Best Lawyers Privacy Policy

Your privacy is important to us. To better protect your privacy, we provide this notice explaining our online information practices and the choices you can make about the way your information is collected and used. To make this notice easy to find, we make it available on our homepage and at every point where personally identifiable information may be requested.

This notice applies to all information collected from or submitted to Woodward/White, Inc., or its subsidiary, Best Lawyers, LLC.

This Web site may contain links to other Web sites operated by third parties. Best Lawyers is not responsible for the privacy practices or policies of such third party Web sites.

If you have any questions about this Policy, please feel free to contact us through our website or write to us at

Privacy Matters, c/o Best Lawyers
237 Park Avenue, SW
Aiken, SC 29801
Phone: 803-648-0300
Fax: 803-641-4794

Best Lawyers is self-certified under the "safe harbor" privacy framework that the U.S. Department of Commerce has negotiated with the European Commission for compliance by U.S. organizations with the European Commission's Directive on Data Protection that went into effect in October 1998.

Information Collection and Use

Best Lawyers, LLC (and its parent company, Woodward/White, Inc.) offers a number of services, including our search features, that do not require you to register for an account or provide any personal information to us. In order to provide our full range of services, we may collect the following types of information:

• Information You Provide - When you subscribe to BestLawyers.com or other Best Lawyers services or promotions that require registration, we ask you for personal information (such as your name, email address, and an account password). For certain goods or services, we also request credit card or other payment account information which we maintain in encrypted form on secure servers. We may combine the information you submit under your account with information from other Best Lawyers services or third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services. For certain services, we may give you the opportunity to opt out of combining such information.
• Log Information - When you use Best Lawyers services, our servers automatically record information that your browser sends whenever you visit our website. These server logs may include information such as your web request, Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request, and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser.
• User Communications - When you send email or other communication to Best Lawyers, we may retain those communications in order to process your inquiries, respond to your requests, and improve our services.
• Nominations, Recommendations, and Balloting - Best Lawyers solicits nominations, as well as votes and commentary, regarding potential and existing candidates for inclusion in its database of preeminent lawyers, expert referrals, and other service providers. This particular information is held in strictest confidence, and is maintained within Woodward/White, Inc. Such information results in the publicly available databases of listed lawyers, experts, and other service providers.
• Affiliated Sites - We offer some of our services in connection with other web sites. Personal information that you provide to those sites may be sent to Best Lawyers in order to deliver the service. We process such information in accordance with this Policy. The affiliated sites may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies.
• Links - Best Lawyers may present links in a format that enables us to keep track of whether these links have been followed. We use this information to improve the quality of our search technology, customized content, and advertising. This Privacy Policy applies to web sites and services that are owned and operated by Best Lawyers. We do not exercise control over links within our various services. These other sites may place their own cookies or other files on your computer, collect data, or solicit personal information from you.

Best Lawyers only processes personal information for the purposes described in the applicable Privacy Policy and/or privacy notice for specific services. In addition to the above, such purposes include:

• Providing our products and services to users;
• Auditing, research and analysis in order to maintain, protect, and improve our services;
• Ensuring the technical functioning of our network; and
• Developing new services.

Options for Personal Information

When you sign up for a particular service that requires registration, we ask you to provide personal information. If we use this information in a manner different from the purpose for which it was collected, then we will ask for your consent prior to such use.

If we propose to use personal information for any purposes other than those described in this Policy and/or in the specific service notices, we will offer you an effective way to opt out of the use of personal information for those other purposes. We will not collect or use sensitive information for purposes other than those described in this Policy and/or in the specific service notices, unless we have obtained your prior consent.

You can decline to submit personal information to any of our services, in which case Best Lawyers may not be able to provide those services to you.

Information Integrity

Best Lawyers processes personal information only for the purposes for which it was collected and in accordance with this. We review our data collection, storage, and processing practices to ensure that we only collect, store, and process the personal information needed to provide or improve our services. We take reasonable steps to ensure that the personal information we process is accurate, complete, and current, but we depend on our users to update or correct their personal information whenever necessary.

Best Lawyers makes every commercially reasonable effort to ensure changes to Attorneys', Experts', and Service Providers' Bio Pages are updated in a timely manner, provided that the request for changes is made in writing and signed by Attorney, Expert, or Service Provider, or his or her firm contact. Best Lawyers makes good faith efforts to provide you with access to your personal information and either to correct this data if it is inaccurate or to delete such data at your request if it is not otherwise required to be retained by law or for legitimate business purposes. We ask individual users to identify themselves and the information requested to be accessed, corrected, or removed before processing such requests, and we may decline to process requests that are unreasonably repetitive or systematic, require disproportionate technical effort, jeopardize the privacy of others, or would be extremely impractical (for instance, requests concerning information residing on backup tapes), or for which access is not otherwise required. In any case where we provide information access and correction, we perform this service free of charge, except if doing so would require a disproportionate effort. Some of our services have different procedures to access, correct, or delete users' personal information. We provide the details for these procedures in the specific privacy notices or FAQs for these services.

Information Safety and Security

Appropriate security measures are in place to protect against unauthorized access to or unauthorized alteration, disclosure or destruction of data. These include internal reviews of our data collection, storage, and processing practices and security measures, as well as physical security measures to guard against unauthorized access to systems where we store personal data.

We restrict access to personal information to Woodward/White employees, contractors, and agents who need to know that information in order to operate, develop, or improve our services. These individuals are bound by confidentiality obligations and may be subject to discipline, including termination and criminal prosecution, if they fail to meet these obligations.

Enforcement

Best Lawyers regularly reviews its compliance with this Policy. Please feel free to direct any questions or concerns regarding this Policy or Best Lawyers' treatment of personal information by contacting us through this web site or by writing to us at Privacy Matters, c/o Best Lawyers, LLC, 237 Park Avenue, SW, Aiken, SC 29801, USA. When we receive formal written complaints at this address, it is Best Lawyers' policy to contact the complaining user regarding his or her concerns. We will cooperate with the appropriate regulatory authorities, including local data protection authorities, to resolve any complaints regarding the transfer of personal data that cannot be resolved between Best Lawyers and an individual.

Changes to this Policy

Please note that this Privacy Policy may change from time to time. We will not reduce your rights under this Policy without your explicit consent, and we expect most such changes will be minor. Regardless, we will post any Policy changes on this page and, if the changes are significant, we will provide a more prominent notice (including, for certain services, email notification of Policy changes). Each version of this Privacy Policy will be identified at the top of the page by its effective date and we will also keep prior versions of this Policy in an archive for your review.

If you have any additional questions or concerns about this Policy, please feel free to contact us any time through this web site or at Privacy Matters, c/o Best Lawyers, LLC, 237 Park Avenue, SW Aiken, SC 29801, USA.