Video

Wragge & Co experts take a look at topical issues in contract law. Covering everything from competition law and boilerplate, to trends in liability law and how to terminate a contract, they outline the main issues in-house lawyers should consider.

Data protection

Amanda Grace: So Kirsten, what is the Data Protection Act and why is it relevant to in-house lawyers?

Kirsten Whitfield: The Data Protection Act is all about protecting personal data. All organisations will process personal data in some form or an other, whether that's your employee data, customer database or even supplier contacts databases, so it is important for organisations to understand what the Data Protection Act is all about and to make sure they are complying with it.

Amanda Grace: What do in-house lawyers need to do to ensure that their organisations are compliant?

Kirsten Whitfield: Well in practice, there's all sorts of things that you need to be doing: making sure that staff are properly trained, making sure that you've got the right policies and procedures in place, data protection policies, maybe data access policies if you receive data access requests and also your data retention policies to make sure you are not holding onto information that you don't need to keep.

It's also important to make sure that you have an up-to-date data protection notification. There are a few exemptions but they're fairly limited so most organisations will need one.

Amanda Grace: What are the dos and don'ts of electronic marketing?

Kirsten Whitfield: There's a few bits of legislation that are particularly relevant to electronic marketing. At a very, very high level you've got the Human Rights Act and Rights to Privacy so you shouldn't be intrusively marketing to people.

The Data Protection Act is around making sure that people are informed about what you are going to do with their data, including marketing. There's also a basic right to opt-out of marketing in the Data Protection Act. On top of that we have the E-Privacy Regulations and these are all about making sure that you're not intrusively marketing to people electronically and that sets the rules around when you can do things by way of an opt-in or when you can do it by an opt-out.

Amanda Grace: And what about cookies, what are they and what are the rules around their use?

Kirsten Whitfield: Cookies are text files that are used on websites and are sent to a user's computer. They do all sorts of useful things like help with your shopping basket when you click to buy stuff. They can also be used to enhance the performance of a website, but also more intrusively, to track behaviour of consumers using your website or track behaviour across a number of websites. Previously under the E-Privacy Regulations it was ok to use cookies as long as people had the opportunity to opt-out, for example through their browser settings. That's now changed since May this year and an opt-in or consent is needed instead.

Amanda Grace: A lot of organisations and employees use social media and networking sites, what are the key things for in-house lawyers to know?

Kirsten Whitfield: There's all sorts of things that businesses will use social networking sites for nowadays, for example to monitor what employees are saying about you, to vet potential new recruits or to gather information about customers or potential new customers. The thing that sometimes gets forgotten is that actually all of that use of personal data is still subject to all of the data protection privacy laws that we have in this country.

Amanda Grace: Kirsten, thank you very much.

This video may contain information of general interest about current legal issues, but does not give legal advice.