Cloud-based eDiscovery Company cicayda Enhances fermata Legal Hold Management Offering

Global News

26
Aug
2013

Editor

cicayda, a software and litigation support services company delivering 100% cloud-based eDiscovery applications, today announced major upgrades to fermata, the company’s legal hold management product first introduced in late January at the LegalTech New York trade show. New workflow enhancements such as legal hold management templates, intuitive reporting, and automated reminders and alerts are available to all existing and future fermata clients.

The upgrades to cicayda include more than 30 customer-driven updates related to fermata templates, reporting, legal hold, people and notice management as well as event logging.

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. Since its introduction in January, fermata has been embraced by law firms and corporate counsel alike based on the ease of deployment and competitive pricing model. Especially law firms have welcomed the affordable pricing opting to expand service offerings accordingly without much additional costs to clients.

One Am Law 200 litigation support professional called cicayda “the most exciting thing in eDiscovery today”. Another cicayda corporate client with many separate legal holds said that “using fermata allowed us to free up one and a half paralegals’ time for more high level work, allowing us to drop the old spreadsheet method altogether.”

In terms of adoption, a large international law firm utilizes fermata on behalf of their corporate clients; several large national and international corporations are currently ‘test driving’ fermata, and an increasing number of legal technology consultants are promoting fermata as their preferred hold management application. With fermata, legal hold administrators can do much more than just create and track legal hold notifications, they can proactively manage their hold workflow. New features and benefits include:

• Templates: Allows users to not have to re-create the wheel for tasks they perform over and over again. Users can template the entire legal hold, or pick 'al a carte' what they copy over including notice language, questionnaires, or people
• Reporting: Allows users to download an entire Excel spreadsheet of their hold and view any and all changes and updates made. Reports can be used for court and users can query any results based on to their needs via Excel as well
• Auto-reminders and auto re-issuance: Allows users to automate the legal hold process and streamline any reminders that need to be sent. Users can also choose how often they would like auto-reminders sent (daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly) as well as auto re-issuance (monthly, quarterly, semiannually or yearly).

Beyond the new functionality, fermata provides users with the following benefits:

• 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 support intelligent lawyering with innovations in e-discovery software focused on contemporary web design, user experience, and scalability," stated Roe Frazer, cicayda’s CEO, veteran trial lawyer and former CaseLogistix CEO. "This is the same philosophy we applied with fermata and the recent enhancements all of which were made based on client feedback and requests. Companies can now turn on the private cloud-based fermata instantly and affordably, giving them complete confidence in this age of complex e-discovery, where costs are increasing and sanctions for non-compliance are severe." According to Jason Cox, cicayda’s CTO, “all of the recent updates to fermata were driven by our customers, in line with our “lean” approach to software development.”