Privacy policy

Probate Lawyer is a website publishing general information about probate and deceased estate administration in Victoria. This policy explains what happens to information you provide through the website, and what happens when you choose to send an enquiry to the published enquiry address.

The website itself does not operate an online submission form, an account system or a database of enquiries. An enquiry reaches the published enquiry address only if you send it from your own email application.

If you choose to send an enquiry, the email you send will usually contain:

• your name;
• your email address, and your phone number if you choose to include it;
• a description of your situation, which may include details about a deceased person, a will, an estate or family members;
• anything else you choose to include in the email, or to say if you telephone instead.

The enquiry form on this website does not submit your details online. When you use it, the form prepares an email draft in your own email application, addressed to the published enquiry address, which you then send in the ordinary way. This means:

• the website itself does not receive the contents of the form before you send the email, and does not store them in a database;
• your enquiry is not sent until you press Send in your email application;
• once you send it, the email is delivered to the published enquiry address and is handled like any other email sent to that address;
• email is not a secure channel, so treat it accordingly.

Separately from the form, ordinary website hosting may still process information about your visit, as described below.

Information you send in an enquiry is used to read and reply to that enquiry, to work out whether the subject matter can be assisted with, and to carry out the usual conflict-of-interest checks before any lawyer agrees to act. If you go on to engage a lawyer, the information is then used for that legal work and for the record-keeping that professional and legal obligations require.

Enquiry details are not sold, and are not used to send you marketing you have not asked for.

Information sent in an enquiry may need to be disclosed for the purpose it was provided for — for example to a court, a land registry or a revenue authority where a matter requires it, to a third party you ask to be dealt with such as a bank, superannuation fund or accountant, to the ordinary IT and document services used to read and store email, or where disclosure is required or permitted by law.

We take reasonable steps to protect personal information from misuse, loss and unauthorised access. No transmission over the internet, including email, can be guaranteed to be secure, so please treat email accordingly.

Records connected with an enquiry or a matter are kept for the period required by the applicable professional and legal obligations, and are then disposed of appropriately. Estate records are commonly kept for a substantial period, because questions about an estate can arise years after it is finalised.

• This site does not require you to create an account or log in.
• We have not added advertising tags or advertising trackers to this website.
• Pages load fonts from Google Fonts, so your browser makes a request to that third-party service, which will receive your IP address.
• Our hosting and platform providers may process information about your visit, including standard server logs containing IP addresses, request details and technical error reports, for security, reliability and diagnostic purposes. We do not control the full detail of that processing, so we cannot make absolute statements about it.

You may ask for access to personal information held about you as a result of an enquiry, and ask for it to be corrected if it is inaccurate. Contact enquiries@probatelawyer.net.au or phone 134 134. If you are not satisfied with how your personal information or your complaint has been handled, you may raise it with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

We may update this policy. The date at the top of this page shows when it was last updated. See also our website terms and disclaimer.