Terms and Conditions - Chattertons Trustee Corporation Limited

IMPORTANT: PLEASE READ CAREFULLY THE SECTION MARKED "LIMITATION OF LIABILITY" AS THIS SETS OUT OUR LIABILITY TO YOU.

Introduction

The appointment of Chattertons Trustee Corporation Limited (also referred to as "we" or "us") to any and all offices including Trustee, Attorney, Deputy or Personal Representative is subject to these terms and conditions, except to the extent that any changes are expressly agreed with you in writing. You should also note that, once appointed, Chattertons Trustee Corporation Limited will have a number of responsibilities and obligations and fiduciary duties which may override or conflict with the obligations and duties set in this document.

Chattertons Trustee Corporation

Chattertons Trustee Corporation Limited is a private company limited by shares and registered in England and Wales under Company Number 9919672. We are regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority Licence Number 631484.

Access and Communication

We will be contactable on normal working days between 09:00 and 17:15.

All telephone calls will be responded to as soon as possible and usually on the same day the call is received. All correspondence will be responded to appropriately within 5 working days of receipt. We will comply with time criteria detailed in the Civil Procedure Rules, Protocols and any Court Orders (from time to time). Telephone calls and emails may be monitored or recorded in order to improve our service and to prevent and detect fraud.

You will be allocated a file handler, who will be an employee of Chattertons Legal Services Limited. They will be your first point of contact and you should liaise with them in relation to any ongoing matter.

Fees and Other Charges

Chattertons Trust Corporation Limited does not charge for its appointment as a professional trustee, personal representative, attorney or deputy or for continuing to act as such, but reserves the right to do so in the future. You will be notified of any changes to our charging policy.

Money Laundering, Proceeds of Crime and Combating the Financing of Terrorism

Money laundering and associated regulations place certain obligations upon us. As part of these obligations we may be obliged to verify the identity of certain individuals and the beneficial ownership of funds under our control as well as the source and destination of any funds before any instructions can be carried out. We are also required to disclose to the appropriate authorities any suspicions of money laundering. We will not be able to inform you of any such disclosure and there may be delay in the progress of your matter as a result of the making of a disclosure.

Chattertons Legal Services Limited will complete an electronic identity check on all individuals relevant to your matter in order to comply with our anti-money laundering obligations. By appointing Chattertons Trustee Corporation Limited, you consent to Chattertons Legal Services Limited completing an electronic identity check on your behalf.

We cannot accept liability for any consequential loss arising as a result of our compliance with statutory or regulatory obligations and our costs may include a charge for complying with those obligations.

Electronic Communication

All our staff have email addresses. Unless otherwise directed by you, we may correspond by means of electronic mail. We each agree to accept the risks of using electronic mail, including but not limited to the risks of viruses, interception and unauthorised access.

We each agree to use commercially reasonable procedures to check for commonly known viruses in information sent and received electronically, but we recognise that such procedures cannot be a guarantee that transmissions will be virus free.

Interest

In the case of estate administration, an Executor may have to pay interest on two kinds of legacy, a pecuniary legacy (a gift of money in the Will) or a statutory legacy for a surviving spouse or civil partner under the intestacy rules (where there is no valid Will). The 'Executor’s year' is meant to give ample time for all assets and liabilities to be properly identified and to ensure everything is in order before the estate is distributed to the beneficiaries. If the executor takes longer than a year to administer the estate the beneficiaries are entitled to interest on any outstanding legacies. The rate of interest payable on a legacy in a Will is the basic rate of interest paid by the Court Funds Office. The current rate (as at November 2021) is 0.05%.

As professional Executors, Chattertons Trustee Corporation Limited will consider whether interest is payable.

Confidentiality Disclosure and Data Protection

We will keep confidential information received from you while acting in connection with any appointment unless:-

We have your authority to disclose it; or
Disclosure is required in order to deal with and progress your matter;
We are required to disclose it by law; or
The information is in or comes into the public domain without any breach of confidentiality on our part, or we are required to disclose it by the regulatory or fiscal authorities, in which case, to the extent that we are permitted to do so we will endeavour to give you as much advance notice as possible of any such required disclosures.

You agree that (subject always to applicable rules and with appropriate safeguards in place to ensure that access to relevant confidential information we hold is restricted) we may be appointed even though we hold confidential information relating to another party which may be material to you.

From time to time we engage external organisations to audit client files, they and our insurers, our regulators and our professional advisors may require access to your files and/or confidential information in order to carry out their functions. Unless you instruct otherwise we will assume your consent to such audit and/or access. You authorise us to transfer your information to (i) other offices, (ii) any banking or other institutions with which conducts business in connection with you, or to (iii) accountants, auditors, legal and other advisors, directors or agents who render any service in connection with the services to be provided to you. This permission shall remain in effect notwithstanding your death, unless and until revoked in writing by your personal representative (executor or administrator). We will require these organisations to comply with our confidentiality procedures in respect of information of which they become aware.

You agree to us sharing all of your information with Chattertons Legal Services Limited and Chattertons Wealth Management Limited as well as any holding company of Chattertons Trustee Corporation Limited and any members of a group of companies of which we are a member.

All members of the Chattertons Group will treat all personal data and special category data as confidential and will not process it other than for a legitimate purpose. Steps will be taken to ensure that the information is accurate, kept up to date and not kept for longer than is necessary. Measures will also be taken to safeguard against unauthorised or unlawful processing and accidental loss or destruction or damage to the data.

Subject to certain exceptions, you are entitled to have access to your personal and special category data held by us.

Furthermore, you permit us to disclose information at any time we are ordered to do so by any Court, regulatory authority or governmental department which has jurisdiction over us and whenever we are compelled to do so by any applicable law including the “Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act” (“FATCA”), United States.

By instructing us you are entering in to a contract with us and therefore we have a lawful reason for processing your data, both manually and by electronic means, for the purposes of providing advice, administration and management of your file and fulfilling our contract with you. We also have the lawful right to process your data because we have a legitimate interest in providing you with a service.

If you are an individual we confirm that we are the data controller of personal information (personal data) relating to individuals who are either a named client or through whom we conduct our relationship with you. We will process such data in accordance with the provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protection Act 2018. We may use such personal data for providing legal services and for related purposes such as updating and enhancing client records, analysis to help us manage our business, statutory and regulatory returns and compliance, professional indemnity insurance, administration and training, and we may disclose it to our service providers and agents for these purposes.

Throughout this document, references to “processing” include obtaining, recording or holding information or data, transferring it to other companies associated with us, service providers, the SRA or any other statutory, governmental or regulatory body for legitimate purposes including, where relevant, to other solicitors and/or other debt collection agencies for debt collection purposes and carrying out operations on the information or data.

We also process personal data for purposes required by law (e.g. evidence of identity checks in respect of money laundering) and for commercial purposes (e.g. credit worthiness checks).

We are a data processor acting on your behalf in respect of any other personal data supplied to us by you or on your behalf in the course of our appointment. In relation to such personal data we will:-

Act only in accordance with your instructions in relation to the processing of that data;
Take appropriate organisational and technical measures against unauthorised or unlawful processing of data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, that data; and
Provide appropriate training to personnel to process that data on our behalf.
Ensure that your data is not transferred to any country that does not have adequate protection for individuals rights.

You may have rights under the Data Protection Act 2018 to obtain information from us, including a description of the data we hold about you. If you have any queries concerning this right, please contact our Data Protection Officer at 5 South Street Horncastle Lincs LN9 6DS or via email DPO@Chattertons.com

We will obtain your permission to contact you with details of similar services or for related marketing purposes which we think may be of interest to you.

If you do not want us to contact you for marketing purposes, please let us know:

By post: Marketing Department, Chattertons, 9 Broad Street, Stamford, PE9 1PY
By email: consent@chattertons.com . You can also opt out by clicking on the unsubscribe link in any marketing email we send to you.

To view our full privacy notice please visit our website www.chattertons.com/site/help/privacy or a hard copy can be provided by contacting us as detailed above.

Complaints and Suggestions

We aim to provide high quality advice and excellent client care. We welcome any suggestions that you might wish to make to help us improve our service. We recognise that on occasion, things can go wrong. To raise a concern or make a complaint about our services or a bill please, in the first instance, raise it with the person handling your matter. If you do not consider this appropriate, or they are not able to resolve the problem to your satisfaction, please contact our Risk and Compliance Director.

We want the opportunity to put matters right and we hope and expect to be able to reach a satisfactory solution with you. If we cannot reach a solution together, you can pursue a complaint with the Legal Ombudsman www.legalombudsman.org.uk. A copy of our Client Complaints Policy is available on request and accessible on our website.

Conflicts

We have procedures designed to prevent us from taking appointments where there is or could be a material conflict with the interests of another of our appointments. If you are aware, or become aware of a possible conflict of this type please raise it immediately with us. If a conflict of this nature arises, then it will be up to us, taking account of legal constraints, professional rules and your (and the other client’s) interests and wishes, to decide whether we should continue our appointment, for one only or for neither office.

We will comply with the law of England and Wales in relation to conflicts of interest and our fiduciary position. You should be aware that this may require us to refrain from certain decision making processes, to refuse to follow your explicit instructions where they conflict with those duties or the law, to seek the guidance and or approval of the court and/or to retire or resign from our appointment.

Papers, Documents and Electronic Communication

You agree that we may store documents and papers electronically.

It is important that you keep all documents that relate in any way to the matter in respect of which you have instructed us. This also includes electronic data such as emails and archive data.

After completing any matter on your behalf we are entitled to retain all your papers and documents while there is money owing to us for our charges and expenses.

We will retain our files of papers (except for any of your papers which you ask to be returned to you, or which we decide to return to you) for a minimum of 6 years from the completion of the matter(or such longer period as we advise in writing when we close your file) after which they may be destroyed without further notice.

Original documents such as Wills and Title Deeds may be deposited with us for safekeeping. We do not usually make a charge for this service. We will not destroy or part with possession of those documents without your express authority.

We will not charge for retrieving papers or documents from storage in relation to continuing or new appointments, however, in other circumstances we may make a charge based on time spent producing stored papers or documents to you or to another at your request. We may also charge for reviewing papers in order to comply with your instructions on storage.

Instructions to other Professionals and Lawyers

On appointment Chattertons Trustee Corporation Limited will instruct Chattertons Legal Services Limited to carry out any and all legal work that is necessary and appurtenant to its appointment. Chattertons Trustee Corporation Limited may also appoint Chattertons Wealth Management Limited in relation to any financial advice required.

We may also engage such accountants, investment advisors, agents experts and other professionals as we consider necessary and appropriate to the proper discharge of our duties and we will deduct the cost of such services from funds of the estate, donor or trust. Should we need to instruct other lawyers or professionals (expert witnesses, accountants, Counsel and so on) we do so, unless otherwise agreed, on your behalf and as your agent. They will be responsible to you for the quality and accuracy of the advice they provide and you will be directly responsible for payment of their fees and expenses. Before making any such appointment on your behalf, we will consult with you and seek your agreement to the appointment. In some cases, such appointment may be essential to discharge our duties or comply with the law or court order. We will (where possible) discuss with you if your refusal to provide such consent interferes, conflicts or prevents us in our duties or compliance and whether we can continue with our appointment.

We may delegate the functions of our office or appointment to the fullest extent allowable under the law of England and Wales.

Termination, Resignation and Retirement

Once appointed the Chattertons Trustee Corporation Limited will not be willing to retire from its appointment in any circumstances in which it considers that to do so would amount to a potential breach of trust or it is dissatisfied as to the level and extent of the indemnity provided in respect of that retirement. Chattertons Trustee Corporation Limited's appointment is determined on matters known at the time of appointment or made known to it. Chattertons Trustee Corporation Limited takes on professional appointments but is not obligated to do so.

Before any appointment, we will assess the roles, obligations and duties required in order to decide whether we are willing or able to accept such appointment. Chattertons Trustee Corporation Limited will not be liable for refusing to accept any appointment.

Chattertons Trustee Corporation Limited does not take on any appointments that could require it to make management decisions, take on a directorship or run another company due to a substantial or controlling shareholding held by the estate. If during its appointment, a matter is discovered resulting in the above requirement, we will discuss with you immediately our appointment and subject to an appropriate indemnity, our retirement.

If the terms of our appointment allow us to be removed unilaterally, our appointment is subject to an undertaking by the person holding the said power that they will not exercise such power of removal without providing an indemnity to us at a level and extent agreed by us, such agreement not to be unreasonably withheld.

Limitation of Liability

Under no circumstances shall our liability to you for damages for breach of contract, negligence, other tort, breach of trust or otherwise including legal costs exceed £10m.

Severance

If any provision in our agreement with you is invalid or unenforceable for any reason, that shall not affect the remainder of our agreement with you.

Application and Prevailing Terms

These terms and conditions of business supersede any earlier terms of business Chattertons Trustee Corporation Limited may have agreed with you. They shall not affect any separate terms that you may have with Chattertons Legal Services Limited or Chattertons Wealth Management Limited.

Force Majeure

It is understood and agreed that neither of us will be liable to the other for any delay or failure to fulfil obligations caused by circumstances outside our reasonable control.

Governing Law and Disputes

The appointment of Chattertons Trustee Corporation Limited is deemed to be made in England and is governed by English law. Unless any alternative dispute resolution procedure is agreed with you from time to time, any dispute between us shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the English courts.

Contact us

If you would like to talk to a member of our specialist Private Client team please contact your local office or complete our online enquiry form.