Terms & Conditions | Sloan Solicitors

General Terms & Conditions

Communication

Sloan Solicitors is the trading name of Peter AC Sloan.

The offices of Sloan Solicitors are located at 2 The Courtyard, Denmark Street, Wokingham, Berkshire RG40 2AZ.

Telephone: 0118 930 5030 | Fax: 0118 908 0685

Normal hours of business are between 9.30am and 5.00pm, Monday to Friday. Telephone and email enquiries will be dealt with between these hours.

Home visits and appointments outside of those hours can be arranged to suit individual client’s needs upon request.

All visits to the office are via appointment only until further notice as part of our Covid-19 health & Safety policy.

Peter AC Sloan Solicitors are Authorised and Regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the regulatory body of the Law Society of England and Wales. SRA Number 439908.

Professional Indemnity

In the interests of our clients, Peter AC Sloan Solicitors maintains professional indemnity insurance in accordance with the requirements of Provision of Service Regulations 2009, and compliant with the Solicitors Regulation Authority terms and conditions of business for offices based in England & Wales.

Our indemnity insurance territorial coverage is worldwide.

Our insurance policy is available for inspection upon request.

Data Protection Act

We are registered under the Data Protection Act 1998 and authorised to collect and store personal data.

In instructing us you should be aware that personal data relating to you and your matter is being collected and held electronically and in paper records and files. The only use that will be made of that personal data is in fulfilling our professional retainer for you and for marketing purposes (unless you indicate to the contrary that you do not wish to receive any marketing information or literature from us.)

We take reasonable measures to secure access, storage and transmission of any data collected and stored by us.

Storage of Papers & Deeds

After completing the sale, we are entitled to keep all your papers and documents while money is owing to us.

We will keep our file of papers (except for any of your papers which you ask to be returned to you) for no more than 12 years and on the understanding that we have your authority to destroy the file 12 years after sending you the final bill. We will not destroy documents you ask us to deposit in safe custody.

We do not normally charge for retrieving stored papers or deeds in response to continuing instructions to act for you. However, we reserve the right to make a charge based on the time we spend reading papers, writing letters or other work necessary to comply with the instructions.

Money Laundering

In common with most other firms of Solicitors, and many other types of business besides, we are obliged by the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 and the Money Laundering Regulations 2007, to disclose to the authorities any activity which we suspect may involve money laundering, and indeed, we are subject to very severe penalties should we fail to do so.

By confirming your instructions you authorise us to make any such disclosure as we, in the reasonable exercise of our discretion think fit, and without reference to you or any other person (and whether before or after any such disclosure is made) and without incurring any liability for any loss or damage occasioned by such disclosure and whether suffered by you or some other person or party.

VAT

We are registered for VAT and therefore all fees and appropriate expenses will have VAT added at the current rate for the time being in force.

VAT Number 923922619.

Complaints

Peter AC Sloan Solicitors are committed to providing a high quality legal service and client care to all of our clients. If you are dissatisfied with any of the aspects of the service that you receive, including our firms bill please do contact Angus Sloan either by telephone:- 0118 930 5030, email angus@peteracsloan.co.uk or by post 2 The Courtyard, Denmark Street, Wokingham, Berkshire, RG40 2AZ as soon as possible. This will help us to maintain and improve our standards and hopefully resolve any concerns that you may have.

You will you be required to provide him with the details and nature of your concern. Upon receipt of your letter he will take the following steps:

1. Angus Sloan will deal with your complaint in the first instance, and will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint. You should expect to receive his letter within 2 working days of him receiving your complaint. In his letter of acknowledgement he will confirm how we shall deal with your complaint

2. Angus Sloan will record the fact that you have made a complaint, and will do this within working 1 day of receiving your complaint. The Matter will then be passed to Peter Sloan, the practice Principal.

3. Peter Sloan will then start to investigate your complaint. This may involve one or more of the following steps:

If you agree, he will review your complaint. He will carry out this review within 10 working days of acknowledging your original letter of complaint.
Alternatively, if you prefer, he will ask another independent solicitor to investigate your complaint and report to him directly. He will do this within working 3 days of you agreeing to this step.

4. In the event that Peter Sloan reviews your complaint, he will send to you a detailed reply within 7 days of carrying out the review. Alternatively, within 7 days of him carrying out a review, he may invite you to a meeting in order to discuss the matter.

5. If it is your preference that he asks an independent solicitor to look at your complaint then he shall invite you, within 3 days of receiving that solicitor’s report, to attend a meeting to discuss their findings.

6. Within 2 working days of any meeting, we will write to you to confirm what took place and any solutions we have agreed with you.

7. Any written reply that we may send to you will be a detailed response to your complaint. This will include my suggestions for resolving the matter.

8. At this stage, if you are still not satisfied, you can write to us again. We will then arrange to review the decision or solution. This may happen in one of the following ways:

We will review any decision in the light of any further comments that you may have made and shall do this within 5 working days of receiving your further comments.
We will arrange for someone who is not connected with the complaint to review our decision. We will do this within working 10 days of receiving your further comments.
We will ask a member of the Sole Practitioner Group, the local Law Society or another solicitor to review your complaint within 10 working days of receiving your further comments. We will advise you at the time of how long this process will take.

9. We will let you know the result of the review within 5 working days of the end of the review. At this time we will write to you confirming our final position on your complaint and explaining any reasons.

If you are not satisfied with the way in which your complaint has been managed you can ask the Legal Ombudsman to consider your complaint. The Legal Ombudsman’s’ contact details are detailed below:

Tel no: 0300 555 0333

Email: enquiries@legalombudsman.org.uk

Website: www.legalombudsman.org.uk

Legal Ombudsman

PO Box 6806

Wolverhampton

WV1 9WJ

Unless it agrees there are good reasons not to do so, the Legal Ombudsman will expect you in the first instance to allow us to consider and respond to your complaint in accordance with the procedure set out above. You can refer your complaint to the Legal Ombudsman up to 6 months after you have received our final written response to your complaint (or within 6 months after you have discovered a problem, whichever is later).

You can also refer your complaint to the Legal Ombudsman if we have not resolved your complaint within 8 weeks after we received it. The Legal Ombudsman deals with service related complaints only; it will refer any conduct-related complaints it receives to the relevant governing body.

Website Cookies Policy

Cookies

Peter AC Sloan (trading as Sloan Solicitors) uses cookies on its web site. By using our web site you agree to our Cookie Policy.

Cookies are small files located in your browser history. The information is sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the website.

There are two main kinds of cookies: session cookies and persistent cookies. Session cookies are deleted from your computer when you close your browser, whereas persistent cookies remain stored on your computer until deleted, or until they reach their expiry date.

Cookies are extremely common and used widely. Cookies allow website operators to track traffic on its site and to improve the performance of the website and the user experience. Cookies will not identify you personally.

We use cookies on this website for the following:

To review website traffic
To improve the functionality of the website

When you use this website, you may also be sent the following third party cookies, which may be used for the following purposes:

Google analytics – this helps us to see how our web site is being used.
Social media cookies which would allow you to log into Facebook or Twitter.

You can choose to accept or decline cookies and most browsers allow you to refuse to accept third party or all cookies. However, please note that by rejecting all cookies you may be prevented from taking full advantage of this web site.

If you have any questions about this cookie policy or Peter AC Sloan’s treatment of your personal information, please contact us:

by email to enquiries@peteracsloan.co.uk
by post to Peter AC Sloan, 2 The Courtyard, Denmark Street, Wokingham, Berkshire, RG40 2AZ

Privacy Policy

Introduction

We are committed to protecting your online privacy and working within the guidelines set out in the Data Protection Act and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Our privacy statement aims to disclose what information is being logged by web users, how this information is used and how this information can be removed/amended.

This Privacy Statement covers the collection and use of data on this website only. This Statement does not apply to any of the websites, which may be linked from this website.

Via this website, we collect data about individuals within a business context. We only collect basic personal data about you, e.g. name, address, email, phone number, etc. as well as some information about your potential property purchase. Information is collected about you when you request us to contact you, request a quotation or complete a form to download information. We treat all data which identifies an individual as Personal Data. Peter AC Sloan (trading as Sloan Solicitors) acts as the ‘Controller’ of the personal data you provide to us, this means we control what happens to the data in our possession. We need to know your basic personal data to provide you with a response to your request for information or to deliver our services. We will not collect any personal data from you if we do not need to provide or oversee this service to you. We also collect information when you voluntarily complete customer surveys or provide feedback. Website usage is collected using cookies.

We have a Data Protection regime in place to oversee the effective and secure processing of your personal data.

Data collection, usage & storage

The data we collect will be used to provide our products and services, in addition to invoicing and communicating with you with regards to other services you may be interested in.

We use a third-party digital marketing agency, who can act as a data processor. They cannot do anything with your personal data unless we have instructed them to do so. They will not share your personal information with any organisation apart from us. They will not store this data, they can only access the web or cloud-based systems where data is stored.

All the personal data we hold is processed using internal or cloud-based services.

The data collected will only be used to send the client information relevant to the original enquiry and the client will be able to unsubscribe at any time by contacting the DPO. Unsubscribes will be recorded to be kept as a permanent suppression list.

You have the right to request a copy of the information that we hold about you. If you would like a copy of some or all your personal information, please email or write to us at 2 The Courtyard, Denmark Street, Wokingham, Berkshire, RG40 2AZ. We want to make sure that your personal information is accurate and up to date. You may ask us to correct or remove information you think is inaccurate.

When you visit the website, we collect web statistics concerning your visit, which are stored in a log file. Log files allow us to record visitors’ use of the site. The web teams use Google Analytics to record visitors’ use of the site and use this information to make changes to the layout of the website and to the information in it. Log files are not used to identify any individual patterns of use on the site.

This statement only covers websites maintained by us and does not cover other websites linked from our site. Our website contains links to other websites. This privacy policy only applies to this website so when you link to other websites you should read their own privacy policies.

Marketing

If consent has been given, we may also send you marketing emails or contact you with details of other products or services we think may be of interest to you. Following consent to receive marketing communications, you may opt out later. You have a right at any time to stop us from contacting you for marketing purposes. If you no longer wish to be contacted for marketing purposes, please email enquiries@peteracsloan.co.uk

Updates

We reserve the right to modify this privacy policy at any time, so please review it frequently. Changes and clarifications will take effect immediately upon their posting on the website. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here that it has been updated, so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we use and/or disclose it.

Your rights

If at any point you believe the information we process on you is incorrect, you can request to see this information and have it corrected or deleted. If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact our Data Protection Officer who will investigate the matter. If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are processing your personal data not in accordance with the law, you can get in touch with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) here.