What the intake form collects, and for how long.

What is collected

One form on this site collects personal information: the intake form on the contact page. It asks for the following, and the fields marked required on the form are the only ones that must be completed.

• Your name
• Email
• Phone
• Your role
• Firm or organisation
• Process sought
• Subject matter
• Other parties
• Opposing counsel
• What the dispute is about
• Timing
• Preferred reply

Submitting the form also records the date and time and your browser's user-agent string. Those two are kept for investigating abuse of the form and are not used for anything else.

It also records the network address the request arrived from. This site sits behind a content delivery network, so that address is normally the network's own rather than your connection's — which is why it is kept simply because it arrives with the request, and not as a way of identifying anyone.

Nothing else on this site collects personal information. There is no newsletter, no account, no comment form and no upload.

Information about other people

The form asks for the other parties to the dispute and their counsel. That is information about people who have not filled in the form and may not know it was sent. It is asked for one reason: I cannot accept an appointment before conflicts are checked, and the check needs names.

Please give names and nothing more about them. The form asks you not to include privileged or confidential detail anywhere in it, and the summary field says so directly. There is deliberately no field for amounts in dispute and no way to attach a document.

Why it is collected, and on what basis

To reply to your inquiry and to run a conflicts check. The basis is your consent, which the form asks for explicitly with an unchecked box you have to tick. The wording you agree to is on the form itself, and it names SML Company Ltd, the company that holds this practice's systems.

It is not used for marketing. It is not sold, rented or shared with anyone for their own purposes.

Where it is stored

In a DynamoDB table in Amazon Web Services' Canada Central region, in Canada. It is encrypted at rest. Two emails are sent when you submit the form — a notification to the practice and a confirmation to you — using Amazon Simple Email Service, also in the same Canadian region.

The table sits in an Amazon Web Services account that also runs systems unrelated to this practice.

Two companies therefore process it, and both are named because a reader asking for a copy or a deletion needs to know where it went. Amazon Web Services stores the submission and sends the two emails, in Canada. Google receives the notification email, because the practice's mail is on Google Workspace — so a copy of what you send, including any names you give me, sits in that mailbox. If you reply to the confirmation, that reply goes there too.

The confirmation sent to you is delivered to whoever runs your email. That is your provider rather than mine, and I have no control over what they keep.

No one else is sent it. There is no CRM, no mailing list and no analytics on the submission. Who can read what is stored is a different question from who it is sent to, and it is answered under "Who can see it" below.

How long it is kept

24 months from the date you send it, after which the record is deleted automatically by the database rather than by someone remembering to do it. That period is long enough to run a conflicts check across the normal life of a matter and no longer than necessary for that purpose.

Emails are a separate matter. The notification sits in the practice's mailbox and the confirmation sits in yours, and neither is deleted by that mechanism.

Who can see it

The record in the table: me, and the small number of people who administer the account it sits in with me.

The system that receives what you send can only add a record — it cannot read back what is stored.

The notification goes to the practice's mailbox, which is read by me and by administrative staff and is hosted on Google Workspace — so Google holds a copy of whatever you send me.

The confirmation that went to you sits with whoever runs your email. That copy is in your hands rather than mine.

Cookies and analytics

This site sets no cookies and runs no analytics. There is no tracking script on any page, nothing is stored on your device, and there is therefore nothing to consent to and no banner. If that changes, this page changes on the same day and its last updated date moves with it.

There are no third-party scripts of any kind on this site, no embedded video, no web fonts fetched from another company's servers, and no social media widgets. The pages you are reading make no request to anyone but this site.

Asking for a copy, or asking me to delete it

Email info@smlcompany.ca and ask. You can ask for a copy of what you sent, ask me to correct it, or ask me to delete it before the 24 months are up. Inquiries are answered within two business days.

Deletion removes the record. It does not retract the emails already sent, and if a conflicts check has already been run I will tell you what its outcome was rather than pretending the inquiry did not happen.

What an inquiry is not

Sending the form does not create a retainer, does not appoint me as a neutral in your matter, and does not itself establish a mediator–party relationship. It also does not, by itself, complete a conflicts check — it gives me what I need to run one.

Changes to this page

If what happens to your information changes, this page is edited on the same day and the date at the top moves. There is no archive of previous versions.

Contact

Questions about any of the above: info@smlcompany.ca. The site is https://adr.smlcompany.ca, and correspondence is by email — Toronto · Ontario · By appointment.