Introduction

Thank you for choosing to be part of our community at Parker, Hudson, Rainer & Dobbs LLP (“Parker Hudson,” “we,” “us,” or “our”). We are committed to protecting personal information we collect from visitors and users of our website (“Users”, “you”, “your”), which is hosted at www.phrd.com. This privacy policy concerns our collection of personal information and potentially applicable rights to privacy. If you have any questions or concerns about our policy, please contact us at privacy@phrd.com, using the subject line “Privacy Policy.”

This Privacy Policy describes how Parker Hudson may collect, use, and share information from its website and any mobile applications that link to this Privacy Policy. Any information accessed through https://phrd.com is collectively referred to as the “Site.”

How we collect Users' information

When you use the Site, we may collect your personal data in the following ways:

  • When you access and navigate around the Site (please also see the Cookies Policy);
  • When you communicate with us by email or via the Site, for example when you request support or submit an inquiry; and
  • When you sign up to receive our newsletters and other updates.

Where you provide us with personal information relating to others (for example, your colleagues, clients or other contacts), we understand that you are authorized to provide that information to us, and that you have provided this Privacy Policy to them, as appropriate.

What types of information do we collect?

We may collect the following types of personal information about Users of this Site. We collect personal information that you voluntarily provide when you visit our Site. For example, we collect information about you when you:

  • Apply for a job with Parker Hudson; or
  • Submit a comment or question through our contact form or otherwise communicate with us through the Site.

In addition, we may automatically collect certain information about your device, including information about your web browser and IP address. We refer to this automatically-collected information as “Device Information.”

We collect Device Information using the following technologies:

  • “Cookies” are data files that are placed on your device or computer and often include an anonymous unique identifier. For more information about cookies and how to disable cookies, visit http://www.allaboutcookies.org. To learn more about how we use cookies, please see our Cookies Policy.
  • “Log files” track actions occurring on the Site and collect data including your IP address, browser type, referring/exit pages, and date/time stamps. We use these for the purposes of logging errors in our system.

When we talk about “personal information” in this Privacy Policy it includes Device Information.

We may obtain information about you from other sources, such as public databases or other third parties. 

How do we use your information?

We may process your personal information as necessary for our or a third party’s legitimate interests. These “legitimate interests” include our interests in operating our firm and the Site in a client focused, efficient and sustainable manner.

We may also process your personal information for our compliance with our legal obligations. In this respect, we may use your personal information in order to assist with investigations (including criminal investigations) carried out by the police, the government, regulators, or other competent authorities, where those authorities are acting in compliance with the law.

We may also process your personal data for additional reasons where:

  • it is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest (for example, where the due diligence checks we carry out involve our processing information relating to criminal convictions);
  • it is necessary for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims (for example, to protect and defend our rights or property include the Site and its content); and
  • we have your consent or, where necessary, explicit consent to do so (for example, where we process sensitive personal information concerning your health or medical conditions because you have provided this in communications by email or through the Site).

We use the information we collect or receive:

  • To provide you with information that you have requested.
  • To provide additional information which we believe may be of interest to you (i.e., newsletters, legal updates, event information, marketing communications, etc.).
  • To maintain our list of contacts or for other record keeping purposes.
  • To perform an activity you have requested (such as to evaluate an application for a job opportunity) or to otherwise interact with you.
  • For other business purposes, such as data analysis, identifying usage trends, determining the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns and events, and to evaluate and improve our Site and user experience.
  • To fulfill or meet the reason you provided the information. For example, to conduct litigation, close a transaction, or provide other legal services you request.
  • To provide, support, personalize, and develop our website, products, and services, including but not limited to outsourcing website administration and other functions to third parties to efficiently manage the Site.
  • To monitor and evaluate the performance and effectiveness of our services and the Site, including by training our staff or monitoring their performance, and to administer, support or improve the Site.
  • To process your requests and payments, or to prevent fraud.
  • To protect our business interests, including to determine acceptable credit, legal, or other risks, to resolve potential or actual conflicts, and for collections purposes.
  • To provide you with support and to respond to your inquiries, including investigating and addressing your concerns and monitoring and improving our responses.
  • To help maintain the safety, security, and integrity of our website, products and services, databases and other technology assets, and business.
  • For security purposes or otherwise to operate our business.
  • To respond to law enforcement or legal process requests and as required by applicable law, court order, or governmental regulations.
  • To evaluate or conduct a merger, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution, or other sale or transfer of some or all of Parker Hudson’s assets, whether as a going concern or as part of bankruptcy, liquidation, or similar proceeding, in which personal information held by Parker Hudson is among the assets transferred.

Legal Services

This Privacy Policy does not apply to personal information we collect during our legal representation of a client; such processing is performed on behalf of and at the direction of our client, subject to our client engagement agreements and professional responsibilities.

If you have engaged us to provide legal services, we will use and process your personal information for providing legal services, assisting with managing, enhancing, and improving our legal services, communicating with you about those legal services, and complying with our legal and ethical obligations related to those legal services.

Our other obligations to you as our client, if applicable, are not addressed by this Privacy Policy. Those obligations are described in our terms of engagement or otherwise arise as a result of applicable law or ethics.


Under what circumstances would we share your information?

We may process or share data based on the following legal basis:

  • Consent: We may process your data if you have given us specific consent to use your personal information for a specific purpose.
  • Legitimate Interests: We may process your personal information when it is reasonably necessary to achieve our legitimate business interests.
  • Performance of a Contract: Where we have entered into a contract with you, we may process your personal information to fulfill the terms of our contract.
  • Legal Obligations: We may disclose your personal information where we are legally required to do so in order to comply with applicable law, governmental requests, a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process, such as in response to a court order or a subpoena (including in response to public authorities to meet national security or law enforcement requirements).
  • Vital Interests: We may disclose your personal information where we believe it is necessary to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding potential violations of our policies, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the safety of any person and illegal activities, or as evidence in litigation in which we are involved.

More specifically, we may need to process your data or share your personal information in the following situations:

  • Vendors, Consultants and Other Third-Party Service Providers: We may share your personal information with third-party vendors, service providers, contractors, or agents who perform services for us or on our behalf and require access to such information to do that work. Examples: data analysis, email delivery, hosting services, and marketing efforts. We may allow selected third parties to use tracking technology on the Site, which will enable them to collect data about how you interact with the Site over time. This information may be used to, among other things, analyze and track data, determine the popularity of certain content and better understand online activity. Unless described in this Policy, we do not share, sell, rent, or trade any of your personal information with third parties.
  • Business Transfers: We may share or transfer your personal information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company.


Who will your information be shared with?

We only share and disclose your personal information with the following third parties. We have categorized each party so that you may easily understand the purpose of our data collection and processing practices. If we have processed your data based on your consent and you wish to revoke your consent, please contact us.

  • Web and Mobile Analytics (such as Google Analytics): We may engage third party analytics services to collect and analyze various data regarding your usage and activity on the Sites. Analytics services may use tracking technologies (e.g., pixel tags and cookies) to collect information on our behalf including your IP address, ISP, browser type, operating system and language, referring and exit pages and URLs, date and time, amount of time spent on particular pages, what sections of the Sites you visit, number of links you click while on the Sites, search terms, and other data. We may also collect information regarding your mobile device, including the type, operating system and version (e.g., iOS, Android or Windows), processor information, network type, and similar data. Please be advised that if you opt out of any analytics service, you may not be able to use the full functionality of the Sites.
    • Our employees, agents, or contractors where there is a legitimate reason for their receiving the information, including:
      • those of our staff and consultants who may provide or offer to provide services to you in response to a request for support or an inquiry made through the Site.
      • providers of outsourced services to us (for example, any third party we engage to administer the Site on our behalf).
    • Internal and external auditors.
    • With a third party in a business transaction, in the event that all or part of Parker Hudson is sold, merged, dissolved, acquired, or involved in a similar transaction that involves the transfer of the Site.
  • Our employees, agents, or contractors where there is a legitimate reason for their receiving the information, including:
    • those of our staff and consultants who may provide or offer to provide services to you in response to a request for support or an inquiry made through the Site.
    • providers of outsourced services to us (for example, any third party we engage to administer the Site on our behalf).
  • Internal and external auditors.
  • With a third party in a business transaction, in the event that all or part of Parker Hudson is sold, merged, dissolved, acquired, or involved in a similar transaction that involves the transfer of the Site.

We do not sell your personal information.

    Do we use cookies and other tracking technologies?

    We may use cookies and similar tracking technologies (like web beacons and pixels) to access or store information. Specific information about how we use such technologies and how you can refuse certain cookies is set out in our Cookie Policy.

    How long do we keep your information?

    We will only keep your personal information for as long as it is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law (such as tax, accounting, or other legal requirements). No purpose in this Privacy Policy will require us to keep your personal information for longer than 1 year.

    When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymize it. If this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your personal information until deletion is possible.


    How do we keep your information safe?

    We have implemented technical and organizational security measures designed to protect the security of any personal information we process. However, please remember that we cannot guarantee that either your personal information or the internet itself is 100% secure. Although we will do our best to reasonably protect your personal information, transmission of personal information to and from our Sites is at your own risk. You should only access the services within a secure environment.

    Do we collect information from minors?

    We do not knowingly solicit data from or market to children under 18 years of age. By using the Site, you represent that you are at least 18 or that you are the parent or guardian of such a minor and consent to such minor dependent’s use of the Site. If we learn that personal information from users less than 18 years of age has been collected, we will take reasonable measures to promptly delete such data from our records. If you become aware of any data we have collected from children under age 18, please contact us at privacy@phrd.com.

    Privacy rights for Users based in Europe

    This section of the Privacy Policy concerns our processing of personal data of Users based in Europe where we are offering goods or services to you in Europe or where our Site may be used to monitor Users’ behavior as far as it takes place in the EU or UK. Please note that this Privacy Policy has general application to Users from anywhere in the world, except where noted, for example in the section “Users’ rights in relation to personal data,” which shall not apply to Users located outside of the EU or UK.

    Parker, Hudson, Rainer & Dobbs LLP (a limited liability partnership, registered in Georgia, USA) may be the “data controller” of your personal data for purposes of the EU General Data Protection Regulation and as it was saved into UK law by virtue of section 3 of the UK’s European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 and the UK Data Protection Act 2018 (collectively hereinafter referred to as the “GDPR”). Parker Hudson is a ‘data controller’ subject to the GDPR only insofar as we are offering goods or services to individuals in the EU or UK or where our Site may be used to monitor individuals’ behavior as far as it takes place in the EU or UK.

    Transferring Users’ information outside of Europe

    This section is for Users located in Europe.

    In the course of interacting with you and to the account any personal data is collected, we will transfer your personal data outside of the UK and the European Economic Area (“EEA”), principally to Parker Hudson’s offices and servers in the United States; this means that your personal data will not have the automatic protection of European data protection laws (including the GDPR) which apply in the UK and the EEA. In these circumstances, in order to ensure that your personal data continues to have adequate protection when it is transferred out of the EEA, your personal data will only be transferred on one of the following bases:

    • where the transfer is subject to one or more of the “appropriate safeguards” for international transfers prescribed by applicable law (for example, standard data protection clauses adopted by the European Commission);
    • a European Commission decision provides that the country or territory to which the transfer is made ensures an adequate level of protection; or
    • there exists another situation where the transfer is permitted under applicable law (for example, where we have your explicit consent).

    You can obtain more details of the protection given to your personal data when it is transferred outside the UK or EEA by contacting us using the contact information set forth above.

    Users’ rights in relation to personal data

    This section is for Users located in Europe.

    Under the GDPR, you have the following rights in relation to our processing of your personal data. Please note that these rights are not absolute, and we may be entitled to refuse requests where exceptions apply or where the GDPR does not apply.

    • to obtain access to, and copies of, the personal data that we hold about you;
    • to require us to correct the personal data we hold about you if it is incorrect;
    • to require us to erase your personal data in certain circumstances;
    • to require us to restrict our data processing activities in certain circumstances;
    • to object, on grounds relating to your particular situation, to any of our particular processing activities where you feel this has a disproportionate impact on you;
    • to receive from us the personal data we hold about you which you have provided to us, in a reasonable format specified by you, including for the purpose of you transmitting that personal data to another data controller; and
    • where our processing is based on your consent, you may withdraw that consent, without affecting the lawfulness of our processing based on consent before its withdrawal.

    Note: If you have given your consent and you wish to withdraw it, please contact us at privacy@phrd.com. Please note that where our processing of your personal data relies on your consent and where you then withdraw that consent, we may not be able to provide all or some aspects of our services to you and/or it may affect the provision of those services.

    If you are not satisfied with how we are processing your personal data, you can make a complaint to a data protection supervisory authority.

    Cookies and similar technologies: Most Web browsers are set to accept cookies by default. If you prefer, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove cookies and to reject cookies. If you choose to remove cookies or reject cookies, this could affect certain features or services of our Site. To opt-out of interest-based advertising by advertisers on our Site visit http://optout.aboutads.info/?c=2&lang=EN. For further information, please see our Cookie Policy.

    Controls for do-not-track features

    Most web browsers and some mobile operating systems and mobile applications include a Do-Not-Track (“DNT”) feature or setting you can activate to signal your privacy preference not to have data about your online browsing activities monitored and collected. No uniform technology standard for recognizing and implementing DNT signals has been finalized. As such, we do not currently respond to DNT browser signals or any other mechanism that automatically communicates your choice not to be tracked online. If a standard for online tracking is adopted that we must follow in the future, we will inform you about that practice in a revised version of this Privacy Policy.


    Do California residents have specific privacy rights?

    The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (“CCPA”) provides California residents with certain, specific rights regarding their personal information. These rights, which may be subject to limitations and/or restrictions, include: (i) the right to disclosure, deletion, access, and non-discrimination; and (ii) the right to opt-out of having your Personal Information shared or sold. We do not sell or share your Personal Information with third-party companies for their direct marketing purposes and we have not done so in the last twelve months. If you are a California resident and wish to exercise your rights under the CCPA, please send us your request using the “Contact Us” section below.

    The following are categories of Personal Information defined under the CCPA we may collect, receive, or maintain in the course of administering firm business or receive from a client in the course of providing legal services: Identifiers, Personal information described in the California Customer Records statute (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.80(e)), Protected classification characteristics under California or federal law, Commercial information, Biometric information, Internet or other electronic network activity, Geolocation data, Sensory data, Professional or employment-related information, Non-public education information, and inferences drawn from other personal information.

    Parker Hudson obtains the categories of personal information listed above from the following categories of sources:

    • Directly from you. For example, when you provide it to us in any format to provide you with legal services or when you sign up to receive our newsletter and other updates.
    • Indirectly from you. For example, from observing your actions on our website, interactions with our marketing correspondence, or interactions with products or services offered by us.
    • From third parties. For example, from other parties involved in the legal services, including opposing parties or counsel, parties responding to subpoenas, or in conducting due diligence.

    Parker Hudson may use or disclose the personal information of California residents we collect for one or more of the purposes outlined in the section titled “How do we use your information” above.

    California's “Shine the Light” law (Civil Code Section § 1798.83) also permits users of our Site who are California residents to request certain information regarding our disclosure of personal information to third parties for direct marketing purposes. If you are a California resident and would like to make such a request, please submit your request in writing to us using the contact information provided below. Please note, however, we do not disclose or sell your personal information to third parties for direct marketing purposes.


    Do we make updates to this policy?

    We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. The updated version will be indicated by an updated “Revised” date and the updated version will be effective as soon as it is accessible. We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy frequently to be informed of how we are protecting your information.

    How can you contact us about this policy?

    Subject to local law, you may have certain rights regarding personal information we have collected about you. Such rights might include the right to (a) know what personal information we have collected about you, (b) know what personal information about you was disclosed to third parties, (c) update or correct such information if you believe there is an inaccuracy, (d) restrict the processing of your personal information, (e) request deletion of your personal information, (f) object to our use of your personal information, or (g) request transmission of your personal information to another data controller. We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of these privacy rights, except that the deletion of your personal information may prevent us from providing you content or benefit that depends on the processing of your personal information.

    If you would like to make a complaint about how we handled your personal information or make a complaint about a breach of data protection laws, please contact us using the contact information below. Complaints will be investigated, and the outcome of the investigation will be communicated to you after the complaint is made in accordance with applicable law. You may have a right in some locations to file a complaint with your local data protection authority.

    If you would like to exercise any of these rights provided under local law, you can contact us at:

    By email: privacy@phrd.com; or
    Phone: (404) 523-5300
    Fax: (404) 522-8409

    This Privacy Policy was last updated on June 9, 2022.