Wilson King LLP has designated Darrell Wade to be responsible for ensuring that it complies with the Personal Information Protection Act.

Please contact Darrell Wade at dvw@wilsonking.bc.ca to request information about the policies and practises of Wilson King LLP or the complaint process under that Act.

The current privacy policy of the firm appears below. This policy is subject to continual review and modification.

The Firm and Its Commitment

The following outlines the policy and the ongoing commitment the law firm of Wilson King LLP employs, in the collecting, using and disclosing of personal information to the extent necessary for the services we provide. Our organization, Wilson King LLP, includes at the time of writing, thirteen lawyers and eighteen support staff.

A Definition of Personal Information

Personal information is information about a specific individual, for example gender, age, income, home address or phone number, ethnic background, family status, their health (e.g., health history, health conditions, health services received by them) or their activities and views (e.g., religion, politics, opinions expressed by an individual, an opinion or evaluation of an individual). Business information on the other hand, which is not protected by privacy legislation, is the individual's business address and telephone number.

People who work for and with us

Wilson King LLP use a number of outside firms to provide miscellaneous services to the firm who may, in the course of providing their service, have limited access to personal information held by the firm. Access to any personal information held is limited as much as is reasonably possible and these firms give their assurance that they follow appropriate privacy principles.

Service to our Clients

Our law firm needs to collect, use and disclose personal information in delivering legal services to our clients. The most important use we make of any personal information collected is in providing legal service. If our client is an individual, we collect information about that person’s legal issue such as anything the client might have communicated or any activity that has taken place that might impact their legal situation in order to give appropriate and accurate advice regarding their legal rights and responsibilities, their options regarding their situation and receiving instructions from them in order carry out their interest.

We may need to obtain personal information from a third party about a client's legal issue so that we can discern what a third party's perception of the events may be and if that could have any impact on our client's legal situation.

The firm also needs emergency contact information for our clients inc case we need to contact clients to deal with urgent situations.

Information about the General Public

Our firm may need to collect personal information to gather and review evidence that is relevant to a legal issue affecting our clients. Thus, the personal information is usually incidental to our providing advice to our client. Often this collection, use and disclosure is done without the individual's consent because we are reviewing an apparent breach of law or an agreement and obtaining consent would compromise the investigation.

We may also collect personal information about members of the general public, to make them aware of legal services in general or our firm in particular. This information could be phone numbers, fax numbers and email addresses. We try to obtain consent before collecting this personal information, but when this is not possible, upon request we will immediately remove any personal information from our distribution list.

Contract Staff

When Wilson King LLP has an employee who works on a contract basis, we collect information about them to ensure we can contact them in the future for additional work assignments or for work related communication. The type of information collected would be home addresses and phone numbers etc. It would be an exceptional circumstance that this type of information would be collected without prior consent, but could happen in in circumstances such as an outbreak of a contagious disease or if a theft were to happen in the office.

Investigations

When Wilson King LLP act as an investigator for our clients, we may collect personal information as necessary information and evidence to provide an opinion on the issue for our client, and represent them in legal proceedings if required. In these instances the information we collect often is often without the consent of the subject of the investigation because we are inquiring into an apparent breach of law or an agreement and obtaining consent would compromise the investigation.

We Collect Personal Information: Related and Secondary Purposes

Wilson King LLP also collects, uses and discloses personal information for purposes related our primary business. Some examples of how this information is used follows:

• To invoice clients for services, to process credit card payments and to collect unpaid accounts.
• The firm reviews client and other files to ensure we are providing quality services, including the assessment of the performance of our partners and staff.
• Lawyers are regulated by the Law Society of British Columbia which may do audits of the firm’s records and it may also interview our staff in the process of conducting its regulatory activities. As professionals, it is our obligation to report serious misconduct, incompetence or incapacity of other lawyers, whether they are an entity of another law firm or belong to Wilson King LLP. We accept and uphold this responsibility. The Law Society has its own strict privacy obligations. Our reports might include personal information about our clients, or other individuals, to support the concern. We attempt to minimize any disclosures. We, like all other organizations, are subject to review by various government agencies e.g., Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, the Commissioner under the Personal Information Protection Act, Human Rights Commission, etc., who have the authority to review our files and interview our staff as a part of their mandates. Solicitor and client privilege restricts their access to much of this information.
• Sometimes third parties (such as insurance companies) who often have our client’s consent or have the legislative authority, pay us to collect for them and disclose to them information in order to demonstrate client entitlement to, and therefore responsible use of, this funding.
• Wilson King LLP is required by the Law Society to retain certain records concerning trust transaction information for a period of ten years. As well, the firm retains other information concerning clients for varying numbers of years, depending upon factors such as the contract with the particular client to keep records, the firm’s judgment of the likelihood of the need of the firm or the client to review file materials and the policies the firm adopts from time to time to provide it with defences to claims by clients. Clients often have questions about the service they had received or need specific information about a particular issue. The information retained most times is the only source for this information.
• If Wilson King LLP or its assets were to be sold, a purchaser may conduct a "due diligence" review of the firm's records to ensure that it is a viable business that has been honestly portrayed to the purchaser. This review may be a review of the firms records for which the potential purchaser would be required to provide a written agreement of confidentially. Only bona fide purchasers would be provided access to the firms records.

A client can choose not to be a part of these purposes by paying for services in advance, however there is little choice for the firm in being examined by external regulators.

Our policy to Protect Personal Information

We take the following steps to protect personal information.

• Users of our computer system must input passwords to get access to any information on the firm network. Users are instructed to log out of the network at day’s end and must log in, with an appropriate user name and password each morning.
• When paper is not under supervision, it is filed in filing cabinets which are organised in numerical order by series of file. Non current files are kept in locked storage sites to which access is restricted.
• Personal information on paper concerning staff is kept in a locked file cabinet when not under supervision.
• Personal information in electronic format concerning staff is only available by use of passwords issued to authorized personnel.
• Documents that are mailed are sent in sealed, addressed envelopes or boxes, or, if sent by courier, are sent in similar mode by reputable companies.
• Staff are trained to collect, use and disclose personal information only as necessary to fulfill their duties and in accordance with our privacy policy.
• External consultants and agencies with access to personal information must enter into privacy agreements with us.
• We prohibit the use of cell phones in our offices except in designated areas. Thus, we avoid the possibility of a camera cell phone capturing unauthorized images from our offices.

Our Policy for retaining and Destroying Personal Information

We retain our client files for a usual maximum of ten years. If you ask, we will remove personal contact information from the stored files right away insofar as we are permitted by the rules of the Law Society of British Columbia.

We destroy paper files containing personal information by shredding. We destroy electronic information by deleting it to the best of our ability.

You Can Look at Your Information

You have the right to see what personal information we hold about you except that which is protected by solicitor client privilege. A request is all that is required. We must confirm your identity. We can provide you assistance with understanding the information and the documents that contain the information. We reserve the right to charge a fee for doing so.

Should there be a problem in providing access we may ask you to put your request in writing and should there be a reason we cannot provide you access we will notify you within 30 days of the reason we cannot. Should the information to which you request access have been collected for another client it may be protected by solicitor and client privilege and you will not be given access to it without our client's consent.

If you believe there is a mistake in the information, You have the right to ask for personal information to be corrected if you believe it to be wrong. We may ask you to provide some documentation if we agree our information is flawed. Should there be a mistake we will correct the error and notify anyone to whom the information was sent. If we believe our information is correct we will still include a statement from you in our files and also send that statement to y anyone to whom the information was sent earlier.

Do You Have Questions?

Our Information Officer, Darrell Wade, can be reached at:

Darrell Wade
Wilson King LLP
Barristers & Solicitors
1000 – 299 Victoria Street
Prince George, BC V2L 5B8

Phone: (250) 960-3200
Fax: (250) 562-7777
Email: dvw@wilsonking.bc.ca

He will attempt to answer any questions or concerns you might have.

If you wish to make a formal complaint about our privacy practices, you may make it in writing to our Information Officer. He will acknowledge receipt of your complaint, ensure that it is investigated promptly and that you are provided with a formal decision and reasons in writing.

This policy is made under the Personal Information Protection Act. It is a complex Act and provides some additional exceptions to the privacy principles that are too detailed to set out here. There are some rare exceptions to the commitments set out above.