This privacy policy explains how we collect and use your personal information through your use of our website, including any personal information you may provide by contacting us through our website.

Who we are and contacting us

Ciel Legal LLP (also referred to as “we”, “us” and “our” in this privacy policy) is the controller of your personal information. Our company number is OC448210. Our registered office is at c/o Millhouses Accountancy, Millhouses Business Centre 2-4 Abbeydale Road, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, S7 2QN.

If you have any questions about this privacy policy or about how we use your personal information, or if you would like to exercise any of your legal rights over your personal information, you can contact us as follows:

• By email: claire.stockill@ciel-legal.com

• By phone: +44(0)7814731805

• By post: Ciel Legal LLP, c/o Millhouses Accountancy, Millhouses Business Centre 2-4 Abbeydale Road, Sheffield, S7 2QN

What personal information do we collect about you?

Personal information means any information about you which allows you to be identified. Through your use of our website, we may collect, store, use and transfer the following types of your personal information:

• First name and last name

• Email address and other contact information such as telephone number

• Information about how you interact with and use our website

• Your preferences in receiving marketing from us and your communications preferences

We may also collect, use and share statistical or demographic data which is aggregated. This type of data is not personal information because it does not identify you. For example, we may aggregate information about how individuals use our website to calculate the number of users who use the contact us form so that we can analyse trends in how people interact with our website and to help us improve our website.

How do we collect your personal information?

We collect information from and about you in different ways:

• When you interact with us: you may give us personal information by filling in our contact form or by otherwise corresponding with us for example by post, email, phone.

• Collection of certain personal information via cookies and automated technologies: as you use our website, we automatically collect analytics data from Google about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this information by using cookies and other similar technologies. Please see our cookie policy for more detail on this.

How do we use your personal information?

We use your personal information that we collect through your use of our website in the ways set out below. Data protection law requires us to have a legal basis to use your personal information. We explain below the legal bases we are using to permit each of the ways we use your personal information:

• Use: To respond to your questions or requests for a chat that you submit through our contact us page or otherwise for example by email, phone or post.

  • Legal Basis: This use is necessary for our legitimate interests in responding to potential client queries and establishing our relationship with you.

• Use: We may store your personal information on our computer systems for the purpose of corresponding with you about your question or request for a chat, for example so that we can email you to confirm the time of our chat.

  • Legal Basis: This use is necessary for our legitimate interests in responding to potential client queries and establishing our relationship with you.

• Use: To administer and protect our business and our website.

  • Legal Basis: This use is necessary for our legitimate interests in running our business, carrying out IT and network security services for our business and to protect our business from fraud and other cyber attacks.

• Use: To share information with law information agencies and other relevant regulators where we have a legal or regulatory reason to do so.

  • Legal Basis: This use is necessary to comply with our legal obligations.

• Use: To use data analytics to improve our website and our relationships with our customers and to measure the effectiveness of our communications.

  • Legal Basis: This use is necessary for our legitimate interests in keeping our website up to date and relevant and ensuring our website is fit for the purpose of enabling potential customers to interact with us easily.

Disclosing your personal information

We may share your personal information with the entities set out below:

• Google or other data analytics service providers for the purposes set out in the How do we use your personal information? section above.

• Law enforcement agencies and/or regulatory bodies where we have a legal or regulatory obligation to share your personal information.

• Third parties to whom we may choose to sell, transfer or merge parts of our business or our assets. Or we may seek to acquire other businesses or merge with them. If a change happens to our business, the new owners may use your personal information in the same way as set out in this privacy policy.

We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal information and to treat it as required by data protection law.

International transfers of your personal information

We may transfer your personal information out of the UK where Google or other analytics service providers may be based. If such transfers of your personal information outside the UK are to countries which have laws that do not provide the same level of protection to personal information as the UK, either we will only transfer your personal information to countries that have been deemed by the UK to offer an adequate level of protection to your personal information, or we may use specific contractual clauses approved for use in the UK which give your personal information the same protection as they would get in the UK.

Security of your personal information

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. We also limit access to your personal information to only the individuals within our business, or our contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know your personal information.

We have put in place procedures to handle any suspected breaches of your personal information. We will, where legally required to do so, notify you and the relevant regulator of a breach.

KEEPING HOLD OF your personal information

We will only keep your personal information for as long as is reasonably necessary to carry out the purpose(s) we collected it for, including for the purpose of satisfying any legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or reporting requirements. We may keep your personal information for longer if there is a complaint or if we reasonably believe there is a prospect of legal proceedings relating to our relationship with you.

The law requires us to keep basic information about our customers (for example contact information and financial information) for six years after they stop being a customer; this is for tax purposes.

In some circumstances, you can ask us to delete your personal information. Please see the Your Legal Rights section below for more information about this.

Your legal rights

Data protection law gives you certain rights over your personal information We have set out these rights below. If you want to exercise any of these rights, please do so using the contact information in the Who we are and Contacting us section above.

• Request access: this allows you to receive a copy of all the personal information we have about you.

• Request correction: this allows you to have any incomplete or incorrect personal information corrected.

• Object to our use of your personal information where we rely on our legitimate interests as our legal basis for using your personal information: in some cases, we may demonstrate that we have compelling legitimate grounds to use your personal information which override your right to object.

• Request deletion in certain limited circumstances: this allows you to ask us to delete your personal information where:

  • we have no good reason to continue using it

  • you have successfully exercised your right to object to our use of your personal information (see above)

  • we may have used your personal information unlawfully

  • we are required to delete your personal information to comply with local law

  We may not always be able to comply with your deletion request for legal reasons which we will notify to you, if applicable, when you make your request.

• Object at any time to the use of your personal information for direct marketing purposes.

• Request transfer to you or a third party: this allows you to ask us to provide you or a third party you have chosen with your personal information in a structured, commonly used, machine readable format. This right only applies to automated information which you initially provided consent for us to use or where we used the information to perform a contract with you.

• Request restriction of our use: this allows you to ask us to suspend our use of your personal information in one of the following cases:

  • you want us to establish the accuracy of your personal information

  • our use of your personal information is unlawful but you do not want us to delete it

  • you need us to hold your personal information even if we no longer need it because you need it to establish, exercise or defend legal claims

  • you have objected to our use of your personal information but we need to check whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it

Complaints

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the UK’s data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (www.ico.gov.uk). It would be great if we could have the chance to resolve your complaint before you contact the Information Commissioner’s Office so please do contact us in the first instance.

Changes to this privacy policy and your duty to notify us of changes

We review our privacy policy regularly. This version was last updated on 9 April 2025.

It is important that the personal information we have about you is accurate and up to date. Please let us know if your personal information changes during your relationship with us.

third party links

Our website may contain links to third party websites. If you click on any of those links, it may allow third parties to collect or share personal information about you. We do not control these third party websites and we are not responsible for their privacy policies. When you leave our website, we encourage you to read the privacy notice of any other websites you visit.