Your Privacy Rights
From January 1, 2004, all businesses engaged in commercial activities must comply with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, and the Canadian Standards Association Model Code for the Protection of Personal Information, which it incorporates. These obligations extend to paralegals and paralegal firms, including MTE. The Act gives you rights concerning the privacy of your personal information.

MTE is responsible for the personal information we collect and hold. To ensure this accountability, we have developed this policy, and trained our staff about our policies and practices.

Why Does MTE Need Personal Information?
MTE provides legal services and products to a wide range of clients. In doing so, it produces direct marketing materials concerning its services and developments in the law.

What personal information do we collect?
Personal information is any information that identifies you, or by which your identity could be deduced.

How do we collect your personal information?
We collect information only by lawful and fair means, and not in an unreasonably intrusive way. Wherever possible we collect your personal information directly from you in the course of our representation. Sometimes we may obtain information about you from other sources, for example; your employer, the Assessment Review Board or other Agency files and documents or from a government agency or registry.

Consent
In most cases, we shall ask you to specifically consent, if we collect, use, or disclose your personal information. Normally, we ask for your consent in writing, but in some circumstances, we may accept your oral consent. Sometimes, your consent may be implied through your conduct with us.

Use of Your Information
We use your personal information to provide legal advice and services to you, to administer our client (time and billing databases) and to include you in any direct marketing activities. If you tell us that you no longer wish to receive information about our services, or about new developments in the law, we will not send any further material.

MTE does not disclose your personal information to any third party to enable them to market their products and services. For example, we do not provide our client mailing lists to other law firms.

• when we are required or authorized by law to do so, for example if a court issues a subpoena;
• when you have consented to the disclosure;
• when the legal services we are providing to you requires us give your information to third parties your consent will be implied, unless you tell us otherwise;
• where it is necessary to establish or collect fees;
• if we engage a third party to provide administrative services to us (like computer back-up services or archival file storage) and the third party is bound by our privacy policy;
• if we engage expert witnesses on your behalf;
• if we retain other paralegal or law firms at your request, and on your behalf;
• if the information is Publicly Available Personal Information, as it is defined under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.

Updating Your Information
Since we use your personal information to provide legal services to you, it is important that the information be accurate and up-to-date.

If any of your information changes, please inform us as soon as possible so that we can make any necessary changes.

• premises security;
• restricted file access to personal information;
• deploying technological safeguards like security software and firewalls to prevent hacking or unauthorized computer access;
• internal password and security policies

Access to Your Personal Information
You may ask for access to any personal information we hold about you.

Summary information is available on request. More detailed requests which require archive or other retrieval costs may be subject to our normal professional and disbursement fees.

• it is required or authorized by law (for example, when a record containing personal information about you is protected by solicitor-client privilege);
• to do so would reveal confidential commercial information, and the personal information cannot be severed from the record;
• to do so could reasonably be expected to threaten the life or security of another individual, and the personal information cannot be severed from the record; or
• the information was generated in the course of a formal dispute resolution process.

Communicating with Us
You should be aware that e-mail is not a 100% secure medium, and you should be aware of this when contacting us to send personal or confidential information.

Changes to this Privacy Policy
Since MTE regularly reviews all of its policies and procedures, we may change our Privacy Policy from time to time.

Requests for Access
If you have any questions, or wish to access your personal information, please write to our Privacy Contact at gregp@mte.ca. If you are not satisfied with our response, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada can be reached at 112 Kent Street, Ottawa Ontario, K1A 1H3.

Employment Inquiries
If you apply for a career with MTE, we need to consider your personal information, as part of our review process. We normally retain information from candidates after a decision has been made, unless you ask us not to retain the information. If we offer you a job, which you accept, the information will be retained in accordance with our privacy procedures for employee records.

Web Site
Our website contains links to other sites, which are not governed by this privacy policy.

On our website, like most other commercial websites, we may monitor traffic patterns, site usage and related site information in order to optimize our web service. We may provide aggregated information to third parties, but these statistics do not include any identifiable personal information.