John Tredennick is the founder and CEO of Merlin Search Technologies, which develops AI-powered search software for investigations, discovery and regulatory compliance. Prior to that he was founder and CEO of Catalyst Repository Systems, which he sold to OpenText in early 2019. For the first 20 years of his career, he was a trial lawyer and litigation partner at Holland & Hart, a national law firm based in the Rocky Mountains.
John is a prolific speaker and writer. Over the past 30 years, he has written eight books and countless articles on legal technology topics, including “TAR for Smart People” (3rd Ed.), two ABA bestsellers “Winning with Computers” (Vols. One and Two), “How to Prepare For, Take and Use a Deposition at Trial (James Publishing), and several editions of “The Lawyer’s Guide to Spreadsheets.” John has served as a Chair of the ABA’s Law Practice Management Section and Editor in Chief of its flagship magazine. John is currently active with the Sedona Conference as co-drafting team leader for the new Sedona Guidelines on Legal Holds and as a member of the drafting team for the International Legal Hold Primer.
John’s legal and technology acumen has earned him numerous awards, including being named one of the top six “E-Discovery Trailblazers,” by the American Lawyer, recognized as a legal visionary to the FastCase 50 and named one of the “Top 100 Global Technology Leaders” by London CityTech magazine. John was also recognized as the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Technology in the Rocky Mountain Region and Top Technology Entrepreneur by the Colorado Software and Internet Association. While at Holland & Hart in the nineties, John became one of the first CTOs of a major law firm and saw his firm inducted into the Computerworld-Smithsonian Institute Innovators Archive (1999) for their pioneering work using PDFs rather that TIFF images for ediscovery software.
