This is the privacy policy of PCS Legal. Throughout this privacy policy 'we', 'us' and 'our' refers to PCS Legal.

Our head office is based at 5 The Capricorn Centre, Cranes Farm Road, Basildon, Essex, SS14 3JA.

We are regulated by the Council for Licensed Conveyancers, offering conveyancing (buying, selling, remortgaging and transfer of equity of properties) and probate (administration of a deceased person's estate) services to national and international clients.

To provide these services and to comply with the law, we collect and manage information from our clients' correspondence and the internet, which can include non-clients in some cases. In doing so, we observe current UK data protection legislation, including the UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018 and the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, and are committed to being transparent with you and protecting and respecting our clients' and non-clients' privacy and rights. That makes us a "Data Controller" in respect of the information gathered and processed via our website.

We are committed to safeguarding the privacy of all visitors to our website. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). Please read the following notice to understand how we will collect and use your information and the rights you have in relation to your information. References in this notice to "your information" are also to personal information that you provide to us. This notice may vary from time to time, so please check it regularly. Any significant changes to this notice will be clearly indicated on our home page.

PCS Legal does not engage in unsolicited marketing practices. We do not make sales calls, cold calls, or use pre-recorded messaging systems to contact individuals. Any communication you receive from us will be in response to a direct enquiry, an existing instruction, or where you have explicitly consented to be contacted.

Occasionally, when you connect to our website we may use "cookie" technology and IP addresses to automatically collect certain technical, non-personally identifiable information. This might include your type of internet browser or computer, the domain name of your internet service provider, the number of page visits, and the character and duration of such visits. We also track the number of visitors to our website in an aggregate form. Personally identifiable information is not extracted in this process. This information helps us keep our website fresh and interesting to our visitors and tailor content to a visitor's interests. You may set your computer browser to disable cookies or to alert you when cookies are being sent. If you disable cookies, we may be unable to optimise your visit to our website and certain features may not be available. For more information regarding cookies, please refer to our cookie policy.

If you visit our office, we have 24-hour video surveillance and we record customer and staff interactions in the common areas; any information captured via this medium will be stored for training, monitoring and security purposes.

How We Use Your Information

We will only use the information you provide to us on these sections of the website in order to process the relevant application form. Other information we gather is normally collected directly from you by telephone, email, letter, fax or personal visit to one of our offices. This information, known as your 'personal data', includes your name, home address, email address, telephone number, other contact details, financial information and date of birth.

We may also use your personal information to, and the lawful basis we rely on for each is shown in brackets:

·        Establish a business relationship with you (steps taken at your request prior to entering into a contract

·        Provide legal services and respond to enquiries (performance of a contract)

·        Conduct administrative or operational processes within our business (legitimate interests)

·        Process applications for employment (legitimate interests / steps prior to a contract)

·        Send marketing communications about our services you may be interested in (consent)

·        Ensure the billing of any procured services and obtain payment (performance of a contract; legal obligation)

·        Process and respond to any complaints (legal obligation; legitimate interests)

·        Monitor and analyse our business and website (legitimate interests)

·        Form a view of you as an individual and to identify, develop or improve our services and/or products that may be of interest to you, and to carry out market research (legitimate interests; see also 'Automated Decision-Making and Profiling' below)

·        Enable us to meet our regulators' and insurers' requirements (legal obligation)

For more details about how we use your information for marketing purposes, please see the section below, 'Using Your Information for Marketing Purposes'.

Using Your Information For Marketing Purposes

We may ask whether you wish to receive marketing communications from us. We will seek explicit consent before sending any individual marketing content, in line with their preferences. We will not send you marketing material if you ask us not to. If you have agreed to receive marketing but later change your mind and no longer wish to receive this, please let us know so we can remove you from our distribution lists.

How and Why We Share Your Information

Please note that we may on occasion be required to share your information with other PCS Legal branches and any third parties who provide services on our behalf, should this be needed. We have taken steps to ensure that all such entities keep your personal information confidential and secure and only use it for the purposes that we have specified and have informed you about. In relation to any other third parties, we will only disclose your information where you have given your consent, where we are required to do so by law, or where it is necessary for the purpose of, or in connection with, legal proceedings or the performance of our contract.

We use a third-party data processor called 'Trustpilot', an online feedback company. Trustpilot may contact you after your matter has completed so you can leave genuine feedback on our service. They will only contact you once, and your information will remain secure with them while they use it to contact you, after which it will be automatically removed.

When obtaining payment for any procured services, we collect and store this data; the legal basis for processing this data is to meet the requirements of the contract. This information may be shared with HM Revenue & Customs and our external and internal auditors, so that we can show the money coming in and ensure we are paying the right amount of tax.

To ensure the information we store for all our offices is secure, we use a closed-circuit television (CCTV) service. This is to meet the requirements of a security contract, and the information is only shared with our CCTV service provider, who ensures that all the information they hold is kept secure at all times.

We monitor the usage of our website to make sure that it remains up to date and current. We obtain this information through website cookies that collect non-personal data (the pages you have visited and for how long), which is used to improve our website and services. This information is only shared with our analytics provider, Google Analytics (see 'Overseas Transfers' below).

How Long We Will Retain Information For

PCS Legal will retain information from a sale for a minimum of 6 years and a purchase for a minimum of 15 years. This is due to regulations imposed on us by the Council for Licensed Conveyancers (CLC), and to ensure our business records are adequate and to maintain the requisite levels of insurance.

Overseas Transfers

We do not transfer client conveyancing or probate files outside the United Kingdom. However, some of the third-party services we use to run our website and respond to enquiries are provided by companies based outside the UK and the European Economic Area (EEA). This currently includes our website analytics provider (Google Analytics) and the artificial intelligence infrastructure used by our website chatbot, which uses systems provided by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google (see 'Website Chatbot Service' below). Where this happens, we require these providers to protect your information using legally recognised safeguards, such as the UK International Data Transfer Agreement, the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or reliance on a UK adequacy decision. You can ask us for more information about these safeguards using the contact details below.

Security

We use up-to-date data storage and security techniques to protect your personal information from unauthorised access, improper use or disclosure, unauthorised modification, or unlawful destruction or accidental loss. All our employees and any third parties we engage to process your personal information are obliged to respect the confidentiality of your information. However, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your information, we cannot guarantee the security of information transmitted to our website; any transmission is at your own risk.

Other Sites

This website may contain links to other websites that we do not own or operate. We do not control, recommend or endorse, and are not responsible for, these sites or their content, products, services or privacy policies. Downloading material from certain sites may risk infringing intellectual property rights or introducing viruses into your system. When you leave this website, please read the privacy policies and terms of the site you visit. You should also independently assess the authenticity of any website which appears or claims to be one of our websites (including those linked to through an email).

Your Rights

Right to Be Informed

This privacy notice fulfils our obligation to tell you about the ways in which we use your information as a result of you using this website.

Right to Access

You have the right to apply for a copy of the information we hold about you free of charge. This is called a data subject access request. We will send you a copy of the information within one calendar month of your request. We may require further information from you to verify your identity before disclosing any personal information to you.

Right to Rectification

You also have the right to have any inaccurate information about you corrected. We want to make sure that your information is accurate and up to date. You may ask us to correct or remove any information that you think is no longer up to date.

Right to Erasure ('Right to Be Forgotten')

You have the right to ask that we erase all personal information that we hold about you. Where it is appropriate for us to comply, your request will be fully actioned within one calendar month. Certain information may have to be retained to meet the requirements of our regulators and cannot be erased.

Right to Object

You have the right to object to:

·        The continued use of your data for any marketing and communications purpose for which consent is the lawful basis for processing; you can withdraw your consent at any time.

·        The continued use of your data for any marketing and communications purpose for which the lawful basis of processing is legitimate interests.

·        Any other processing of your personal data, including profiling, that is based on our legitimate interests, unless we can demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds for the processing which override your interests, rights and freedoms, or the processing is necessary to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

Right to Restrict Processing

If you wish us to restrict the use of your data because:

(i) you think it is inaccurate but this will take time to validate

(ii) you believe our data processing is unlawful but you do not want your data erased

(iii) you want us to retain your data in order to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim

(iv) you wish to object to the processing of your data, but we have yet to determine whether this is appropriate,

Right to Data Portability

If you would like to move, copy or transfer the electronic personal data that we hold about you to another organisation.

Automated Decision-Making and Profiling

We may use limited profiling to help us understand your likely interests and to improve our services, for example by analysing website usage patterns (see 'Collection of Additional Information' above) and enquiries handled by our website chatbot. We do not use fully automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects about you without human involvement. If this changes, we will tell you and explain your right to request human review of the decision, to express your point of view, and to contest it.

You can also contact us if you have any concerns or complaints about the way your personal data has been handled as a result of you using this website. For any of the above, please use the contact information provided as follows:

Email us:dsar@pcslegal.co.uk

Call us: 01268 590003

Write to us: Data Protection Department, PCS Legal, 5 The Capricorn Centre, Cranes Farm Road, Basildon, SS14 3JA.

Alternatively, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), who can be contacted at Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, SK9 5AF, or www.ico.org.uk.

Website Chatbot Service (SiteSpeakAI)

We provide an interactive, AI-powered chatbot on our website to assist visitors with general enquiries and to help capture contact details for quotes or follow-up communications. This chatbot service is provided on our behalf by a third-party provider, SiteSpeakAI.

When you choose to interact with the chatbot, any personal data you explicitly provide, such as your name, email address, phone number, or details of your property matter, will be processed by SiteSpeakAI to generate automated replies and route your enquiry directly to our team.

To deliver these dynamic responses, the chatbot uses secure third-party artificial intelligence infrastructure sub-processors (including systems such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google) to analyse your queries. SiteSpeakAI does not sell your personal data. However, because this is an independent third-party platform, we strongly advise you to review the SiteSpeakAI Privacy Policy (https://sitespeak.ai/privacy-policy) to understand how they safeguard and process your information.

You are not required to use the chatbot to navigate our site, and you should avoid entering highly sensitive financial details or confidential personal information into the chat interface. If your enquiry is highly sensitive, please contact our offices directly by telephone or our primary secure email channel.