INTRODUCTION
Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP and its affiliates located in the People’s Republic of China (“PRC” or “China”) and globally (collectively, the “Firm”) are committed to safeguarding the privacy and security of Personal Data (as defined below) that we may collect from visitors to our website, the clients to whom we provide legal and other services, and other third parties that interact with the Firm or submit information to us, including but not limited to job applicants (collectively, “you”).
This Data Protection Policy (this “Policy”) addresses the basis on which the Firm may collect, use, disclose, or otherwise process Personal Data in accordance with applicable data protection laws including, but not limited to, the China Cybersecurity Law, the Data Security Law, and the Personal Information Protection Law and their associated regulations (collectively, the “Data Protection Laws”). This Policy applies to Personal Data in the Firm’s possession or under its control. Under applicable Data Protection Laws, the Firm is acting in its capacity as a data controller.
By interacting with the Firm, using our website, submitting information to us or engaging our services, you agree and consent to the Firm and third parties collecting, using, disclosing and/or processing your Personal Data in the manner set out in this Policy.
Please read the following information carefully to understand our practices regarding your Personal Data and how we treat it.
This Policy may be updated by the Firm at any time and any amendments or revisions made to this Policy will be published on our website. Under such circumstances, if you continue to use our services and/or our website, you will be deemed to have agreed to be bound by the updated Policy.
DEFINITION OF PERSONAL DATA
Personal Data refers to any data, recorded electronically or by other means, related to identified or identifiable natural persons located in China, excluding anonymized information.
COLLECTION, USE, AND PURPOSES OF PROCESSING PERSONAL DATA
The Firm may collect your Personal Data in the course of operating our business and providing our services. We collect your Personal Data for the following primary purposes:
Functionality of Our Website
When visiting our website, your browser will contact our webserver to retrieve the sites you wish to visit. In this context, Personal Data, such as your IP address, is transferred by your browser (i.e., by HTTP/S requests) to us. This connection data is processed by our webserver to enable access to and the display of our website. Our webserver automatically saves a record of the pages you visited (“log files” or “session records”). We use these log files to ensure the security of our website, in particular to prevent unauthorized interference with it, and to enable us to exercise our legal rights and obligations regarding any such unauthorized interference.
For more information about what is collected via our website, please see the Firm’s Cookie Policy.
If you decline to provide your Personal Data as described above, you may not be able to display and visit our website.
Basic Legal Services
We collect your Personal Data to provide legal services to you, respond to your inquiries, perform our contractual obligations, and handle other professional and operational matters for you. Depending on the nature of the services, the types of Personal Data that we typically collect include:
- your contact details, including name, employer, title, postal address, email address and phone number(s); and
- to the extent necessary, (i) your identification information, including the ID number; (ii) financial information, including transaction records; (iii) details regarding health, sickness, and/or disability; and/or (iv) criminal records.
To ensure that we are paid, we may collect and use your financial information such as bank account details.
We also typically collect the name of counterparties/contractual partners in order to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations and/or our contractual obligations to you or your employer for our own legitimate interests, for example, to carry out conflict and Know Your Customer checks.
Please note that we may not be able to provide legal services to you if you decline to provide the Personal Data described above.
Recruitment
For the purpose of recruitment, we may collect and use your curriculum vitae, education and employment history, details of professional memberships and other relevant information that you or your authorized representative provide to us.
Expanded Services – Business Promotion
For marketing purposes, we may collect and use your Personal Data to administer our client relationships; send LawFlashes and other legal updates; invite you to seminars, webinars, and other events hosted or sponsored by the Firm; or for other types of business promotion purposes. We typically collect the following Personal Data:
- technical information, including the information collected from your visits to our website, or other technical services, such as your IP address, device type, etc.;
- other personal information, including your visiting records, your dietary requirements, health information, disability information and other information that we may need to respond to your specific needs or preferences; and
- when you sign up for a seminar or webinar or subscribe to LawFlashes and other legal updates, we will also collect and use the registration or subscription data you provide, such as your name, phone number and email address.
We will not be able to provide business promotion services without collecting the Personal Data as described above. However, declining to provide this information for marketing purposes will not affect the provision of our basic legal services. You may unsubscribe from these marketing communications at any time.
If we collect your sensitive Personal Data, we will inform you of the necessity and the impact on you and seek to obtain consent from you before collecting this data.
The Firm will not use your Personal Data for any additional purposes without your express consent unless we have a lawful ground on which to process your Personal Data under the Data Protection Laws. Any such consent is revocable at any time as described below.
The Firm does not use Personal Data for automated decision making, including profiling.
DISCLOSURE OF PERSONAL DATA
The Firm may disclose your Personal Data as follows:
Entrust to Process
We may entrust certain third parties to process your Personal Data. The third parties include vendors providing payment collection services, information technology support, technical and organizational services in connection with normal operational activities; legal, audit, operational or other advisors; and other service providers for the purposes referred to in this Policy. We will exercise appropriate due diligence in the selection of the third-party vendors and execute agreements with them requiring that such providers maintain adequate technical and organizational security measures to safeguard your Personal Data, and to process your Personal Data only as instructed by us and for no other purposes.
Share
We may share your Personal Data with our offices and affiliates worldwide. Within the Firm, your Personal Data will be shared only with a limited number of relevant individuals on a need-to-know basis in connection with their job responsibilities.
We may also share Personal Data to comply with the law, respond to compulsory legal processes (such as a search warrant or court order), in response to a request for information from a regulator or governmental authority, in the course of actual or anticipated litigation, or otherwise for legal purposes, such as to other law firms, courts, or government authorities to protect your rights, and/or to provide services to you.
Transfer of Control
We will require the data recipients to undertake to protect your Personal Data as required by the Data Protection Laws. We do not transfer control over your Personal Data to any third-party except as follows:
- You expressly consent to the transfer in this Policy or otherwise;
- Pursuant to legal requirements, procedural requirements, litigation, or mandatory requirements of a competent governmental authority; or
- To another business entity in connection with the sale, assignment, merger, or other transfer of all or a portion of the Firm’s business to that business entity.
Publicly Disclose
We will not publicly disclose your Personal Data except for the following instances:
- when you explicitly consent or you voluntarily request us to publicly disclose. Before disclosing your Personal Data, we will notify you of the purpose of such disclosure and the types of Personal Data to be disclosed. If the disclosure involves your sensitive Personal Data, we will notify you of the purpose, type and specific contents of such sensitive Personal Data;
- pursuant to legal requirements, procedural requirements, litigation, or mandatory requirements of a competent governmental authority.
WITHDRAWAL OF CONSENT
Your consent for the collection, use, disclosure, and processing of your Personal Data will remain valid until it is withdrawn by you in writing. You may withdraw consent and request the Firm to stop using, disclosing, and/or processing your Personal Data for any or all of the purposes listed above by submitting your request in writing or via email to the China Offices Data Protection Officer and/or the Privacy Office at the contact details provided below.
Upon receipt of your written request to withdraw your consent, the Firm may require reasonable time (depending on the complexity of the request and its impact on its relationship with you) for your request to be processed and for the Firm to notify you of the consequences, including any legal consequences that may affect your rights and liabilities to the Firm. In general, the Firm will process your request within thirty (30) days of receipt. If you decide to cancel your withdrawal of consent, you must inform the Firm in writing in the manner described above.
Once you withdraw your consent, we will no longer process the corresponding Personal Data. However, withdrawing your consent does not affect the Firm’s right to continue to collect, use, disclose, and/or process your Personal Data where such collection, use, disclosure and processing is permitted without consent or required under applicable laws. Further, your decision to withdraw the consent will not affect our prior processing of your Personal Data based on your previous consent.
DATA RETENTION
We intend to keep your Personal Data accurate and up to date. The Firm will only retain your Personal Data for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes for which it was collected in accordance with our data retention policies (including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting or reporting requirements) or as required or permitted by applicable laws. For visitors to our website, we will retain the Personal Data for up to ten (10) years from the date of our last interaction with you or for longer if we are required to do so according to our regulatory obligations. For service provision to any client, we retain the Personal Data for the duration of the engagement or business relationship and up to ten (10) years following the end of engagement or our business relationship with you or for longer as required by regulatory obligations or applicable law. However, legal documents in connection with the termination of the engagement or business relationship will be retained as long as such termination may be disputed.
At the end of any retention period, the Firm will delete, anonymize, or securely dispose of your Personal Data when retention no longer serves the purposes for which the Personal Data was collected, and is no longer necessary for legal or business purposes.
DATA SUBJECTS’ RIGHTS
You have certain rights in relation to your Personal Data that we hold. You may exercise these rights as follows.
Access and Correction
You have the right to request access to your Personal Data that we hold and information on how we use it and with whom we share it. If you find that your Personal Data is inaccurate, you have the right to request that we update or correct your Personal Data.
Deletion
You may request that we delete or remove your Personal Data. Please note that we may retain your Personal Data if we have valid legal grounds, such as for the defense of legal claims or other legal obligations, and we will advise you accordingly.
If we decide to respond to your deletion request, we will also notify the entities that have obtained your Personal Data from us and request that they to delete it in a timely manner, unless otherwise provided by laws and regulations or these entities obtain your authorization separately.
When the Personal Data is deleted from our servers, we may not be able to delete the corresponding Personal Data in our backup system immediately, but we will delete it when the backup is updated.
Processing Restriction
You have the right at any time to restrict the processing of your Personal Data in accordance with the Data Protection Laws.
Copy
You have the right to obtain a copy of your Personal Data in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and to reuse it elsewhere, or to ask us to transfer your Personal Data to a third party. We will accommodate your request where technically feasible. We are not responsible for the security or processing of your Personal Data once it is transferred to the third party. Please note that we may not copy or transfer certain Personal Data if doing so would interfere with the rights of others, such as where providing your Personal Data would reveal information about another person or our trade secrets or intellectual property.
To exercise any of the above rights, submit your request to MLPrivacyOffice@morganlewis.com. We will respond to your request within thirty (30) days. If the Firm is unable to respond to your request within thirty (30) days of receipt, the Firm will inform you, in writing, within this thirty (30) day period. If the Firm is unable to provide you with any Personal Data or to make a requested correction, the Firm will inform you of the reason(s) why it is unable to do so (except where the Firm is not required to do so under the Data Protection Laws).
Depending on the request made, the Firm may only provide you with (i) access to the Personal Data contained in the documents requested (not to the documents in their entirety), and (ii) where appropriate, confirmation of the Personal Data that the Firm has on record where your Personal Data forms a negligible part of the document(s).
For a reasonable request, we do not charge a fee, but you may be charged a fee for repeated requests. For requests that are unnecessarily repetitive and require excessive technical means (such as a request that requires the development of a new system or a fundamental change in current practice), we may reject your request and provide an alternative way to protect your legitimate rights and interests. If your request poses a risk to the legitimate interests of others or is highly impractical, we may reject your request.
In addition, we will not respond to your request if it is:
- related to the performance of our statutory obligations;
- directly related to national security and national defense;
- directly related to public safety, public health, and significant public interests;
- directly related to a criminal investigation, prosecution, trial, and judgment enforcement, etc.;
- shown with sufficient evidence that the data subjects have subjective malice or are abusing their rights;
- for the purpose of protecting the life, property or other significant legal rights and interests of you or other individuals, and it is difficult to obtain consent from you or other individuals;
- causing or will cause serious damage to the legitimate rights and interests of other data subjects, individuals or organizations; or
- related to trade secrets.
You have the right to raise concerns with the Firm or a supervisory authority about our processing of your Personal Data. If you wish to raise concerns with us, please contact us as described below. The applicable supervisory authorities for the Firm are the Cyberspace Administration of China and its local counterparts.
DATA SECURITY
The Firm understands that storing Personal Data in a secure manner is an essential requirement of the Data Protection Laws and, therefore, we employ reasonable physical, technical, and administrative safeguards to secure Personal Data against foreseeable risks, including unauthorized use, access, disclosure, destruction, or modification. Our information security team has developed policies, standards, and procedures to support and enforce preventive and detective operational controls to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of Personal Data. We utilize preventive and detective controls, such as up-to-date antivirus protection and encryption, to safeguard your Personal Data. Additionally, all personnel are required to read and attest to the Firm’s code of business conduct and confidentiality and data security policies on an annual basis. They are also required to attend online data privacy and security training.
No method of transmission over the internet or method of electronic storage is completely secure. While security cannot be guaranteed, the Firm strives to protect the security of your information and is constantly reviewing and enhancing its information security measures. Transmission of your data to our website is at your own risk.
INTERNATIONAL DATA TRANSFER
Due to the Firm’s multinational character, our affiliates, offices, and other third-party recipients listed above may be located in different countries. A list of the Firm’s offices is available here. You understand and agree that, for the purposes stated above, we may transfer your Personal Data to other Firm affiliates and offices as well as third parties outside China.
To the extent that we transfer your Personal Data to recipients located outside China, we will provide an adequate level of protection to the Personal Data, including appropriate technical and organizational security measures. We will also enter into agreements with the data recipients to allocate responsibilities and obligations to protect your Personal Data. The retention period of Personal Data will be the shortest time needed to achieve the purposes of the cross-border transfer unless applicable laws provide otherwise.
CHILDREN’S PRIVACY
Children under 14 years old are not the target audience for our website. To protect their privacy, we prohibit the collection of Personal Data from children. Please contact us if you believe that we have any Personal Data from any children under the age of 14 without their parental/guardian consent — we will promptly investigate (and remove) such Personal Data.
CONTACT INFORMATION
If you (i) have any questions or feedback relating to your Personal Data or this Policy, (ii) would like to withdraw your consent to any use of your Personal Data as set out in this Policy, (iii) would like to make a request related to your rights to your Personal Data, or (iv) would like to report a violation of this Policy, please contact the China Offices Data Protection Officer and/or the Privacy Office at the contact information below.
CHINA OFFICES DATA PROTECTION OFFICER
|
Email: |
MLChinaDPO@morganlewis.com |
Telephone: |
+86.10.5876.3500 (Beijing)
+86.21.8022.8588 |
Addresses: |
Suite 823, 8th Floor
Beijing Kerry Centre South Tower,
No. 1 Guang Hua Road
Chaoyang District, Beijing
and
Units 2802-2810 Tower A, Three ITC
No. 183 Hongqiao Road
Shanghai 200030, China |
MORGAN LEWIS PRIVACY OFFICE
|
Email: |
MLPrivacyOffice@morganlewis.com |
Telephone: |
+1.215.963.5000 |
Address: |
2222 Market Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103 |
CHANGES TO THIS POLICY
The Firm may revise this Policy from time to time without any prior notice. Please refer to the date of the Policy to determine when it was last updated. Your continued interaction with the Firm constitutes your acknowledgement and acceptance of such changes.
Effective: November 2023