Privacy

What happens to your information

A workers compensation claim is built out of information about your body and your work. This page sets out what this website collects, what happens to that material once a claim is running, and how to see it, correct it or complain about it.

General information, not legal advice. This page sets out how the law generally applies. It does not take account of your circumstances, and you should get advice about your own situation before acting on it. The official sources this page is written from are listed on it; where they differ from anything here, they are the authority.

Last updated: 23 September 2026

A workers compensation claim runs on information about you that you would not normally hand to anyone. How the injury happened. The certificate your doctor writes, and the one after that. What treatment has been asked for, what has been approved and what has been declined. What you can lift, how long you can stand, and what your employer has offered you instead. If the claim reaches permanent impairment or work injury damages there is more again, and some of it reaches back years. This page says what happens to all of it.

It covers two things: this website, and the handling of personal information by the law practice that provides legal services through it. In this policy we, us and our mean that practice. The framework is the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles made under it, and because almost everything in a workers compensation claim is health information, New South Wales has its own health privacy statute sitting alongside them. A solicitor also owes a client a duty of confidentiality that is stricter than either, and that duty is dealt with further down this page.

Who this policy is about, and who it does not yet name

Legal services on this website are provided by Jameson Law, a New South Wales law practice. Its published contact details are at the foot of every page and on the contact page.

There is a second thing that cannot honestly be stated yet, and it is better said than left implied. The Privacy Act does not reach every business in Australia. A small business operator, which the Act defines by annual turnover, sits outside it unless one of the exceptions applies or the business chooses to be covered; the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner publishes both the turnover threshold and the list of exceptions. Whether the providing practice is covered is a question about that particular practice, and nobody can answer it until the practice is named. The standard described on this page is the one followed either way.

That has one practical consequence for you. This policy can set out how your information is handled, and it does. It cannot yet name a person for you to write to. The last section explains how to make a privacy request in the meantime, and gives you an external route that does not depend on anyone here.

If you would rather not deal with a practice that is not yet named, that is a reasonable position, and a workers compensation dispute does not require a lawyer. LawAccess NSW is a free information service run by Legal Aid NSW, and the NSW courts list the free services available to people without a lawyer, including community legal centres and the Law Society of NSW Pro Bono Scheme, at courts.nsw.gov.au.

What this website collects

You can read every page of this site without telling us who you are. Information is collected only when you send an enquiry, or automatically by the server that hosts the site.

The enquiry form is deliberately short. It asks for enough to come back to you and to work out whether we can help, and no more. Please do not use it to send the detail of your claim, and do not attach documents to it. It is a contact form, not a secure way to transfer certificates of capacity, clinical notes or a claim file.

The only thing the form is set up to do with your message is send it on by email. It is not configured to store submissions in the website’s database.

The web server also keeps standard access logs. They are used to keep the site working and secure and to investigate faults or abuse. They are not used to build a profile of you.

Analytics and cookies are a separate question, and the honest answer is that what this site measures has not been settled. Nothing is claimed about it here until it is, because a list of cookies that is not the list the site actually sets would be worse than no list at all.

Enquiry form: your name and your email address, both of which the form requires
Enquiry form: your telephone number, which is optional and is labelled optional
Enquiry form: your message, which is whatever you choose to tell us
Enquiry form: the tick confirming you have read this policy, which is never pre-ticked for you
Enquiry form: a hidden field that people never see and never fill in. Automated submissions do, which is how they are discarded. It records nothing about you
Server logs: your IP address, the date and time of each request, the pages requested, the response given, and your browser and device type

You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings and every page of this site will still work.

The information a workers compensation claim runs on

Once a practice acts for you, the information involved is a great deal more than a name and an email address, and most of it is what the Privacy Act calls sensitive information. That is a category the Act protects more carefully: it can generally be collected only with your consent, and only where it is reasonably necessary for what is being done. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner lists health information as sensitive information. In a workers compensation claim, health information is not a corner of the file. It is most of the file.

Information is asked for when the claim actually requires it, and you are told why at the time.

What the injury is, roughly when it happened, and when you notified your employer
Your certificates of capacity, and what changes between one and the next
Clinical notes, imaging, test results and reports from the practitioners treating you
What treatment has been requested, approved, declined or funded
A report from a doctor you did not choose, where an examination is arranged in the claim or in a dispute
Your employment records: your hours, your duties, your pay, and what suitable duties have been offered
Your income records, where weekly payments are in dispute
Where permanent impairment or work injury damages is involved, material about earlier injuries, earlier claims and your working life before this one

Please do not gather medical records before anyone has asked you for them. What decides a dispute in this scheme is usually narrower than people expect, and a full medical history collected on spec is information you have disclosed for nothing, much of it about conditions that have nothing to do with the injury. Our pages on medical expenses and permanent impairment set out what each part of the scheme turns on, and certificates of capacity explains the document that carries most of this information in the first place.

Why it is collected, and who it is given to

Information is collected for a particular reason at a particular time, rather than gathered in case it is useful later. The reasons are these: to answer your enquiry and tell you whether we can help; to run a conflict check before acting, which means checking whether the practice already acts for someone whose interests are opposed to yours; to advise you and to run a claim or a dispute; to deal with an insurer, a medical assessor or the Personal Injury Commission on your instructions; to meet the obligations a law practice has under the Legal Profession Uniform Law, including costs disclosure, billing and keeping proper records; and to keep this website available and secure.

The harder half of this section is disclosure, and there is something about this scheme that a privacy policy ought to say plainly rather than bury. A workers compensation claim is not confidential from the insurer, and it is not entirely confidential from your employer. The claim is made to the insurer and the insurer decides it, which means the insurer reads the medical material the decision rests on. Your employer knows a claim exists, is involved in your return to work, and will generally know what you can and cannot do, because that is what a conversation about suitable duties is. What your employer is entitled to see beyond that is a separate question, and it is worth asking before you hand something over directly rather than afterwards.

Beyond what the scheme and the law require, information is given to others only on your instructions.

The insurer dealing with your claim, or the agent managing it on the insurer's behalf
Your employer, to the extent the claim and your return to work require it
The practitioners treating you, where a report or a record is requested
A doctor engaged to examine you, and a medical assessor where a medical dispute is referred to one
The Personal Injury Commission, and any other party to a dispute in it
icare NSW and the State Insurance Regulatory Authority, where the scheme or the regulator requires it
Counsel briefed on your matter
Interpreters and accredited translators, where a conference or a document needs one
The practice's insurer and auditors, where the law or the policy requires it
The technology and document storage providers whose systems your file sits in

Personal information is not sold. It is not given to data brokers and it is not passed to other businesses for their marketing, and making an enquiry does not put you on a marketing list. Where a disclosure is required by an Australian law or by an order of a court or tribunal, it may have to be made without your instructions; where we are permitted to tell you it happened, we will. Our page on return to work sets out where your employer sits in the scheme, and weekly payments explains what the insurer reassesses and why it asks for what it asks for.

The Personal Injury Commission, and what it publishes

If a dispute goes to the Personal Injury Commission, your information goes with it. The Commission says as much itself. Its privacy page records that it collects personal and health information provided by the parties and their legal representatives in proceedings before it, including medical and investigative reports, clinical notes and medical certificates.

The Commission names two New South Wales statutes as the privacy laws it works under, the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act 1998 and the Health Records and Information Privacy Act 2002, which set out Information Protection Principles and Health Privacy Principles. It also publishes an important limit on them, and you should know about it before you assume privacy law will keep something out of a case. Those laws do not affect the exercise of the Commission’s judicial function in hearing or determining proceedings. The Commission applies them to the general management and administration of its registry and its office resources.

The Commission publishes its decisions. It maintains published collections of workers compensation decisions, and it has a procedural direction dealing with publication, de-identification, redaction and non-publication, including how an application about any of those is made. If the prospect of a decision about your injury being published concerns you, raise it early rather than once a decision has been written, and read that direction first.

How matters are heard is set out in the Commission’s own procedural direction on hearings. Both that direction and the one on publication and de-identification are on the procedural directions page, and the Commission’s privacy page sets out what it does with the material it holds. Our page on how the scheme works explains where the Commission sits in the sequence.

How it is stored, how long it is kept, and where it goes

The Australian Privacy Principles require reasonable steps to protect personal information from misuse, interference and loss, and from unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. In practice that means access controls on the systems holding client files, limiting access to the people working on your matter, and secure destruction of material that is no longer needed.

A workers compensation file is not finished when the payments stop. An injury can deteriorate, a claim can be reopened, and a question about an earlier injury, an earlier claim or work injury damages is often answered out of a file from years before. A law practice also keeps a client file for a period after a matter ends, because obligations to produce it can outlive the matter itself.

Some of the systems a practice uses, including email, document storage and practice management software, are commonly provided by companies that store or back up data outside Australia. Before personal information is disclosed to an overseas recipient, the Australian Privacy Principles require reasonable steps to be taken to ensure that recipient does not breach those principles, which is normally done through the contract with the provider.

If a data breach occurs that is likely to result in serious harm, the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme in the Privacy Act requires notification both to the people affected and to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

If you want to know what is still held from a claim that has finished, you can ask. The next section explains how.

Seeing your information, and correcting it

You can ask for a copy of the personal information held about you, and you can ask for it to be corrected if it is wrong, out of date, incomplete, irrelevant or misleading. Ask in writing, and say what you are after. A whole file, or one identified document, is far easier to find than “everything”.

Making the request costs nothing. An organisation may charge for the work of providing access where a request involves real effort, that charge must not be excessive, and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner says it cannot be used to discourage you from asking; you should be told what it will be before anything starts. The Commissioner publishes its view that 30 days is a reasonable period for an organisation to respond to a request for access. That is the regulator’s published view of what is reasonable, not a promise made by anyone here.

Access can be refused only on limited grounds. The ones most likely to come up in a workers compensation claim are these.

Giving access would have an unreasonable impact on the privacy of another person
Giving access may endanger the life, health or safety of any person
The information relates to existing or anticipated legal proceedings between you and us, and would not be available through discovery in those proceedings
Giving access would be unlawful, or refusing it is required or authorised by an Australian law or by an order of a court or tribunal
The request is frivolous or vexatious

A workers compensation file usually holds information about other people: a supervisor, a co-worker who saw the injury, someone who gave a statement about it. That is why a file is not always released in full. Correction matters more in this scheme than in most, because a wrong fact in an early medical report tends to be repeated by every report written afterwards. If access or a correction is refused, you should be told the reasons in writing and how to complain about it, and if a record is not corrected you can ask for a statement to be attached to it recording that you disagree with it.

Confidentiality and client legal privilege

Privacy law is not the strongest protection your information has here. Two others sit above it.

The first is confidentiality. A solicitor must not disclose a client’s confidential information, and that duty continues after your claim has finished and after the file is closed.

The second is client legal privilege, usually called legal professional privilege. Confidential communications between you and your lawyer made for the dominant purpose of giving you legal advice, or for use in litigation, are privileged. The privilege belongs to you rather than to the practice, and it generally means the communication cannot be compelled out of us.

Privilege can be lost by sharing, and in workers compensation matters this happens constantly. Written advice gets forwarded to an employer who wants to know what is going on, to a union delegate who is helping, to a rehabilitation provider, to an insurer’s case manager who has asked a reasonable-sounding question, or to a treating doctor. Ask before you send it on if you are not sure.

Nothing in this policy reduces that privilege, and a request made under privacy law is not a route by which anyone else can obtain privileged material about you.

Privacy requests and complaints

Because the providing practice is not yet named, a privacy request or a privacy complaint should be sent through the contact page with the words privacy request or privacy complaint at the top of it, so that it is not read as a general enquiry about a claim. Say what you are asking for, or what happened and what you would like done about it. Making a privacy complaint does not change how a claim is run.

If it is not resolved, you can take it to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. The OAIC asks you to complain to the organisation first and to give it a chance to respond before bringing the complaint to it. The OAIC publishes 1300 363 992 as its contact number and accepts complaints in writing through its website.

Health information in New South Wales also sits under a State statute, the Health Records and Information Privacy Act 2002 (NSW), which sets out Health Privacy Principles; the Personal Injury Commission names it as one of the two NSW privacy laws it works under. Whether it applies to the providing practice alongside the Commonwealth Act, and where a complaint under it is made, is something the practice will state once it is named rather than something this page will guess at.

A complaint about legal services, about costs, or about the conduct of a solicitor is a different thing again and takes a different path. In New South Wales it goes to the Office of the NSW Legal Services Commissioner, which deals with complaints about lawyers under the Legal Profession Uniform Law and the Legal Profession Uniform Law Application Act 2014 (NSW), and not to the OAIC. The Law Society of New South Wales publishes a Register of Solicitors, which is where you check that a person acting for you is admitted and holds a current practising certificate.

If something in your claim has a date running on it, do not wait on a privacy request to deal with that date. Notifying an injury, making a claim, disputing an insurer’s decision and moving from one part of the scheme to another each run on their own period, those periods are short and strict, and which one binds you depends on the kind of claim, on the injury and on the document you were given. Confirm the period that applies to you before you rely on it. The period that applies is the one in the material the insurer sent you and in the legislation behind it, so bring the document and the dates and have them read by someone who can see them. If a date is close and you have no lawyer, use the free services above rather than wait on anything here. This policy covers this website and this practice’s handling of personal information; if it changes, the current version is always on this page and the date at the top changes with it. See also our terms of use and our page on work injury damages, which is the part of the scheme where the most material about you is usually assembled.