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

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">After Catalyst, the pioneering cloud-based e-discovery company he founded and spent 19 years building,</span> <a href= "https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2019/02/e-discovery-deal-opentext-acquires-catalyst-75-million.html"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">sold last year to OpenText</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">for $75 million,</span> <a href= "https://www.linkedin.com/in/tredennick/"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">John Tredennick</span></a> <span style= "font-weight: 400;">was not ready to sit back and rest on his laurels. Instead, he launched two separate but related undertakings —</span> <a href="https://www.merlindm.com/"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">Merlin Digital Magic</span></a><span style= "font-weight: 400;">, a company developing AI-powered software for investigations, discovery and regulatory compliance, and the</span> <a href="https://www.merlinfoundation.org/"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">Merlin Legal Open Source Foundation</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, a nonprofit devoted to the use of open source software to improve access to justice and make legal operations and regulatory compliance more efficient. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">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. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">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 Le