The human rights landscape has evolved – and so have we.

Bindmans LLP was set up in 1974 to champion human rights and civil liberties – and we have continued to be the leading law firm in this area as almost five decades have passed to bring us into the digital era.

Fresh challenges to human rights and justice have come with new technologies. Facial recognition cameras are used by the police and other detaining authorities. Algorithms have taken over crucial decision-making for companies and public authorities. Employees are increasingly surveilled, sifted and scrutinised with monitoring and work analytics tools. These technologies create new problems for society such as election interference. They engage new laws such as the data rights available under the GDPR.

There is no time in human history when our future rights have been under greater threat from surveillance capitalism and government interference, aided and abetted by technologies built in the digital age. Our data privacy lawyers are committed to bringing about an era of greater tech justice and being the firm that campaigners and activists turn to.

Taking action to protect your digital and data rights.

Our data privacy and digital rights lawyers can provide you with legal support on all types of issues that involve digital technologies and online harms – whether an organisation has leaked or misused your personal data, infringed your data privacy rights, or you have been the victim of cyber extortion, harassment or defamatory campaigns online.

We will champion your rights as an employee against Big Tech, or where your employer has breached the law using new technologies.

Our data privacy lawyers will hold the police and other public authorities to account for where they have used digital technologies to overreach their powers – or have taken bad decisions in procuring or using new and risky technologies in ways that affect you.

We can assemble a multi-disciplinary team that not only has a deep understanding of the patchwork of laws applying to your case, whether they concern challenges to decisions made by a public authority, discrimination by an employer or infringement of your human rights; our data rights and digital privacy team will also have a strong technical understanding of the technologies that you are challenging. 

Our data privacy and digital rights work includes:

• Exercising data rights, such as the right to access information and the right to be forgotten
• Challenging misuse of your data, whether seeking compensation or seeking to challenge or stop the data processing
• Challenging decisions made using your data or which impact upon you, such as decisions taken by public authority and employer algorithms

Defending those who seek to call out injustice.

Individuals seeking to challenge tech companies and public authorities have been dismissed, marginalised and charged with criminal offences in an attempt to silence them.

Our data privacy and digital rights lawyers have experience of working with whistleblowers, activists and human rights organisations in protecting individuals in this space.

Seeking to change the narrative.

Too long have tech companies relied upon well-resourced legal teams and inequality of arms to continue to push an agenda that is privacy-intrusive, infringes on basic rights and entrenches inequalities.

Our creative legal team can provide strategic advice and litigation support on issues of public interest in technology, such as the development of ethical and privacy-protective Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how to challenge where privacy and other considerations (such as discrimination and human rights) have not been embedded by design and by default.

We also have the legal know-how to help those seeking to gather intelligence. Our lawyers have a proven record in dealing effectively with Freedom of Information and data protection requests and can successfully challenge public procurement decisions and failures to carry out necessary compliance steps, such as Equality Impact Assessments (EIAs) and Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs).