Privacy notice

Who we are

CaseLawDigest is a trading name of Playblast Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under number 16116921, with its registered office at 71-75 Shelton Street, London, England, WC2H 9JQ. Playblast Ltd is the data controller for everything described here and is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under ZC062512.

For anything in this notice, including a request to see, correct or delete your data, write to support@caselawdigest.co.uk.

We collect as little as the service allows. There is no advertising network on this site, and we do not sell or share personal data for anyone else’s marketing. One thing we should name plainly rather than leave you to discover: the provider that sends our emails records whether you opened an issue and which links you followed. It is in the table below.

What we collect, and why

We never see your card number. Card details are entered on our payment processor’s own pages and are never sent to or stored on our servers. Your password is stored only as a one-way hash, so nobody here can read it, including us.

Your weekly issues carry your name

Every PDF you download is prepared for you and carries your name on it. This is deliberate and we would rather say so than have you find it: a document that carries your name is a document you think twice about forwarding outside your firm, which is the whole basis on which the subscription is priced.

If you add a colleague to your subscription

Plans covering more than one person let you add colleagues. When you enter a colleague’s email address, you are giving us their personal data. Please make sure they are expecting it.

Two things happen. We start sending them the weekly issues your firm subscribes to, and we create an account in their name holding nothing but that address. That account has no password and opens nothing until they set one up themselves, from their own inbox. You cannot sign in as them, and we will not do it for you.

We do not email them to announce it. The first thing they receive is the weekly issue itself, and every issue carries a one-click unsubscribe. Any colleague can also ask us to remove them directly, without going through you.

Cookies

The cookies we set are all strictly necessary for a service you have asked for, which is why there is no cookie banner on this site: there is nothing optional to consent to. One records that you are signed in, so that you are not asked to sign in again on every page; it lasts up to 60 days, or expires immediately when you sign out. A second, short-lived cookie is set only during the few minutes it takes to redeem a trial code, to prove you have entered a valid one. We use no analytics, advertising or social-media cookies.

If you pay by card, our payment processor sets its own cookies on its own checkout pages, which are governed by its notice rather than ours.

How we count visits

We measure how many people read which pages, because we would otherwise be writing into the dark. We do it with Umami, which we run on our own server. Nothing about your visit is sent to anyone else.

It sets no cookie, stores no IP address, and does not follow you between sites or between visits. What it keeps is the page you looked at, roughly where in the world you were, and what kind of device and browser you used. None of that identifies you, which is why it changes nothing about the cookie banner: there is still nothing optional to consent to.

If you would rather not be counted at all, any tracker blocker will stop it, and the site works exactly the same.

What we can tell about our emails

Our email provider records how many messages were opened and how many links were clicked, with the option enabled that stops those figures being tied back to an individual recipient. We use them to know whether an issue arrived and was read at all, which is the only reliable signal that our sending is not being filtered into a spam folder. We do not build a profile of you from them, and nothing you do inside an email changes what you are sent.

Every message we send carries an unsubscribe link that works without signing in.

Who else processes your data

We use a small number of suppliers to run the service. They act on our instructions and may not use your data for their own purposes. They are listed by name, with what each one does and where it does it, on our sub-processors page, which we keep up to date.

Some of them process data outside the UK. Where they do, the transfer is covered by the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses.

We do not train models on your data

Our summaries are written by AI from the text of published judgments and nothing else. No subscriber data of any kind goes into that process: not your name, not your email address, not your practice areas, not what you read. We do not use your personal data to train, fine-tune or improve any model, ours or anyone else’s, and our AI supplier is contractually barred from using what we send it to train its own.

We do not process your clients’ data

Nothing about this service asks you to send us anything from your files. We hold your email address and your subscription, and that is the extent of it. We are not a processor acting on your firm’s behalf, so there is no data processing agreement for you to sign. If your procurement process wants one anyway, write to us and we will look at it.

How long we keep it

• Free digest sign-ups: until you unsubscribe, then deleted within 30 days.
• Account and subscription data: for as long as you are a subscriber, then 12 months after your subscription ends, in case you come back.
• Billing and tax records: six years after the end of the accounting period, as UK tax law requires.
• Error reports: kept with the correction history for the summary, so that our record of what we changed and why stays intact.
• Server and application logs: kept for a short period by our hosting providers, and not archived by us.

Security

We protect your data with measures appropriate to what it is: encryption in transit, access limited to the people who run the service, passwords stored only as one-way hashes, and payment card data that never reaches our systems at all. No system is perfectly secure. If personal data of ours is ever breached, we will tell the Information Commissioner within 72 hours where the law requires it, and we will tell you directly if the breach is likely to put you at risk.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you may ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, restrict how we use it, or send it to another provider. You may object to processing we carry out on the basis of legitimate interests, and you may withdraw consent for the free digest at any time. We will respond within one month.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, please tell us first so we can put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk, by post at Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF, or on 0303 123 1113.

What we publish, and where it comes from

We do not report on people. We summarise judgments, one at a time, exactly as the court published them on Find Case Law, the official record kept by The National Archives. Every summary links to the official text, and the official text is the version that counts. We add nothing from outside the judgment: no press coverage, no public records, no search of the internet. The model that writes a summary sees the words of the court and nothing else.

That means any name in a summary is a name the court itself put on a public judgment.

The lawful basis

Publishing summaries of public judgments, so that lawyers can find out what the courts have decided, is what we do and why anyone pays us. Our lawful basis is legitimate interests: the open justice interest in the public reporting of court decisions, weighed against the privacy of those named. That weighing is easier than it might sound, because the court has already made the decision to publish and we do not go beyond what it published.

Judgments in some areas contain information about health, family life, religion, sexual life or criminal convictions. Where our summaries repeat that information, we do so only because it is part of a decision the court chose to publish and cannot be summarised honestly without it. We do not collect it about anyone, we do not search for it, and we do not compile it across cases into anything about a person.

What we never do

• We never remove a court’s anonymisation. If a judgment calls someone AB, or a child T, our summary calls them AB and T, and we make no attempt to work out who they are.
• We never add a name the judgment does not contain.
• We never publish statistics, rankings or trends about named individuals, courts or representatives. A summary describes one case.
• We never use judgments to build a profile of anybody, and we never sell access to anything of that shape.

When a judgment changes or disappears

We check the official record continuously. If a judgment is revised, or republished in anonymised form, our summary comes down until it has been rewritten from the new text. If a judgment is removed from the official record, our summary is withdrawn. Withdrawal takes it off the site, out of search results, out of the sitemap, out of future issues, and out of the PDFs we have already produced.

If you are named and you want something done

Start with The National Archives. We publish because they publish, and if the official record changes, ours follows automatically. Their contact details and takedown process are on Find Case Law.

You do not have to wait for them, though. Write to support@caselawdigest.co.uk with the case name and what the problem is, and we will look at our own copy straight away. If a name appears in our summary that the court withheld, or the summary says something about you the judgment does not, tell us and we will treat it as urgent: that is our mistake, not the court’s, and we will correct or withdraw it. You have the right to object to our processing and to complain to the Information Commissioner, whether or not you come to us first.

Reporting an error

Anyone can report an error in a summary from the report form on any case page. It reaches the same editorial queue as everything else, and reporting an error never changes what is published until a person has read it.

Changes to this notice

If we change how we use personal data, we will update this page and change the date at the top. If the change is significant, we will tell subscribers by email rather than rely on you noticing.

See also our terms and our editorial policy, which explains how summaries are produced, checked and corrected.