1. Who we are and what this policy covers
This Privacy Policy explains how Doyle’s Guide Pte. Ltd. (“Doyle’s Guide“, “we“, “us“) collects, uses, discloses and protects personal information. Doyle’s Guide Pte. Ltd. is a company incorporated in Singapore (UEN 201908599M) with its registered office at 68 Circular Road #02-01, Singapore 049422. For the purposes of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (“EU GDPR“) and the UK GDPR, we are the controller of the personal information described in this policy.
Doyle’s Guide is an independent legal directory and rankings publication. We research, rank and publish recommendations of lawyers and law firms in Australia, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore and other Asia-Pacific markets.
This policy applies to:
- Lawyers and other legal professionals whom we research, verify, rank, list or contact, whether or not they have ever dealt with us directly;
- Survey participants, including lawyers, clients and other market participants who take part in our peer-nomination and client surveys or make submissions to us;
- Visitors to doylesguide.com and any related websites, newsletters and services (the “Site“);
- Customers, subscribers and advertisers, and the individuals who act for them; and
- Anyone who contacts us, including by email, enquiry form or social media.
It does not apply to third-party websites we link to, or to personal information we handle as an employer, which is covered by separate notices.
Where this policy refers to “personal information”, it includes “personal data” and “personal information” as those terms are defined under the laws that apply to you. Section 10 sets out additional information for people in specific jurisdictions.
2. Personal information we collect
| Category | Examples | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Professional identity | Name, post-nominals (e.g. KC, SC), title, firm or organisation, office location, practice areas, jurisdictions of admission, year of admission or call | Public sources; the individual; their firm; survey participants |
| Business contact details | Work email address, work phone number, office address, professional profile URLs | Public sources (firm websites, regulator and bar registers, professional profiles); the individual; their firm |
| Professional standing and reputation | Admission and licence status, regulator and bar register entries, published disciplinary findings, professional memberships and fellowships, awards, notable matters, peer and client opinions about the individual’s work | Regulators and courts; public sources; survey participants; the individual; their firm |
| Survey and submission data | Nominations and comments a participant makes, their own professional details, the date and context of the response | Survey participants; firms making submissions |
| Account and transaction data | Name, organisation, billing contact, purchase and subscription history, correspondence | Customers, subscribers and advertisers |
| Communications | Emails, enquiries, feedback, complaints and our replies | The individual |
| Technical and usage data | IP address, browser and device type, pages viewed, referring site, approximate location derived from IP address, cookie identifiers, security and bot-detection signals | The Site and our service providers (see section 5) |
Information collected from third parties. Much of the information we hold about lawyers is collected from sources other than the lawyer, including firm websites, regulator and bar registers, court and tribunal records, professional associations, published directories, media reports, professional networking profiles, and nominations made by peers and clients. Where the law requires it, we notify individuals that we hold their information, as described in section 4.
Sensitive information. We do not seek to collect sensitive or special category information (such as health, racial or ethnic origin, religious or political beliefs, or sexual orientation). Where we review publicly available disciplinary or regulatory findings to verify a lawyer’s eligibility for inclusion, we use that information only for that purpose and do not publish it. Please do not send us sensitive information about yourself or others in survey responses or submissions.
3. How we use personal information and our legal bases
We use personal information only for the purposes below. The “legal basis” column applies to individuals in the EU, EEA and UK; equivalent purposes and consent rules under other laws are explained in section 10.
| Purpose | Legal basis (EU/UK GDPR) |
|---|---|
| Researching, verifying, assessing and ranking lawyers and law firms, and publishing our rankings, recommendations and editorial content | Legitimate interests: operating an independent legal directory that helps clients identify experienced lawyers, and the public interest in freedom of expression and information |
| Verifying eligibility and accuracy, including checking licence, admission and regulator records, live firm biographies, practice focus, office location and published disciplinary findings | Legitimate interests: publishing accurate rankings and protecting the integrity of our research |
| Inviting individuals to take part in peer-nomination and client surveys, and analysing responses | Legitimate interests: conducting independent market research |
| Sending lawyers and firms information about their listings, research timetables, submissions and related Doyle’s Guide products | Legitimate interests; or consent where the law requires it. You can opt out at any time |
| Providing products and services to customers, subscribers and advertisers, invoicing and account management | Performance of a contract; legal obligation (tax and accounting records) |
| Responding to enquiries, correction requests, complaints and rights requests | Legitimate interests; legal obligation |
| Operating, securing and improving the Site, including preventing scraping, fraud and abuse | Legitimate interests; consent for non-essential cookies (section 5) |
| Complying with law, enforcing our rights and handling disputes | Legal obligation; legitimate interests |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have balanced our interests against the rights and interests of the individuals concerned. We publish only professional information, not private-life information, and we give individuals a straightforward way to object and to correct their entries. You can ask us for more information about this balancing assessment.
We do not use personal information for purposes incompatible with those above without first telling you and, where required, obtaining your consent.
4. Rankings, surveys and published professional information
What we publish. Our published rankings and listings contain professional information only: a lawyer’s name, any senior-counsel designation (e.g. KC or SC), firm or chambers, office locality, practice area and ranking tier, together with editorial commentary about firms and markets. We do not publish lawyers’ contact details on ranking pages, survey responses, or the identity of the people who nominated them.
How rankings are made. Rankings are editorial judgements made by our research team. They draw on peer and client nominations, interviews, firm submissions, publicly available information and independent verification. We use software, including AI-assisted research and analysis tools, to help gather and organise information, but every ranking decision is reviewed and made by a person. No ranking is produced solely by automated means.
Peer-nomination and client surveys. If you take part in a survey, we collect your own professional details and the nominations and comments you provide. We treat individual responses as confidential. We do not disclose who nominated whom, and we publish survey results only in aggregated form or as unattributed comments.
Notice to lawyers. If we collect information about you from someone other than you, we take reasonable steps to tell you, for example when we invite you to a survey, contact you about your listing, or publish a ranking that includes you. This policy forms part of that notice.
Corrections and objections. If you are listed and believe your entry is inaccurate or out of date, email [[email protected]] and we will correct it promptly. You may also object to being included in our rankings. We will consider every objection carefully and will remove or not publish your entry unless we have compelling legitimate grounds, or a legal right, to continue. Ranking tiers reflect our independent editorial opinion, and we may decline a request to change a tier itself.
Contact lists. We keep business contact details for lawyers so that we can run our surveys and tell them about their listings and our products. We use individual work email addresses only, not firm general inboxes. Every email we send includes a simple way to unsubscribe.
5. Cookies, analytics and similar technologies
We use cookies and similar technologies on the Site in three categories.
| Category | What it does | Examples | Your choice |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strictly necessary | Delivers and secures the Site, including protection against bots, scraping and attacks | Cloudflare security and bot-management cookies; WordPress session cookies | Always on; cannot be switched off |
| Analytics | Tells us, in aggregate, how the Site is used so we can improve it | [Google Analytics 4 / insert provider] | Off by default for visitors in the EU, EEA and UK until you consent; elsewhere you can opt out at any time |
| Functional | Remembers your preferences | [insert, or delete row] | You can accept or refuse |
We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and we do not sell or share Site data for targeted advertising.
You can change your choices at any time through the [Cookie Settings] link in the Site footer, or by adjusting your browser settings. We honour Global Privacy Control (GPC) browser signals as a request to opt out where the law requires it.
6. Who we share personal information with
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We do not rent or sell our contact lists.
We disclose personal information only to:
- The public, to the extent of the professional information we publish in our rankings and editorial content (section 4);
- Service providers who process information on our behalf under written contracts that require them to protect it and use it only on our instructions, including website hosting and content delivery ([insert host]; Cloudflare), email and productivity services ([Google Workspace]), survey and form tools ([insert]), analytics ([insert]), payment processing ([PayPal / insert]), and AI-assisted research and drafting tools ([insert, e.g. Anthropic]);
- Our professional advisers, such as lawyers, accountants and auditors, under duties of confidentiality;
- Related entities and successors, including in connection with a sale, merger, restructure or transfer of all or part of our business, provided the recipient is bound by protections at least equivalent to this policy; and
- Regulators, courts, law enforcement and other authorities, where the law requires it or where necessary to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.
We do not disclose individual survey responses or nominator identities to the lawyers or firms concerned, or to any other third party, except where the law compels us.
7. International transfers
We are based in Singapore and our service providers operate in several countries, including [the United States, Australia and the European Union]. Your personal information may therefore be transferred to, stored in and accessed from countries other than the one in which you live, which may have different data protection laws.
When we transfer personal information across borders, we take steps to ensure it receives a standard of protection comparable to that required where it was collected:
- From the EU/EEA: we rely on adequacy decisions where available, or on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses;
- From the UK: we rely on UK adequacy regulations where available, or on the International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the Standard Contractual Clauses;
- From Singapore: we ensure recipients are bound by legally enforceable obligations providing a standard of protection comparable to the Personal Data Protection Act 2012, as required by the Personal Data Protection Regulations 2021;
- From Canada: we use contractual and other means to provide a comparable level of protection, and, for personal information of Québec residents, we carry out the privacy impact assessment required before communicating it outside Québec;
- From New Zealand: we disclose personal information overseas only where Information Privacy Principle 12 of the Privacy Act 2020 permits, including where the recipient is subject to comparable safeguards.
You can ask us for a copy or summary of the safeguards we use for a particular transfer.
8. Retention, security and data breaches
Retention. We keep personal information only for as long as we need it for the purposes in section 3, or as the law requires.
| Information | Retention period |
|---|---|
| Published rankings and editorial content | Kept as part of our historical archive of published editions, unless removed following an objection or correction |
| Research and verification records about lawyers | [6] years after the edition they relate to |
| Individual survey responses | [3] years after the survey closes; aggregated results kept indefinitely |
| Business contact details | Until the individual unsubscribes, objects, or we learn the details are no longer current; a suppression record is kept so we do not contact them again |
| Customer and transaction records | [7] years after the end of the relationship, to meet tax and accounting obligations |
| Enquiries, complaints and rights requests | [3] years after the matter is closed |
| Site security logs | [90 days] |
| Analytics data | [14] months |
When information is no longer needed, we securely delete or anonymise it.
Security. We protect personal information with technical and organisational measures appropriate to the risk, including encryption in transit, access controls and multi-factor authentication, restricting access to staff and contractors who need it, vetting our service providers, and monitoring the Site for attacks and automated scraping. No system is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee the security of information transmitted over the internet.
Data breaches. If a data breach is likely to result in significant harm to you, or a risk to your rights and freedoms, we will notify you and the relevant regulators as required by law, including the Personal Data Protection Commission of Singapore, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and any relevant provincial regulator, the New Zealand Privacy Commissioner, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office, the competent EU supervisory authority, and US state authorities.
9. Your rights and how to exercise them
Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of the following rights:
- Access: to know whether we hold personal information about you, and to receive a copy of it and information about how we use it;
- Correction: to have inaccurate or incomplete information corrected;
- Deletion: to ask us to delete your personal information;
- Objection: to object to our processing based on legitimate interests, including inclusion in our rankings, and to object at any time to direct marketing;
- Restriction: to ask us to limit how we use your information while a concern is resolved;
- Portability: to receive information you provided to us in a structured, machine-readable format, or have it sent to another organisation;
- Withdrawal of consent: where we rely on consent, to withdraw it at any time, without affecting processing before withdrawal;
- Opt out: of the sale or sharing of personal information, targeted advertising and profiling (we do none of these, but you may still submit a request); and
- Complaint: to complain to us and to a data protection regulator (section 12).
How to make a request. Email [[email protected]] or write to us at the address in section 12. You may also use an authorised agent. We may need to verify your identity, or your agent’s authority, before we act, and we will ask only for the information we need to do so.
Our response. We will acknowledge your request promptly and respond within the time required by the law that applies to you, which is generally one month for EU and UK requests, 30 days for Singapore, Canada and New Zealand requests, and 45 days for US state requests. Where the law allows, we may extend this period and will tell you why. Requests are free unless they are manifestly unfounded or excessive, or the law permits a reasonable fee.
These rights are not absolute. We may decline all or part of a request where the law permits, for example where complying would reveal another person’s personal information (such as the identity of a nominator), or where we need the information for legal claims or to exercise freedom of expression. If we decline, we will explain why and tell you how to complain. We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of your rights.
If you are dissatisfied with our response, you may appeal by replying to our decision. We will respond to an appeal within the period the law requires (60 days in most US states).
10. Additional information for specific jurisdictions
European Union and European Economic Area
The EU GDPR applies to our processing of personal information about individuals in the EU and EEA. Our EU representative under Article 27 of the EU GDPR is [insert name and address], who may be contacted at [insert email]. You have the right to lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority in the EU member state where you live or work, or where an alleged infringement took place. Section 2 describes the sources of personal information we collect indirectly.
United Kingdom
The UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, as amended by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, apply to our processing of personal information about individuals in the UK. Our UK representative under Article 27 of the UK GDPR is [insert name and address], who may be contacted at [insert email]. If you complain to us about our use of your personal information, we will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days, investigate it without undue delay and tell you the outcome. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk).
United States
This section applies to residents of California and other US states with comprehensive consumer privacy laws. It forms our notice at collection.
| Category of personal information | Collected in the last 12 months | Disclosed for a business purpose to |
|---|---|---|
| Identifiers (name, work email, IP address, cookie identifiers) | Yes | Service providers; the public (name only, in published rankings) |
| Professional or employment-related information (firm, role, practice areas, admission status, professional reputation) | Yes | Service providers; the public (in published rankings) |
| Commercial information (purchase and subscription history) | Yes, customers only | Service providers; professional advisers |
| Internet or other electronic network activity (pages viewed, browser and device data) | Yes | Service providers |
| Approximate geolocation (derived from IP address) | Yes | Service providers |
| Inferences (our editorial assessments of professional standing, expressed as ranking tiers) | Yes | The public (in published rankings) |
| Sensitive personal information | No | Not applicable |
We collect these categories from the sources in section 2, for the purposes in section 3, and keep them for the periods in section 8. We have not sold or shared personal information, as those terms are defined under California law, in the last 12 months, and we have no actual knowledge of selling or sharing the personal information of anyone under 16. We honour Global Privacy Control signals as a valid opt-out request.
California residents may also request information about disclosures of personal information to third parties for their own direct marketing purposes; we make no such disclosures. To exercise your rights, see section 9.
Canada
We handle personal information in accordance with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act and, where they apply, the private-sector privacy laws of Alberta, British Columbia and Québec. Business contact information that we collect, use or disclose solely to communicate with individuals about their employment, business or profession is largely outside the scope of these laws. Where consent is required, we rely on implied consent for professional information that individuals or their firms have made publicly available, and you can withdraw your consent at any time, subject to legal and contractual restrictions.
The person in charge of the protection of personal information at Doyle’s Guide is our Privacy Officer, [insert name and title], who may be contacted at [[email protected]]. Our electronic messages comply with Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation, and we action unsubscribe requests within 10 business days. You may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada or to the privacy commissioner of your province.
New Zealand
We comply with the Privacy Act 2020, including Information Privacy Principle 3A, which requires us to take reasonable steps to tell you when we collect personal information about you from someone else. You have the right to access, and request correction of, personal information we hold about you. If we decline to correct it, you may ask us to attach a statement of the correction you sought. You may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (privacy.org.nz).
Singapore
We comply with the Personal Data Protection Act 2012 (“PDPA“). Business contact information provided or collected for business purposes is generally outside the PDPA’s consent, purpose and notification obligations, but we protect it in line with this policy. Where the PDPA requires consent, we obtain it or rely on deemed consent or a statutory exception, and you may withdraw consent by contacting our Data Protection Officer. We will tell you the likely consequences of withdrawing consent before we act on it. You may complain to the Personal Data Protection Commission (pdpc.gov.sg).
11. Other matters
Children. The Site and our services are intended for legal professionals and their clients. They are not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe we have done so, contact us and we will delete it.
Automated decision-making. We do not make decisions that have legal or similarly significant effects on individuals based solely on automated processing. Rankings are editorial decisions made by people (section 4).
Third-party links. The Site links to law firm and other third-party websites. We are not responsible for their privacy practices, and we encourage you to read their privacy policies.
Changes to this policy. We may update this policy from time to time. We will post the updated version on the Site with a new “last updated” date and, where changes are material, take reasonable steps to tell affected individuals before the changes take effect.
12. Governing law, contact details and complaints
Governing law. This policy is governed by the laws of Singapore, and the courts of Singapore have non-exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from it. Nothing in this section limits any right you have under the data protection laws of the place where you live, including your right to complain to your local regulator or to bring proceedings in your local courts where those laws allow.
Contact us. For privacy questions, requests or complaints, contact our Data Protection Officer:
Data Protection Officer
Doyle’s Guide Pte. Ltd.
68 Circular Road #02-01
Singapore 049422
Email: [[email protected]]
We aim to resolve every concern directly. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to the regulator for your jurisdiction:
| Jurisdiction | Regulator |
|---|---|
| Singapore | Personal Data Protection Commission |
| United Kingdom | Information Commissioner’s Office |
| EU and EEA | Your national data protection supervisory authority (list) |
| Canada | Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, or your provincial privacy commissioner |
| New Zealand | Office of the Privacy Commissioner |
| United States | The California Privacy Protection Agency, or the Attorney General of your state |
Last updated: 22 October 2026.