Privacy Notice

Legal Internationals is a legal-industry publication: law-firm rankings, a directory of law firms and their lawyers, and legal news. It is published from the Republic of Korea. The website and its database are hosted on Amazon Web Services in Hong Kong; email to the publication is received by Amazon Web Services in Singapore.

We decide why and how the personal data described here is used, and we are responsible for it (the “controller” or “personal information handler”). For any question or request about personal data, write to inquiry@legalinternationals.com with “Privacy” in the subject line.

What we publish. For each lawyer: the name as the firm publishes it (and a local-script form where the firm gives one), the firm, the title or position, practice areas, the year of admission where the firm states it, a link to the lawyer’s profile page on the firm’s own website, and the rankings or recognitions that legal directories publish openly about the lawyer, each with a link to its source. Firm news posts that name a lawyer may be listed on the firm’s page.

What we do not publish. No personal email address, no direct or mobile telephone number, no home address, no portrait of an individual lawyer, no date of birth, and nothing about health, religion, politics or other sensitive matters. A firm’s general office address, switchboard and general enquiry email are shown on the firm’s page because the firm publishes them as its business contact; an individual’s own email or direct line is not, even where a firm’s site prints it. A firm’s page may show a picture of the firm’s own homepage as any visitor sees it; it is removed on request.

Where it comes from. From each firm’s own public website, read by our identified crawler (LegalInternationalsBot), which reads robots.txt and obeys it; and from the ranking pages that directories such as Chambers and Partners and The Legal 500 publish openly. We do not buy lists and we do not publish anything a firm has not itself made public. Records link to the page they were read from.

Why. To help clients, in-house counsel and other lawyers find and compare legal advisers, and to report on the legal market. The information is the professional information a firm publishes so that its lawyers can be found; we use it for that same purpose.

Legal basis. Where the EU or UK General Data Protection Regulation applies, our legitimate interest, and the public’s, in an accurate and sourced directory of legal professionals (Article 6(1)(f)), limited to professional information the lawyer’s firm has already made public, and balanced by the right to object and have the entry removed at any time. Under Korea’s Personal Information Protection Act and the comparable laws of other jurisdictions, we rely on the information having been made public by the firm for professional purposes and process it only within that purpose. This notice is published so that people listed in the directory, whom we cannot practically contact one by one, can learn what we hold.

Your choices. Any lawyer may ask us to correct an entry or remove it. A removal takes the person out of the directory, the find-a-lawyer search and the firm’s page, and keeps them out when the firm’s site is read again. See Corrections and removals.

How long. An entry is kept while the firm’s own site lists the person, and firms’ sites are read again regularly to keep entries current. A lawyer who has moved firm or retired can ask us to remove the old entry at once. Removal requests are kept for as long as the removal must be enforced, holding only the name, the firm and the date.

Visits. We count visits ourselves, without cookies and without any third-party analytics or advertising service. For each page view the site records the page, the referring website (its name only), the campaign tag in the link if there is one, the country (from the network address, which is then discarded), the kind of device, and, for clicks on links that leave the site, the website the link went to (for an email link, only its domain). To tell one visitor from another within a single day, the site keeps a one-way code made from the network address, the browser’s identification and a random value that changes every day; the random value is deleted after a day, after which the code cannot be traced back to anyone. No IP address is stored with these records. If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, nothing is recorded at all.

Cookies and browser storage. The site sets no cookies for readers. If you choose a language, the choice is kept in your own browser (local storage) so the next page opens in it; it is never sent to us. The back office used by the editors sets a sign-in cookie for them only.

Server records. Like any web server, ours keeps a short technical log of requests (including the network address) for security and to fix faults. It is kept for a short period and is not used to identify or profile readers.

Third parties. The site’s fonts and pictures are served from our own server, except small country-flag images, which are loaded from flagcdn.com; that service therefore receives your network address when a page shows a flag, as any image host does. Links to firms, publishers and news outlets take you to their sites, which have their own privacy policies.

Newsletter and subscriptions. If you sign up, we keep your email address and, if you give them, your name, organisation and the plan you chose, to write to you about the publication and, for firms, about the subscription. We send newsletters only to people who signed up; every newsletter carries a way to unsubscribe, and you can also unsubscribe or ask for deletion by writing to inquiry@legalinternationals.com. We do not sell or rent the list. A subscriber’s details are kept until they unsubscribe or ask us to delete them.

Email to us. Messages sent to any address at legalinternationals.com are received by Amazon Web Services in Singapore, stored there, and forwarded to the editors who answer them. We use them only to deal with what you wrote about, and delete them when they are no longer needed for that or for our records of a correction, removal or complaint.

The site and its database run in Hong Kong; email is received and stored in Singapore; the publication is edited from the Republic of Korea, so the editors read the data from there. Our service providers are Amazon Web Services (hosting, database, email) and the email services of the editors who receive forwarded mail. They act on our instructions. We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with advertisers. Subscription firms never see who else subscribes, and the people who place firms in rankings cannot see who subscribes.

The directory itself is public: anyone, anywhere, can read it, as they can read the firms’ own sites it comes from.

Depending on where you are, you may have the right to know what we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to object to or restrict its use, to withdraw consent you gave (for example to the newsletter), and to receive a copy. Write to inquiry@legalinternationals.com; we answer within 10 days. We may ask you to confirm who you are, for example by writing from your firm email address, so that nobody can have someone else’s entry changed.

If you are not satisfied with our answer you may complain to a data protection authority: in Korea the Personal Information Protection Commission; in Hong Kong the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data; in the United Kingdom the Information Commissioner’s Office; in the European Union the authority of your country; or the authority where you live.

The site is written for legal professionals and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect data from children.

When this notice changes, the date at the top changes with it. A change in what we collect or why will be stated here before it takes effect.

See also the Terms of use, Corrections and removals and the Methodology.