In a legal context, due diligence is a process that regulated firms are required to undertake in order to ensure that they know who their clients are. The process is also often referred to as KYC (Know Your Customer).
At Quinn Legal, knowing who you are allows us to truly understand your needs and establish exactly which services best fit your situation. The personal details that you provide ensure that we can give you quality legal advice and help us to draft legal documents that are accurate and legally-binding.
Equally as important, due diligence is necessary to show regulators that we know who the people are that we supply services to.
Quinn Legal and other law firms on the Isle of Man are regulated by the Isle of Man Law Society.
Regulation has increased over recent years, including the Designated Non-Financial Business Act 2015. Law firms have been required to improve their anti-money laundering and countering financing of terrorism procedures.
As part of the client take-on process, we need to follow our due diligence procedures. We’ll need to establish how you will pay for your legal services and the staff member you’re dealing with will ask you for certain documents. The documents requested will include some or all of the following:
- Passport, driver’s license or government-issued identity card such as a bus pass – evidence of your identity in the form of photographic I.D will be required.
- Utility bill (e.g. gas, electric, phone bill), bank statement or rates bill – you will be asked to produce evidence of your residential address dated within the last 6 months. Please note that we cannot accept mobile phone bills, e-statements or e-bills, Care Of or PO Box addresses.
- You may be asked to present evidence for the source of your funds. We’ll need to know where the money for your transaction has come from. You should provide the name of your bank, the name on the account and evidence of where your funds are held (e.g. bank statement). Alternatively, if you’re selling something (e.g. a property), our team will need to know the bank name and bank account details of where the sale proceeds will go.
- In some circumstances, we might also need to know the source of your wealth. This is different to the source of funds described in (3) and generally refers to your occupation and how your funds have been generated. You may be asked to provide evidence of your source of wealth, for example, payslips.
You’ll be asked to visit our reception with your original documents (valid photo ID, proof of residential address, source of funds and source of wealth information and documents). Our reception team will take valid photocopies of the original documents, the copies will be certified and held on your client record file. You’ll need to provide your photo ID document in person, so that we can establish your identity.
In the beginning stages of a new instruction, the speed in which you supply your identity documents influences how quickly we can progress your instruction.
To avoid delays, we ask that you bring in your original documents as soon as possible, as without these in place, we are unable to commence any legal work on your behalf.
The process of due diligence greatly benefits you as the legal process will run more smoothly if we have the necessary paperwork in place.
