Privacy and data

Who is responsible

ABOGADO LIMITED, registered in England and Wales under company number 15407875, registered office 124 City Road, London EC1V 2NX, is the data controller. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under reference ZC082759.

Legal work is carried out by a Spanish abogado from our office in Seville, Spain. Your file is therefore handled in Spain, and that is dealt with below.

For anything about your data, write to [email protected] or telephone 0330 684 5332.

What we collect

When you enquire — your name, email, telephone, and whatever you tell us about your situation. If you arrived from an advertisement and consented to Google cookies, the click identifier from that advertisement.
When you instruct us — identity documents, your NIE and national insurance or tax references, property details, bank details for invoicing, and the documents your matter needs. In an estate, that will include information about the person who died and about the other beneficiaries.
When you visit the site — see the cookies section below.

Occasionally a document you send us will contain more sensitive information, typically a death certificate. We use it only for the matter and hold it under the same rules as everything else.

Why we are allowed to hold it

To take steps before a contract, and to perform it. This covers answering your enquiry and then running your matter. Answering an enquiry does not run on consent, which is why there is no consent tickbox on our form and why you cannot “withdraw consent” to it — but you can tell us to stop and delete, and we will.
Legal obligation. Spanish anti-money-laundering law requires us to identify clients, keep records and, in defined circumstances, report. UK company and tax law requires us to keep accounting records.
Legitimate interests. Keeping a conflicts record, defending ourselves against a claim, and basic site measurement that identifies nobody.
Consent — only for Google Analytics and Google Ads cookies, which you may refuse and later change.

Who else sees it

Only those who need it to do the job: the Spanish notary, the Spanish tax authorities and the land registry, a Spanish gestoría where one is used, sworn translators, and your own solicitor or accountant where you have asked us to deal with them. Our email, file storage and payment providers process data on our instructions under contract.

We do not sell your data, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not put you on a mailing list. Nothing you send through the enquiry form is passed to Google or to anyone else.

Your file is in Spain

Because the legal work is done in Seville, your data is transferred from the United Kingdom to Spain. The United Kingdom has recognised the European Economic Area, which includes Spain, as providing an adequate level of protection, so the transfer needs no additional safeguards and your data keeps equivalent legal protection on arrival.

How long we keep it

Enquiries that go nowhere — twelve months, then deleted.
Client files — six years from the end of the matter, which reflects the period in which a claim could still be brought against us.
Anti-money-laundering records — ten years, as Spanish law requires. We cannot shorten this one even if you ask.
Accounting records — six years, as UK law requires.

What you can require us to do

You have the right to ask for a copy of what we hold, to have inaccuracies corrected, to have data deleted where we have no continuing reason to keep it, to restrict or object to processing, and to receive data you gave us in a portable form. Ask at [email protected] and we will respond within one month.

Where the law requires us to keep something — the anti-money-laundering records above — we will tell you plainly that we cannot delete it, rather than agreeing and then not doing it.

Cookies

Site measurement. We use Plausible Analytics, which sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device. It tells us which pages people read. It cannot identify you, and it runs whether or not you accept anything.

Google Analytics and Google Ads. These set cookies and only run if you press the accept button. If you decline, no request is made to Google at all. We use them to see whether our advertising is reaching people who actually need us.

Changing your mind. Click here to clear your choice and the question will be asked again.

There is one further piece of storage: if you accept Google cookies and arrived from an advertisement, we keep the advertisement's click identifier for the length of your visit so we can tell which advertisements bring people who become clients. If you decline, we do not.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data

Tell us first — our complaints procedure is here. You also have the right to complain directly to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113, and using our procedure does not affect that right.