Who is responsible

Rooney Family Law Limited is the data controller for information you give us through this site.

What we collect

What you tell us through the enquiry route: the area of law, where in Scotland you are, whether the matter is urgent, your name, your contact details and a short description of your situation in your own words.

Information about your health

Where your enquiry concerns an injury, an illness or medical treatment, what you tell us is likely to include information about your health. That is special category data and it receives additional protection.

We ask you to confirm, before anything is sent, what you want us to do with it. If you would rather we did not send it, say so and nothing is sent.

We do not rely on your consent to handle that information. We rely on the condition in the law that covers information handled in connection with legal claims, which includes obtaining legal advice and establishing or exercising your legal rights. That is set out under the next heading.

Who it goes to

One member firm that handles that kind of work, and nobody else. Family law enquiries may be dealt with by Rooney Family Law Limited itself. We do not sell contact details, we do not share them with marketing companies, and we do not pass them to more than one firm.

How long we keep it

Enquiries that proceed to a referral are kept for the period required by our professional and regulatory obligations. Enquiries that do not proceed are kept for a shorter defined period and then deleted.

The legal basis we rely on

Two separate questions arise under data protection law, and we have to answer both.

For your information generally, we rely on the basis that covers a service you have asked us to provide. When you send an enquiry you are asking us to do a specific and limited job: read what you have told us, work out which area of Scots law it belongs to, identify a practice that handles that kind of work, and pass your enquiry to it so that the practice can contact you. Using your information to do that is not incidental to the service, it is the service.

For information about your health, which the law protects more strictly, we rely on the condition covering the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims. That condition is not confined to cases already in court. It covers obtaining legal advice, and establishing or exercising your legal rights in other ways, which is exactly what a person is doing when they ask us to find them a solicitor about an injury or about medical treatment that went wrong.

Because that condition applies, we do not ask for your consent to it and we do not need to. That matters in a practical way: consent given to an unnamed organisation would not be worth much, and we would rather rely on a basis that is honestly made out than on a tick box that is not.

We only handle what is reasonably needed for that purpose. We ask what happened, the kind of injury or treatment, roughly when, and the circumstances that bear on it. We do not ask for your medical records, and you should not send them to us.

Your rights

You may ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, and object to how we use it. That includes asking us which practice received your enquiry. We do not name the practice while you are sending the enquiry, but if you ask us afterwards we will tell you. Write to info@ineedalawyerto.com. If you are unhappy with our response you may complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.