Privacy policy and use of information

The data controller is The Industry Reviews Group, publisher of IRG Library and of the magazines that make it up.

For anything relating to your data, including exercising the rights in section 09, the channel is alliances@thelegalindustry.com. Write from the address you registered with, or tell us what it is, so that we can identify you.

We process professional identification data only. We do not ask for or store bank details, identity documents or special categories of data (health, beliefs, membership, orientation).

What you give us

• When requesting access: first name, last name, organization (company or university) and email address. All four are required; there are no other fields in the form.
• When creating the account: your first and last name, your email address and the password you choose.

Your password does not pass through our servers or our database. Registration, sign-in, the verification code and password changes are handled by Amazon Cognito directly from your browser. We cannot see it, recover it or change it for you.

What the system generates

• The status of your request (pending, approved, rejected or registered) and the dates and times when it was created, reviewed and turned into an account.
• A single-use invitation code, valid for 30 days, carried in the link of the approval email.
• Which administrator reviewed your request, or the domain that approved it automatically if that was the case (section 03).
• The internal identifier of your account in Amazon Cognito: an opaque string with no meaning outside that system. We keep it only to link your request to your account. We do not keep a copy of your account, only that reference.
• Internal notes an administrator may add when reviewing the request.

What we do not collect

• We use no pixels, third-party tags, advertising cookies or social-network cookies.
• We do not store names, email addresses or IP addresses in usage events.
• The application does not log your IP address. Our infrastructure provider’s servers keep technical connection logs, as any internet server does; we neither exploit them nor cross-reference them with your account.

IRG Library first-party analytics

When a registered member uses IRG Library in production, we collect pseudonymised events—pages and articles viewed, searches, reading time, and interactions with editions and links—to measure and improve the service. The technical identifier does not reveal the member’s identity in the administration panel. Administrator sessions and development environments are not recorded.

The service is aimed at professionals and is not offered to anyone under 16. We do not knowingly collect data from minors; if we find that an account belongs to one, we will delete it.

• To assess your access request. Basis: your own request and our legitimate interest in deciding who is granted access to a professional publication.
• To create and maintain your account and give you access to full articles and editions. Basis: performance of the relationship you accept when registering.
• To send you the emails of the process (acknowledgement of receipt, outcome of the review and invitation to register), plus those Amazon Cognito sends to verify your address or reset your password. Basis: that same relationship. These are service emails, not advertising, and they cannot be switched off while the process is under way.
• To keep the service secure and prevent abusive access or use, including the uses prohibited in section 12. Basis: legitimate interest.
• To comply with legal obligations where a rule or a competent authority requires it.

We send no commercial communications, newsletters or advertising, and we do not use your data for any purpose other than those above. If we ever wanted to, we would ask for your consent first and separately.

Automatic approval by domain. We keep a list of trusted email domains: firms, companies and universities we already work with. If your address belongs to one of them, the request is approved automatically and you receive the invitation without waiting; if not, a person reviews it. This is the only automated decision in the service and its only effect is to bring forward access to editorial content: it does not assess you, does not attribute characteristics to you and cannot harm you, because the manual route remains open. You can ask us for human review by writing to alliances@thelegalindustry.com.

We use four cookies: three that are essential in order to sign in and stay signed in, and one that remembers which language you prefer to read the site in. None of them measures, tracks or profiles, and none is third-party. That is why you will not see a cookie banner: there is nothing to consent to beyond the workings of access itself and one reading preference.

• lir_id: proves your session as a member. Duration: 30 days.
• lir_refresh: renews the session without making you type your password again. Duration: 30 days.
• lir_admin: proves the session of staff with access to the administration panel. Duration: 30 days.
• lir_lang: stores the language you want the interface in (English or Spanish). It identifies no one: its value is either “en” or “es”. Duration: one year.

The three session cookies are httpOnly: the browser does not let any script read them, which prevents them from being stolen through code injected into the page. They are deleted when you sign out. The language cookie is readable by the page, which is what lets the button change it, and contains no personal data. You can delete all of them at any time from your browser settings.

We do not sell, rent or transfer personal data to anyone, and we do not share it with third parties for their own purposes. Only the providers we need in order to operate are involved, acting on our behalf and under contract:

• Amazon Web Services: Cognito manages accounts and passwords; S3 hosts the images; the database and the application run on its infrastructure.
• Google: carries the service emails we send you.

Flipsnack deserves a separate warning: editions are not read inside IRG Library but on flipsnack.com. When you open an edition you leave our site and enter a third-party site with its own cookies and its own privacy policy, which we do not control. We do not pass your identity to it.

Accounts and the database live in the São Paulo, Brazil region of Amazon Web Services; some ancillary services run in the United States. If you live in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, this involves an international transfer of your data, covered by the standard contractual clauses approved by the European Commission and incorporated into our providers’ data processing agreements.

We will also disclose data where a legal obligation or a competent authority requires it.

• Active account: we keep your account and the request that gave rise to it for as long as the account exists.
• Closing an account: if you ask us to delete your account, we delete it together with its request within a maximum of 30 days.
• Rejected or unapproved requests: kept for 12 months from the review, so that we can answer if you ask about them or apply again. They are deleted afterwards.
• Invitation codes: they expire after 30 days and are invalidated as soon as they are used.

If a legal obligation requires us to keep any data for longer, we will hold it blocked, without using it for anything else, until that period ends.

The site is always served over an encrypted connection. Passwords live in Amazon Cognito and never reach our systems. Session cookies are inaccessible to any script on the page. The administration panel and the request lists are restricted to authorized staff.

Links to full editions are not sent to anyone without a session: the server omits them from the response, rather than hiding them visually in the browser.

Said honestly: no measure is infallible. If we detected a breach affecting your data, we would tell you and would notify the relevant authority within the deadlines set by the applicable law.

IRG Library is a publication. Authors’ names, positions, organizations, photographs and texts are published deliberately as editorial content, with their participation, and are accessible to the public and to search engines. That processing rests on the legitimate interest in journalistic and professional dissemination.

If you appear as an author and want to correct your details, update your photograph or withdraw your profile, write to us at alliances@thelegalindustry.com and we will take care of it.

Whatever your country of residence, you may exercise these rights over your data:

• Access: to know what data of yours we process and obtain a copy.
• Rectification: to correct anything wrong or incomplete.
• Erasure: to ask us to delete it, including your account.
• Objection and restriction: to object to processing based on our legitimate interest, or ask us to restrict it while a disagreement is resolved.
• Portability: to receive your data in a machine-readable format.
• Withdrawal of consent you had given, without affecting the lawfulness of what was done before.

Write to us at alliances@thelegalindustry.com and we will reply within a maximum of 30 days. We charge nothing for handling these requests.

If you believe we have not acted correctly, you may complain to the data protection authority of your country: in the European Union, the one where you live; in Brazil, the ANPD; in Chile, the Personal Data Protection Agency; in Mexico, the competent supervisory body. In California you may also exercise the rights granted by the CCPA, including opting out of the sale or sharing of data, which in our case we do not carry out at all.

The articles, editions, covers, photographs, trademarks, databases and other contents of IRG Library are protected by intellectual property rights owned by The Industry Reviews Group or by the authors, firms, companies and institutions that have authorized their publication.

Access to the site transfers none of those rights, and holding a member account does not change this: it grants reading access, not a licence to exploit the content.

You may consult, read and download the content for your personal or internal professional use, on a non-commercial basis.

You may quote short extracts in your own work, reports or publications clearly stating the source (the name of the magazine and of IRG Library) and linking to the original where the medium allows it.

Any other reproduction, distribution, public communication, translation or transformation, in whole or in part, requires prior written authorization. Request it at alliances@thelegalindustry.com: we do not usually refuse, but we need to know who is publishing what and where.

Without our prior written consent, any visitor or member is prohibited from:

1. Using the content in a way that infringes applicable intellectual property or personal data protection law.
2. Using automated programs or mechanisms to extract all or part of the site’s content, including web scraping and data mining techniques. This prohibition does not reach search engines that respect our crawling directives.
3. Using the content, in whole or in part, to train, fine-tune or evaluate machine learning or artificial intelligence systems.
4. Using the content as a database, or part of one, for the operation of any program or model.
5. Using any tool or procedure, automated or manual, to circumvent the restrictions or technical measures that control access to member-only content, as well as obtaining, publishing or sharing the links to full editions with anyone who does not have an account.
6. Sharing access credentials, or allowing a third party to use the account. The account is personal.
7. Carrying out actions on the site that place an unreasonable or disproportionate load on our network or infrastructure.

Breach may result in immediate suspension or cancellation of the account, without prejudice to any legal action that may apply.

Opinions published in IRG Library (columns, analysis, interviews, signed articles or any other format) are the sole responsibility of their authors and do not necessarily represent the position of The Industry Reviews Group or of its members.

A good part of our content is written by professionals and firms practising in the sectors they write about. We mark this with the author and organization identification on every piece, so that you can weigh what you read.

The site contains links to external pages, among them flipsnack.com, where the editions are read, and other publications of the group. We do not control their content or their privacy practices, and linking to them implies neither recommendation nor endorsement of what they publish. We are not responsible for the accuracy of the information they offer.

All content on IRG Library is provided for information purposes only. It may be out of date, may refer to legal systems other than your own and does not constitute legal, financial, medical or professional advice of any kind, nor does it replace consulting a qualified professional.

No user of the site, and no person obtaining information from it, should act or refrain from acting on the basis of its content alone. Consulting the site creates no professional relationship between the reader and The Industry Reviews Group, its members or the authors.

We make a reasonable effort to keep the information correct, but we do not guarantee its accuracy, completeness or currency, nor the uninterrupted operation of the service.

Use of the site implies acceptance of this policy. If we amend the document, we will publish the new version at this same address with its date of entry into force, and continued use of the site will be taken as acceptance.

Where a change substantially affects how we process personal data, we will notify account holders by email before applying it.