Cooper Grace Ward Lawyers is committed to protecting the privacy of your personal information. You can access our full privacy policy here.

Cooper Grace Ward is a full service commercial law firm, that provides legal advice in numerous areas such as commercial, insurance, construction and infrastructure, workplace relations and safety, estate planning, family law, insolvency, restructuring and debt recovery, litigation and dispute resolution and property, planning and environment.

The primary purpose for which we collect personal information from you is to provide you with legal and other services. We may also use or disclose the personal information for another purpose, such as to accept a whistleblower disclosure from you,  to inform you of updates and changes in the law that may affect you or your associated entities, and to invite you to events that may interest you. You may choose not to receive such communications at any time.

Our usual process of collecting personal information varies, as we have a large referral network and it is not possible to provide an exhaustive list of entities that might provide us with personal information. Generally, we collect personal information directly from you or from your advisers or consultants. For example, this might include collecting personal information about you from your accountant or financial advisers, banks and financial institutions, insurance companies, barristers and other solicitors, paid search providers, your employer, superannuation provider, government body or other professional adviser or agent connected to you.

The information is usually collected before and during the course of providing the legal services to you.

Under our professional obligations, we are also required to issue you with an engagement agreement for some matters (see Part 3.4 of the Legal Profession Act 2007 (Qld)). For this reason we will need to collect your contact details before providing the legal services.

If you do not provide us with the requested information, we may not be able to provide you with our legal services. In some cases it may be possible to provide some but not other personal information to us, and you can ask us if this is possible before providing us with your instructions or disclosure.

We do not usually disclose your personal information to other entities, unless it is necessary to provide you with the legal services or you have requested or authorised us to disclose the information to another entity. For example, we may disclose your personal information to your accountant or financial adviser, a barrister or expert witness who is engaged to act for you in litigation, or government body, to CGW Structures (our affiliated entity), to any third party contractors we engage to assist us in providing services to you, or any other entity connected to the legal services we are providing you.

We generally do not disclose your personal information to overseas recipients otherwise than in accordance with your instructions (e.g. if we have to deal with foreign law firms or counter parties for your matter). However, in some cases we may indirectly disclose personal information overseas through our service providers. For example, we disclose personal information with Hubspot, which has data centres located in the United States. Where we disclose your personal information to parties located overseas (or which have data centres located in other countries), we take reasonable steps to ensure that those parties will handle the personal information in accordance with the Australian Privacy Principles. We are not required to take such steps if we believe that the overseas recipient is already subject to a law that has the effect of protecting personal information in a substantially similar way to the relevant law in Australia, or with your consent.

Our detailed privacy policy includes further information on how you can access and seek correction of your personal information, how we handle data breaches and how you can complain about a breach of your privacy. The policy also contains information about how we will deal with a complaint.

If you have any concerns about the privacy of your personal information, please consult our full privacy policy or contact our Privacy Officer on +61 7 3231 2444 or by email at [email protected].