Privacy

How we handle your information

What this website collects, what happens to your information once you make contact about a property transaction, and how to see it, correct it or complain about it.

Last updated: 23 September 2026

A conveyance runs on personal information. To act for you we need your full legal name and your identity documents, your financial position and your lender’s details, where you live and where you are moving to, and sometimes the reason the property is being sold. This page explains what happens to all of that.

My Conveyancing Lawyer is an informational website about conveyancing in New South Wales. Legal services offered through this website are provided by Jameson Law. In this policy we, us and our mean that firm. We handle personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles. We are also bound by the duty of confidentiality a solicitor owes a client, which is stricter than privacy law and is dealt with further down this page.

What this website collects

You can read every page of this site without telling us who you are. Information is collected only when you send an enquiry, or automatically by the server that hosts the site.

The enquiry form is deliberately short. It asks for enough to let us come back to you and work out whether we can help, and no more. Please do not use it to send the detail of your matter and do not attach documents to it. It is a contact form, not a secure way to transfer files.

Exactly four things are asked for: your name, your email address, a message and a tick to confirm you have read this policy. A phone number is optional and the form says so. There is also a hidden field that people never see and never fill in — automated submissions do, which is how they are discarded, and it records nothing about you. The only thing the form is set up to do with your message is send it to the firm by email. It is not configured to store submissions in the website’s database.

The server that hosts this site also keeps standard access logs, as web servers ordinarily do. They exist to keep the site working and secure and to investigate faults or abuse, and they are not used to build a profile of you.

Enquiry form: your name and your email address, which the form requires
Enquiry form: your phone number, which is optional
Enquiry form: your message, which is whatever you choose to tell us
Enquiry form: the tick confirming you have read this policy
Server logs: your IP address, the browser and device type you are using, the date and time of each request, the pages requested and the response given
Cookies and analytics: any cookie set by this site, and any measurement data collected by an analytics service the site uses

If you would rather not use the form at all, call or email instead. The details are at the foot of this page. You can also block or delete cookies in your browser settings, and this site will still work.

Why we collect it

We ask for personal information only where it is reasonably necessary for something we actually do. In a conveyance that is a short and fairly practical list.

To answer your enquiry, quote for the work and tell you whether we can help
To run a conflict check before we act, which means checking whether the firm already acts for someone on the other side of your transaction
To verify your identity, which is required before a dealing can be lodged electronically
To advise you on the contract, to negotiate it, and to carry the transaction through exchange and settlement on your instructions
To deal with Revenue NSW about transfer duty, and with the land register about the transfer
To meet the obligations a law practice has under the Legal Profession Uniform Law, including costs disclosure, billing, trust accounting and keeping proper records
To keep this website available and secure

If you do not engage us we still keep a record of your enquiry, so that a later conflict check picks it up. That is how you stay protected, not how you end up on a list. Making an enquiry does not put you on a marketing list.

Identity, money and the information a conveyance needs

Two kinds of information in a conveyance deserve separate mention because people are, rightly, cautious about both.

The first is identity. Property settlements in New South Wales are completed electronically, and identity verification requirements apply before a dealing can be lodged. You will be asked to produce identity documents, and that is a legal requirement of the system rather than a preference of ours. Those documents are held with your file and are subject to the same confidentiality as everything else in it.

The second is money. A conveyance moves large sums, and that makes it a target. We will never tell you that our bank account details have changed by email alone, and you should treat any message that does so as fraudulent until you have confirmed it by telephone on a number you already had. Confirm settlement figures and account details by voice before you transfer anything.

Identity documents, of the kind required for verification of identity in electronic conveyancing
Your full legal name and current address, and the names of everyone who will be on the title
Your lender, loan details and financial position as it affects the transaction
Details needed by Revenue NSW to assess duty, including whether a concession is claimed
Where a concession or exemption is claimed, the evidence supporting it, which can include information about a relationship, a death or a family arrangement

Please do not send identity documents or bank details through the enquiry form. Wait until we have confirmed we can act and have told you how to send documents to us.

Who we give it to

A conveyance is not a private transaction. It requires information to go to several other parties, and that is unavoidable if the property is to change hands.

The other side’s solicitor or licensed conveyancer receives what the transaction requires. Revenue NSW receives what it needs to assess transfer duty, under the Duties Act 1997 (NSW). The transfer is lodged with the land register, kept by NSW Land Registry Services, and the register is a public record: once the transfer is registered, the fact that you own the property is not confidential.

Settlement itself happens through an electronic lodgment network, which necessarily holds the transaction and settlement details.

Everyone else receives your information only on your instructions or where the law requires it. We do not sell personal information. We do not give it to data brokers and we do not pass it to other businesses for their marketing.

The other party's solicitor or licensed conveyancer, and the estate agent, so far as the transaction requires
Your lender, and the lender discharging a mortgage on the other side
Revenue NSW, for the assessment and payment of transfer duty
NSW Land Registry Services, for lodgement and registration of the dealing
The operator of the electronic lodgment network through which settlement takes place
Councils, water authorities and other bodies that issue the certificates required for the transaction
For a strata or community scheme purchase, the strata manager or the owners corporation, and any report provider you instruct
The firm's insurer and auditors, where the law or the policy requires it
The technology and document storage providers that host the systems your file sits in

Where a disclosure is required by an Australian law or by a court or tribunal order we may have to make it without your instructions. If that happens and we are permitted to tell you, we will.

How it is stored and kept secure

We take reasonable steps to protect personal information from misuse, interference and loss, and from unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. That means keeping client files on systems that control who can open them, limiting access to the people working on your matter and destroying material securely once it is no longer needed.

A law practice keeps client files for a period after a matter ends, because obligations to produce them can outlive the matter. A conveyancing file is also often needed later — when you sell, when a boundary question arises, or when a capital gains position has to be worked out — so keeping it is usually in your interest as well as ours.

If a data breach occurs that is likely to result in serious harm, the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme in the Privacy Act requires notification to the people affected and to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. We would also tell you plainly what had happened and what you should do about it.

If you want to know what we still hold from a transaction that has settled, you can ask. See Seeing your information, and correcting it below.

Information sent or held overseas

A conveyance in New South Wales is a domestic transaction, so most of the information stays here. Two things can still take it outside Australia.

The first is you. If you are overseas during the transaction, or one of the purchasers is, then correspondence and identity verification take place across a border because your circumstances require it.

The second is the technology we use. Email, document storage and practice management systems are often provided by companies that store or back up data outside Australia. Before personal information is disclosed to an overseas recipient, the Australian Privacy Principles require reasonable steps to be taken to ensure the recipient does not breach those principles, which is normally done through the contract with the provider.

If you would prefer that a particular document is not sent overseas, tell us. We cannot change what the transaction itself requires, but we can explain what a disclosure involves before it is made.

Seeing your information, and correcting it

You can ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, and you can ask us to correct it if it is wrong, out of date, incomplete or misleading. Ask in writing using the details below, and tell us what you are after. A whole file, or a particular document, is much easier to find than ‘everything’.

There is no charge for making a request. If a request is large enough that gathering it involves real work, we will tell you what the charge will be before we start, and it will not be more than a reasonable cost of doing it. We will respond within a reasonable period; the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner treats 30 days as reasonable.

Access can be refused only on the limited grounds set out in the Australian Privacy Principles. The ones most likely to come up here are these.

Giving access would have an unreasonable impact on the privacy of another person
The information relates to existing or anticipated legal proceedings between you and us, and would not be available through discovery
Giving access would be unlawful, or refusing access is required or authorised by an Australian law or by a court or tribunal order
Giving access would pose a serious threat to the life, health or safety of any person

A conveyancing file often contains information about other people — a co-purchaser, a former partner, the other party to the transaction — so a file is not always released in full. If we refuse access, or refuse to make a correction, we will tell you why in writing and how to complain about it. If we do not agree that something is wrong, you can ask us to attach a statement to the record saying that you disagree.

Confidentiality and legal professional privilege

Privacy law is not the strongest protection your information has here. Two others sit above it.

The first is confidentiality. A solicitor must not disclose a client’s confidential information, and that duty continues after your matter has finished and after the file is closed.

The second is client legal privilege, usually called legal professional privilege. Confidential communications between you and us made for the dominant purpose of giving you legal advice, or for use in litigation, are privileged. The privilege belongs to you rather than to us, and it generally means the communication cannot be compelled out of us.

Privilege can be lost by sharing. In a property transaction that happens easily: forwarding our advice to the agent, to the other side, to a broker or to a family member may waive privilege in it. Ask us before you send it on if you are not sure.

Nothing in this policy reduces that privilege, and a request made under privacy law is not a route by which anyone else can obtain privileged material about you.

The land register is public. Confidentiality protects what you tell us; it does not make the ownership of registered land private once the transfer is registered.

If you have a complaint

Tell us first. Put it in writing using the details below, say what happened and say what you would like done about it. A privacy complaint is dealt with by the practice rather than by the person you were dealing with, and making one does not change how your matter is run.

If we have not responded within 30 days, or you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. The OAIC generally expects you to have complained to us first and to have given us those 30 days. It can be reached on 1300 363 992 or through its website.

A complaint about our legal service, our costs or our conduct as solicitors is a different thing and takes a different path. That is set out on our complaints page, and the external body for it is the Office of the NSW Legal Services Commissioner, not the OAIC.

This policy covers this website and the conveyancing work offered through it. If we change it, the current version will always be on this page and the date at the top will change. Where this page describes the law — what the access grounds are, how the data breach scheme works — it describes it in general terms, and the official sources listed below are the authority on it. What it says about how we handle your information is our own commitment to you. See also our terms of use and our accessibility statement.

Privacy requests and complaints

Write to us by email, and say that it is a privacy request or a privacy complaint so that it reaches the right person rather than being treated as a general enquiry. If you would rather talk it through first, call.

[email protected]

Phone

(02) 8806 0866

Who you are contacting

My Conveyancing Lawyer is an informational website about conveyancing in New South Wales. Legal services offered through it are provided by Jameson Law, and it is Jameson Law you are writing to. Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards Legislation.

Office of the Australian Information Commissioner

1300 363 992, or lodge a complaint at oaic.gov.au