We've Been Solving Discovery Problems for Twenty-Five Years
Legal teams have been searching through documents one at a time for decades. We've spent our careers building the technology to change that.
The Founding Question
In 2019, after selling Catalyst Repository Systems, we asked a simple question: What if AI could change how we managed investigations and discovery?
What if instead of searching through millions of documents and reading thousands of results, you could ask a question and get a sourced answer in minutes? What if the platform was smart enough to find what matters, read it, and tell you what it means — with every finding linked to the evidence?
That wasn’t a new question for us. We’d been working on it for over two decades. But for the first time, the technology existed to deliver a real answer.
So we started over. Not an upgrade to an existing platform. Not a feature bolted onto legacy architecture. A completely new system, built from the ground up on cloud-native infrastructure and generative AI.
The result is Alchemy.
John Tredennick
Founder and CEO
Author, "Generative AI for Smart Discovery Professionals"
From Our Founder
This is the third chapter of my professional life. I spent the first twenty years as a trial lawyer and partner at a national law firm, where I wrote “Winning with Computers” and was named a top five ediscovery pioneer by American Lawyer.
I then founded Catalyst Repository Systems and spent another twenty years building discovery technology used by some of the largest corporations and law firms in the world. During that time, we pioneered cloud-based ediscovery, multi-language discovery for Asian, Arabic, and Cyrillic scripts, and designed the first Continuous Active Learning algorithm on the market — what the industry now calls TAR 2.0.
After Catalyst was acquired in 2019, I saw the opportunity I’d been waiting for: AI and cloud technology had finally reached the point where we could fundamentally transform how legal teams work with information. Not incremental improvement. A thousandfold leap in speed, quality, and cost-effectiveness. All new from the ground up.
That’s why I founded Merlin.
The Track Record
This isn’t our first time building discovery technology. The Merlin team built and ran Catalyst Repository Systems for nearly two decades — growing it into a global operation with 160+ people and offices across the U.S., Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Seoul, serving many of the world’s largest corporations and law firms.
During those years, the team pioneered:
- One of the first cloud-based ediscovery platforms
- Multi-language discovery handling CJK, Arabic, Hebrew, and Cyrillic scripts
- Continuous Active Learning (CAL) in 2012 — now the industry standard for technology-assisted review (TAR 2.0)
When Catalyst was acquired in 2019, the core team came together again with a clear mandate: use everything we’d learned to build something fundamentally better.
"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."
Kathy Phillips
Former Chief of Search, Wells Fargo
