Roe Frazer, CEO of Cicayda: Big Data has many unknown unknowns — aka “Black Swan” events — that can unseat litigation, bankrupt firms, and otherwise cause great turmoil in law. Advice: You can predict unknown unknowns by using “distant reading” techniques that identify and examine a lot of little relationships, using Big Data and artificial intelligence tools to decipher the big picture.

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Stay up to date on cicayda & fermata news by following us on twitter and facebook. For more information on fermata, please go to fermatalegalhold.com and sign up for a free 30 day trial.

Lawyers be warned: Big data analytics, such as programs that predict settlement outcomes by a few percentage points, computers that universally interpret and comprehend state and international laws, and competitors who deliver legal services more quickly, cheaply and successfully than traditional bricks-and-mortar law offices are permanently shifting the legal landscape.

Disruption of the legal marketplace was the dominant theme at last night’s ABA Techshow kickoff event,LexThink.1: The Future of Law Practice. The fast-paced program was an alternative to the traditional panel presentation model; the 12 speakers had only six minutes each to make their points with slides flashing beside them at 18-second intervals.

“Big data puts the pieces together, sees relationships form, applies the concrete to the abstract and let’s us know big things early in cases,” said speaker Roe Frazer, a legal tech entrepreneur who founded Cicayda, a start-up that takes aim at the booming e-discovery industry. Searching for major surprises in matters buried in vastly multiplying amounts of data has become near impossible for human eyes alone, which hover around 14 percent accurate, Frazer said. The faster lawyers grasp the importance of big data analytical programs, the quicker they will find the unknowns that will impact their clients.

Read the full article here. 

Stay up to date on cicayda & fermata news by following us on twitter and facebook. For more information on fermata, please go to fermatalegalhold.com and sign up for a free 30 day trial.

The old, tired excuses given by technology-resistant lawyers might be funny, but if the ABA has its way they will not be funny for too much longer. It’s about time for this change and we applaud the ABA for moving forward with requiring lawyers to embrace technology.

Lawyers need to get with the times in order to meet the requirements of six resolutions adopted by the ABA House of Delegates to amend the ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct. State bar associations are sure to follow suit.

Among every lawyer’s new professional responsibilities include keeping up with technology relevant to each client and the representation, and protecting electronically-stored client data.

It is truly amazing to hear lawyers consistently dead pan about technology, facebook, twitter (or “tweeter” as I have heard frequently), or getting data produced in the paper-equivalency of the 21st Century, tiffs and pdfs. Big Data did not get that name by accident, and lawyers need to get up to speed on how to handle it in their practices.

Lawyers are clearly charged with knowing about the details of the technology they use, including the security of their own systems. Lawyers and law firms are prime targets of hackers, and public disclosures of private and confidential information in a lawyer-client scenario can be catastrophic events, much more so than just normal business information.

Lawyers even need to pay attention to the Terms of Service of any service or software they use, for it is often in the small print that things like how subpoenas or government requests for information get treated.

The area of ediscovery presents its own special problems. How does a small law firm afford to invest in an ediscovery review tool or advanced text analytics software? Keep following what we are doing with cicayda and as we release our solutions in 2013, you will see the benefits of having solid technology and ediscovery tools all at a very affordable price.

Stay up to date on cicayda & fermata news by following us on twitter and facebook. For more information on fermata, please go to fermatalegalhold.com and sign up for a free 30 day trial.

From Ari Kaplan of reinventingprofessionals.com:

I spoke with Roe Frazer, the founder of Cicayda, a Nashville-based software company providing cloud-based e-discovery tools; Case Logistix, now owned by Thomson Reuters; and, Digome, a digital marketing firm.

Frazer noted that the name of his new venture, Cicayda, comes from the quest to find a rare blue-eyed cicayda and compared it to a legal team’s search for documents in the era of big data.  Calling it “Angry Birds for e-discovery,” he highlighted that Cicayda offers an app-like look and feel for all of the company’s offerings.

Frazer’s goal is make software that lawyers can use while bringing “transparent pricing and price sanity” to the marketplace through a pay-per-use model.  He considers this new offering “iteration 0.0″ because he expects that customers will drive future development through social media channels.

Listen to our interview here

Big Data has grabbed center stage in the ediscovery ecosystem. But what is Big Data? Well it is really Big with a capital B, maybe even all caps BIG. Just think for a second that 90% of all digital data have been created in the last two years. The digital load in a typical case has gone from using gigabytes as a measure to using terabytes. That’s BIG.

Where does this data come from:  apps, GPS activity, cell phone activity, credit card transactions, survey data, facial recognition, and just about everything on your smart phone. Add to that BYOD and social media, and the problem becomes even more than you can imagine. Things get even more complicated when you throw in unstructured data such as email and text messages. In particular, ediscovery is overwhelmed to the point that many lawyers are going backward, rather than forward in coping with the Big Data overload.

More data, more data locations, complexity of data processing and collection, topped off with regulatory and class action risks equals the specter of more, uncontrolled, infinite costs. With an ediscovery market that is bloated with spreadsheet and outlook looking behind-the-firewall software installations coupled with escalating, non-transparent pricing, just what is a company’s General Counsel supposed to do? And don’t forget the smaller companies who are totally dependent on outside counsel. Whew.

The bottom line is that companies must accept, embrace, and rely on technology solutions that are not costly and which do not require paying for the same processing over and over again. With information governance, you will need comprehensive policies, security protocols, integration of data across sources, data retention policies, data mapping data expiration, data classification, and data reduction. Perhaps most important will be some sort of early warning system to red-flag issues when they happen rather than after they have gotten way out of control.

So, how does one tame the tiger of Big Data?

1. Establish and frequently update protocols;
2. Join forces inside between legal, records, and information;
3. Management and compliance should team-up to create a comprehensive Big Data Policy;
4. Create a data map and proactively identify where data resides before litigation hits your company like an asteroid;
5. Classify data by managing information into buckets for retention, security, audit, legal, and business purposes;
6. Defensibly delete, de-dupe, and near-dupe data as it is created.

If you don’t prune your data now, you will simply drown in the cost of ediscovery later. Start with creating an automated legal hold process using fermata legal hold. This will get you way ahead of the game.  Your Big Data can be made smaller to start with and retained to litigate with, all in a much more intuitive and cost-effective manner. With cicayda’s full line of offerings, data can be culled and your Big Data made much smaller, making costs predictable and manageable.

Stay up to date on cicayda & fermata news by following us on twitter and facebook. For more information on fermata, please go to fermatalegalhold.com and sign up for a free 30 day trial.

Legal Hold – Affordable and Easy with fermata

We have made a number of updates to fermata legal hold since it debuted at Legal Tech New York. Consistent with our philosophy of free, micro-updates and improvements to the software, most of which are customer-driven, here are just a few of how we have improved fermata legal hold over the past 45 days:

More Templates:

1. Notice Templates - Copy from an existing Notice when creating a new Notice
2. Questionnaire Templates - Copy from an existing Questionnaire when creating a new Questionnaire
3. People Templates - Copy people from an existing hold into a new hold

Deletion:

1. Delete unsent Notices
2. Delete questionnaires that haven’t been sent

Reporting:

1. Questionnaire Response Spreadsheet - users can now download a spreadsheet containing all of the responses to the selected questionnaire as an Excel spreadsheet.  Users can also download a spreadsheet of responses for all questionnaires in the hold.  Each questionnaire’s data is on a separate tab on the spreadsheet.

How about all of that! Now here is a sneak preview of what’s coming next (they might even already be out!):

1. Deletion -  Deletion of people without activity
2. Templates - Ability to create new hold by copying some or all elements of an existing hold
3. Reporting - People history report
4. Reporting - Notice history report
5. Reporting - Questionnaire report
6. Reporting - Hold Report
7. Scheduling - Automated scheduling of reminders and re-issuance

For more information on fermata, please go to fermatalegalhold.com and sign up for a free 30 day trial.

Stay up to date on cicayda & fermata news by following us on twitter and facebook. 

LexThink.1 is the kickoff to ABA TechShow 2013, the conference that brings lawyers and technology together.  The brainchild of Matt Homann, CEO of Kendeo and JoAnna Forshee, CEO of Inside Legal, LexThink.1 is back again this year as the prelude event to ABA TechShow.

The goal of LexThink is to bring the most innovative people in the technology and law industry together in an incredibly interesting evening of idea-sharing.  LexThink ‘s unique presentation format contributes to the overall frenetic pace by requiring each of its 10 select speakers give their presentations in a lively six minutes.

Seven of the speakers are selected by popular vote, while the other three are selected by LexThink.

Roe Frazer, cicayda’s CEO, hopes to speak on the limits of  “predictive coding” and “technology assisted review.”  Technology is needed to promote intelligent lawyering by being able to find “unknown unkowns” – outlier document and relationships that word searches and text analytics simply cannot find.

The event is open to the public, on a first come, first serve basis and complimentary tickets to the event can be ordered via the website leading up to the event.  Please take time to vote for Roe and the other speakers vying to make the cut for LexThink. Voting runs through March 13th on Right Here.  You can also follower the conversation on twitter via @lexthink1 @insidelegal or use the hashtag #LexThink.

Cicayda, a software company delivering 100% cloud-based e-discovery applications, today introduced fermata, the company’s new legal hold management product, and the first of a series of easy to use and ‘pay-as-you-need’ e-discovery tools including processing, review, search, and text analytics.

The Nashville-based cicayda team is led by veteran trial lawyer and former CaseLogistix CEO Roe Frazer and CaseLogistix software architect Jason Cox.

Fermata is secure, cloud-based legal hold management software that fits easily into existing legal hold compliance workflows, allowing in-house counsel and legal IT departments to manage the entire legal hold communications process. With fermata, legal hold administrators can do much more than just create and track legal hold notifications. Key features and benefits include:

• Intuitive interface: fermata was developed with a simple and familiar interface. fermata’s unique design allows users to see the overall status and progress of a hold or at the individual notice and questionnaire level;
• Accessibility: fermata is web-based so can easily be accessed anywhere at any time and from any device ranging from traditional desktops to numerous mobile solutions. The web delivery is also operating system agnostic so works with any Windows or Mac platform;
• Simple Pricing: fermata’s pricing model is based on a ‘pay-as-you-need’ basis. If the legal hold only includes a few custodians, corporations can only pay for them without the need to buy a more comprehensive enterprise license;
• Hold management: fermata allows users to manage legal holds according to their own workflow. This includes creating and tracking ad-hoc communications about the hold as well as creating and managing questionnaires including pre-notification interviews;
• Flexibility: fermata effectively handles the management of smaller (e.g., EEOC matters) as well as much larger litigation through the use of easy to use templates and more elaborate custodian questionnaires and associated tracking;
• Security: Privately managed, highly secure cloud.

“cicayda’s mission is to create innovation in e-discovery software, bringing contemporary web thinking, design, user experience, scalability, functionality, and economic sensibility to the forefront,” stated Roe Frazer, cicayda’s CEO. “With fermata, market disruption, in price and performance, was our overall goal, with all our deliverables embracing a consumer-friendly look, feel, and intuitive functionality.” 

According to Doug Grawe, General Counsel, Dart Transit Company, and an existing fermata user, cicayda’s cloud based technology makes starting, tracking, and executing litigation holds easier and more manageable. “Litigation holds are increasingly becoming higher profile for in-house legal departments so having a product like fermata that easily manages the process without requiring me to learn a radically different user interface is invaluable.”

Frazer added: “Legal hold managers can spend upwards of 25% of their time setting up legal hold notifications, tracking responses, and informing outside counsel of results. Having the fermata app at your fingertips gives corporate legal the on-demand ability to easily track notifications and questionnaire responses from custodians, literally in minutes.”

For more information on fermata, please go to fermatalegalhold.com and sign up for a free 30 day trial.

Nashville-based cicayda closes A-round of $2MM, just as it launches its first offering in ediscovery  

CEO Roe Frazer reports that cicayda llc, a Nashville-based software company focused on the litigation and ediscovery market, successfully closed its A-round of investment. Coinciding with this is the launch of cicayda’s first product, fermata legal hold, a web-based intuitive app that makes it easy for companies to manage pesky litigation holds on their data and documents.

Cicayda deployed its first proceeds of its A-round to hire an A-list of group of developers centered on using the most advanced programming language called “clojure”. Cicayda has grown to 15 employees in less than a year, and looks to hire up to an additional 10 employees in the next 8 months. Cicayda is very proud to be a solidly venture-backed company.  

Cicayda is more than a startup given its founders’ backgrounds.  

Frazer’s earlier venture, review software and evidence-management product is one of the fastest growing products in Thomson Reuters’ suite of law office products.  Frazer and his co-founder Jason Cox, whowas a founding partner and chief software architect of CaseLogistix, are seeking once again to gain a national and international client base.

Cicayda’s first offering has opened to overwhelming positive reviews, as attested to numerous product reviews by legal technology professionals and bloggers.

“Cicayda” is the dot com re-spelling of “cicada”, needed to secure an Internet domain name. Frazer and Cox named the company with a distinctively Nashville flavor after the emergence of Nashville-area cicadas. All of cicayda’s products will be named after musical notes, the first being “fermata”, the musical symbol for a dramatic pause in the music, something that all companies must do when they receive notice or a threat of a lawsuit. With a well-orchestrated legal hold with fermata, a company can rest assured that it has managed its legal hold process as a maestro!

For more information on fermata, please go to fermatalegalhold.com and sign up for a free 30 day trial. For more information on cicayda, go to cicayda.com. For more information on the foregoing, contact Roe Frazer at roe@cicayda.com