Merlin is a cloud technology company, developing AI-powered search software for investigations, discovery, ECA and any other situation where people need to search and review large quantities of documents or email.

For the past four years, we’ve been working to deliver the next generation of search, which many call Search 2.0. Our goal was to integrate smart, machine learning algorithms with keywords to make finding relevant documents faster and easier and less costly.  And to help people move beyond traditional, but often ineffective, keywords. 

The result: Sherlock Integrated Search, the first software to seamlessly integrate keyword and algorithmic search in a full-featured investigation and discovery platform. 

While our company is new, the team is not. We’ve been at it for more than two decades, building, hosting and supporting a leading international ediscovery  software platform used by many of the largest corporations and law firms in the world.  

Our Beginnings

We began in the early 1990s when our founder, John Tredennick, was a top-rated (AV-Preeminent) trial lawyer and a partner at a national law firm. Tredennick began by forming a team to build web-based litigation and compliance systems for the firm and its clients. Over the next ten years, the firm was featured in Adobe and Microsoft videos, legal magazines, and won numerous innovation awards. In 1999, Tredennick and the firm were inducted into the Smithsonian Institute for groundbreaking work using the PDF format for litigation document review.

In 2000, Tredennick and his law firm created Catalyst Repository Systems, a pioneering e-discovery search technology company. Over the next two decades, Catalyst grew to more than 160 people, with offices and five data centers around the world,  The company served many of the largest companies and law firms in the world. 

Among its many accomplishments, Catalyst pioneered the first Continuous Learning algorithm for Technology Assisted Review, setting a new industry standard we named TAR 2.0. The company also led the move to multi-language discovery, with a particular focus on the challenging Asian languages. Along with its U.S. facilities, the company deployed offices and data centers in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Seoul.  

Merlin Search

In early 2019, Catalyst was sold to a large public technology company. Not yet ready to retire, Tredennick founded a new company, Merlin Search Technologies, with a simple plan:  

Develop the next generation of search technology and deliver it securely in a cloud-native environment. 

In the years that followed, Tredennick was fortunate to be joined by many of his former team members (primarily experienced senior developers) to build out his vision. He also recruited a senior data scientist from Melbourne Australia to help design and build Sherlock AI, a powerful set of machine learning algorithms designed to take document search to the next level.  

After more than three years of hard work, Merlin delivered on its founder’s vision, launching Sherlock Integrated Search, the first software to integrate keyword and algorithmic search in a seamless investigation and discovery. Try it for yourself and you too will soon share our passion for algorithmic search.  You’ll never go back to keywords only again.