Privacy Policy

Caucus (“Caucus”, “we”, “us”) provides the Caucus scheduling service at justcaucus.com. This policy explains what we collect and what we do with it.

There are two kinds of people in this policy, and they are treated differently:

• Mediators and their staff — our customers. They hold accounts, and the information about them is information we collect from them directly.
• Participants — parties, their counsel, adjusters, and assistants. They never hold accounts. Their information reaches us because a mediator entered it in order to schedule a mediation they are involved in. For that information the mediator decides what is collected and why; we hold and process it on the mediator’s instruction. A participant who wants their information corrected or removed should contact the mediator, and we will assist the mediator in doing so.

Account and profile. Name, preferred name, email address, a cryptographic hash of your password (never the password itself), organisation name, and the professional details you enter: firm name, phone, address, timezone, mediator and certification numbers.

Your scheduling preferences. Weekly working hours, date exceptions, conference length, buffer between conferences, lead time, daily limits, and how far ahead you are willing to offer.

Case information you enter. The case caption, the program or referral basis, file, claim, and court numbers, deadlines and the dates they run from, venue, modality, the general location of a loss, fee terms, and any notes you write.

Participants. Name, email address, telephone number if you enter one, role, and which party they act for.

What happened while scheduling. Which times were offered, who was asked and when, who said they could attend which times, who could attend none, the date confirmed, and a dated record of these events. Where a participant types something in the “none of these work” box, we keep what they wrote, verbatim and unread by any automated process, so the mediator can read it.

Email we send. The recipient, the subject and body of the message we generated, when it was sent, and what the delivery service reports back: delivered, bounced, or refused. A hard bounce puts that address on a list that stops us writing to it again, which exists so a dead address is visible to the mediator rather than mistaken for a party ignoring them.

Access links. Each participant link is a random secret we store only as a one-way hash, alongside how many times it was opened and when it was last opened. We cannot reconstruct a link from what we store.

Technical. When you sign in, we record the IP address and browser identification of that session, so that a session can be recognised and ended. Our servers keep ordinary operational logs.

We do not receive, read, store, or parse replies to the messages we send. Every message replies directly to the mediator’s own address. Correspondence about a matter stays between the people having it.

Also outside the system, by design:

• The substance of any mediation: what was discussed, offered, or agreed. The Service is for scheduling and is not a channel for confidential mediation communications.
• Documents. There is no facility to upload a file to a matter.
• What is on your calendar. See article 4 — we read busy times, not event details.
• Any special category of personal information: no health, financial account, biometric, or government identification data is requested. Do not enter it.
• Advertising and cross-site tracking data. There are no advertising cookies, no third-party analytics, and no tracking pixels. We do not track whether a recipient opened a message.

Connecting a calendar is optional, and the Service works without it. Its only purpose is so that Caucus does not offer a time when you are already busy.

What we read. The start time, the end time, and whether an entry marks you busy or free. Where the calendar provider allows it, we ask only for free-and-busy permission, which means the provider does not give us event details at all.

We do not store event titles, descriptions, attendees, locations, organisers, or attachments from your calendar. Where a feed happens to contain them, they are discarded when it is read and are never written to our database.

What we write. Nothing to your calendar unless you ask for it. Where a write is enabled, it is limited to the mediations Caucus books for you, and never touches an entry it did not create.

Google user data. Where you connect Google Calendar, our use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Specifically: we use Google calendar data only to provide and improve the scheduling features you are using it for; we do not transfer it to others except as necessary to provide those features, to comply with applicable law, or as part of a merger or acquisition; we do not use it for advertising; and no human reads it except with your explicit permission, to resolve a specific problem you have reported, for security purposes, or where the law requires it. We do not use it to train generalised artificial intelligence or machine learning models.

Disconnecting. You can disconnect a calendar at any time from within Caucus, and you can revoke our access from your calendar provider’s own security settings. Cached busy times are deleted when a calendar is disconnected.

• To generate times to offer, and to narrow them as participants answer.
• To send the scheduling requests, confirmations, and reminders a mediation needs, and the calendar file that accompanies a confirmation.
• To show the mediator where a matter stands and what is holding it up.
• To keep a dated record of what the system did, which is what lets a mediator answer a question about a matter months later.
• To operate the Service: authentication, security, preventing abuse, diagnosing faults, and taking backups.
• To bill a subscription, and to contact you about your account or a material change to the Service.
• To comply with the law, and to respond to a lawful request for information.

We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for advertising or cross-context behavioural advertising, and we do not use the contents of your matters to train artificial intelligence models.

Only the service providers needed to run the Service, each limited to what its job requires:

• Postmark (ActiveCampaign, LLC). Delivers the scheduling and confirmation email, and reports delivery and bounces.
• Vultr Holdings, LLC. Hosts the application and its database, in the United States.
• Cloudflare, Inc.. Provides DNS and routes mail addressed to our domain.
• Google LLC / Microsoft Corporation. Only where a mediator connects that calendar. We read busy time from the calendar they choose; we send nothing to them about your matter.

Beyond those, we disclose information only where the law requires it, in response to valid legal process, to protect the safety or rights of someone, or in connection with a merger or sale of the business — in which case the acquirer takes it subject to this policy.

Participants necessarily learn some information from the messages we send: the case caption, the mediator, the times on offer, and the names and roles of the other participants in the confirmation notice. Email addresses of other participants are not disclosed to them.

The Service and its database are hosted in the United States. Passwords are stored using a memory-hard hashing algorithm and are not recoverable. Participant links are stored as one-way hashes. Traffic is encrypted in transit. Access to production systems is limited to those who need it to operate the Service.

Each mediator’s organisation is separated within the database, and every query is scoped to the organisation making it, so one mediator’s matters are not reachable from another’s account.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your information, we will notify you as the law requires and tell you what we know.

• Case and scheduling records: while your account is active, and for one year after it closes, unless you ask us to delete them sooner.
• Records of email we sent, including delivery outcomes: two years, because that record is often the answer to a question about whether and when a party was notified.
• Participant links: they expire when the round they belong to closes, and are deleted with the matter.
• Sign-in sessions: until they expire or you sign out.
• Suppressed addresses: kept until released, so a known-bad address is not written to again.
• Billing records: as long as tax and accounting law requires.
• Backups: cycled out on a rolling schedule, so deleted data may persist briefly in a backup before it is overwritten.

You can see and correct almost everything about you and your matters from inside the Service. Write to privacy@justcaucus.com to ask for a copy of your data in a machine-readable format, to ask us to correct something, to ask us to delete your account and its data, or to ask a question about this policy. We will respond within 30 days.

Deletion has a limit worth stating plainly: where a record is the proof that a statutory or court-ordered notice was sent, we may keep the minimum record of that fact even after a deletion request, because destroying it could harm the mediator whose compliance it evidences.

A participant who wants their information corrected or removed should contact the mediator who is scheduling the mediation. If they contact us instead, we will refer them to that mediator and let the mediator know.

We set one cookie, and only after you sign in: a session cookie that keeps you signed in. It is marked secure and http-only, and it is not readable by other sites. There are no advertising cookies and no third-party analytics. Participants following a link from an email are not given a cookie at all.

The Service is for legal professionals and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. A mediator should not enter a minor’s contact details; enter the adult representative instead.

If we change this policy materially, we will give notice by email to the address on your account, or in the Service, before the change takes effect, and we will update the date at the top. Earlier versions are available on request.

Caucus, Tampa, Florida. Privacy questions and requests: privacy@justcaucus.com. The Terms of Use govern your use of the Service.