Privacy Policy

I am a solicitor-advocate qualified in England & Wales. I practise as an Independent Arbitrator & Mediator. I am regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (“SRA”).

I am committed to respecting your privacy and protecting confidential and privileged information. Personal information is information from which you may be identified, or which, together with other data which I have or have access to, may identify you (“Personal Information”).

I take my obligations in relation to Personal Information seriously. This notice contains the privacy policy adopted by me, and sets out how I collect and process Personal Information, as well as the rights and options that you have, and how to contact me if you have a complaint.

By contacting me, using this website, sharing Personal Information with me and/or engaging my services, you consent to me collecting, processing and sharing your Personal Information in accordance with this policy.

This notice is in effect as of the date indicated on it. Updated versions of this notice will appear on my website (www.bengiaretta.com) from time to time.

Personal Information is collected when:

• you or your organisation make(s) enquiries or appoint(s) me as an arbitrator or a mediator.
• you or your organisation correspond(s) with me.
  

What types of Personal Information are collected?

The types of Personal Information which I may collect and process include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Your name, address, telephone number, email address or contact details, and job title.
• Passport, driving licence, identification card, or other identification information.
• Financial information (including banking details), and other Personal Information      relevant to enable me to invoice for payment of fees and expenses.
• Workplace information (employment history, job title etc).
• Online identifiers, including IP addresses and cookie identifiers.
• Gender and ethnicity information.
• Data from third party sources such as arbitration institutions, regulatory agencies, government agencies, online information service providers or from publicly available records and Personal Information that is available publicly, for example on an organisation’s website or LinkedIn.

The Personal Information may relate to parties involved in arbitrations, arbitrators, tribunal secretaries, arbitral institution employees, legal representatives, witnesses, experts, service providers, and suppliers.
 

How Personal Information is used?

Your Personal Information is used for the following purposes:

• To carry out conflict checks relevant to any potential engagement or appointment.
• To comply with legal obligations, including maintaining records, or conducting any necessary checks (e.g. anti-money laundering, fraud and crime prevention and detection, or in relation to international or trade sanctions).
• To hold sufficient information relevant for administrative and billing purposes.
• To monitor compliance with existing policies and standards.
• To protect the security of communications and other systems and to prevent      and detect security threats, frauds or other criminal or malicious activities.
• To exercise or defend my legal rights, or to comply with the order of any court or other judicial authority or arbitral body.
• For other purposes ancillary to any of the above or any other specific purposes for which your Personal Information was provided.

The legal basis for processing your Personal Information 

The legal basis for processing your Personal Information, and that of any third party which you provide to me, is:

• Your consent to process your Personal Information in that manner. (You have the right to withdraw this consent at any time, but this will not affect the lawfulness of any processing activity carried out prior to you withdrawing your consent.)
• Because it is necessary to do so to provide the services for which I am approached or engaged relating to the case in question, you, and/or your organisation.
• To comply with my professional and legal obligations as well as to keep records of compliance processes or other records.
• Because my legitimate interests, or those of a third-party recipient of your personal data, make the processing necessary, provided that those interests are not overridden by your interests or fundamental rights and freedoms.

Please note that some of the processing of personal data may be covered by legal professional privilege.

Sharing your Personal Information with others

It may be necessary for professional reasons or because I am legally required to do so, for me to share Personal Information with third parties, including courts, arbitration institutions, arbitrators, professional transcribers, other arbitration service providers, law enforcement authorities and regulators. 

I may also need to share Personal Information with third parties (including but not limited to Newmans Row) for the purposes of business administration. 

Please note that my practice is international so that it may be necessary in the course of my work or the administration of my business to transfer Personal Information in or out of the UK and the European Economic Area. Where this occurs, I will take appropriate measures to safeguard the security of any Personal Information transferred and to protect your privacy rights. If this applies to you and you wish additional precautions to be taken in respect of your Personal Information please let me know.

Storage of Personal Information

Your Personal Information will be securely stored and access will be limited to me and those third parties who assist me to provide my services or administer my practice.

Personal Information will be stored for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes for which it was collected. In general, this means that Personal Information in relation to any specific engagement, legal case or legal service provided will be retained for a period long enough to satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements or to provide protection for me in relation to any complaint or legal claim, or as necessary in relation to any past, ongoing or potential dispute which is the subject of the engagement.

In relation to the limited information necessary to conduct conflict checks, such Personal Information is generally required to be retained indefinitely while I maintain a professional practice to comply with professional, regulatory, and legal obligations. Such data is limited to your name (only if you were an individual client) or the name of your organisation (which is not Personal Information).

The policy for retention of Personal Information may be reviewed from time to time. In relation to specific cases, any departure from this general policy will be considered on a case-by-case basis. 

In order to decide on the appropriate period to retain any Personal Information, the nature, extent and sensitivity of the Personal Information will be taken into account as well as the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure, the purposes for which it was collected and will be processed, and whether there is an appropriate way of achieving my legitimate purpose through other means.

At the end of the retention period Personal Information will be destroyed in accordance with my obligations under applicable laws and in accordance with any relevant guidance.

My website 

I use cookies on my website which are necessary for the website to work properly. A cookie consists of information sent by a web server to a web browser and stored by the browser. The information is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server. This enables the web server to identify and track the web browser.

Some cookies will be deleted from your computer when you close your browser, but some will remain stored on your computer until deleted, or until they reach a specified expiry date. Most browsers allow you to reject all cookies, whilst some browsers allow you to reject just third-party cookies. For example, in Edge you can refuse all cookies by clicking “Tools”, “Internet Options”, “Privacy”, and selecting “Block all cookies” using the sliding selector. Blocking all cookies will, however, have a negative impact upon the usability of many websites, including mine.

Your data protection rights

You have a number of rights that you can exercise free of charge and on request in certain circumstances. But if your requests are obviously unfounded or excessive, I reserve the right to charge a reasonable fee or to refuse to act on them.

In summary, depending on the circumstances, you have the right:

• to be informed about the collection and use of your Personal Information
• to access your Personal Information 
• to have inaccurate Personal Information corrected, or completed (if it is incomplete)
• to have your Personal Information erased
• to restrict my processing of your Personal Information
• to receive a copy of any Personal Information you have provided to me, in a machine-readable format, or have this information sent to a third party
• to object at any time to processing of your Personal Information for direct      marketing purposes
• to object in certain other situations to the continued processing of your Personal Information

For more information on these rights and when you can exercise them, see the Information Commissioner’s Guide.

If you want to exercise any of these rights, please me us know by emailing me at bg@bengiaretta.com. Please include “Data Protection” in the subject line of your email. If you want me to reply, or to send you anything, you must give me your contact details as well. I may need to ask you to verify your identity.

I will respond to you within one calendar month from when I receive your request, unless the complexity and number of requests I receive means that I need more time. If I need more time (up to two further months) I will tell you why within the first month.

How to complain

If you have any complaint about my use of your Personal Information, please send your complaint to me at bg@bengiaretta.com.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office if you are in the UK, or with the supervisory authority of the European Member State where you work, normally live or where the alleged infringement of data protection laws occurred. The Information Commissioner’s Office can be contacted here.

Please see: https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/. The ICO’s helpline number is: +44 (0)303 123 1113.

Changes to this privacy policy

Any changes to this privacy policy will be notified by way of update and amendment to this privacy notice.

July 2026