HTI Law Professional Corporation (HTI Law PC) understands the importance of privacy and the sensitivity of personal information. This Privacy Policy has been prepared to affirm our commitment to maintaining the privacy of our clients and site visitors and to inform you of our practices concerning the collection, use, and disclosure of Personal Information collected by HTI Law PC. 

Your Privacy Rights

From January 1, 2004, all organizations engaged in commercial activities must comply with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). These obligations extend to lawyers and law firms, including HTI Law PC. PIPEDA, which gives you rights concerning the privacy of your personal information. In addition, as lawyers of the Law Society of Ontario, we are also obligated by our Rules of Professional Conduct to maintain the confidentiality of client information. If you provide certain information by which you can be identified when using this website, you can rest assured that it will only be used in a lawful manner and in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

The purpose for Collection of Personal Information

As a Law Firm, HTI Law PC collects, uses, and discloses personal information to render our legal services/business operations, avoid conflict of interests, communicate with our clients or potential clients, and any other purpose to which you consent. If we do not collect and use your personal information, we cannot provide you with legal services.

What Personal Information Do We Collect?

Personal information is any information that identifies you, or by which your identity could be deduced. We collect and use your personal information in order to provide you with legal services. The information we collect and use, may include, but is not limited, to the following:

• Your contact information, such as your full name, address, billing address, phone number, e-mail address;
• Information needed to identify you and/or verify your identity;
• Information about your organization and its directors, officers, employees, clients etc.
• Information needed to provide you legal advice and services;
• Payment information, such as credit card information;
• Site usage and related site information such as details of visits to our websites or information collected through cookies and other tracking technologies; and
• Any other information provided to us.

Our firm restricts the collection of personal information only to that information that is necessary for the purposes it was given.

We are committed to collecting personal information in a fair, open and lawful manner. We collect only the information you give us voluntarily by sending us an email message, completing forms, or using the links contained on the website. Wherever possible, we collect your personal information directly from you at the start of a retainer and in the course of our representation. In most cases, we shall ask you to specifically consent if we collect, use or disclose your personal information. Sometimes, your consent may be implied through your conduct with us.

Your provision of Personal Information to HTI Law PC means that you agree and consent that we may collect, use and disclose your Personal Information in accordance with this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree with these terms, you are requested not to provide any Personal Information to HTI Law PC. Unfortunately, certain services can only be offered if you provide Personal Information to HTI Law PC. Consequently if you choose not to provide us with any required Personal Information, HTI Law PC may not be able to offer you those services.

Use of Your Information

By using our website and providing HTI Law PC with your Information, you consent to the collection, use, and disclosure of the Information as specified in this Privacy Policy. We use your personal information to provide legal services to you and to administer our client (time and billing) databases. We are obliged for legal purposes to retain our client files after the end of the retainer.

HTI Law PC does not disclose your personal information to any third party to enable them to market their products and services. For example, we do not provide our client mailing lists to other law firms.

Our firm stores and maintains personal information in conformity with the requirements of PIPEDA and the Law Society of Ontario’s Rules of Professional Conduct.

Disclosure of Your Personal Information

Under certain circumstances, HTI Law PC may disclose your personal information. For example, we may disclose your personal information:

• To comply with applicable laws and regulations (E.g., if a court issues a subpoena, search warrant, or another lawful request for information);
• when you have consented to the disclosure;
• when the legal or related services we are providing to you require us to give your information to third parties (for example, Professionals such as an Immigration officer of Immigration, Refugees, Citizenship Canada or Employment and Social Development Canada Officer) your consent will be implied, unless you tell us otherwise;
• when it is needed to establish or collect fees;
• where HTI Law PC believes, upon reasonable grounds, that it is necessary to protect the rights, privacy, safety or property of an identifiable person or group;
• if we engage a third party to provide administrative website services to us (like hosting, maintenance, computer backup services or archival file storage), and the information we provide to third parties is limited to what is reasonable and needed for them to perform their functions; or
• if the information is already publicly known, as it is defined under the PIPEDA. 

Retention

HTI Law PC keeps Personal Information only as long as it is required for the reasons it was collected. The length of time we retain information varies, depending on the product or service and the nature of the information. This period may extend beyond the end of a person’s relationship with us, but it will only be for so long as it is reasonably needed for us to fulfill relevant purposes set out in this Privacy policy, to respond to any issues that may arise at a later date, and in order to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations. When your Personal Information is no longer required for HTI Law PC’s purposes, we have procedures to destroy, delete, erase or convert it into an anonymous form.

Is My Personal Information Secure?

Our firm has developed and implemented security safeguards appropriate to the sensitivity of the personal information kept by us. We take all reasonable precautions to ensure that your personal information is kept safe from loss, unauthorized access, modification, or disclosure. Among the steps taken to protect your information are:

• premise security;
• restricted file access to personal information stored electronically;
• deploying technological safeguards like security software and firewalls to prevent hacking or unauthorized computer access;
• where personal information is sent to a third party for processing, we make sure, through our contracts with them, that personal information is kept secure; and
• we use internal passwords and security policies.

We ensure that any of our employees who deal with personal information are properly trained and are aware of the necessary and appropriate measures required to protect personal information.

Accuracy

Our firm is committed to maintaining accurate, complete and up-to-date personal information. If during the course of the retainer, any of your information changes, please inform us of the changes and we can update our records accordingly.

Communication with Us

You should be aware that email is not a 100% secure medium. In addition, mail, telephone calls, faxes and transmissions over the internet are all susceptible to possible loss, misrouting, interception and misuse of the information being communicated or transmitted. You should be aware of this when contacting us to send personal or confidential information.

Changes to This Privacy Policy

Please note we regularly review all of our policies and procedures and may change any part of them at any time.

Website

Our website, , contains links to other sites which are not governed by this Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy does not apply to any third party websites to which we may link or be linked to. If you proceed to access those websites, please note that HTI Law PC is not responsible, and each site has their own privacy policy that applies to any personal information you provide to them.  

On our website, like most other commercial websites, we may monitor traffic patterns, site usage and related site information in order to optimize our web service. We may provide aggregated information to third parties, but these statistics do not include any identifiable personal information.

Access to Your Personal Information

You may ask for access to any personal information we hold about you. Summary information is available upon request. More detailed requests which require archive or other retrieval costs may be subject to our normal professional and disbursement fees. If you have any additional questions or concerns about privacy, we invite you to contact us by email at info@htilaw.ca, or our websites, and we will address your concerns to the best of our ability.