Acceptable use policy

1. Scope

This policy applies to every visitor, account holder, enquirer and listed firm, and forms part of our Terms of use. NE26 Limited operates LegalDirectory.org.uk. Breaching this policy is a material breach of the Terms.

2. Prohibited uses

You must not use the Directory:

• In any way that breaches applicable UK or international law or regulation.
• To defraud, mislead or impersonate any person, firm, regulator or public body.
• To harvest contact details for unsolicited marketing, or to send spam or chain communications.
• To transmit malicious code, or to probe, scan or test the vulnerability of our systems without written authorisation.
• To gain unauthorised access to accounts, data, servers or networks connected to the Directory.
• To place unreasonable load on our infrastructure, including through automated request floods.
• To resell, sublicense or commercially exploit access to the Directory or its data.

3. Automated access and scraping

Search engine crawlers that obey our robots.txt are welcome. All other automated collection - scraping, crawling, bulk extraction, database creation or training a competing dataset or model on our content - is prohibited without a written licence from us.

We may rate-limit, block IP ranges, require verification or take legal action against systematic extraction, including under the database right and the Copyright and Rights in Databases Regulations 1997.

4. Content standards

Any content you submit - enquiries, profile copy, correction requests or correspondence - must be accurate, held in good faith, and must not be defamatory, obscene, discriminatory, harassing, threatening, deceptive or in breach of anyone's intellectual property, confidentiality or privacy rights.

Law firm content must additionally comply with the SRA Standards and Regulations, must not overstate expertise, accreditations or outcomes, and must not make comparative claims that cannot be substantiated.

5. Enquiry conduct

Enquiries must relate to a genuine need for legal services. Do not use the enquiry function to market to firms, to test competitors, to send bulk messages or to submit another person's details without their authority.

6. Reporting a breach

Report abuse, inaccurate listings or suspected security vulnerabilities to hello@legaldirectory.org.uk with enough detail for us to investigate. Please give us a reasonable period to remediate a security issue before any public disclosure, and do not access, alter or exfiltrate data belonging to others while testing.

7. Enforcement

Where we determine that this policy has been breached we may take any action we consider appropriate, including issuing a warning, removing or amending content, suspending or terminating an account or listing without refund, blocking access, disclosing information to law enforcement, and taking legal proceedings to recover our costs and losses.

We exclude liability for actions taken in response to breaches of this policy. The actions described are not exhaustive and we may take any other action we reasonably deem appropriate.