Last updated: 31 January 2021
AESI (also "we", "our" or "us") is part of a group of companies. The AESI is the entity responsible for processing your personal data / information ("personal information").
Updates
This Privacy Policy may change to reflect AESI's business, laws and technology. We will place any updates on our website https://aesi.coi.uk. Whenever you need to refer to this Privacy Policy you should refer to our website or contact us for the most up to date version. Where we are required to do so under applicable law, we will obtain your notified consent to such changes.
Third Party Websites
You might find links to external third party websites on our website. This Privacy Policy does not apply to your use of a third party site and we are not responsible for the privacy practices of any such third party. You should check the privacy policies of any third party websites for information on how these third parties handle your personal information.
Do you have to provide your personal information?
The provision of your personal information to us is voluntary, however, to the extent that we require personal information to evaluate a legal claim, determine whether to enter into an agreement, carry out our duties under an agreement or comply with our legal obligations, the provision is mandatory in the sense that without the requested personal information, we reserve the right to:
- not enter into an agreement with the (legal) person in respect of which the provision of personal information is required; or
- suspend or terminate any existing agreement in respect of which the provision of personal information is required.
WHAT PERSONAL INFORMATION WE COLLECT, HOW AND WHY WE USE IT
How does AESI collect your personal information?
AESI generally collects personal information directly from you, your authorised representative or another third party. For example, AESI may collect personal information about you when you deal with us over the telephone, when you send us correspondence (whether by letter, fax, e-mail) or via the AESI website, or when a representative of AESI meets with you.
AESI also collects personal information from third party sources to the extent permitted by applicable law, including:
- our clients, counterparties and suppliers (e.g. lawyers, advisors, credit rating agencies and other information service providers);
- publicly maintained records or from the public domain generally (for example via the internet or social media platform).
If you provide us with personal information of other persons, please make sure that you obtain their consent to disclose their personal information to us for the purposes contained in this Privacy Policy and that such personal information is correct.
What personal information we collect
In the context of our activities, personal information that may be collected from you, or a third party (where applicable) includes:
- your full name;
- personal and business contact information (for example, phone number, email address, mailing address, home address);
- job title and organisation/employer name;
- financial and tax information (bank account numbers, share trading data and supporting documentation);
- sound/voice recordings (voicemail / phone messages and sometimes telephone conversations) as permitted by applicable laws and with prior consent (where necessary);
- information relating to claims;
- national or government identifiers (e.g. social security numbers / national insurance / passport / driver's license) as permitted by applicable laws;
- demographic information;
- information obtained from your use of our website (e.g. your IP address and how you navigate our website, see our Cookie Policy at Annexure A of this Policy for more information about this);
- credit rating information as permitted by applicable laws;
- information from fraud prevention agencies and/or due diligence information, as permitted by applicable laws, electoral roll, court records of debt judgements and bankruptcies and other publicly available sources, as noted further below; and/or
- where you contact us, AESI may keep a record of the correspondence.
In order to provide clients with our services, AESI also collects information relating to the legal proceedings or claims for which our services are sought or being provided. Some of this information may contain your personal information (for example, procedural information as the parties to a dispute and their solvency status, cases involving family trusts and beneficiary details and relevant relationships (subject in each case to compliance with all relevant confidentiality restrictions), and other facts collected in respect of a claim.
For what purposes we use your personal information
We collect, hold, disclose, use and otherwise process your personal information for the following business and commercial purposes:
- to verify whether we wish to conclude an agreement with you or your organisation (*);
- to provide our services and products (for example, for our legitimate interest in managing claim(s), reviewing and evaluating litigation funding prospects and other potential agreements, conducting legal proceedings, settling legal claims, and to perform contracts with our clients (including claim enforcement) and with our suppliers or vendors) (**);
- to market our services and products to you, including informing you about legal and funding developments that may be of interest to you, and notifying you of AESI hosted events (unless you have notified us that you do not wish to receive marketing material, and where required by applicable law, with your prior consent) (**);
- to administer and archive case-related information and our financial information (***);
- to maintain commercial relationships with contact persons (****);
- to communicate with you or other contact persons, including corresponding with you to resolve queries or complaints (*);
- to analyse the use of our website, enhance its user friendliness and optimise it for website users (****);
- if you are a prospective employee, to manage recruitment, work placement or internship processes, including considering applications, maintaining professional HR administration, and making offers and related activities (* / ***);
- to purchase goods and services from you (*);
- to help us manage or improve our services (**);
- to be able to disclose necessary information to a potential or actual third party purchaser of our business, shares or assets (if your personal information is included as an asset of the business) (**);
- to comply with our legal obligations including our tax, audit and company law requirements (***); and/or
- to protect our assets, business and personnel (**).
AESI does not engage in automated individual decision making.
Legal basis for processing your personal information
If the data processing is governed by European data protection laws, then all processing of your personal information is justified by a "legal basis" for processing. Such justified legal basis is that we may need to process your personal information:
- (*) to perform a contract or take steps to enter into a contract with you and to provide you with our services for example, where you as an individual enter into a contract with us for litigation funding, or that is required from you under the terms of use that apply to the use of our websites;
- (**) for our legitimate interest, which derives from the purpose of our business activities, which include the evaluation and management of our client's legal claims as part of our funding and recovery services;
- (***) to comply with a relevant legal or regulatory obligation under EU, Member State or other jurisdictions' law that we are subject to for example carrying out right to work checks on recruitment applicants, and maintaining client information in accordance with tax, audit or company law requirements;
- (****) for certain specific processing activities, such as sending email marketing (where this cannot be done on a legitimate interests basis) and retaining candidates' personal information for longer than the period initially prescribed by applicable law, we ask your prior consent, this consent may be revoked at any time.
In certain other jurisdictions our processing of your personal information is based on prior notification to you (for example, through provision of this Privacy Policy to you) or on prior consent from you.
SHARING PERSONAL INFORMATION WITH OTHERS
AESI may share your personal information, as permitted by applicable law, for the following business and commercial purposes:
- between affiliates of AESI situated in a number of locations globally where such disclosure is necessary to provide you with our services and/or to manage our business.
- with third parties who help manage our business and/or deliver services or perform functions on our behalf. These include:
o IT service providers who help manage our IT and back office systems (these service providers are located and store personal information in the EEA);
o solicitors, barristers, bailiffs, advisors, auditors and translators -- personal information from our case files are shared with suppliers who provide services on specific cases. These suppliers are usually established in the country where the legal proceedings take or are intended to take place (this can be anywhere in the world);
o investment partners -- limited personal information contained in case files may be shared with investors for investment decisions related to our cases;
- with a defendant or respondent in proceedings in relation to which AESI has agreed to provide our services, for the purpose of AESI performing its obligations under an agreement or to comply with applicable law, such defendant or respondent could be located anywhere in the world;
- with financial institutions in the context of legal proceedings, e.g. a bank to levy attachments on a bank account;
- courts, arbitral tribunals, arbitral institutes -- personal information from specific case files is shared with these bodies in the country where legal proceedings take or are intended to take place;
- with local government organisations and agencies, courts, law enforcement and regulators to comply with applicable laws, regulations and rules, and requests of law enforcement, regulatory and other governmental agencies;
- we may share in anonymised, statistical form, information regarding the visitors to our website, traffic patterns, and website usage with our affiliates and service providers.
- if, in the future, we sell or transfer some or all of our business, shares or assets to a third party, we may disclose information to a potential or actual third party purchaser of our business, shares or assets and this may include personal information as an asset of the business;
- with lawyers, law firms and related legal service providers in the context of a relevant claim. These parties agree or are legally bound to strict confidentiality restrictions and use any personal information we share with them or which they collect on our behalf solely for the purpose of providing legal confidential services; and/or
- with our clients who may receive personal information contained in their case files.
TRANSFERRING PERSONAL INFORMATION GLOBALLY
We operate on a global basis. Accordingly, your personal information may be disclosed, transferred, stored or otherwise processed outside of your country of residence. The countries in which overseas recipients are located will depend on the circumstances of the services AESI provides you. These locations may be subject to a different standard of data protection than the laws in your country and will be accessible to law enforcement and/or regulatory authorities according to the
In addition, in the context of litigation in countries outside the United Kingdom, we will have to transfer relevant personal data relating to the case files to such other countries that may have different standards of data protection.
Where required, we will take appropriate steps to ensure that transfers of personal information are in accordance with applicable laws, such as:
o where we transfer your personal information outside AESI or to third parties who help provide our products and services, we will obtain contractual commitments from them to protect your personal information. Some of these assurances are the use of EU Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the EU Commission for the transfers of personal information to a third country adducing adequate safeguards; or
o where we receive requests for information from law enforcement or regulators, we will carefully validate these requests before any personal information are disclosed, if permitted by applicable laws.
Storing your personal information
AESI will store your personal information for as long as is necessary for the purposes for which it was collected, as explained in this privacy policy. However, once AESI believes the information is no longer required, we will undertake to remove any identifying details or destroy the information entirely.
In specific circumstances, we may store your personal information for longer periods of time if required under applicable law or so that we have an accurate record of your dealings with us in the event of any complaints or challenges, or if we reasonably believe there is a prospect of litigation relating to your personal information or dealings.
COOKIES
For more information about how our cookies work and information about how to manage your cookie settings please refer to our Cookie Policy at Annexure A of this Policy.
LEGAL RIGHTS AVAILABLE TO HELP MANAGE YOUR PRIVACY
You may access or request correction of incorrect personal information that we hold about you by contacting us using the details at the Contact Us section of this Policy. We may take appropriate steps to verify your identity (or verify that you act as a legal guardian or authorised agent of the individual concerned) before granting a request to exercise a right in respect of your personal information.
We will respond in a timely manner to your requests and will take all reasonable steps to ensure that the personal information we hold about you remains accurate, up to date and complete. If we are unable to provide you with access to the information or if we cannot respond to other requests, we will provide you with reasons and inform you of any exceptions relied upon under applicable data protection laws. There will be some circumstances in which we are not required to give you access to your personal information or comply with your other requests. If we disagree with your correction request, we will annotate your personal information to indicate that a correction request was made.
We reserve the right to charge a reasonable fee where permitted by law, including where your request is manifestly unfounded or excessive (for example, photocopying costs or costs for our time spent in collating large amounts of material)
CONTACT US
To contact your data protection supervisory authority
If you are unsatisfied with the outcome of your complaint you may ask the Privacy Officer to be referred to a higher authority within the company. Irrespective of the foregoing, you always have a right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection supervisory authority (i.e. your place of habitual residence, place or work or place of alleged infringement). In the UK, this will be the UK Information Commissioner's Office, contactable at https://ico.org.uk/global/contact-us/.
ANNEXURE A -- COOKIE POLICY
We may use certain cookies on our website. Some of them are essential to make our site work, others serve to provide you a better, faster and safer user experience and some provide us with statistical data by tracking users behaviour on our website.
Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile device by websites that you visit. They are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide web services and functionalities for users. We use cookies to provide us with anonymous information on the use of our Website for analytics, to know what you find interesting on the Website and to deliver targeted advertising.
Most web browsers are set to accept cookies; however, you do not need to have cookies turned on to visit most of the Website. However, having cookies switched on should allow for a smoother and more tailored browsing experience, and is required for certain parts of the Website's functionality. In the majority of cases, a cookie does not provide us with any personal information.
Where we do process personal information through the cookies, we do so because this is necessary with a view to our legitimate interest in being able to operate our website and to offer a user-friendly website.
Types of Cookies we use
Cookies may be either "persistent" cookies or "session" cookies. The Website uses both persistent and session cookies.
- A persistent cookie consists of a text file sent by a web server to a web browser, which allows us to collect and analyse (on an anonymous basis) traffic and use of the Website, monitor the system and improve operating performance, for example, store your preferences to enhance your subsequent visits. It will not be automatically deleted when the browser is closed but is stored by the browser and will remain valid until its set expiry date (unless deleted by the user before the expiry date).
- A session cookie is essential to ensure the correct functioning of the Website and is used to manage registration/login and access to reserved features. It is stored temporarily during a browsing session will expire at the end of the user session, when the web browser is closed. The Website uses both persistent and session cookies.
A complete list of the cookies we use is set out in the table at the end of this policy. This list (together with the rest of this policy) is subject to change by AESI from time to time.
Other Tracking Technologies
- Clear GIFs, pixel tags and other technologies. Clear GIFs are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on your computer's hard drive, clear GIFs are embedded invisibly on web pages. We may use clear GIFs (a.k.a. web beacons, web bugs or pixel tags), in connection with our Website and services to, among other things, track the activities of Website's visitors and users, help us manage content, and compile statistics about the Website's usage. We and our third party service providers also use clear GIFs in HTML emails to our customers, to help us track email response rates, identify when our emails are viewed, and track whether our emails are forwarded.
- Local Storage Objects. We may use HTML5 Local Storage Objects ("HTML LSOs") to store your Website preferences and to personalize your visit. HTML LSOs are different from browser cookies because of the amount and type of data stored. Typically, you cannot control, delete, or disable the acceptance of HTML LSOs through your web browser.
- Third Party Ad Networks. We use third parties such as network advertisers to serve advertisements on third-party websites or other media (e.g., social networking platforms). This enables us and these third parties to target advertisements to you for products and services in which you might be interested. Third-party ad network providers, advertisers, sponsors and/or traffic measurement services may use cookies, JavaScript, web beacons (including clear GIFs), Flash LSOs and other tracking technologies to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content to you. These third-party cookies and other technologies are governed by each third party's specific privacy or cookies policy, not this one.
In order to be compliant with GDPR, we request consent for deploying analytics cookies, or advertising pixels/tags on our website where necessary.
Our Use of Cookies
We do not automatically capture or store personal information from browsers to the Website, other than to log your IP address (which in certain circumstances will be your personal data) and session information such as the duration of the visit to our site and the nature of the browser used. This information is used only for administration of the Website and in the compilation of statistics which we use for analysis in order to improve the Website and understand in general terms who uses our Website.
Cookies may be required to allow you to access and participate in certain areas of the Website. Once you have closed your browser, this type of cookie is deactivated. Like all cookies, you are able to remove or block particular cookies at any time.
Your Cookie Choices
The majority of browsers will allow you to alter the settings used for cookies and to disable and enable them as you require.
You can reject all cookies (except strictly necessary cookies) in case you prefer not to receive them, and you can have your computer warn you whenever cookies are being used. You can delete the cookies that are already on your computer and you can set your browser to prevent them from being placed. Disabling cookies may, however, prevent some web services (including on the Website) from working correctly. Please be aware that when you have set your computer to reject cookies, it can limit the functionality of the Website and it is possible then that you will not have access to some of the features on the Website.
To disable cookies, or to receive a warning whenever cookies are being used, you have to adjust your browser settings. You can adjust your browser settings to delete certain cookies. Visit the "help" section of your browser for how to manage your cookie settings, or follow the links below:
- Internet Explorer: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cookies/en
- Mozilla Firefox: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Cookies
- Google Chrome: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95647
- Safari: http://support.apple.com/kb/PH5042
- Opera: http://www.opera.com/browser/tutorials/security/privacy/
Opting-out of Third Party Ad Networks.
You have the ability to opt out of many third-party ad networks. For example, you may go to the Digital Advertising Alliance ("DAA") Consumer Choice Page for information about opting out of interest-based advertising and their choices regarding having information used by DAA companies. You may also go to the Network Advertising Initiative ("NAI") Consumer Opt-Out Page for information about opting out of interest-based advertising and their choices regarding having information used by NAI members. Opting out from one or more companies listed on the DAA Consumer Choice Page or the NAI Consumer Opt-Out Page will opt you out from those companies' delivery of interest-based content or ads to you, but it does not mean you will no longer receive any advertising through our Website or on other websites. You may continue to receive advertisements, for example, based on the particular website that you are viewing (i.e., contextually based ads). Also, if your browsers are configured to reject cookies when you opt out on the DAA or NAI websites, your opt out may not be effective. Additional information is available on the DAA's website at www.aboutads.info or the NAI's website at www.networkadvertising.org.