GDPR Guide For UK Law Firm | Intellistart Law Firm Marketing

What Is GDPR?

The UK GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation are some of the strictest data protection laws in the world.

Introduced in 2018, GDPR governs how all personal data is collected and processed within the European Union and the UK. 

The UK GDPR replaced the numerous data protection legislations including the historic Data Protect Act. Now including guidelines on the way digital data is collected and stored.

How Does GDPR Protect Individuals?

The UK GDPR gives individuals more rights over how their data is used and sits at the heart of the data reforms that took place.

It provides the following rights for individuals:

1. The right to be informed.
2. The right of access.
3. The right to rectification.
4. The right to erasure.
5. The right to restrict processing.
6. The right to data portability.
7. The right to object.
8. Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling.

How does GDPR affect Law Firms?

Breach of GDPR can result in significant penalties.

The ICO is able to enforce fines with an upper limit of £17.6m or 4% of annual global turnover, whichever is the higher.

So, it is definitely worth investing time in checking compliancy. 

There are numerous Data Protection principles that a business must adhere to, with the main ones being:

• Lawfulness, fairness and transparency — Processing must be lawful, fair, and transparent to the data subject.
• Purpose limitation — You must process data for the legitimate purposes specified explicitly to the data subject when you collected it.
• Data minimisation — You should collect and process only as much data as absolutely necessary for the purposes specified.
• Accuracy — You must keep personal data accurate and up to date.
• Storage limitation — You may only store personally identifying data for as long as necessary for the specified purpose.
• Integrity and confidentiality — Processing must be done in such a way as to ensure appropriate security, integrity, and confidentiality.
• Accountability — The data controller is responsible for being able to demonstrate GDPR compliance with all of these principles.

How Do I Become UK GDPR Compliant?

The process for making your law firm website UK GDPR compliant will depend on what type of personal data you are collecting from your visitors. 

If you have no tracking cookies, data collection forms, online accounts or collect email addresses, your firm may not need to do anything. However, this is rare.

The best way to ensure your law firm is UK GDPR compliant is to review the information on the ICO – Information Commissioners Office website to inform your decision on next steps.

For your FREE Intellistart Audit, call 0161 877 4888 or email: info@intellistart.co.uk