Cicayda: eDiscovery for 21st Century Lawyers

At cicayda, we believe that the U.S. justice system, while not perfect, is the greatest justice system the world has ever produced. Our justice system was built on the foundations of equal access to justice, equal access to facts, and a search for the truth. In the past, this foundational goal was met by ensuring equal access to the courthouse and to competent legal representation. In modern society with data volume and variety growing exponentially, lawyers must have access to the best technology to augment their abilities and serve their clients. If they do not, the client and lawyer are at a significant disadvantage and the system begins to crumble.

eDiscovery is crowded with software companies and service bureaus. As a litigator for ten years, I worked with and received demonstrations on countless eDiscovery applications. While there are many players, product or service offerings lack differentiation. At a time when technology to empower individuals are developed at a phenomenal clip, eDiscovery technology and its supply chain have been stuck in the 1990s. Improvements have been incremental at best.

In an era of limitless information availability, continuous connectivity and limitless computing power, 21st century justice systems and the lawyers that operate within them cannot afford incremental improvements. The incumbent leading providers of eDiscovery technology have not empowered intelligent lawyering. The intelligent lawyering portion of litigation where you integrate what you learn or find into a winning narrative should be the long tail in the process not the search for information. Legal departments and law firms need to scale instantly and automatically without the hassle of continuously adding costly storage infrastructure and architecture that inevitably comes with information security and disaster recovery nightmares.

My view of what eDiscovery could be began to change when I visited cicayda’s office in the early days of the company. The CTO, a developer, and data scientist were huddled together. I asked what they were working on. The response, “a problem that needs a bigger computer”, immediately sparked my interest. cicayda had designed its proprietary search and Natural Language Processing based analytics engine. The ability of the analytics engine to reveal key people, organizations, dates and other entities instantly prior to either a costly manual review or supervised machine learning exercise required by Predictive Coding techniques represented a dramatic improvement in the empowerment of litigators. The problem to solve was how to architect the system so that this powerful search could be performed at lightning speed and in stark contrast to present industry solutions that sometimes require minutes and even hours to execute.

To find a solution to scale, we looked at what the great technology companies of the world were doing not what eDiscovery companies were doing. This led us to Cloud Computing and the result is a purpose-built, easy-to-use suite of applications rather than feature and function laden, cumbersome databases requiring very lengthy training manuals. Lucene is our text search engine. ElasticSearch is a layer that wraps around Lucene providing powerful API, text search and data management services. ElasticSearch is essential for scalability. It allows the Lucene database to grow beyond what could reasonably be stored and queried on a single computer without significant loss in performance. Datomic is our database of record. Advantages of Datomic include point-in-time queries, a functional query language allowing it to be a non-SQL database that still maintains relational database functionality, immutable data storage, and separate methods to scale reads and writes. Clojure is our programming language. It is a modern Lisp language created by Rich Hickey who also created Datomic. The choice of Clojure has attracted top-notch developers to our company with the added benefit that it is an incredibly lean code, which has enhanced agile software development and made ou software less buggy. The result of our carefully designed architecture is millisecond search across incredibly large litigation data sets representing a 10x-100x improvement over incumbent technologies.
We believe as Steve Jobs did that personal computers are like bicycles for the mind. The PC and applications that in spawned allow smart, creative humans to accomplish intellectual tasks faster and better. Advanced applications that empower lawyers have been lacking until recently. It is an honor to participate and wonderful to see the work of CodeX, its bringing together and development of companies and ideas that are going to allow lawyers to travel much faster and better than they ever dreamed for the betterment of the justice system.