Directory privacy notice

01What this notice covers

newlaw.ai publishes a directory of Australian law firms. Each firm has a page. We build most of those pages ourselves, from public sources, before the firm has any contact with us. This notice explains what we hold, where it comes from, and how to change or remove it.

It sits alongside our main privacy policy, which covers people who use the product. We handle personal information under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles.

The directory also lists firms outside Australia, and the law where a firm and the people it names are also applies to what we hold about them: the Privacy Act 2020 in New Zealand, the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 in the United Kingdom, and the state privacy laws that apply in the United States. What we hold, and how to correct or remove it, is the same in every country and is set out below.

02What we hold about a firm

• The firm name, its website, and its general switchboard number.
• Office addresses.
• The areas of law the firm says it works in.
• Things the firm publishes about itself: languages, fee models, accreditations, the year it started, how many people it says it has.
• A short description we write from those facts, and up to forty words quoted from the firm's own website, in quote marks, linked to the page we took them from.

03What we hold about a person

Where a firm names its people on its own website, we may list a person's name and the role the firm gives them. That is all.

We hold no direct email address, no direct phone number, no mobile number, no photo, no biography and no practising certificate number for any individual named on a firm page. Our database has no column for those things, so they cannot be stored even by mistake.

04Where it comes from

Almost everything on a firm page comes from the firm's own website. We record the page each fact came from and the date we fetched it, and the firm page shows the date we last checked the site.

We also look at publicly available official records about law practices, in Australia and in the other countries the directory covers. We use those only for our own checks, to be confident a firm exists and that we have matched the right one. Nothing from that material is published, quoted or named on any page.

05Why we hold it

So that a person looking for a lawyer can find firms that do the kind of work they need, in their own state or region, and contact the firm directly. A directory of firms is only useful if the firms in it are the real ones.

If someone sends a firm a consultation request through this site, we pass on what they wrote, with their consent, and keep a record of the request. Nothing about a request is published.

06What we never do

• We are never paid per enquiry. Paid placement is a flat fee for a period, and it is labelled on the page where it appears. It does not change which firms are shown to a person or the order the others appear in.
• We publish no ratings, no reviews and no rankings of firms.
• We say nothing evaluative about a firm. A firm page repeats what the firm itself publishes, and facts we can check.
• We do not sell personal information, and we do not sell contact lists.

How the pages are ordered, and how paid placement is disclosed, is set out on how we rank.

07How to correct or remove it

Every firm page has a link that says "Ask us to remove this listing". It goes to a short form. A firm can ask for the whole page to come down, and a person named on a page can ask for their own name to come off it.

You do not have to give a reason and you do not have to prove anything. We aim to action removal and correction requests within one business day, and we tell you if it will take longer. When the request comes from an address at the firm's own domain, we email a short code there and the listing comes down as soon as you type it back, so that nobody but the firm can take the firm's page down.

A page we take down is not rebuilt from public sources afterwards. If you would rather keep the page and control what it says, a firm can claim its listing and edit it directly.

08How long we keep it

While a firm is listed, we keep the current facts and the record of where each one came from. When a listing is removed we keep only what we need to make sure it stays removed, and the record of the request itself.

09Contact us

Email info@newlaw.ai with the firm name. Removal and correction requests sent by email are treated exactly like ones sent through the form.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled a privacy matter, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au. In New Zealand you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, and in the United Kingdom to the Information Commissioner's Office.

This notice is general information about how the directory works. It is not legal advice.