Privacy notice

MyLocalSolicitors.co.uk is a trading name of Property Architecture Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 17536132, registered office 90 Hendon Lane, London N3 3SL. Property Architecture Ltd runs mylocalsolicitors.co.uk and is the controller of the personal data described here, which means it decides how it is used. Email us at [email protected].

This notice covers visitors, people who send enquiries or write reviews, and firms that claim a listing.

When you send an enquiry from a firm’s profile we collect what you type into the form:

• your name, email address and message;
• your phone number and the service you are asking about, if you give them.

We save the enquiry in our database and email it to the one firm you chose, at the email address on its listing. It is not sent to any other firm and we do not sell it. We email you a copy. We also email a copy to us at [email protected], which we use to check that enquiries are delivered and to deal with misuse and complaints. Once a firm has your enquiry it holds that data under its own privacy notice.

Enquiries that do not lead to work are kept for up to 24 months. We then delete them. Deletion is done by hand, not automatically, so an enquiry can stay a little longer than 24 months before we get to it.

The form on our articles and guides collects the area of law you choose, your postcode or town, your name, email address, phone number if you give one, and your message. We save it in our database and email it to us at [email protected]so that we can reply to you. It is not sent to any firm, and we will not pass it on without asking you first. We normally email you a short confirmation. A salted hash of your IP address is kept with it to limit repeated or automated requests. These requests are kept and deleted on the same 24-month basis as enquiries.

To write a review you sign in, and we store your account email address with your rating, the text of your review, the kind of work and the month it was done. If the firm has claimed its listing we ask it to confirm you were its client; the firm sees the kind of work and the dates, never your email address or what you wrote before it is published. We use your email address to tell you whether your review was published or why not, and a moderator may use it to ask you for evidence. It is never shown publicly. We delete it from the review 90 days after the review is published, rejected or removed; the review stays linked to your account so you can still see and download it. If you delete your account, published reviews stay, without your email address. You can change or delete your own review from your account page. If you change a published review, a moderator checks the change first and we email your account address with the decision; moderators keep the earlier wording for 90 days, then the text is deleted (its date, rating and the decision are kept). If you delete a review, we delete it and its earlier versions, and keep a record in our audit log that you wrote a review of that firm, with its rating and date, but not its text.

You sign in with a one-time link sent to your email address; there are no passwords. We store your email address, your name if you give it, your role on the site and your sign-in sessions. We set one session cookie to keep you signed in, plus short-lived cookies used during sign-in. They are strictly necessary and need no consent; Google Analytics cookies are optional (see Cookies). We do not use advertising cookies. If we switch on Umami site statistics, they run on our own server and set no cookies; Google Analytics is separate and runs only if you accept (see Cookies). From your account page you can download your data or delete your account.

To claim a listing we collect your name, your role at the firm, the SRA number you enter and your sign-in email. We send a code to the email address on the register and store only a hashed version of it. Once the code is entered we check your sign-in email domain against the website and email domain the register holds for the firm; if you give a Companies House number, we look up that company’s status, name and current officers on the Companies House public register to match your name. We keep a record of the claim, of each check and of the actions taken on it. If someone reports a listing, we keep the report, the reply address they choose to give and a keyed hash of their network address (not the address itself) to limit repeated reports.

Paid listings are taken by Stripe. We store the payment reference, amount and invoice number, and email the listing owner a payment confirmation. We do not receive your card number.

A firm on a paid listing may add a WhatsApp number to its profile. We store the number, whether the firm wants the button shown and when it confirmed the number is its business number and may be shown publicly. We show it only while the firm wants it shown and the listing is a paid listing that a moderator has not hidden; the firm can remove it at any time, and then we delete the number. Until the firm removes it we keep it, also while the button is not shown (for example after the listing stops being a paid listing).

If a firm adds a WhatsApp number, we show it on their profile because the firm asked us to. Tapping Message on WhatsApp takes you to WhatsApp, a service owned by Meta: what you send there goes from you to the firm through WhatsApp, under WhatsApp’s own terms and privacy policy, and we do not see it. We keep a count of taps per firm per day for 13 months and then delete it; the count does not record who tapped. To count each connection once a day, our server keeps a scrambled form of your internet address in memory for the rest of that day; it is never written down.

We list solicitor firms, including sole practitioners, from the public register of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA). We take it from SRA Data Share and reuse it under the SRA’s terms (SRA attribution statement). A firm does not have to sign up to be listed.

For each firm we show what the register publishes:

• the firm’s name and SRA number;
• its office address;
• its office phone number, email address and website, where the register gives them.

For a sole practitioner these details can identify a person. We use them on the basis of legitimate interests: helping people find a regulated solicitor near them, using details the firm has already made public through its regulator.

We check the register again every night. When our check finds that the SRA no longer authorises a firm, we take the listing out of search. When a firm’s name, address or registration status changes on the register, we change it here.

To ask us to remove or correct a listing, email [email protected] or use our contact page. Tell us the firm’s name or SRA number. If a name or address is wrong on the register itself, please also ask the SRA to correct it, or our nightly check will bring the old one back.

To limit spam we count the enquiries sent from the same email address (no more than five an hour, and one to each firm a day) and a hidden form field catches bots. We do not store IP addresses for this. Our hosting provider and Cloudflare process IP addresses as part of delivering and protecting the site.

• Resend sends our email: enquiries and their copies, sign-in links, review and claim messages and payment confirmations.
• Stripe processes payments for paid listings.
• Companies House (a UK government register) answers our look-up when a claimant gives a company number; we send it only that number.
• Our application and database run on a server we rent from Hetzner, and database backups are kept in Hetzner object storage.
• Cloudflare sits in front of the site.

• Contract: delivering your enquiry, signing you in, and providing a paid listing.
• Legitimate interests: listing firms from the public SRA register, publishing verified reviews, keeping the site secure, preventing abuse, and handling complaints.
• Legal obligation: keeping payment and invoice records, and answering lawful requests.

Under UK data protection law you can ask us for a copy of your personal data, to correct it, to delete it, to restrict how we use it, to move it, and to object to uses based on legitimate interests. Email [email protected], or use the download and delete options on your account page. We will reply within one month.

If you are unhappy with our answer you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

See also our review policy and other policies.