PRIVACY POLICY

Rehman Chambers ("Rehman Chambers", "the Firm", "we", "us" or "our") is a firm of advocates and legal consultants based in Karachi, Pakistan. Confidentiality is not an add-on to what we do; it is the foundation of it. The same discipline we apply to a client's file, we apply to every piece of information that reaches us through this website, our inbox, our reception desk or our telephone line.

This Privacy Policy ("Policy") explains what personal information we collect, why we collect it, who we share it with, how long we keep it, how we protect it, and what you can ask us to do with it. It applies to www.rehmanchambers.com and any subdomain or page operated by us (together, the "Site"), and to personal information we collect when you contact us, request an appointment, subscribe to our updates, apply for a position, attend an event we host, or visit our offices.

Please read this Policy together with any engagement letter, retainer or terms of business agreed between us. Where our engagement terms for a matter say something different about how we handle your information, those terms prevail for that matter.

Sending us an enquiry, booking an appointment, subscribing to our publications or otherwise contacting us through the Site does not make you our client and does not create a lawyer-client relationship.

Before we have confirmed that we can act, information you send us is not protected by legal professional privilege and we may be unable to treat it as confidential - for example, if we already act for another party with an interest adverse to yours. Please do not send us details of a matter, or confidential, privileged or time-sensitive material, through the Site until we have replied. Send only what is necessary for us to identify the nature of your enquiry and run our conflict check. If the matter is a sensitive one, say so without the detail and we will arrange a secure route for the documents, as described below.

Once we have told you that there is no conflict and invited you to send us the papers, we treat everything you send as confidential from that moment whether or not we ultimately act. If we decide not to take the matter forward, we will tell you, and we will not use what you have shared for any purpose other than that enquiry.

The engagement itself begins when we accept your instructions on a matter. Where we issue an engagement letter or terms of business, that document records the engagement and governs it. Where we do not, our written confirmation that we will act or the invoice we raise for the work serves the same purpose. A signed engagement letter is not a precondition: once we have accepted instructions, our duties of confidentiality and privilege apply to that matter whether or not one has been issued.

Where we do act for a client, the information we hold about that client and their matter is governed by:–

Our professional obligations of confidentiality as advocates enrolled with the Bar, including the canons of professional conduct and etiquette applicable to legal practitioners in Pakistan;   

The law of legal professional privilege; and

Our engagement letter with the client.

Those obligations are stricter than this Policy. Nothing in this Policy should be read as permitting us to disclose privileged or confidential client information, and no request made by a third party will be used to obtain another person's protected information.

When you visit the Site, certain information is recorded by our servers and by the analytics and security tools we use:

• IP address and the approximate city or country derived from it;

• Device type, operating system, browser type and language, and screen resolution;

• Date, time and duration of your visit, pages viewed, the order in which you viewed them, and the page or search that referred you;

• Interactions such as clicks, scroll depth, downloads and form submissions;

• Error and security logs, including records of blocked or suspicious requests.

Section 08 explains the cookies and similar technologies that make this possible and how you can control them.

We also receive information about individuals from sources other than the individual, including:–   

• Clients and prospective clients who give us information about their employees, officers, counterparties, witnesses or opponents in the course of a matter;

• Referrers - other law firms, foreign counsel, associations and existing clients who introduce you to us;

• Courts, tribunals, arbitral institutions, the Intellectual Property Organisation of Pakistan, the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan, registries and other public bodies;

• Publicly available and commercial sources - company registers, trade mark and patent databases, published judgments, news reports, sanctions and litigation screening tools, and professional networking profiles;

• Our service providers, such as our website host, email provider, analytics provider and recruitment platforms;

• referees you nominate in a job application.

Some legal work necessarily involves information of a sensitive nature - for example, medical records in a personal injury or employment claim, or information about allegations made against a person. We collect information of this kind only where it is necessary for a matter we have been instructed on, where it has been provided to us for that purpose, or where the law requires or permits it, and we apply heightened access restrictions to it. We do not ask for sensitive information through the Site, and you should not volunteer it in an enquiry form.

We use personal information only for purposes that are compatible with the reason it was collected:

To respond and advise

• To identify you, run conflict-of-interest and identity checks, and decide whether we can act.

• To answer enquiries, arrange and hold appointments, and correspond with you.

• To provide legal advice and representation, prepare documents, and act before courts, tribunals, arbitrators and regulators.

To run the Firm

• To issue invoices, collect fees, maintain accounts, and manage our client and matter records.

• To manage suppliers, agents, foreign counsel and other professionals we instruct on your behalf.

• To operate, secure, maintain and improve our information systems.

To keep you informed

• To send legal updates, client alerts, case notes and event invitations to people who have asked for them or who have an existing professional relationship with us. You can opt out at any time by writing to privacy@rehmanchambers.com.

To improve the Site

• To measure how the Site is used, understand which content is valuable, diagnose faults, and strengthen its security and performance.

To recruit

• To assess applications, verify credentials and references, arrange interviews, and keep in touch with candidates we would like to consider for future openings.

To meet legal and professional obligations

• To comply with statute, court orders, regulatory or Bar Council requirements and tax law.

• To establish, exercise or defend legal claims, including claims involving the Firm.

• To detect and prevent fraud, unauthorised access and misuse of the Site.

We rely on your consent for optional activities such as marketing emails and non-essential cookies, and you may withdraw that consent at any time. Everything else is done because it is necessary to perform our engagement with you, to comply with a legal or professional obligation, to protect vital interests, or in pursuit of the Firm's legitimate interests in operating a professional practice - balanced against your interests and rights.

We do not sell personal information. We do not rent, trade or otherwise make personal information available to third parties for their own marketing. We do not use automated decision-making or profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects on you.

We share information only where there is a proper reason to do so, and only to the extent needed:

Two things take information outside Pakistan. First, the everyday services we use to run the Firm - email, cloud document storage, website hosting and analytics - are operated by established international providers who store information on servers abroad. Second, a matter with an international element may require us to send information to foreign counsel, local agents, registries, courts or arbitral institutions in another country.

Where information leaves Pakistan, we disclose it only to those engaged to carry out the work, and only so much of it as that work requires. Foreign counsel and agents we instruct are professionals bound by duties of confidentiality of their own, and we instruct them on the same confidential footing on which we hold the information ourselves. We do not transfer client information abroad for any purpose unconnected with the matter, and we do not authorise any service provider to use information passing through its systems for its own purposes.

If you access the Site from outside Pakistan, please be aware that your information will be handled in Pakistan, where data protection law differs from that of your own country.

A cookie is a small text file placed on your device when you visit a website. We use cookies and comparable technologies for four purposes:

• Strictly necessary - to make pages load, keep the Site secure, manage server load and remember your cookie choices. These cannot be switched off through the Site.

• Functional - to remember preferences such as language or a form you have partly completed.

• Analytics - to count visits, see which pages and publications are read, and understand how visitors move through the Site. We use Google Analytics for this purpose; the information it produces is used in aggregate to improve the Site.

• Media - YouTube sets cookies when a video embedded on the Site is played, and LinkedIn may set cookies when you use a LinkedIn share or follow button.

Your choices - Most browsers accept cookies by default and let you review, block or delete them through their settings; the "Help" menu of your browser will explain how. You can also opt out of Google Analytics across all websites by installing Google's browser add-on at tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. Blocking cookies will not stop you reading the Site, but some features may not work as intended. Where your browser sends a Global Privacy Control or similar opt-out signal, we honour it as a request to disable non-essential cookies.

We do not run behavioural advertising on the Site and do not permit third parties to use it to build advertising profiles.

We maintain a presence on LinkedIn and YouTube, and content from those platforms may appear on the Site.

• Anything you post publicly on our LinkedIn page or YouTube channel is public. It is not confidential, it does not create a lawyer–client relationship, and we may quote or re-share it. Please do not describe your legal problem in a public comment or message us confidential material through a social platform.

• When you view an embedded YouTube video or click through to a LinkedIn post, that platform collects information about you under its own terms, not ours. Your use of YouTube is governed by the YouTube Terms of Service and the Google Privacy Policy; your use of LinkedIn is governed by the LinkedIn User Agreement and LinkedIn Privacy Policy.

• We encourage you to read them. We receive only aggregate audience statistics from these platforms; we do not obtain a list of who has watched or followed us.

Where a retention period applies, we securely destroy or irreversibly anonymise the information at the end of it, unless it must be kept longer because of a live or anticipated dispute, a court order or a legal or professional obligation.

A client may at any time ask us to return their file or to destroy it, and we will do so unless we are required to retain it - for example by a court order, a statutory obligation, or an unresolved question over fees or a claim. Retaining a file indefinitely does not mean we use it: closed files are held under the same access restrictions as live ones and are not used for marketing or any purpose outside the matter and our professional obligations.

We maintain physical, technical and organisational safeguards proportionate to the sensitivity of the information we hold. These include encrypted transmission of the Site over HTTPS, access controls that restrict matter files to the lawyers and staff working on them, password and multi-factor authentication requirements, secured premises and locked storage for hard-copy files, routine backups, vetting of and contractual confidentiality undertakings from our service providers, and written confidentiality undertakings from everyone who works with us.

No method of transmitting or storing information is completely secure, and email in particular travels over networks we do not control. We cannot guarantee the security of information you send us before it reaches us.

For anything sensitive, please tell us before you send it. Let us know that you have sensitive material to share without setting out the detail and we will send you instructions on how you can transmit the material to us safely and directly. Please wait for the instructions before sending any sensitive documents.

If we become aware of a security incident affecting your personal information, we will investigate it promptly and notify you and any relevant authority where the law or our professional obligations require, and in any event where the incident is likely to cause you significant harm.

Subject to our professional obligations, the rights of others and any legal restriction, you may ask us to:

• tell you what personal information we hold about you and why;

• give you a copy of that information;

• correct information that is inaccurate or incomplete;

• delete information we no longer have a proper reason to keep;

• stop or limit a particular use, including any use based on our legitimate interests;

• stop sending you marketing, at any time and without giving a reason;

• withdraw a consent you previously gave, without affecting anything done before you withdrew it.

How to make a request - Write to us at privacy@rehmanchambers.com, or by post or telephone using the details in Section 15. Please tell us what you are asking for and enough about yourself for us to locate your records. We may ask you for proof of identity, and for written authority if you are acting for someone else. We will acknowledge your request promptly and respond within thirty (30) days; if a request is complex we will tell you within that period how much longer we need and why. We do not charge for a first request, though we may charge a reasonable fee for additional copies of the same information.

When we may decline - We may be unable to comply, in whole or in part, where doing so would disclose another client's privileged or confidential information, prejudice a live matter or investigation, breach a court order or our professional obligations, or where we are required by law to retain the information. If we decline, we will tell you why unless we are prohibited from doing so.

Visitors from the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom. We are established in Pakistan and are not generally subject to the EU or UK General Data Protection Regulation. Nonetheless, where we handle the information of individuals in the EEA or the UK, we apply the standards set out in this Policy - including the rights above, which are drawn from those regimes - as a matter of practice, and we will engage with any request you make on that basis. Where the GDPR does apply to a particular activity, you additionally retain the right to lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority and the right to data portability in a machine-readable format.

The Site is intended for use by adults and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from children through the Site. Where a matter concerns a child - for example, in family, guardianship or succession work - we handle that information under the instructions of the parent, guardian or the court, and with the additional care such matters require. If you believe a child has given us information through the Site, please write to privacy@rehmanchambers.com and we will delete it.

The Site links to material we do not control, including legislation and the LinkedIn and YouTube platforms. We provide those links for convenience. We are not responsible for the content, security or privacy practices of any website we do not operate, and this Policy does not apply once you leave the Site. Please read the privacy policy of any site you visit.

Questions, requests and complaints about this Policy or about how we handle personal information should be directed to our Privacy Contact:

Email: privacy@rehmanchambers.com

Telephone: +92-21-3888-8477

Post: Rehman Chambers, Floor 2, 123-C, Commercial Area B, Phase II, DHA, Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan.

We take complaints seriously and will investigate any concern you raise. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may also raise the matter with the Sindh Bar Council or, where applicable, with any competent authority or supervisory body having jurisdiction over the matter.

Pakistan does not yet have a consolidated data protection statute. The draft Personal Data Protection Bill has been through public consultation but has not been enacted, and no national data protection authority is presently constituted. In the meantime, our handling of personal information is governed by the right to privacy under Article 14 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, 1973, the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2016 (as amended), the Electronic Transactions Ordinance, 2002, our duties of confidentiality as legal practitioners, and the contractual terms of our engagements. Beyond what those require, we have chosen to align our practices with the internationally recognised principles reflected in this Policy. We will revise this Policy once a national data protection law comes into force.

This Policy, and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with it, is governed by the laws of Pakistan. The courts at Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan have exclusive jurisdiction, without prejudice to any dispute-resolution provision agreed in an engagement letter.

We review this Policy periodically and will update it when our practices, our technology or the law changes. The version in force is the one published on this page, and the "Effective date" at the top tells you when it took effect. Where a change materially affects how we use information you have already given us, we will bring it to your attention - by a notice on the Site or, where appropriate, by writing to you directly. Continuing to use the Site after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Policy.

This Policy describes the Firm's own information-handling practices and should be read together with the disclaimer and legal notices.

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