Terms of Use

These Terms of Use are an agreement between you and Caucus (“Caucus”, “we”, “us”). They govern your use of the Caucus service at justcaucus.com and everything reachable from it (the “Service”).

By creating an account, signing in, or using the Service, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service. If you are accepting them for a firm or other organisation, you represent that you have authority to bind it, and “you” means both you and that organisation.

Our Privacy Policy is part of this agreement.

Caucus collects availability from the people involved in a mediation, narrows the possible times as each one answers, and records the date the mediator confirms. It sends email on the mediator’s behalf, from our domain, with the mediator’s own address as the reply address.

The following are outside the Service, and no part of it should be understood otherwise:

• We are not a law firm and give no legal advice. Nothing in the Service or in any message it sends is legal advice, and using the Service creates no attorney-client relationship with anyone.
• We are not the mediator and not a party. We do not mediate, do not take part in a mediation, and have no role in what is discussed or agreed there.
• We do not decide whether a notice satisfies a legal requirement. Where a rule, statute, or order requires notice of a mediation — including the notices required by Florida’s Department of Financial Services mediation rules — the mediator is responsible for confirming that what was sent, to whom, and when, satisfies that requirement. Our records are a convenience, not a legal opinion and not proof of compliance.
• We do not calculate your deadlines for you. The Service computes dates from configured rules as an aid. The mediator remains responsible for every deadline in the matter.
• We do not hold or handle mediation communications. The Service is for scheduling. It is not a channel for confidential mediation communications, settlement discussions, or privileged material, and it must not be used as one.

The Service is in pre-release testing. Features may change, be withdrawn, or fail; data may be reset; and the interface you learn today may be different tomorrow. Do not rely on the Service as the only record of any date, deadline, or notice. Keep your own records, in your own system, of anything that matters to a matter.

A licence is granted per mediator. Under a mediator’s licence, that mediator may give access to their own assistants and staff, because those are the people who do this work. Every person with access must have their own credentials, and you must not share a login.

You are responsible for everything done under your account and under the accounts of anyone you give access to, including what they enter, send, and confirm. Tell us promptly at support@justcaucus.com if you believe an account has been compromised.

Participants in a mediation — parties, counsel, adjusters, assistants — do not get accounts. They act through single-purpose links sent to them by email. You are responsible for the accuracy of the addresses you enter, and a link sent to a wrong address is a consequence of that entry.

• Authority to send. You represent that you have a legitimate professional reason to email each address you enter, and that entering it does not breach any duty you owe.
• Accuracy. Names, roles, addresses, deadlines, and case details come from you. The Service acts on what you enter.
• Professional obligations. Your own rules of conduct, certification requirements, court orders, and program rules are yours to satisfy. The Service does not lift or alter any of them.
• Confirmation. No date becomes a confirmed mediation until you confirm it. That is a decision you make, and it is yours.
• Lawful use. Not for bulk or unsolicited mail, not for anything unlawful, and not for a purpose other than coordinating a mediation you are engaged in.

You agree not to:

• Attempt to access data belonging to another mediator, organisation, or matter.
• Probe, scan, or test the security of the Service, or interfere with its operation.
• Use the Service to send bulk, unsolicited, or deceptive email, or to harvest addresses.
• Reverse engineer, decompile, scrape, or copy the Service or any part of it, or use it to build a competing product.
• Resell, sublicense, or provide the Service to anyone outside your own licence.
• Use automated means to access the Service other than as we document.

We may suspend or terminate access immediately, without notice, if we reasonably believe this article has been breached or that continued access presents a risk to the Service or to other users.

Paid subscriptions are billed in advance for the term you select, monthly or annually, and renew automatically at the then-current rate until cancelled. You may cancel at any time before the next renewal, and access continues to the end of the term already paid for.

Fees are not refundable, in whole or in part, including for partial periods and for periods in which you did not use the Service. Prices may change on notice, taking effect at your next renewal. You are responsible for any applicable taxes. During beta, the Service may be provided at no charge, and doing so creates no entitlement to continued free use.

Your case data is yours. We claim no ownership of it. You grant us only the licence needed to operate the Service for you: to store it, to display it back to you, to include what is necessary in the messages we send on your behalf, and to keep the backups that operating responsibly requires.

We do not receive replies to the messages we send. Those go directly to the mediator’s own address. What we collect, what we deliberately do not collect, and how long we keep it is set out in the Privacy Policy.

On termination you may ask us for an export of your case data within 30 days, and we will provide it in a machine-readable format.

The Service depends on third parties to deliver email, to host the application, and — if you connect one — to read your calendar. We are not responsible for their acts, omissions, outages, or changes to their terms. If you connect a calendar, you authorise us to read the busy time on the calendar you select, and you remain subject to that provider’s own terms. You can disconnect it at any time.

Email delivery is not within our control. A recipient’s mail system may delay, filter, quarantine, or discard a message for reasons we cannot see and cannot prevent. We report what we are told about delivery, and that report is not a guarantee that anyone read anything.

We make no representation, warranty, or commitment about uptime, availability, response time, or the timing of any message. There is no service level agreement, no uptime guarantee, and no credit or remedy for unavailability, delay, or interruption, whether planned or not.

The Service may be unavailable for maintenance, for reasons attributable to a provider we rely on, or for reasons we cannot anticipate. Plan accordingly: keep your own record of any date or deadline you cannot afford to lose.

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE”, WITH ALL FAULTS AND WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. YOU USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express, implied, statutory, and otherwise, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, quiet enjoyment, accuracy, and non-infringement, and any warranty arising out of a course of dealing or usage of trade.

Without limiting that, we do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, timely, or error-free; that any message will be delivered, delivered on time, or read; that any date, deadline, or availability it shows is correct; that it will detect a conflict on your calendar; that it will meet your requirements; or that defects will be corrected. No advice or information, oral or written, obtained from us creates any warranty.

Our total liability to you, for all claims arising out of or relating to the Service or this agreement, taken together, will not exceed the amount you actually paid us for the Service in the one month immediately preceding the event giving rise to the claim. If you paid us nothing in that month, our total liability is nothing.

We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages; for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business, or lost opportunity; for loss of goodwill or reputation; for loss or corruption of data; for the cost of substitute services; or for a missed deadline, a missed or late mediation, a cancelled or rescheduled conference, a fee not earned, a sanction, or an adverse result in any matter — whether or not we were told such damages were possible, and regardless of the theory of liability.

These limits apply to every theory of liability, including contract, tort, negligence, strict liability, and statute, and they apply even if a limited remedy is found to have failed of its essential purpose. They are a fundamental part of the bargain between us: without them, the Service would not be offered at this price, or at all.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded. Where a limitation is not permitted, it applies to the maximum extent that is.

You will defend, indemnify, and hold us harmless from any claim, demand, loss, or expense, including reasonable legal fees, arising out of your use of the Service, the data you enter, the messages sent at your direction, your breach of this agreement, or any assertion that you lacked authority or a proper basis to contact someone through the Service.

This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Florida, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

Any claim arising out of or relating to the Service or this agreement must be brought exclusively in the small claims division of the county court in Hillsborough County, Florida. You and we each consent to the personal jurisdiction of that court and waive any objection to venue there, and waive any right to bring or maintain a claim in any other forum.

You and we agree that all use of the Service occurs in Hillsborough County, Florida, regardless of where any user, mediator, participant, recipient, server, or network happens to be, and regardless of the distributed nature of the internet. That is the agreed place of performance for every purpose, including jurisdiction and venue.

Every claim must be brought individually and in your own name only. You waive any right to bring, join, or participate in a class action, collective action, consolidated action, multi-party action, private attorney general action, or representative proceeding of any kind. No claim may be consolidated with the claim of any other person, and no arbitrator or court may preside over any form of representative proceeding.

Each party bears its own attorneys’ fees, costs, and expenses. There is no prevailing-party entitlement to fees or costs under this agreement, and each party waives any statutory, contractual, or common-law right to recover them from the other.

Any claim must be brought within one year after it arises, or it is permanently barred. You also waive any right to punitive or exemplary damages and any right to a jury trial, to the extent either may lawfully be waived.

You may stop using the Service and close your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate your access for breach of this agreement, for non-payment, or where we reasonably believe continued access presents a legal or security risk. We may also discontinue the Service, or any part of it, on reasonable notice.

On termination, your right to use the Service ends immediately. Articles 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, and this sentence survive.

We may change these terms. If a change is material, we will give notice by email to the address on your account, or in the Service, before it takes effect. Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect is acceptance of it. If you do not accept a change, stop using the Service and close your account.

This agreement, together with the Privacy Policy, is the entire agreement between us about the Service, and it supersedes any prior understanding on the subject. If any provision is held unenforceable, it is limited or severed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest remains in force — except that if the class-action waiver in article 14 is held unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim must be brought in a court of competent jurisdiction in Hillsborough County, Florida and the remainder of article 14 continues to apply.

A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign this agreement without our written consent; we may assign it in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets. Nothing here creates a partnership, agency, employment, or joint venture between us, and there are no third-party beneficiaries.

Notices to us go to legal@justcaucus.com and to Caucus, Tampa, Florida. Notices to you go to the email address on your account, and are effective when sent.