consent to our exchanging electronic communications, including those containing confidential documents and other confidential information, unencrypted. In addition, while we routinely assess and monitor the security of our electronic systems and adopt safeguards intended to protect and prevent unauthorized access to and use of our electronic systems, we make no representation or warranty with respect to the security of electronic communications or our systems.

We make every effort to use the right technology for the efficient delivery of our legal services. We may use collaborative technologies, artificial intelligence, machine-learning document analysis, matter management tools, electronic signatures, etc. in connection with the provision of our legal services to our clients (sometimes managed internally and sometimes involving cloud-based systems). We may also use cloud-based platforms to manage corporate records and minute books, data rooms, e-discovery and other litigation support, legal research and various transaction closings. While we assess and monitor the security of our cloud-based third party service providers, we make no representation or warranty with respect to the security of their systems.

When LSC Law provides Personal Information of clients to third party service providers or suppliers for the processing of data (e.g. for contracted services such as photocopying, printing, scanning, computer backup services or archival storage services) or to other third party service providers or suppliers in respect of the legal services we are providing to our clients, we will ensure that those third parties agree to only use the Personal Information for the specified purposes, and to provide a level of protection to the Personal Information comparable to that adopted by LSC Law.

Links to Other Websites

Our Site may provide links or references to websites operated by third parties. These links or references are provided solely as a convenience to you and not as an endorsement by LSC Law. We are not responsible for the content of linked third party sites and do not make any representations regarding the content or accuracy of materials on such third party sites. If you decide to access linked third party sites, you do so at your own risk. This Privacy Policy does not extend to the collection of Personal Information by these third parties and we do not assume any responsibility for the privacy practices, policies or actions of third parties. In visiting any third party websites, whether linked to this Site or otherwise, you do so at your own risk and you assume all responsibility in that regard. We make no representations or warranties regarding, and do not endorse, any third party website or any content in such website. We encourage you to review the privacy policies of each website visited before using those websites or disclosing any Personal Information to third parties.

Access to Personal Information

You may access your Personal Information held by LSC Law to the extent required by law. Individuals may write to or email our Privacy Officer at the address below to request access to Personal Information held about them. Upon written request and authentication of identity, we will comply with our legal obligations to provide you with your Personal Information under our control, information about the ways in which that Personal Information is being or was used, and a description of the individuals and organizations to whom that Personal Information may have been disclosed.

We may charge a reasonable fee for providing Personal Information in response to an access request and will provide an estimate of any such fee upon receiving an access request. We may require a deposit for all or part of the fee. We will make the Personal Information available within 30 days or provide written notice where additional time is required to fulfill the access request.

In some situations, we may not be able to provide access to certain Personal Information. For example, access would be denied if disclosure would reveal Personal Information about another individual, the Personal Information is protected by solicitor-client privilege, the Personal Information was collected for the purposes of an investigation, or disclosure of the Personal Information would reveal confidential commercial information that, if disclosed, could harm LSC Law or any of its former, current or potential clients. There are also circumstances where LSC Law may be prevented by Canadian federal or Ontario law from providing access to certain Personal Information.

If a request for access to Personal Information is denied, LSC Law will provide an explanation of the reasons for such refusal.

Accuracy and Correction of Personal Information

We take reasonable efforts to ensure that the Personal Information we collect, use or disclose is accurate and complete. In most cases, we rely on you and/or our client to ensure that the Personal Information provided to us is current, complete and accurate.

If you demonstrate to us the inaccuracy or incompleteness of your Personal Information, we will amend the Personal Information as required. If appropriate under the circumstances, we will send the amended Personal Information to third parties to whom the Personal Information had previously been disclosed. If a request to correct the accuracy of Personal Information is not resolved to your satisfaction, we will annotate the Personal Information under our control with a note that the correction was requested but not made.

If you have any questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy or LSC Law Personal Information management practices or records retention policies, please write to us at:

Privacy Officer
LSC Law Professional Corporation
8 Culinary Lane
Barrie, ON L9J 0T2

info@lsclaw.ca

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