Hire.Legal is a registered trademark under DocPro Limited (the “Company”). The Company operates under and is part of DocPro group of companies (“DocPro Group”). This Privacy Policy applies to Hire.Legal.com (the “Website”) owned and operated by the Company.
We respect the privacy of our online visitors and customers at the Website and comply with applicable laws for the protection of your privacy, including, without limitation, the European Union General Data Protection Regulation ("GDPR") and the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance (the “PDPO”).
1.1 Wherever we talk about Personal Data below ("Personal Data"), we mean any information that can either itself identify you as an individual ("Personally Identifying Information") or that can be connected to you indirectly by linking it to Personally Identifying Information, for example:
1.2 When you register on the Website, we ask that you provide your name, email address and telephone number. If you are a lawyer, you will also be asked to provide your name, firm name, work e-mail address, telephone number, year of admission, jurisdiction, solicitor number, current practising certificate/Law Society of Hong Kong membership card, area of practice and describe your experience. However, If you are searching for a lawyer, you will be asked to describe your situation and ask questions so that lawyers can evaluate your legal needs and make a response to work for you.
1.3 If you are a lawyer, you shall be responsible for updating all the information provided on the Website at the time of registration and ensuring it is correct, accurate at all times; and in no event we shall be held responsible for the inaccuracy of the said information posted by you on the Website.
1.4 We also process anonymous data, aggregated or not, to analyse and produce statistics related to the habits, usage patterns, and demographics of customers as a group or as individuals. Such anonymous data does not allow the identification of the customers to which it relates. We may share anonymous data, aggregated or not, with third parties.
1.5 The Company does not interfere with or control the content of legal advice from lawyers to clients in any way. Whether any particular communication is privileged is a fact-specific analysis and depends on the laws of the relevant jurisdiction. Furthermore, the lawyer-client communication platform provided by the Website anonymises client details so that the lawyer does not know the identity of the client. As a result, if you are a client and you choose to communicate with a lawyer using the platform available on the Website, please note that, depending on the laws in the applicable jurisdiction, any such communications between you and a participating lawyer may not necessarily be protected by the lawyer-client privilege doctrine.
2.1 Our business has been built on trust between us and our customers. To preserve the confidentiality of all information you provide to us, we have adopted the following privacy principles:
2.2 By maintaining our commitment to these principles, we will ensure that we respect the inherent trust that you place in us.
3.1 We collect and use Personal Data for the following purposes:
(a) performing our agreement with you to provide content and services on the Website, including the creation of documents, as well as providing, improving and developing our services;
(b) researching, designing and launching new platforms, products, services, document templates, features;
(c) providing you with alerts, updates, materials or information about our services or other types of information that you requested or signed up to;
(d) exercising our rights under our contracts with you, including collecting amounts outstanding from you;
(e) responding or taking part in legal proceedings, including seeking professional advice, or for the purposes of the legitimate and legal interests of the Company or a third party (e.g. the interests of our other customers);
(f) compliance with any law, regulation, judgment, court order, voluntary code, sanctions regime, within or outside Hong Kong existing currently and in the future or other legal obligations that we are subject to;
(g) communicating with you and responding to your questions or requests;
(h) researching, customer profiling and segmentation;
(i) analysing how you access and use our platforms, products and services including those available on our websites and apps;
(j) advertising and marketing our Website, products and services and other related subjects;
(k) determining the amount of indebtedness owed to or by you;
(l) complying with any obligations, requirements, policies, procedures, measures or arrangements for sharing data and information within the DocPro Group and/or any other use of data;
(m) facilitating consolidated supervision of the DocPro Group for the conduct of internal audit and the performance of risk management;
(n) responding to any legal, governmental, or regulatory or quasi-governmental related matter, action or proceeding (including any prospective action or legal proceeding);
(o) making or investigating any claim or responding to any search or document request, including but not limited to action, proceeding, request from government authorities, Hospital Authority or the Law Society of Hong Kong;
(p) providing analytics by third party on our behalf via the Website which are aggregated or de-identified information with third parties, which cannot reasonably be used to identify you;
(q) processing Personal Data with our strategic partners to provide products and services, or that help us market to customers (including, but not limited with DocPro Group on document creation service and a third-party provider on optical character recognition technology);
(r) review the Personal Data from time to time to identify problems and solve disputes, to identify users who use multiple user identifications or aliases, and to compare and review your Personal Data for errors, omissions and accuracy;
(s) purposes directly related or incidental to the above; or
(t) where you have given consent to it.
The primary reason that the Company collects information from its users is to match the right lawyer with the people and businesses that need them.
3.2 Your IP address may be used to help diagnose problems with our server, to administer our Website, and for security needs. We may provide aggregate statistics about our customers, sales, traffic patterns, and related site information to third-party vendors, but these statistics will include no personal identifying information.
3.3 These reasons for collecting and processing Personal Data determine and limit what Personal Data we collect and how we use it (section 4. below), how long we store it (section 5. below), who has access to it (section 6. below) and what rights and other control mechanisms are available to you as a user (section 8. below).
4.1 When setting up an Account on the Website, we will collect your name, email address, phone number and country of residence. You are also required to choose a user name and a password. The provision of this information is necessary to register a User Account. You are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share a password with anyone. Your password and password reminder answers are kept encrypted at all times, so they cannot be decoded even if someone gains access to our database. However, to avoid unauthorized use of your account by others, you must take steps to control your password.
4.2 During setup of your account, the account is automatically assigned a number (the "ID") that is later used to reference your user account without directly exposing Personally Identifying Information about you.
4.3 Any information provided as part of registration, online/phone consultation becomes part of your Hire.Legal record.
4.4 You agree to provide accurate information to help us serve you best to our knowledge, to periodically review such information and to update such information as and when necessary.
4.5 Hire.Legal reserves the right to maintain, delete or destroy all communications and materials posted or uploaded using the Hire.Legal Service according to its internal record retention and/or destruction policies.
4.6 You might be contacted via email to review the information provided by you for Hire.Legal record for online consultations. Please make sure you provide a valid email-id and you update it as and when needed.
4.7 In order to make a transaction online, you may need to provide payment data to us to enable the transaction. If you pay by credit card, you need to provide typical credit card information (name, address, credit card number, expiration date and security code) to us, which we will process and transmit to the payment service provider of your choice to enable the transaction and perform anti-fraud checks. Likewise, we will receive data from your payment service provider for the same reasons.
4.8 We will collect and process Personal Data whenever you explicitly provide it to us or send it as part of communication with others, e.g. in forums, chats, or when you provide feedback or other user generated content. This data includes:
(a) Information that you post, comment or follow in any of our Content and Services;
(b) Information sent through chat;
(c) Information you provide when you request information or support from us or purchase Content and Services from us, including information necessary to process your orders with the relevant payment merchant or, in case of physical goods, shipping providers;
(d) Information you provide to us when creating documents.
4.9 We collect a variety of information through your general interaction with the websites, Content and Services offered by us. Personal Data we collect may include, but is not limited to, browser and device information, data collected through automated electronic interactions and application usage data. Likewise, we will track your process across your websites and applications to verify that you are not a bot and to optimize our services.
4.10 In order to provide you with services, we need to collect, store and use various information about your activity in our Content and Services. "Content-Related Information" includes your ID, as well as information about your preferences, progress, time spent, as well as information about the device you are using, including what operating system you are using, device settings, unique device identifiers, and crash data.
4.11 We use "Cookies", which are text files placed on your computer, to help us analyse how users use our services, and similar technologies (e.g. web beacons, pixels, ad tags and device identifiers) to recognize you and/or your device(s) on, off and across different devices and our services, as well as to improve the services we are offering, to improve marketing, analytics or website functionality. The use of Cookies is standard on the internet. Although most web browsers automatically accept cookies, the decision of whether to accept or not is yours. You may adjust your browser settings to prevent the reception of cookies, or to provide notification whenever a cookie is sent to you. You may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser. However, please note that if you do this, you may not be able to access the full functionality of our websites. When you visit any of our services, our servers log your global IP address, which is a number that is automatically assigned to the network your computer is part of.
4.12 We may process information collected under this section 3 so that content, products and services shown on the pages and in update messages displayed when launching the service can be tailored to meet your needs and populated with relevant recommendations and offers. This is done to improve your customer experience.
4.13 Subject to your separate consent or where explicitly permitted under applicable laws on email marketing, we may send you marketing messages about products and services offered by us to your email address. In such a case we may also use your collected information to customise such marketing messages as well as collect information on whether you opened such messages and which links in their text you followed.
4.14 You can opt out or withdraw your consent to receive marketing emails at any time by either withdrawing the consent on the same page where you previously provided it or clicking the "unsubscribe" link provided in every marketing email.
4.15 We collect certain data that is required for our detection, investigation and prevention of fraud, cheating and other violations of the applicable laws ("Violations"). This data is used only for the purposes of detection, investigation, prevention and, where applicable, acting on of such Violations and stored only for the minimum amount of time needed for this purpose. If the data indicates that a Violation has occurred, we will further store the data for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims during the applicable statute of limitations or until a legal case related to it has been resolved. Please note that the specific data stored for this purpose may not be disclosed to you if the disclosure will compromise the mechanism through which we detect, investigate and prevent such Violations.
5.1 We will store your information as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes for which the information is collected and processed or — where the applicable law provides for longer storage and retention period — for the storage and retention period required by law. In particular, if you terminate your User Account, your Personal Data will be marked for deletion except to the degree legal requirements or other prevailing legitimate purposes dictate a longer storage.
5.2 In cases where Personal Data cannot be completely deleted in order to ensure the consistency of the system, the user experience or the community, your information will be permanently anonymized. Please note that the we are required to retain certain transactional data under statutory commercial and tax law for a period of up to seven (7) years.
5.3 If you withdraw your consent on the processing of your Personal Data, we will delete your Personal Data without undue delay to the extent that the collection and processing of the Personal Data was based on a written notice of withdrawn consent.
5.4 If you exercise a right to object to the processing of your Personal Data, we will review your objection and delete your Personal Data that we processed for the purpose to which you objected without undue delay, unless another legal basis for processing and retaining this data exists or unless applicable law requires us to retain the data.
5.5 The data that we collect from you may be transferred to, and stored at cloud storage globally, or a destination outside of your jurisdiction. It may also be processed by third parties who operate outside of your jurisdiction. By submitting your personal data you agree to this transfer, storing or processing of data outside of your jurisdiction. We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely in accordance with this privacy policy.
6.1 The Company and DocPro Group may share your Personal Data with each other and use it to the degree necessary to achieve the purposes listed in section 2 and 3 above. This includes our overseas offices, affiliates, business partners and counterparts (on a need-to-know basis only). In the event of a reorganization, sale or merger we may transfer Personal Data to the relevant or proposed transferees of our operations (or a substantial part thereof) in any part of the world.
6.2 We may also share your Personal Data with our third party providers that provide customer support services, optical character recognition, artificial intelligence or big data technology in connection with the documents, products, content and services distributed via us. Your Personal Data will be used in accordance with this Privacy Policy and only as far as this is necessary for performing customer support services.
6.3 We may also share your information with our personnel, agents, advisers, auditors, contractors, financial institutions, and service providers in connection with our operations or services (for example staff engaged in the fulfilment of your order, the processing of your payment and the provision of support services); persons under a duty of confidentiality to us; or persons to whom we are required to make disclosure under applicable laws and regulations in any part of the world.
6.4 In accordance with internet standards, we may also share certain information (including your IP address and the identification of content you wish to access) with our third party network providers that provide content delivery network services and server services in connection with us. Our content delivery network providers enable the delivery of digital content you have requested, by using a system of distributed servers that deliver the content to you, based on your geographic location.
6.5 We may allow you to link your User Account to an account offered by a third party. If you consent to link the accounts, we may collect and combine information you allowed us to receive from a third party with information of your User Account to the degree allowed by your consent at the time. If the linking of the accounts requires the transmission of information about your person from us to a third party, you will be informed about it before the linking takes place and you will be given the opportunity to consent to the linking and the transmission of your information. The third party's use of your information will be subject to the third party's privacy policy, which we encourage you to review.
6.6 We may release Personal Data to comply with court orders or laws and regulations that require us to disclose such information. WE UNDERSTAND THAT THE NATURE OF DOCUMENTS CREATED BY OUR MEMBERS OR ANY COMMUNICATIONS WITH OUR LAWYERS MAY BE SENSITIVE, PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL, AND IT IS OUR POLICY NOT TO ACCESS THE CONTENT OF ANY DOCUMENTS CREATED BY OUR MEMBERS UNLESS IT IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.
6.7 If we engage outsourcing service providers or data processors (whether within or outside Hong Kong), outsourcing service providers or data processors are required to adhere to specific standards, including any standards prescribed by a privacy regulator, to prevent any loss, unauthorized access, use, modification or disclosure of data, either by contractual provisions or other means.
6.8 The community includes documents sharing, request and/or comments areas, where users can exchange ideas and communicate with each other. When posting a message to a sharing, request and/or comments area, please be aware that the information is being made publicly available online; therefore, you are doing so at your own risk. If your Personal Data is posted on one of our public areas against your will, please use the reporting function and the help site to request its removal.
6.9 The Website is designed to disclose certain limited information to connect lawyers with the people who need them. The users have full control over when and to whom personally identifying information is disclosed. Our service is designed specifically to keep clients anonymous to the lawyers communicating with them via the Website platform. The limited information we disclose is described below.
7.1 The minimum age to create a User Account on the Website is 18. We will not knowingly collect Personal Data from persons under the age of 18.
7.2 Nothing in this Privacy Policy shall limit your rights as a data subject under the PDPO.
7.3 To the extent permitted by law, the Company and other members of the DocPro Group may record and monitor electronic communications with you to ensure compliance with legal and regulatory obligations and internal policies for the purposes outlined in this Privacy Policy.
7.4 This Privacy Policy shall be deemed an integral part of all contracts, agreements, application for credit, account opening documents and other binding arrangements which you have entered into or intended to enter into with us.
7.5 In case of discrepancies between the English and Chinese versions, the English version shall apply and prevail.
8.1 You have the right:
(a) to check whether we hold data about you and to request access to such data;
(b) to require us to correct any data relating to you which is inaccurate;
(c) to ascertain our policies and practices in relation to data and to be informed of the kind of personal data held by us;
(d) in relation to uploaded documents, to delete the uploaded documents or to change the access rights of others to your uploaded documents.
8.2 In accordance with the provisions of the PDPO, we have the right to charge a reasonable fee for the processing of any data access request.
8.3 You should send requests for access to data or correction of data or for information regarding policies and practices and kinds of data held to:
DocPro Limited GPO Box 869 General Post Office Central, Hong Kong
Attention: Privacy Officer
While we review any request sent by mail, please be aware that to combat fraud, harassment and identity theft, the only way to access, rectify or delete your data is through logging in with your User Account at the Website.
This Agreement was last updated on 1 March 2022 ("Revision Date"). If you were a user before the Revision Date, it replaces the existing Privacy Policy.