Ep 099: John Tredennick On His New Company Merlin and the Magic of Open Source

After Catalyst, the pioneering cloud-based e-discovery company he founded and spent 19 years building, sold last year to OpenText for $75 million, John Tredennick was not ready to sit back and rest on his laurels. Instead, he launched two separate but related undertakings — Merlin Digital Magic, a company developing AI-powered software for investigations, discovery and regulatory compliance, and the Merlin Legal Open Source Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to the use of open source software to improve access to justice and make legal operations and regulatory compliance more efficient.  Now, Tredennick’s new company is about to release a product called Sherlock that he believes will revolutionize enterprise search. Tredennick calls it “the first AI-powered digital document bloodhound.” Start with a simple search query, then refine the results with increasing precision by telling Sherlock which results do or do not match the results you seek.  A litigator before founding Catalyst in 2000, Tredennick is a true pioneer in legal technology who continues to blaze new trails. His legal and technology acumen have earned him numerous awards, including having been named by The American Lawyer as one of the top six “E-Discovery Trailblazers,” named to the FastCase 50 as a legal visionary and named one of the “Top 100 Global Technology Leaders” by London CityTech magazine. In this episode, Tredennick joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss his current projects as well as his former company, his interest in open source technology, his thoughts on the current state of legal technology, and his advice for legal technology entrepreneurs who are just starting out.  If you would like to share a comment on this show, you can record a voice comment on your mobile phone and send it to [email protected]. We will play it in a future episode.  Thank You To Our Sponsors With this episode, we are thrilled to welcome a new sponsor: Everlaw, a cloud-based ediscovery platform that enables law firms, corporations, and government agencies to collaboratively discover information, illuminate critical insights, and act on key evidence.  Thanks also to our sponsor, ASG LegalTech, the company bringing innovation to the legal space with modern and affordable software solutions. ASG LegalTech’s suite of technology includes the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote. We appreciate their support.  A reminder that we are now on Patreon. Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests.