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Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

Geradin Partners is a boutique law firm that specialises in competition law with offices in Brussels and London. We take the protection of your personal data seriously. We are committed to safeguarding the privacy of the personal data that we receive from you during the course of our business relationship and that collected from visitors to our website. We have implemented appropriate technological and organisational measures to protect the personal data that we process. This Privacy Policy sets out Geradin Partners’ privacy practices and your rights.

2. Data protection laws

Our use of your personal data is subject to the law (including but not limited to the European Union (“EU”) General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (“GDPR”), the GDPR as incorporated into the law the United Kingdom by virtue of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (i.e., the “UK GDPR”), and other relevant UK and EU legislation). Unless otherwise indicated, references in this Privacy Policy to the GDPR include the UK GDPR.

In this Privacy Policy, the terms personal data, controller, processor, data subject, consent, recipient, third party, processing and profiling have the meanings given to them in the GDPR.

3. Contact details of controllers

The controllers for the processing of personal data under this Privacy Policy are:

Geradin Partners

City Pavilion, 

27 Bush Lane,

London, EC3M 5AD

United Kingdom

Email: info@geradinpartners.com

Website: https://www.geradinpartners.com

Geradin Partners 

475 Avenue Louise,

Brussels, 1000

Belgium

Email: info@geradinpartners.com

Website: https://www.geradinpartners.com

4. What personal data we collect and why we collect it

1. Clients

We use your personal data (and any related information) primarily to provide our legal services to you. We keep a record of contact details of individuals at your business or working on behalf of your business whom we may contact in order to carry out your instructions. We also keep other personal information (including events organised by us in which those individuals have participated or expressed an interest in participating, areas of legal and commercial interest and personal preferences) in order to update those individuals from time to time with information (such as legal or commercial news) which may be of interest, and to invite them to events held by us. We may also record telephone calls and monitor emails for training, regulatory and compliance purposes. 

We will also need to process your personal data for the administration of our relationship with you including (but not limited to) billing, record keeping and where necessary debt collection. In this regard, we act as a separate data controller in our own right.  

We may use your personal data to send you updates (by email, text, telephone or post) about legal developments that might be of interest to you and/or information about our services, including exclusive offers, promotions or new services or products. You have the right to opt out of receiving promotional communications at any time by contacting the matter partner.

2. Individuals involved in or connected with a client matter

In the course of a client matter, we may collect personal data about individuals employed by the counterparties of our clients or prospective clients. Such personal data may include information collected about claimants, policyholders, witnesses, investigators, experts, advisors and consultants. We may obtain this personal data directly from the individual, from third parties or public sources. 

The types of personal data we collect may differ depending on what is necessary for and relevant to a particular client matter. However, the types of personal data we will collect generally are as follows: names, addresses, contact details and job/business details. 

3. Business development 

During the course of our business development initiatives, we may collect personal information about prospective clients. The types of personal information that may be collected include name, address, nationality, business interests, track record and employment history. We obtain the personal information that we collect for business development purposes from you, your employer and from publicly available sources.

4. Our blogs

When visitors leave comments on our blogs (i.e., The Platform Blog and The Thicket), we collect the data shown in the comments form (such as your name and contact details) as well as the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

We do not engage in any automated decision-making or profiling.

5. How long we will retain your personal information for

We will retain your personal data as long as it is reasonably required for the purposes for which it was collected, and delete it when it is no longer necessary for these purposes or when you withdraw your consent. 

6. How and why we share your personal information with third parties

  • 6.1 Courts, law enforcement authorities and regulators 

We may have to disclose some information to third parties, including courts, law enforcement authorities, regulators, attorneys and other authorities. We accept instructions only on the understanding that we have your authority to do so when reasonable and necessary for the purposes of dealing with any matter on which you instruct us on your behalf, or in addressing any issue or concern you or we may identify in your interest, or (in the context of our insurance arrangements) in our own interest, or if required by law. If we have any doubt as to whether you might object to the disclosure of any information, we will seek to obtain your consent before doing so unless disclosure is required by our regulators, insurers, professional advisers or as a matter of law.  

  • 6.2 Other legal service providers, consultants and experts

We may need to share your personal data with foreign law firms to receive local legal advice as well as other legal specialists, barristers, consultants and experts engaged in your matter.

  • 6.3 Third party service providers 

We also use third party service providers to help us deliver efficient, cost-effective legal services. These third parties may include “cloud” service providers for document/information hosting, sharing, transfer, analysis, processing or storage. If you instruct us to use an alternative provider for storing, sharing or exchanging documents/information, we are not responsible for the security of the data or the provider’s security standards. 

We may also disclose your contact details on a confidential basis to third parties for the purposes of collecting feedback on our services and to improve and promote our services.

7. Transferring your personal data abroad

As we work as a joined team across our offices, we may sometimes transfer personal data between them where necessary to provide our services. We may also need to transfer personal data outside of the UK and the EEA to receive local legal advice from foreign law firms as well as other legal specialists, consultants and experts engaged in your matter. 

We protect your personal data overseas through the following measures:

  • We always make any personal data transfers in compliance with the data privacy laws of your home country.
  • We ensure that any overseas third party to which your personal data is disclosed to: 
    • only uses that personal data for the purposes for which it was disclosed; 
    • undertakes the necessary technical and organisational measures which are reasonable in the circumstances to secure that personal data; 
    • deletes that personal data when it is no longer required; and 
    • processes your personal data in accordance with this Privacy Policy and the local data privacy laws.

8. Your rights

Your rights in relation to your personal data are as follows:

  • You have the right to request access to and a copy of any personal data about you which we hold. 
  • You have the right to request information about whether your personal data has been transferred outside the EU and any safeguards relating to this transfer.
  • You have the right to ask us to correct any incorrect or incomplete personal data we may hold about you. 
  • Under certain circumstances, you have the right to ask us to delete any personal data we hold about you.
  • Under certain circumstances, you have the right to limit the way we use your personal data by asking us not to process your personal data for certain purposes.
  • Under certain circumstances, you have the right to object to us processing your personal data for certain purposes.
  • Under certain circumstances, you have the right to request a copy of your personal data.
  • Where you have provided consent to the collection, processing and transfer of your personal data for a specific purpose, and we are collecting, processing and transferring your data on the basis of that consent, you have the right to withdraw your consent for that specific processing at any time. 

You can find more information about these rights by visiting https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/.

To make a request pursuant to these rights, please contact the matter partners. 

We keep the Privacy Policy under regular review and publish any updates to it on our websites. This Privacy Policy was last updated in May 2022.