Courtney Legal Terms and Conditions
Terms and Conditions of Use – last updated September 2024
YOUR USE OF OR VISIT TO THIS SITE CONSTITUTES YOUR AGREEMENT TO BE BOUND BY THESE WEBSITE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF USE AND BY OUR WEBSITE DISCLAIMER AND PRIVACY POLICY.
Please do take the time to read these 🤓
**Please note that Courtney is in its early post-launch phase. There may be early stage snags and interruptions in your experience. Please do tell us if you think anything needs our attention. **
YOUR USE OF OR VISIT TO THIS SITE AND YOUR USE OF OUR CONTENT INCLUDING ANY LINKED MATERIALS IS AT YOUR OWN RISK.
Courtney Legal Group Limited ('Courtney Legal') is not a law firm or chambers and is not regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority or the Bar Standards Board. No lawyer-client relationship is created between Courtney Legal and its subscribers, users or visitors.
Introduction
Who we are and how to contact us:
- www.Courtney.Legal is a site comprising a multimedia content hub, email newsletter and social media presence (collectively "the Site") that provides information, guidance, audio, videos, opinions, support, tools, links and other resources and features related to separation and divorce ("Our Content"). The site is owned and provided by Courtney Legal Group LImited ("Courtney Legal", "we", "us" and "our"). We are a limited company registered in England and Wales under company number 14203085 and have our registered office at Suite 4, Humberstone House, 40 Thurmaston Lane, Leicester LE5 0TE.
- Courtney Legal is not a law firm or chambers and is not regulated as such. It is very important that you understand what this means in terms of your use of Our Content and the interaction we provide and the lack of regulatory protections available to you. We explain this in more detail below and recommend you read this section carefully. To contact us, including if you have questions about these Terms, please email admin@courtney.legal .
- We do not have an office telephone number and our contributors and team should not be contacted, in connection with Courtney, via their individual professional addresses including by email or telephone.
When these Terms and Conditions apply:
- These Terms and Conditions ("Terms") apply to your ("you" and "User" below) use of the Site and Our Content whether or not you are paying for its use and whether or not you personally set up an account or have access to an account via a third party or otherwise.
- As a user of or visitor to this Site you are granted a nonexclusive, nontransferable, revocable, limited license to access and use the Site and Our Content in accordance with these Terms. We may terminate this license at any time for any reason.
- To use the Site, you must agree to these Terms, so please read them carefully. By accessing or using the Site or Our Content (of any type) you agree that you have read, understood and accept these Terms, our Privacy Policy and all other policies or notices posted by us on the Site. If you do not agree, you must not use the Site or Our Content.
- PLEASE NOTE that we amend these Terms from time to time and that your use of the Site will be subject to these Terms as amended at the time. Therefore please revisit these Terms every so often. We will aim to notify changes to these Terms in our subscriber newsletter.
- You are responsible for ensuring that all persons who access the Site and Our Content through your internet connection or via your Courtney.Legal account or on your devices are aware of these Terms and other applicable terms and conditions, and that they comply with them.
- Please note that our Privacy Policy is also relevant to your use of the Site and Our Content, and it is important you read it.
Access to the Site and Our Content
- You are not permitted to access or view our content which appears behind our paywall without having an active account. For this purpose, an active account must either be set up by you personally or set up by an organisation which we have agreed is permitted to provide an account or access to our content to you. You should satisfy yourself as to whether your access to our content via any third party is permitted. If in doubt, please contact Courtney at admin@courtney.legal
- You must have unexpired written permission from the organisation whose account you are using to access or view our content which appears behind our paywall.
- You or the organisation whose account you are using to access or view our content must have made full payment in advance in accordance with the applicable pricing policy shown on our website at the point of payment or by written agreement with us.
Changes and Availability:
- We may update and change the Site and Our Content from time to time to reflect changes to our offering, our users' needs and our business priorities or for other reasons. We will use reasonable efforts consistent with prevailing industry standards to maintain the Site and/or Our Content in a manner which minimises errors and interruptions in their use. We will perform the Site's updates in a professional and workmanlike manner.
- We do not guarantee that the Site and Our Content will always be available or be uninterrupted. The Site and/or Our Content may be temporarily unavailable for scheduled maintenance or for unscheduled emergency maintenance, either by us or by third-party providers, or because of other causes beyond our reasonable control. We will try to give you reasonable notice of any major changes.
- We may suspend or withdraw or restrict the availability of all or any part of the Site and/or Our Content for any reason. We may update, edit or change the Site and/or Our Content from time to time to reflect changes to our offering, our Users' needs and our business priorities or any other commercial priority of ours. We will try to give you reasonable notice of any major changes.
- You agree that we may, in our sole discretion and without prior notice, terminate your access to the Site and/or Our Content and/or block your future access to the Site and/or Our Content if we determine that you have violated these Terms or other agreements or policies which may be associated with your use of the Site and/or Our Content.
No provision of Legal Advice:
- We are not a law firm or a set of barristers/chambers and are not regulated as such. Law firms in England and Wales are authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority ("SRA"). Barristers are regulated by the Bar Standards Board ("BSB"). It is very important that you understand that we are not regulated or authorised by the SRA or BSB. This means we cannot and do not provide services that are "reserved" to solicitors or barristers or other regulated professionals, such as providing legal advice, conducting litigation, conveyancing, probate activities, notarising or the administration of oaths. The Site and Our Content do not carry out or offer any of the activities that can only be provided by regulated solicitors and barristers.
- There are certain key differences in the regulatory protections (or the lack of) that are available to you when you deal with a non-SRA regulated entity or a non-BSB regulated person/organisation and it is very important that you understand that:
- you will not be able to complain to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the Bar Standards Board or the Legal Ombudsman about Courtney Legal, the Site and/or Our Content;
- you will not be able to apply for a grant to be made out of the SRA Compensation Fund managed by the SRA;
- we are not required to take out compulsory professional indemnity insurance and are not subject to the SRA Minimum Terms and Conditions of Professional Indemnity Insurance or the BSB equivalents; and
- the Site and Our Content are not covered by legal professional privilege, meaning that any communications between you and us could be produced as evidence in court proceedings if ordered by a court or other authority.
No provision of Legal, Tax, Accounting or Financial Advice or source material:
- The Site and Our Content constitute, among other things, an online hub with a social media presence.
- Our Content has been created to help you understand certain (but not all) legal processes associated with separation and divorce and to understand certain (but not all) options for resolving some types of family law disputes (mainly financial). Whilst sourced from experts including experienced barristers, Our Content is information only. It is not intended to amount to legal, tax, accounting or financial advice on which you should rely. You should not take or avoid or delay taking any steps purely on the basis of Our Content. You should obtain professional and/or specialist advice from independent legal, tax, accounting or financial advisors (as appropriate) before taking or refraining from any step or action on the basis of Our Content. Whilst we feature various individual professionals on the Site and in Our Content, we are not responsible for the service you receive from any firm or professional identified on the Site or contributing to Our Content.
- Some members of our team may be solicitors who are regulated by the SRA in their personal capacity or barristers who are regulated by the BSB in their personal capacity, but it is important that you understand that this authorisation and regulation does not apply to Courtney Legal as a company, to the Site and/or Our Content. No lawyer-client relationship is created between you and Courtney Legal at any time, regardless of whether any person within the Courtney Legal team or our contributors is an individual regulated by the SRA or BSB in their personal capacity.
- For the avoidance of doubt, by using the Site and Our Content, you agree that:
- You are solely responsible for your decisions and your use of the Site's resources and Our Content;
- Our Content is created for a wide audience and may not suit your individual needs, and may be out of date for your needs at any given time; we do not warrant or guarantee that any of Our Content is accurate, unbiased or up-to-date;
- The documents and third-party links available via the Site may not fit your specific circumstances. You should make your own judgment on the suitability of any such materials to your circumstances, or obtain your own legal, tax, accounting or financial advice to review such materials before using them;
- We are not providing legal, tax, accounting, financial or any other advice. The Site and/or Our Content should not be used as a substitute for advice from qualified legal, tax, accounting or financial professionals in the jurisdiction relevant to your circumstances;
- The appearance of the names of any professionals, individuals or organisations on the Site or in Our Content must not be taken as endorsement of him/her/them or as confirmation of their credentials and you should undertake your own research into any third party you may wish to engage.
- You shall not quote from or reproduce any of Our Content in a court or arbitration or other legal setting including in legal correspondence.
- Whilst we deny that any legal responsibility arises when you use the Site and/or Our Content, in the event we are wrong, we exclude all legal responsibility and costs for reliance placed by anyone on the opinions, information, tools and third-party links provided and materials linked from this Site.
- You understand and accept the differences in the regulatory protections that are available to you as outlined above. Namely, there is no regulatory professional body to which you can effectively complain about the Site and/or Our Content.
- Although we make reasonable efforts to update the information on the Site and in Our Content, we make no representations, warranties or guarantees, whether express or implied, that the content on the Site and in Our Content is accurate, complete, up to date or free from bias.
- Our Content including videos, characters and examples are not based on real cases and are not accurate representations of court hearings, arbitrations or mediations and must not be treated as such. Our videos, characters and examples are intended to assist with general understanding and to give the 'gist' of some (but not all) family law processes. The pretend 'outcomes' offered by Our Content including our animations should not be used or adopted in real life as they may be wholly unsuitable in your specific circumstances. We do not warrant, represent or guarantee that these representations and pretend outcomes are accurate, appropriate or unbiased.
- Your use of Our Content and this Site or materials linked from this Site is at your own risk.
The Site and Our Content is only for users in England and Wales:
- The Site and Our Content are designed for people in England and Wales. While the content of the Site and Our Content may be available in other locations, you should be aware that the description of laws and processes relating to family law and separation or divorce that are made available on the Site and via Our Content are limited to the laws of England and Wales.
- If you are in a jurisdiction outside of England and Wales or it is possible that the laws of another jurisdiction apply to your situation, it is important that you understand:
a. The Site and Our Content are designed for people in England and Wales and the description of laws and processes relating to separation and divorce are limited to the laws of England and Wales.
b. We are not a regulated entity in any jurisdiction and are not authorised or regulated by any relevant professional regulatory body in your jurisdiction. There may be differences in the regulatory protections that are available to you when you deal with an unregulated entity and it is important that you understand that you may not have the same regulatory protections as you would have if you engaged an authorised lawyer and/or regulated law firm in your jurisdiction.
c. Our content may not be relevant or suitable for your situation and you should seek advice from an English qualified and regulated lawyer before accessing it.
No Responsibility for websites we link to:
- Where the Site and/or Our Content contains links to other third-party sites and resources provided by third parties, these links are provided for your information only. Such links should not be interpreted as approval by us of those linked websites or information you may obtain from them. We have no control over the contents of those sites or resources. When you access these sites, you are subject to third-party terms of use and privacy/security policies, which we recommend that you review before proceeding. We are not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, legality, practices, or availability of linked sites (including any related services, content, software applications, and other technologies). In addition, we are not responsible for any interruption of services, malfunctions, or security breaches involving these third-party sites.
- We are not responsible for viruses and you must not introduce them.
- We do not guarantee that our Site will be secure or free from bugs or viruses.
- You are responsible for configuring your information technology, computer programmes and platform to access the Site and/or Our Content. You should use your own virus protection software.
- You must not misuse the Site and/or Our Content by knowingly introducing viruses, trojans, worms, logic bombs or other material that is malicious or technologically harmful. You must not attempt to gain unauthorised access to the Site and/or Our Content, the server on which they are stored or any server, computer or database connected to the Site and/or Our Content. You must not attack the Site or Our Content via a denial-of-service attack or a distributed denial-of service attack. By breaching this provision, you would commit a criminal offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. We will report any such breach to the relevant law enforcement authorities and we will cooperate with those authorities by disclosing your identity to them. In the event of such a breach, your right to use the Site and/or Our Content will cease immediately.
Your responsibility to keep your account details safe:
- If you register to access the Site and/or Our Content by opening an account or subscribing to our newsletter, you will set your own password in order to ensure secure access to your account. We expect you to ensure that you have a strong password. You shall treat such information as confidential and not disclose it to any third party. If you know or suspect that anyone other than you knows your password, you must reset your password as soon as possible and not share any reset password. We do not store (or even know) your password.
- We reserve the right to disable any user password at any time, if in our reasonable opinion you have breached any of the provisions of these Terms.
- Accessing material about separation or divorce can be a sensitive matter. We cannot take any responsibility for the consequences of another person becoming aware, from your or their actions or communications, of your use of the Site and/or Our Content.
How we may use your information:
- We will collect, process and retain (or delete) your personal information as set out in our Privacy Policy.
Protection of our intellectual property:
- We have taken steps to protect our name and 'Courtney Legal' is a registered Trademark, which means that you cannot use our name without first obtaining our permission to do so, in writing (usually by way of a written license agreement).
- All Our Content, materials and the look and feel of the Site and Our Content are protected by copyright, we have attached the copyright notice to each page expressly to assert our copyright ownership in all such materials.
- We are the owner or the licensee of all Our Content and material on the Site and all intellectual property rights in Our Content. Our Content is mainly protected by copyright laws and treaties around the world. All such rights are reserved. If you print off, copy, download, share or repost any part of the Site or Our Content in breach of the Terms, your right to use the Site will cease immediately and you must, at our option, return or destroy any copies of the materials you have made.
- Our Content is for your personal use only and not for commercial exploitation. You may not decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, rent, lease, loan, sell, sublicense, or create derivative works from the Site or Our Content. The use of any network monitoring or discovery software to determine the site architecture, or extract information about usage, individual identities or users is prohibited. You may not use any robot, spider, other automatic software or device, or manual process to monitor or copy our Site or Our Content without our prior written permission. You may not use this Site to transmit any false, misleading, fraudulent or illegal communications. You may not copy, modify, reproduce, republish, distribute, display, or transmit for commercial, non-profit or public purposes all or any portion of the Site, except to the extent permitted above. Unauthorised use of this Site or Our Content is prohibited.
- You may access Our Content and print off one copy, and may download extracts, of any page(s) from the Site or Our Content for your personal use but not to provide to third parties with the aim of their avoiding applicable fees. Our status (and that of any identified contributors) as the authors of Our Content on the Site must always be acknowledged (except where the content is user-generated).
- Unless specifically stated otherwise, you must not modify the paper or digital copies of any materials you have printed off or downloaded from the Site in any way, and you must not use any illustrations, photographs, video or audio sequences or any graphics separately from any accompanying text.
- You must not use any part of Our Content on the Site for commercial purposes without obtaining a licence to do so from us or our licensors.
- You will comply with all reasonable instructions we give you in relation to your use of the Site and Our Content and you agree that we reserve the right at any time to suspend or cancel your use of, or access to, the Site and Our Content.
No text or data mining, or web scraping:
- You shall not conduct, facilitate, authorise or permit any text or data mining or web scraping in relation to the Site or Our Content. This includes using (or permitting, authorising or attempting the use of):
- Any "robot", "bot", "spider", "scraper" or other automated device, program, tool, algorithm, code, process or methodology to access, obtain, copy, monitor or republish any portion of the Site or Our Content or any data, content, information or services accessed via the same.
- Any automated analytical technique aimed at analysing text and data in digital form to generate information which includes but is not limited to patterns, trends and correlations.
- The provisions in this clause should be treated as an express reservation of our rights in this regard, including for the purposes of Article 4(3) of Digital Copyright Directive ((EU) 2019/790).
- This clause shall not apply insofar as (but only to the extent that) we are unable to exclude or limit text or data mining or web scraping activity by contract under the laws which are applicable to us.
Links
- You may link to the Site's home page, provided you do so in a way that is fair and legal and does not damage our reputation or take advantage of it.
- You must not establish a link in such a way as to suggest any form of association, approval or endorsement on our parts where none exists.
- The Site must not be framed on any other site, nor may you create a link to any part of our site other than the home page.
- We reserve the right to withdraw linking permission without notice.
- If you wish to link to or make any use of Our Content other than as set out above, please contact admin@Courtney.Legal
Our responsibility for loss or damage suffered by you:
- We do not exclude or limit in any way our liability to you where it would be unlawful to do so. This includes liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence or the negligence of our employees, agents or subcontractors (while working for us) and for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation.
- Please note that we only provide the Site and Our Content for domestic and private use. Unless agreed otherwise in writing, you agree not to use the Site and Our Content for any commercial or business purposes, and we have no liability to you for any loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption, or loss of business opportunity.
- We accept no liability for any loss or damage resulting, directly or indirectly, from your visit to the Site or Our Content, or through access from the Site or via Our Content, whether via a website or document or platform that is linked from the Site, or any website that masquerades as the Site or Our Content or from data and information appearing through data sharing technologies, or from your use of less than the optimal encryption security, anti-virus or anti-spam protection or other similar procedures, including measures to protect your personal identity, in your browser or e-mail program, or otherwise the manner and procedures you adopt when browsing around the world wide web.
- We accept no liability for any loss or damage resulting directly or indirectly from any action or lack of action by you as a result of Our Content which is displayed for general information only and is not a comprehensive or regularly updated analysis of the law or any other subject. Your accessing or acting upon Our Content does not imply any duty of care is being assumed by us nor any client-relationship. Our Content in no way represents legal advice to you or others or the general public and we specifically exclude all responsibility and liability for any reliance placed on the Site or Our Content.
- Whilst we endeavour to ensure the continuity of the availability of the Site and Our Content, we give no guarantee or warranty of the availability of the Site and Our Content, nor its condition, satisfactory quality, fitness for purpose or performance and we exclude all such representations, guarantees or warranties expressly. You agree that the potential for disruption of connectivity extends well beyond technology and events over which we have no control, covering possible actions by many varied organisations who contribute to the functionality and connectivity of the Site as well as the status of your own software, and that we accept no responsibility (nor any liability) for any loss or damage resulting, directly or indirectly, from any disruption of access or failure or variation of intended functionality that occurs for whatever reason.
- We are under no obligation to oversee, monitor or moderate any interactive service we provide on the Site or through Our Content, and we expressly exclude our liability for any loss or damage arising from the use of any interactive service by a user in contravention of our content standards, whether the service is moderated or not.
- If defective digital content that we have both authored and supplied damages a device or digital content belonging to you and this is caused by our failure to use reasonable care and skill, we will either repair the damage or pay you proportionate compensation.
- We have obtained insurance cover in respect of our own legal liability which has informed our limitation of liability (£250,000). This limitation of liability applies to every kind of liability arising under or in connection with your use of the Site and/or Our Content.
- In the event that any term is held to be invalid by a decision of a court of competent authority, the remainder of these Terms shall remain valid and enforceable.
- The laws of England and Wales shall be the only laws that apply to your use of the Site and Our Content and you agree to submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales for the resolution of any claim or dispute arising out of or in connection with these Terms and your use of the Site and Our Content.
**Rights you are giving us to use information **
- You grant us the right to use anonymised general statistics about use of the Site and Our Content for our purposes.
Reporting content:
- If you become aware of any material or content on the Site and/or in Our Content that could comprise or be connected to child sexual abuse or exploitation or that could comprise terrorist content or be connected to terrorism, or that is racist or otherwise an incitement to hatred, please contact us immediately on admin@Courtney.Legal
- If you wish to highlight or complain about any other content which you find offensive or inappropriate or wrong appearing on the Site, you can also email us at admin@Courtney.Legal
We reserve the right to transfer this agreement to someone else:
- We may transfer our rights and obligations under these Terms to another organisation or individual. We will always tell you in writing (email or electronic message) if this happens and we will ensure that the transfer will not affect your rights under the contract.
Last Updated July 2024