Mediation

Chat and Caucus Rooms

Vilulia Mediate includes real-time text chat within each case, giving mediators and parties a structured space to communicate without exchanging personal email addresses. In addition to the shared case chat, mediators can create private caucus rooms — confidential spaces where the mediator can communicate with one party at a time, out of sight of the other. Video caucus (breakout) rooms are also available for in-person-style private sessions.

What you'll learn

How case chat works and who can participate
What a caucus room is and when to use one
How to start a video caucus session
How chat messages feed into AI priority analysis
How messages are encrypted for HIPAA tenants

Case chat

Every mediation case has a shared main chat room. The mediator and all parties with portal access can send and receive messages here. Messages are timestamped and stored on the case record. The main channel is the only channel the AI Assistant monitors — it provides facilitation guidance, detects sentiment, and identifies when parties reach agreement.

Caucus rooms

A caucus room is a private channel between the mediator and a single party. Other parties cannot see caucus room messages. Mediators create a caucus room from within the case and select which party is included. Caucus rooms are useful for exploring a party's real settlement priorities, sharing a proposal before presenting it jointly, or addressing sensitive issues without the other party present.

The AI Assistant and the AI Priority Analysis tool do not read caucus room messages. Only main channel messages and uploaded documents are used as input for AI tools.

Video caucus

For video-based private sessions, Vilulia supports breakout rooms within a scheduled video session. Breakout rooms use the same Daily.co video infrastructure as main sessions and include AI transcription, screen sharing, and in-session chat. The transcript from any video session — including caucus breakouts — is automatically saved to the case file when the session ends. Video conferencing is available as an add-on on Starter ($50/month) and included on Enterprise.

HIPAA message encryption

For organizations with the HIPAA Basic or HIPAA Enhanced add-on enabled, all chat messages are encrypted at rest using AES-256 via AWS KMS before being written to the database. Messages are decrypted transparently on retrieval. For HIPAA tenants, party notification previews are replaced with a generic "You have a new message" notice — message content is never included in notification emails or SMS.

AI Priority Analysis and chat

The AI Priority Analysis tool reads all case documents and main channel chat messages to surface each party's stated and inferred priorities. Caucus room messages are excluded from this analysis. Running Priority Analysis requires at least one document or main channel message to exist on the case.

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