Privacy policy

Last updated: 4 October 2026

Who is responsible

Legal Advice of Africa is operated by LAoA SY LLC, Francis Rachel Street, Victoria, Seychelles. Email: [email protected]. We are responsible for the personal information processed to operate this directory. Contact us about privacy, corrections, removal or your rights.

Information and purposes

• Lawyer profiles and accounts: names, professional details, location, practice areas, languages, experience, biography, photos and account email. Profiles come from lawyer submissions and an existing professional directory. Activated profile details are public; account email addresses and password hashes are not published. We process account information to provide the requested service and directory information for our legitimate interest in connecting people with legal professionals. You can request correction or removal of a legacy listing.
• Enquiries: your message, name, email and phone number are sent to your selected lawyer and copied to [email protected] for quality control. Delivering an enquiry is part of the service you request; limited quality review supports our legitimate interest in maintaining the service. These fields are required to send an enquiry, but you may browse without submitting them. Do not submit sensitive personal information, criminal allegations, case documents or confidential details before agreeing appropriate arrangements directly with a lawyer.
• Security: we use session identifiers, password hashes, reset tokens, authentication and delivery records, and IP-derived rate limits to protect accounts and prevent abuse. This supports our legitimate interest in operating a secure service.
• Optional statistics: only after you allow statistics, we store your IP address, browser user agent and homepage visit timestamp, together with your consent time and notice version. We rely on your consent. Refusing or withdrawing does not restrict access to the site. Earlier statistics may have been collected before this consent feature was introduced.

Cookies and your choices

We do not use advertising cookies. With your consent, we use Contentsquare analytics and session replay on public directory and blog pages to understand navigation, interactions and usability. Form elements are masked. Lawyer profile/enquiry pages, accounts and the admin dashboard are not tracked. Contentsquare processes technical browser/device data, visited pages, interaction events and replay data; connections to its servers also disclose your IP address. Query strings are removed from configured pageview and referrer tracking. We do not send enquiry contents or account identifiers to Contentsquare. Contentsquare cookies may include _cs_id (up to 13 months) and _cs_s (30 minutes), with additional technical cookies depending on enabled features. Our implementation loads the tag only after consent and stops loading it after withdrawal or expiry. Contentsquare privacy information. The necessary laoa_privacy cookie remembers your choice for 180 days; laoa_privacy_csrf protects the settings form for up to 7 days. The enquiry security cookie laoa_session lasts 2 hours. Lawyer login and form-security cookies last up to 7 days. Administrator cookies support an 8-hour session with a 30-minute inactivity limit, plus form protection for up to 7 days. Necessary cookies are used for the requested functionality independently of optional statistics consent.

Change cookie settings or withdraw statistics consent at any time. Withdrawal stops future collection; it does not affect the lawfulness of earlier consent-based processing. Browser cookie controls can also remove cookies, but may sign you out.

Who receives information

Authorised LAoA staff manage accounts and enquiries. A contacted lawyer receives the information you send and is independently responsible for their subsequent handling of it. Our service providers include DigitalOcean for hosting in Amsterdam, Twilio SendGrid for email delivery, Contentsquare for consent-based analytics/session replay, and Cloudflare for domain/DNS services and, when enabled, proxy and security services. These providers may process technical information needed to provide their services. We do not sell your personal information. Public profile information can be seen and indexed by others.

International processing

Our operator is in Seychelles; the server is in the Netherlands. Email providers, infrastructure providers and the lawyer you choose may process information in other countries, including countries outside the EEA. Where GDPR applies, restricted transfers require an applicable adequacy decision or appropriate safeguards such as contractual clauses, or another legally permitted basis. Contact us for information about the arrangements applicable to your data before sharing sensitive information.

How long information is kept

Contentsquare replay and analytics retention depends on the settings and subscription for our project; contact us for the applicable period or to request deletion. Locally stored visitor statistics are retained for 90 days and expired rows are removed when statistics are recorded or viewed. Your browser privacy preference lasts 180 days. Routine server backups rotate after 7 days. Lawyer account and profile information remains while the account or listing is maintained, unless removal is requested or another reason requires retention. Enquiry emails remain in the recipient mailboxes under their respective retention practices; contact us to request deletion of our copy. Delivery, security and administrative records may be retained to investigate issues, resolve disputes or meet legal obligations. Password reset links expire after 30 minutes. Successful queued portal emails have their message payload removed; failed jobs may retain encrypted payloads for troubleshooting. We assess requests for removal against any applicable legal retention duties.

Your rights

Where applicable, you can request access, correction, erasure, restriction or portability of your personal information, object to processing based on legitimate interests, and withdraw consent. Email the contact above; we may need proportionate information to verify your identity. We normally respond to GDPR rights requests within one month, subject to lawful extensions. You can complain to the competent data protection authority, including the authority in your EEA country of residence or work where GDPR applies. There is no automated decision-making with legal or similarly significant effects.

Updates

We will update this notice when the service or its processing changes. Material changes to optional statistics will require a renewed choice.