STANDARD TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT

Services

The services which we are to provide for you are outlined in our engagement letter.

Financial

Fees:

1. The fees which we will charge or the manner in which they will be arrived at are set out in our engagement letter. Our fee may include a file administration fee, which will always be itemised on any invoice that we send to you.
2. If the engagement letter specifies a fixed fee, we will charge this for the agreed scope of our services. We will advise you as soon as reasonably practicable if it becomes necessary for us to provide services outside the agreed scope and, if requested, give you an estimate of the likely amount of the further costs.
3. Where our fees are calculated on an hourly basis, the hourly rates are set out in our Letter of Engagement. The differences in those rates reflect the experience and specialisation of our professional staff.

Disbursements and expenses: In providing services we may incur disbursements or have to make payments to third parties on your behalf. These will be included in our invoice to you when the expense is incurred. We may require an advance payment for the disbursements or expenses which we will be incurring on your behalf.

GST (if any): Is payable by you on our fees and charges.

Invoices: We will send interim invoices to you, at regular intervals, usually monthly and on completion of the matter, or termination of our engagement. We may also send you an invoice when we incur a significant expense.

Payment: Invoices are within 7 days of the date of the invoice, unless alternative arrangements have been made with us. We reserve the right to charge interest on any amount which is more than seven days overdue. Interest will be calculated on a daily basis at the rate of 5% above the then official cash rate as published by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and this interest will automatically accrue from the due date for payment without further notice to you.

Security: We may ask you to pre-pay amounts to us, or to provide security for our fees and expenses. You authorise us:

1. to debit against amounts pre-paid by you; and
2. to deduct from any funds held on your behalf in our trust account, any fees, expenses or disbursements for which we have provided an invoice to you.

Debt Recovery Costs: In the event that we incur third party costs in attempting to recover any debt from you, including legal costs incurred on a solicitor-client basis and costs charged by a debt collection agency and related courts costs, those will be added to the debt owed by you.

Third parties: Although you may expect to be reimbursed by a third party for our fees and expenses, and although our invoices may at your request or with your approval be directed to a third party, nevertheless you remain responsible for payment to us if the third party fails to pay us.

Cash: We do not accept cash payments of any kind.

Confidentiality

We will hold in confidence all information concerning you or your affairs that we acquire during the course of acting for you. We will not disclose any of this information to any other person except:

1. to the extent necessary or desirable to enable us to carry out your instructions; or
2. to the extent required by law or by the Law Society's Rules of Conduct and Client Care for Lawyers.

Confidential information concerning you will as far as practicable be made available only to those within our firm who are providing legal services for you.

We will, of course, not disclose to your confidential information which we have in relation to any other client.

Privacy

We comply with the Privacy Act 2020 when dealing with personal information.

We collect personal information about you. This may include your name, phone number, email address, residential address, date of birth, billing information, financial information, IRD number, computer/network Internet Protocol (‘IP’) address, identification information (such as your driver’s licence or passport), personal opinions or feedback you provide on our services, and your membership of an advocacy group, trade union or political party.

Where possible, we collect your personal information directly from you. We may also collect your personal information: from someone else, where you have authorised this; from publicly-available sources; and/or automatically, when you visit our website or use our Services, such as your IP address, web pages you viewed and links you clicked on. Some of this information is collected using cookies (text files saved on your device) and similar tracking technologies.

We collect your personal information for the following purposes: to deliver the services you have requested to you; to communicate with you regarding the services; to verify your identity and/or address; to monitor suspicious or fraudulent activity; to undertake credit checks of you (if necessary); to bill you and collect money that you owe us; to provide relevant marketing and advertising relating to our services; to improve our services based on your feedback; to protect and/or enforce our legitimate business interests and legal rights, including defending any claim and compliance with regulatory and audit functions; and for any other purpose authorised by you or by the Privacy Act 2020.

If you do not provide us with some of the personal information we request, we may be unable to provide you with the services you have requested.

There may be times where we need to share your personal information with third parties. We may share your personal information with the following third parties: SmartAR, a third party payment provider; RealAML and Dimension GRC who provide assistance to fulfil our Anti-Money Laundering obligations; Xero Limited, which provides the accounting software to enable us to pay our suppliers’ invoices; OneLaw, which provides our document management system; The Hustle, which maintains our website; Focus Technology Group, which maintains our IT system; a credit reference agency, for the purpose of carrying out a credit check on you; an actual or potential buyer (and its agents and advisors) in connection with an actual or proposed purchase, merger or acquisition of any part of our business; regulators, law enforcement bodies, government agencies, dispute resolution providers, or other third parties where we consider it is necessary to comply with applicable laws or regulations, or to exercise or defend our legal rights; and other people, where authorised by you.

We will take reasonable steps to keep your personal information safe from loss, unauthorised activity, or other misuse. While we take reasonable steps to maintain secure internet connections, if you provide us with personal information over the internet, the provision of that information is at your own risk. If you follow a link on our website to another site, we suggest you review that site’s privacy policy before you provide personal information.

Subject to certain grounds for refusal set out in the Privacy Act 2020, you have the right to ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, and to ask for your personal information to be corrected if you think it is wrong. We may impose a charge for complying with your request for access to or correction of your personal information. To exercise any of your rights in relation to your personal information, you can contact us by emailing lawyers@marksandworth.co.nz or phoning us on +64 3 474 9272 or writing to us at Marks & Worth Lawyers Limited, PO Box 1116, Dunedin 9054

Termination

You may terminate our retainer at any time.

We may terminate our retainer in any of the circumstances set out in the Law Society's Rules of Conduct and Client Care for Lawyers.

If our retainer is terminated you must pay us all fees due up to the date of termination and all expenses incurred up to that date. We may retain your files until such fees are paid.

Retention of files and documents

You authorise us (without further reference to you) to destroy all physical files and documents for this matter (other than any documents that we hold in safe custody for you or any documents we are required by law to retain for a longer period) seven years after our engagement ends, or earlier if we have converted those files and documents to an electronic format.

Conflicts of interest

We have procedures in place to identify and respond to conflicts of interest. If a conflict of interest arises we will advise you of this and follow the requirements and procedures set out in the Law Society's Rules of Conduct and Client Care for Lawyers.

Duty of care

Our duty of care is to you and not to any other person. Before any other person may rely on our advice, we must expressly agree to this.

Trust Account

We maintain a trust account for all funds which we receive from clients (except monies received for payment of our invoices). If we are holding significant funds on your behalf we will normally lodge those funds on interest bearing deposit with a bank. In that case we will charge an administration fee of 5% of the gross interest derived. If we hold funds on your behalf on interest bearing deposit, we will need to collect certain information from you to comply with our obligations in relation to FATCA and CRS (which we will explain to you).

If we are required to hold funds on your behalf on interest-bearing deposit in our trust account, we are legally obliged to collect certain information in relation to foreign tax residency in order to comply with the requirements for the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and Common Reporting Standards (CRS). We may also be required to report this information to the New Zealand Inland Revenue or to our bank (Westpac) if requested by them.

Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act (AML)

The New Zealand Government has implemented legislation to ensure New Zealand remains a safe place to do business and to deter people from trying to launder money here. The Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009 applies to all law firms.

Under AML we may be required to verify your identity, address and in some cases your source of funds or wealth. We may also be required to verify the details of other individuals connected to you. Although we might already know you, AML rules prescribe steps we must take to complete “customer due diligence” (CDD).

If you are seeing us about company or trust business, we will need information about the company or trust including the people associated with it (such as directors and shareholders, trustees and beneficiaries).

We will try to make this as easy as we can, however, we will need your co-operation to fulfil our AML obligations.

If we are unable to comply with our obligations from information we already hold, we may request you to provide certain documentation such as a copy of your passport or drivers licence, proof of address and details of your source of funds or wealth. If we are unable to verify such documentation, we may be unable to act for you.

General

These Terms apply to any current engagement and also to any future engagement, whether or not we send you another copy of them.

We are entitled to changes these Terms from time to time, in which case we will send you amended Terms.

Our relationship with you is governed by New Zealand law and New Zealand courts have non-exclusive jurisdiction.