Marten Walsh Cherer Ltd
Privacy Policy
Company Background
Marten Walsh Cherer (MWC) is one of the leading courts and verbatim reporting companies in the UK. The Company has unrivalled experience in all areas of court reporting, tape transcription, note taking, videography, deposition, and examination reporting. Founded in 1871, MWC has covered the Tichborne Claimant, one of the longest-running trials in British legal history.
Since 1907 the Company have been entrusted with reporting and transcriptions in London’s High Court and Crown Courts throughout the UK.
Overview
Personal data is defined by the General Data Protection Regulation (EU Regulation 2016/679) (the “GDPR”) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (collectively, “the Data Protection Legislation”) as ‘any information relating to an identifiable person who can be directly or indirectly identified in particular by reference to an identifier’.
Personal data is, in simpler terms, any information about you that enables you to be identified. Personal data covers obvious information such as your name and contact details, but it also covers less obvious information such as identification numbers, electronic location data, and other online identifiers.
Marten Walsh Cherer understands that your privacy is important to you and that you care about how your personal data is used. We respect and value the privacy of everyone and will only collect and use personal data in ways that are described here, and in a way that is consistent with our obligations and your rights under the law.
We routinely collect and use personal data about individuals, including permanent staff, freelancers, contracted staff, or business partners (“you”). We are aware of our responsibilities to handle your personal data with care, to keep it secure and comply with applicable privacy and data
How we use your information
This privacy notice tells you what to expect when we collect personal information. It applies to information we collect about:
- rights of the individual
- what do we collect and why?
- visitors to our website
- people who communicate with us
- job applicants and our current and former employees
- complaints regarding your personal data
- access to personal information
- right to be forgotten
- identified individuals in our productions
- people who make a complaint to us
- data breaches
- changes to this privacy notice
- how to contact us
You should be aware that, although we will be principally responsible for controlling and looking after your personal data, we may pass your details to other members within the company when required. Your data will comply with the standards set out in this policy, and when we pass it on to an external third party for processing, we will not do so without your knowledge and consent. We will also stipulate how they must process your data, ensure it is held securely and they are transparent with any data breaches of your data and they do not pass your data on to any other third parties without your consent.
Rights of the individual
As the owner of your data, GDPR is the toolset that allows you to ensure your data protection rights as an individual to:
- the right to be informed
- the right of access
- the right to rectification
- the right to be forgotten
- the right to restrict processing
- the right to data portability
- the right to object
- the right to withdraw consent
- rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling
This policy shows you how we manage your data to ensure these rights.
What do we collect and why?
When we collect your personal information, we ensure that it is managed properly and securely. If we collect “sensitive information” that relates to physical or mental health, racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, trade union membership, religious beliefs, sexual life, commission or alleged commission of an offence and the sentence of any court, we will ask specifically to collect it and ensure there is extra security around its management and storage.
Below are where and how we collect personal data:
- Your CV will be collected for any job vacancies and held in line with our retention policies.
- Your employment contract and any personal data we hold on your employment is stated in the internal privacy policy and your contract, along with all processors we use.
- We will only keep your data in line with our agreed retention policies, unless we have an exception to this, in which case we will ensure you understand the reasons why we will hold it for longer.
In terms of employment, we will collect your data as per your agreement and under the terms stated in your contract, allowing us to administer your contract, holding only the minimal required data to do so.
Visitors to our website
Marten Walsh Cherer respects and values the privacy of everyone who visits our website, martenwalshcherer.com. Our website will only collect and use personal data in a way that is consistent with our obligations and your rights under the law.
Links to other websites
This privacy notice does not cover the links within this site linking to other websites. We encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit.
Use of Cookies
Our site may place and access certain Cookies on your computer or device. We use Cookies to facilitate and improve your experience of our site and to provide and improve our services.
What are cookies?
Cookies are small files saved to the user’s computer’s hard drive that track, save, and store information about the user’s interactions and usage of the website. This allows the website, through its server, to provide the users with a tailored experience within this website. Users are advised that, if they wish to deny the use and saving of cookies from this website on to their computers’ hard drive, they should take necessary steps within their web browsers’ security settings to block all cookies from this website and its external serving vendors or use the cookie control system if available upon their first visit.
Website Visitor Tracking
This website may choose to use tracking software to monitor its visitors to better understand how they use it. The software will save a cookie to your computer’s hard drive in order to track and monitor your engagement and usage of the website, but will not store, save, or collect personal information.
Downloads & Media Files
Any downloadable documents, files or media made available on this website are provided to users at their own risk. While all precautions have been undertaken to ensure only genuine downloads are available, users are advised to verify their authenticity using third party anti-virus software or similar applications.
We accept no responsibility for third party downloads and downloads provided by external third-party websites and advise users to verify their authenticity using third party anti-virus software or similar applications.
People who communicate with us
Users contacting us through this website or via email do so at their own discretion and provide any such personal details requested at their own risk. Your personal information is kept private and stored securely until a time it is no longer required or has no use.
People who contact us via social media
We use social media, such as Facebook and LinkedIn to communicate with our industry peers and people in the industry. If you send us a private or direct message via social media, such as your CV, we may keep it for up to six years. We do not pass it on to external processors without your consent.
People who email us
Any email sent to us, including any attachments, may be monitored, and used by us for reasons of security and for monitoring compliance with office policy. Email monitoring or blocking software may also be used. Please be aware that you have a responsibility to ensure that any email you send to us is within the bounds of the law.
Job applicants, current and former employees
When individuals apply to work with us, we will only use the information they supply to us within the company and to process their application. Where we want to disclose information to a third party, for example where we want to obtain a “disclosure” from the Disclosure and Barring Service, we will not do so without informing them beforehand unless the disclosure is required by law.
Personal information about unsuccessful candidates will be held for up to six years after the recruitment exercise has been completed. It will then be destroyed or deleted.
Once a person has been hired by us, we will compile a file relating to their service / employment with us. The information contained in this will be kept secure and will only be used for purposes directly relevant to that person’s employment. Once their employment with us has ended, we will retain the file in accordance with the requirements of our retention schedule and then delete it.
Complaints regarding your personal data
We try to meet the highest standards when collecting and using personal information. For this reason, we take any complaints we receive about this very seriously. We encourage people to bring it to our attention if they think that our collection or use of information is unfair, misleading, inappropriate or data has been unfairly shared, lost or held inappropriately. We would also welcome any suggestions for improving our procedures.
How to voice your concerns to us
This privacy notice was drafted with brevity and clarity in mind. It does not provide exhaustive detail of all aspects of our collection and use of personal information. However, we are happy to provide any additional information or explanation needed. Any requests for this should be sent to our Data Protection Officer (DPO) at the email address: gareth@wordpressmu-1142215-3973775.cloudwaysapps.com
If you are unhappy with our response, you have the right to escalate this to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) @ https://ico.org.uk/concerns/.
Access to personal information
We try to be as open as we can be in terms of giving people access to their personal information. Individuals can find out if we hold any personal information by making a “subject access request”, without any cost to the individual. If we do hold information about you, we will:
- give you a description of it
- tell you why we are holding it
- tell you who it could be disclosed to
- let you have a copy of the information in an intelligible form within 10 days of your request
To contact us about anything to do with your personal data and data protection, including to make a subject access request, please use the following details for the attention of Gareth Evans:
Email address: gareth@wordpressmu-1142215-3973775.cloudwaysapps.com
Telephone number: 020 7067 2900.
Postal Address: 2nd Floor, Quality House, 5-9 Quality Court, Chancery Lane, London, WC2A 1HP.
We will respond to your subject access request within 10 days and, in any case, not more than one month of receiving it. Normally, we aim to provide a complete response, including a copy of your personal data within that time. In some cases, however, particularly if your request is more complex, more time may be required up to a maximum of three months from the date we receive your request. You will be kept fully informed of our progress.
Right to be forgotten
Within GDPR the Data Protection Act 2018, every individual has the right for their data to be forgotten or erased, unless there are legal grounds which do not allow the erasure, such as:
- legal obligations such as HMRC or legal investigation
- contractual obligation must be fulfilled by the company
- public task or interest where it is helping with the detection or prevention of a criminal act
Should you request to be forgotten, or give authority to a third party, such as your solicitor, we will confirm the identity and then proceed to remove your personally identifiable data from our records and send you an audit. We will keep the minimum data to identify you as a living person, in case of an audit by the ICO or a second request should come in, so as to prove we have acted in accordance with the GDPR.
Again, should you not be happy with the process we have gone through, you have the right to complain to our Data Protection Lead, and in turn if the response is not adequate you retain the right to escalate this to the ICO.
People who make a complaint to us
When we receive a complaint from a person, we log the details of the complaint and validate them against our records. This normally contains the identity of the complainant and any other individuals involved in the complaint. We will only use the personal information we collect to process the complaint.
We usually have to disclose the complainant’s identity to whoever the complaint is about. This is inevitable where, for example, the accuracy of a person’s record is in dispute. If a complainant does not want information identifying him or her to be disclosed, we will try to respect that. However, it may not be possible to handle a complaint on an anonymous basis.
We will keep personal information contained in complaint files in line with our retention policy. This means that information relating to a complaint will be retained for six years from closure. It will be retained in a secure environment and access to it will be restricted according to the ‘need to know’ principle.
Similarly, where enquiries are submitted to us, we will only use the information supplied to us to deal with the enquiry and any subsequent issues.
Retention and deletion of data records
We will ensure your data is retained for the agreed retention period and deleted at that point. We will also ensure your data is properly deleted. This also includes any data transmissions that hold data temporarily, as we will ensure they are deleted after the event.
Data Breaches
We ensure all your data is held securely and our staff are trained to understand the many different types of breaches, such as:
- Hacking by external parties
- We ensure we have the correct security in place to secure our premises and the correct access internally should an internal party look to hack into secure areas.
- Break-ins to our premises and stealing of data or computer equipment
- We abide by a clear desk policy to ensure personal data is secured every evening and security on our premises is checked regularly.
- Virus affecting our IT infrastructure
- We have state of the art anti-virus software with backups and disaster recovery in place should we have issues.
- Couriers, cleaners or third parties having access to our premises
- Our clear desk policy, physical security checks and staff awareness ensure we have a safe and secure environment
Any data breaches will be detected, reported to the ICO within 72 hours and we will let the individuals know who have been affected while we carry out our investigations.
Changes to this privacy notice
We keep our privacy notice under regular review. This privacy notice was last updated on 31 January 2020.