Todd Walker Privacy Policy

This privacy policy (Policy) applies to Todd Walker (we, us, and our). This Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose and protect your personal information in the course of our business and comply with the requirements of the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 (Act). We acknowledge that personal information about you is given in trust and confidence, and as such, the privacy and protection of your information is of absolute importance to us.

By using our website and/or services or providing your personal information to us, you consent to our collection, storage, use and disclosure of your personal information in accordance with this Policy. It should be read in conjunction with our Website Terms of Use, which you can view here.

For the purposes of this Policy, personal information means information about an identifiable individual.

How we collect personal information

We collect, use and disclose your personal information to enable us to effectively provide our services and to keep you updated with changes to the law. For example, we may use your personal information to:

verify your identity;
perform customer due diligence;
provide and improve our services;
manage and administer our relationship with you;
communicate with you;
respond to your queries;
engage people or organisations that provide us with office support services, including IT services;
other law firms;
communicate with parties involved in a matter for which you (or your employer) have engaged our services;
engage third party providers, including but not limited to data storage providers, consultants, barristers, expert witnesses, financial institutions, insurers, brokers, auditors and artificial intelligence platforms. All such providers are required to handle personal information under contractual confidentiality and security obligations;
identify and manage legal conflicts of interest;
comply with our professional and legal obligations, including under legislation relating to anti-money laundering and countering financing of terrorism;
help us improve and better market our services;
enable us to undertake our business processes, such as sending invoices;
conduct credit checks, manage credit processes, or otherwise assess your ability to pay for our services;
recover any outstanding amounts owed to us;
send you our newsletters, alerts and invitations to webinars, seminars, functions and other events or information about the services we offer or anything else we may consider relevant;
optimise your experience as a user of our website;
take any action required in the event of a dispute or legal proceeding between you and us, or between you and another party in connection with our business;
protect our property, legal rights, and interests (or those of others), including by detecting, investigating, preventing, or addressing fraud, security, or technical issues, or where we have reasonable grounds to believe there is an imminent risk of death, injury, or a serious threat to health and safety;
for any purpose authorised by you, the Act, by any law, court or tribunal order, government or regulatory agency or regulation (e.g. the New Zealand Law Society’s Rules of Professional Conduct);
recruit staff and referees that you provide to us to contact; or
for any other purpose notified to you at the time your personal information is collected.

We may not be able to properly advise you or provide you our services if you do not provide us with necessary personal information when requested to do so. Furthermore, notwithstanding any such request not to share your personal information, there may be circumstances in which we are required by law (including, without limitation, pursuant to a court order or direction from a regulatory authority) to disclose your personal information, and in such circumstances, we will comply with our legal obligations irrespective of your request.

Disclosure and purposes for which we use personal information

As a firm, we take all reasonable steps to protect your personal information to ensure it is safe from unauthorised use, modification, disclosure, misuse and loss or unauthorised access. We do this by use of appropriate physical security and restricted access to both electronic and hard copy records.

In accordance with our obligations under the Act, if a breach occurs and has caused or is likely to cause anyone serious harm, we have established procedures for notifying the Privacy Commissioner and all affected persons, detailing steps taken to mitigate effects, as required by law.

We may store personal information we collect in any format we choose at our offices or at premises outside our offices, including data storage facilities or online storage located within or outside New Zealand, which may be operated by independent service contractors. Further, from time to time, we may share personal information with certain service providers who provide services to us or perform client insight analytics or marketing activities on our behalf. If your personal information is transferred outside of New Zealand, we will ensure the recipient of the information is operating in accordance with the Act or is subject to privacy standards that provide comparably sufficient safeguards.

We will retain your personal information for as long as necessary to:

provide our services to you, and for any period of time afterwards where we have an ongoing business need to retain it;
maintain secure backups in line with our security practices;
respond to any claims that may arise after our services have ended; and/or
meet our professional and legal obligations.

If you request that we delete your personal information, we will take reasonable steps to do so unless we are legally required, or otherwise have a legitimate reason, to retain it.

Storage and security of personal information

We collect personal information about you whenever you interact with us, for example when you visit our website, if you instruct us to represent and advise you (if you are the client) or to represent and advise the client (if you are representing the client), to conduct our business, apply for a job with us, to provide and market our services and to meet our legal obligations, including (but not limited to) our anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance obligations.

The information we collect and hold may include any of the following:

your name, date of birth, address, contact details (including evidence of your residential address);
your job title, employer, employment history or if you are an organisation your organisational structure;
copies of photographic identity documents:
facial recognition images with passive liveness detection;
payment details, evidence of source of wealth and funds;
date, time, URL of pages visited, IP address, location, and browser software;
any information you provide, directly or indirectly or interactions you have with us (this includes time and date of contact, and relevant emails and documents), in the course of us providing our services to you;
other personal information we require from, or about, you to provide the advice that has been
requested. This may be in the context of advice you have asked for, or that a third party has asked for (for example, your employer, if we are acting for your employer);
other information necessary to conduct our business, provide services, and comply with legal obligations; and
if you apply for a job, information about your qualifications and experience.

We may also collect your personal information from publicly available sources, or external third-party providers to carry out customer due diligence or as part of the provision of our services to you.

Statistical information

We collect non-identifying statistical information about all visits to our website and publications. Those statistics allow us to assess the number of visitors to different sections of the website and publications, identify what information is of interest, monitor system performance, and help us make our website and publications more useful to visitors.

Accessing and correcting personal information

Under the Act, individuals have rights of access to, and to request correction of, their personal information. Subject to any lawful grounds for withholding, we will provide you with a copy of the personal information we keep about you. You may request that the personal information we hold about you be corrected by emailing us. If we agree that your personal information is to be corrected, we will do so. If we do not correct your personal information, your correction request will be kept with the personal information held. If you have any questions about this Policy or requests relating to your personal information, please contact us at info@toddwalker.com. We may charge you our reasonable costs of providing to you copies of your personal information or correcting that information.

Updates to this Policy

We reserve the right to update this Policy from time to time. Your continued use of our services following notification of any changes to this Policy constitutes acceptance of those changes. If you do not agree with any aspect of the updated Policy, you must immediately cease all use of our services. Any change we make applies from the date the updated Policy is posted on our website.