Privacy Policy

The French version prevails.

Eigenmann Associés is a law firm without legal personality (hereinafter referred to as “the Firm”).

The Firm is located at Place Bel-Air 1, 1001 Lausanne, Switzerland, and comprises attorneys at law who may practice under different legal forms, as well as trainee lawyers, legal experts, assistants, and other employees or collaborators.

References to “we” or “our” refer to the entity or person with whom a mandate contract has been concluded, as well as to the various attorney at law, trainee lawyers, legal experts, assistants, and other employees or collaborators of the Firm.

We are subject to the Federal Data Protection Act, excluding the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) since we do not deliberately target European residents in connection with the provision of our services.

For all our activities as attorney at law, we are bound by the duty of professional secrecy.

We process personal data (i.e., data that directly or indirectly identifies individuals). The personal data is transmitted to us by you or third parties due to the mandate that binds us. Additionally, we may collect certain personal data ourselves.

We are responsible for the processing of personal data according to this privacy policy.

Data processed:

Certain personal data is provided by yourself (or other individuals concerned) when you (or they) contact us by email or phone or interact with us in any other way. All data you provide to us is voluntarily given and/or related to the proper execution of the mandate you have entrusted us with.

We also collect certain personal data ourselves, e.g., from public registers or websites.

The personal data we process about you includes:

Contact information (first name, last name, address, phone number, email address, contact data, date of birth, information about employment relationships, income information, information about wealth, family status, health status, professional activity, employer, and other basic data about you when we open your file).

Information about the role of the individual within the company, organization, for which you (or the respective contact persons) work, or on behalf of which you (or they) contact us.

Financial information, such as your bank details during transactions related to your file.

Any other information about you that you have communicated to us.

Purposes of the Processed Data:

The processing of your data aims primarily to allow us to provide our legal services, document them, and invoice them.

It also includes:

• Communicating with you.
• Performing necessary checks for conflict-of-interest management and anti-money laundering.
• Complying with our legal, regulatory, and risk management obligations, including establishing, exercising, or defending legal claims.

We process data to the extent necessary for the execution of the mandate, particularly to provide legal services, establishing, exercising, or defending legal claims or judicial proceedings, and to comply with legal and regulatory obligations.

The purposes are based on a legitimate interest in the processing of personal data. Some processing is also necessary for us to fulfill our contractual obligations to you. The same applies to the legal obligations to which we are subject, e.g., our obligation to retain documents.

Data Sharing :

In compliance with obligations arising from professional secrecy and to achieve our purposes, we may share your data with third parties, including:

• External service providers, such as IT service providers, auditors, and banks.
• External service providers on delegation (for translation or document review).
• Authorities and courts, including tax authorities.
• Adversaries, lawyers, and other entities and individuals with whom we communicate in the course of executing your mandate.
• Business partners with whom we may need to coordinate legal services.
• Clients.

We may also share personal data with arbitration courts, courts, regulatory authorities, government agencies, and bodies to comply with our legal or regulatory requirements.

We process personal data related to our sphere of responsibility in and within the EU/EEA. We may also transmit this data to recipients (including clients, opposing parties, or authorities) who, in turn, process personal data in other countries, even if they do not guarantee a level of protection comparable to Swiss law. On this last point, we will only do so based on consent or standard contractual clauses. The same applies if the transmission of data is necessary for the performance of a contract or to assert legal claims.

Location of Data Processing and Data Storage:

Our servers are hosted in Switzerland.

A transfer of your data abroad, including to countries that do not offer the same level of protection as Swiss law, only occurs if such a transfer is necessary for the proper execution of the mandate.

We draw your attention to the fact that, to execute the mandate, we may use external IT service providers or cloud providers with servers in Switzerland. We then use certain IT services or means of communication that may be associated with data security risks (e.g., email and video conferences). If you wish us to take specific security measures, please inform us.

Data Retention Period :

Your data is retained for the entire duration of the mandate and for the period necessary for the completion of the mandate. At the end of it, usually from the date of sending the final fee note, your data is retained for as long as we have a legitimate interest, private or public, in keeping personal data, for example, to assert or defend claims or for archiving and IT security purposes, but in all cases during the legal retention or documentation period.

We also keep your personal data as long as they are subject to a legal obligation to retain, usually ten years from the end of the mandate or from the date of sending the final fee note.

We take appropriate and proportionate measures to protect personal data against loss, unauthorized alteration, or unlawful access by third parties. If you provide us with personal data through a third party (e.g., your employees or other contact persons), it is your responsibility to inform them comprehensively about the data processing carried out by our law firm and other legal or external service providers (e.g., in a data protection declaration for your employees).

Social Media:

On our social media pages (e.g., LinkedIn and Facebook), you will find communications about our activities and various events. Social media providers collect and analyze data such as the number of visits and demographic data of visitors to our pages.

Only the respective provider can identify you based on the collected data. Therefore, please consider the privacy policy of that provider.

Your rights:

Individuals whose data is processed have the right to obtain information about the personal data processed about them, to know its purpose, to correct it, delete it, limit its processing, object to it, and file a complaint with a supervisory authority. These individuals also have a right to data portability. However, please note that these rights are subject to conditions and exceptions.

To the extent permitted or required by law, certain requests may be refused. Thus, we may or must possibly continue to retain personal data or process it differently for legal reasons, despite a request for deletion or limitation of data processing. The request to delete personal data concerning you may be impossible depending on our legal obligations and may make it impossible to continue our mandate.

In case of a dispute, you can file a complaint to the Federal Data Protection Officer and Transparency Commissioner or with a judicial authority.

Information :

For this statement, no formal consent is required from the client, their employees, or other contact persons. This statement is merely information about the nature, scope, and purpose of the data we process. We reserve the right to unilaterally modify the content of this statement at any time and without notice.

It is therefore recommended to regularly consult the data protection statement, available on our website.

The French version prevails.

If you, your employees, or other contact persons have any questions or wish to assert your or the rights of data subjects under data protection, please contact us at data@eigenmann-avocats.ch or at Eigenmann Associés, Géraldine Chapus-Rapin, Place Bel-Air 1, 1003 Lausanne, Suisse.

17 November 2023