Privacy and Terms of Use

INTRODUCTION

Nu Legal Limited trading as Home Loan Lawyers (Home Loan Lawyers) (we, us, our) complies with the requirements of the New Zealand Privacy Act 1993 (the Act) and is strongly committed to protecting personal data.

This policy explains how Home Hoan Lawyers handles personal information covered by the Act. Personal information is information about an identifiable individual.

WHY DOES HOME LOAN LAWYERS COLLECT PERSONAL INFORMATION?

We collect personal information in order to conduct our business, provide and market our services, and to meet our legal obligations, including but not limited to, our obligations under anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance obligations.

WHO DOES HOME LOAN LAWYERS COLLECT PERSONAL INFORMATION ABOUT?

We collect and hold personal information about (but not limited to) clients, potential clients and their employees, business associates, contractors, owners and directors, individuals we deal with in the course of acting for clients and carrying on business, suppliers and their employees and contractors, prospective employees and contractors, and other people who come into contact with Home Loan Lawyers.

WHO DO WE COLLECT YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION FROM

We collect personal information about you from:

you directly when you provide your details to us;
you indirectly, for example through emails, phone calls, forms, subscription and registration processes, face-to-face meetings, interviews, attendance at seminars, business cards, social medial channels, through the website and any related service.
third parties in some instances, for example, we may use third parties to analyse traffic at our website and social media accounts, which may involve the use of cookies and web beacons. In some circumstances we might collect personal information about you from a third party, for example, a report provided by a medical professional or an employment reference from another person; and
publicly available information for example from websites, or in other cases where you have authorised the availability of that information.

Where possible, we will collect personal information from you directly.

HOW MIGHT HOME LOAN LAWYERS COLLECT, HOLD, USE AND DISCLOSE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION?

In general, we collect, hold, use and disclose your personal information for the following purposes:

to conduct our business;
to provide and market our services to you;
to provide joint marketing initiatives with other service providers;
to perform analytics, including producing metrics for Home Loan Lawyers, leadership, such as trends, relationship maps, sales intelligence and progress against account business goals;
to administer an dmanage IT systems, websites and applications;
to engage third parties on your behalf;
to communicate with you;
to purchase good or services;
to help us manage and enhave our services;
for recruitment purposes;
for security, quality and risk management activies;
to verify your identiy against governmental and other databases; and
to comply with our legal obligations, including (but not limited to) in relation to our anti-money laundering and sanctions compliane obligations.

We may disclose your personal information to:

any business that supports our services and products, including any person that hosts or maintains any underlying IT system or data centre that we use to provide the website or other services and products;
a credit reference agency for the purpose of credit checking you;
other third parties (for anonymised statistical information);
other companies or individuals who perform checks that are necessary or desirable under law on our behalf;
other companies, agencies or individuals that maintain databases against which your identyt may be verified, which may include (but is not limitedto) the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs, New Zealand Transport Agency and the Commonwealth of Australia Document Verification Services;
a person who can require us to supply your personal information (e.g. a regulatory authority);
any other person authorised by the Act or another law (e.g. a law enforcement agency); and
any other person authorised by you.

A business that supports our services and products may be located outside New Zealand. This may mean your personal information is held and processed outside New Zealand, including (but not limited to) with services provided by offshore cloud service providers.

We retain personal information for as long as is necessary for the purpose for which it was collected. Personal information may be held for longer periods where extended retention periods are required by law or regulation and as necessary in order to defend our legal rights.

If we hold funds in our trust account on your behalf (including any judgment, sale proceeds, settlement amount, or other money), you authorise us to:
(a) provide any information we hold relating to your United States Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) or Common Reporting Standard (CRS) status, or other FATCA or CRS matters, to Inland Revenue and to our banks if they request information to be able to meet their FATCA or CRS obligations; and

(b) if you do not provide any such information we request, report your non-response, identity, and reportable balance to our banks and Inland Revenue (who will in turn pass this information to the relevant foreign tax authority).

Please ask us if you would like more information about FATCA or CRS.

MANAGEMENT OF YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

We will take reasonable steps to keep your personal information safe from loss, unauthorised activity, or other misuse. Depending on the purposes for which we have collected personal information, we may store some of the information electronically in Home Loan Lawyers customer relationship management system. Some or all of this personal information may be available to partners and authorised personnel of Home Loan Lawyser for use in accordance with this policy. Home Loan Lawyers personnel and staff are required to respect the confidentiality of any personal informaiotn held by Home Loan Lawyers.

ACCESSING AND CORRECTING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

Subject to certain grounds for refusal set out in the Act, you have the right to access your readily retrievable personal information that we hold and to request a correction to your personal information. Before you exercise this right, we will need evidence to confirm that you are the individual to whom the personal information relates.

In respect of a request for correction, if we think the correction is reasonable and we are reasonably able to change the personal information, we will make the correction. If we do not make the correction, we will take reasonable steps to note on the personal information that you requested the correction.

If you want to exercise either of the above rights, email us at [email protected]. Your email should provide evidence of who you are and set out the details of your request (e.g. the personal information, or the correction, that you are requesting).

We may charge you our reasonable costs of providing to you copies of your personal information or correcting that information.

INTERNET USE

While we take reasonable steps to maintain secure internet connections, if you provide us with personal information over the internet, the provision of that information is at your own risk.

If you follow a link on our website to another site, the owner of that site will have its own privacy policy relating to your personal information. We suggest you review that site’s privacy policy before you provide personal information.

We use cookies (an alphanumeric identifier that we transfer to your computer’s hard drive so that we can recognise your browser) to monitor your use of the website. You may disable cookies by changing the settings on your browser, although this may mean that you cannot use all of the features of the website.

CHANGES TO THIS POLICY

This policy was last updated on 28 February 2019.

We may change this policy by uploading a revised policy onto the website. The change will apply from the date that we upload the revised policy.