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Pioneers in AI and Cloud Discovery

Our team has been building AI and advanced
cloud technologies for more than two decades.

This time we’ve taken things to a whole new level.

Founded in 2019, Merlin Search Technologies is a pioneering AI and cloud technology software company. Our mission is to harness AI and secure cloud technologies to transform investigations, and discovery workflow, making them significantly faster, more effective and less expensive.

An Experienced Team: While Merlin itself is relatively new, the team brings two decades of experience at a prior company where we developed ediscovery software still used by many of the largest companies and law firms in the world. During those years, we pioneered such innovations as Secure Cloud Hosting, Multi-Language Discovery, and Continuous Active Learning for Technology Assisted Review.

With Secure Cloud Software: We deliver our software securely via the Amazon cloud, employing a unique, single-tenant architecture that ensures greater security through data isolation, along with enhanced control over your data. We help clients save money on hosting costs by offering a first-of-its-kind On/Off Cloud Utility Pricing. It allows you to reduce hosting costs–by up to 60%–simply by turning off the site when you aren’t using it. We are proud to have launched the first green computing initiative in our industry.

Redefining Discovery: DiscoveryPartner is a full-featured discovery platform that integrates Generative AI, machine learning and advanced cloud technologies to re-engineer how we find, analyze and review documents and other ESI (electronically stored information). Our goal is to set a new standard for discovery workflow, based on speed, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.

We started out with a single question:

“How can we significantly enhance the process of finding, analyzing,
and reviewing relevant information in large document sets?”


Our goal was not just improvement, but a radical transformation—achieving a thousandfold improvement in speed, efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Discovery Pioneers for Over Two Decades.

(We still have the T-Shirts.)

In the early 1990s, John Tredennick, a trial lawyer and longtime partner at a national law firm, became convinced that Internet software could help make trial lawyers better manage digital information and meet the increasingly complex requirements for this new field called “ediscovery.” Lacking good solutions in the marketplace, he created his own team at the firm and began developing a web-based litigation system designed to streamline the process for the firm and its clients. Soon, other law firms began asking to use the system.

Founding Catalyst

In 2000, John and his law firm created Catalyst Repository Systems, a pioneering cloud ediscovery technology company. Over the next several decades, Catalyst grew to more than 160 people with offices and data centers around the world, including the U.S., Tokyo, Hong Kong and Seoul. The company served many of the largest companies and law firms in the world.

At Catalyst, John and his team built one of the first cloud-based ediscovery platforms, and led the industry with multi-language software designed to handle the most challenging languages, e.g. CJK, Arabic, Hebrew and the Romance languages. In 2012, Catalyst introduced the first Continuous Active Learning algorithm (CAL) for technology-assisted review, setting and naming a new industry standard known as TAR 2.0. 

The Birth of Merlin

Fast forward to 2019, when Catalyst was sold to an international technology company. Convinced that discovery could be radically transformed and improved through AI and cloud technologies (and not yet ready to retire), John founded Merlin Search Technologies.

He was joined by an Indian team of senior developers from his former company (now approaching 20) and Dr. William Webber, a top international AI scientist from Melbourne (who had worked with John before). The team also includes his former CFO at Catalyst and the Vice President, Litigation and Legal Operations from Fiserv, a former Catalyst client. All have come aboard to be part of this exciting new vision for investigations and discovery.

We are witnessing the dawn of a new era for ediscovery applications. For the first time, clients can use the cloud the way it was meant to be used and realize cost savings through Cloud Utility Pricing.

Merlin’s technology revolutionizes ediscovery, blending algorithmic search with LLMs’ analytical power. It provides not just results, but also their analysis, replacing long scrolls and doubtful sources with rapid, confirmed answers.

Breaking New Ground

Tredennick and his team had the luxury of starting from scratch. We made an initial decision to purpose build our software for the Amazon cloud, using cloud technologies the way they were meant to be used. Our second decision was to integrate the latest and most advanced AI machine learning capabilities directly into our evolving platform. Lastly, we seized the opportunity to use the latest software, user interface frameworks and open source products to construct our new platform. 

The result was DiscoveryPartner, a full-featured, cloud native software platform that integrates a newer, faster CAL engine directly into the search process to make it faster and easier to find relevant documents. More recently, we added multi-LLM capabilities to allow clients to analyze discovery documents in minutes rather than hours or days. Simply put, DiscoveryPartner is transforming how we find, analyze and review documents, transcripts, SMS chat messages and other forms of ESI.

We’re continuing to invest heavily in R&D to both maximize cloud technologies and incorporate powerful large language models (LLMs) and other innovations directly into our platform for even more speed, efficiency and savings. Our commitment is to stay on top of the advancing technology curve, delivering the most powerful and easy to use software on the market.

From our Founder

Welcome to Merlin, the third chapter in my professional journey. I spent the first 20 years as a trial lawyer and partner in a national law firm, where I wrote the book on using computers in litigation (“Winning with Computers”) and was named a top five  ediscovery pioneer by American Lawyer.

I then founded and spent another 20 years running Catalyst Repository Systems. During that time, we pioneered multi-language ediscovery—focusing on the more challenging Asian, Arabic and Cyrillic languages. We also designed and developed the first Continuous Active learning (CAL) algorithm on the market. During those years we were honored to provide ediscovery systems for some of the largest companies and law firms in the world.

Following the sale of Catalyst in 2019, I founded Merlin Search Technologies to take discovery to a whole new level, combining the speed and analytical capabilities of AI with modern cloud technologies

We are passionate about building software for the next era for investigations and discovery–one that combines new ways to search, analyze and review documents with an all-cloud architecture that provides enhanced speed, security and cost savings!

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