Privacy Policy

Scope of this policy

This policy describes how personal information is handled in connection with trialwitness.com, published by Hartzer Consulting. It covers the website itself and correspondence arriving through it. It does not cover the terms of any engagement, which are set out in the engagement documents for that engagement, and it does not cover other websites reachable through links here.

The short version is that this site is designed to collect as little as possible. It is a set of static pages. There is no account system, no login, no comment system, no newsletter list, no e-commerce, and no server-side application receiving form submissions.

Cookies, analytics and tracking

This website does not set cookies. It does not run analytics scripts, advertising pixels, session-recording tools, or third-party tracking of any kind. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.

Fonts, stylesheets, scripts and images are served from this domain rather than from third-party content networks, so ordinary browsing does not disclose a visit to any other company. The small amount of JavaScript the site uses handles interface behavior — the mobile navigation control and a back-to-top link — and sends nothing anywhere.

Because nothing is tracked, no profile of a visitor is built, no behavioral data is retained, and there is nothing to sell, share or transfer to advertising partners. Browser signals such as Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control are therefore honored by default, in the sense that the site does not do the thing they ask it not to do.

Server logs

Like effectively every website, this one is delivered by a hosting provider whose servers may record standard technical information about requests: an IP address, the time of the request, the page requested, a referring page where the browser supplies one, and a user-agent string. That information is generated by the hosting infrastructure rather than by this site, and it is used for delivering pages, diagnosing faults and protecting against abuse.

Those logs are not used to build visitor profiles, are not combined with correspondence, and are not used for advertising. Retention periods are set by the hosting provider’s own practices.

The contact form

The form on the contact page does not post to this website and does not transmit anything to any server operated for it. It assembles what has been typed into a message in the visitor’s own email application, where it can be read, edited or abandoned before anything is sent. Nothing typed into the form is stored on this site, and closing the page discards it.

The consequence worth stating plainly is that any message that reaches Hartzer Consulting arrives by ordinary email, with the properties of ordinary email: it travels through the sender’s mail provider and the recipient’s, and it is not end-to-end encrypted by default. Material that requires more protection than that should not be sent by email at all.

Correspondence, and how it is used

Where someone writes, the message and the address it came from are kept so that the enquiry can be answered and so that a record of conflict checks can be maintained. Conflict records are the reason correspondence is retained rather than deleted: an expert practice has to be able to establish, sometimes years later, who approached it about which matter and when.

Correspondence is not added to a marketing list, not sold, and not shared with third parties, except where disclosure is required by law, by a court order, or by a subpoena, or where it is necessary to establish or respond to a conflict question.

An enquiry that becomes an engagement is thereafter governed by the engagement documents and by the professional obligations attaching to the work, including any protective order in the underlying matter.

Confidential and case material

A conflict check comes before any substantive discussion, and privileged or confidential material should not be sent until that check has cleared and terms are agreed. Material sent before then is not protected by any relationship, because none exists yet.

Anyone who has already sent something they would rather had not been sent should say so; material that was not requested and is not needed will be deleted where it is not subject to a preservation obligation, and a note of what happened will be kept if a conflict question could turn on it.

Links to other sites

Pages here link to primary sources: rule text, court opinions, statutes, advisory committee materials, and named studies. Those sites are operated by others and have their own privacy practices, which this policy does not govern and this publisher does not control. Following a link discloses the visit to the operator of the destination site in the ordinary way.

Children

This site is intended for legal practitioners, students and researchers. It is not directed to children, and no information is knowingly collected from them. Because the site collects nothing from visitors in the first place, there is no category of children’s data held in connection with it.

Requests about your information

Anyone who has corresponded with Hartzer Consulting may ask what correspondence is held, ask for a copy of it, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted. Requests are handled by email, and identity may need to be confirmed before a request is acted on.

Two limits apply, and they are stated rather than buried. Deletion may not be possible where material is subject to a preservation obligation, a protective order or a professional record-keeping requirement, and a minimal record that a conflict check was run may be retained for that reason alone. Where a request cannot be met in full, the reason will be given.

Changes to this policy

This policy will be updated if the site’s technical arrangements change — if, for example, analytics were ever added, or if the contact arrangement changed. Any such change would be described here rather than made silently, and the change would be visible in the page’s dateline.

Questions about this policy can be sent through the contact page.