Ari Kaplan, one of the leading legal podcasters and thought leaders interviewed Merlin Search Technologies CEO John Tredennick for his award-winning podcast called Reinventing Professionals. The long-running  podcast is designed to offer ideas, guidance, and perspectives on how to effectively navigate a perpetually shifting professional landscape, with a unique focus on the legal industry and the technology that is driving its evolution.

You can access the podcast here or on listen to it on  ITunes.

Tredennick spoke on applying search technology to legal matters and beyond. The talk covered a variety of topics with a focus on how legal and other markets were evolving in an era of exploding digital content. He started by responding to a question on whether he thought his training as a trial lawyer prepared him for a second career in business. The answer was yes: “Being straight, treating everyone well, getting to the heart of issues  and not overstating your case was a formula for success as a trial lawyer and a recipe for business as well.” 

Kaplan then asked: How has your team been able to accelerate the search process so much?

Tredennick responded: We’re the first to integrate keyword and algorithmic search into a single platform. We had a vision once we developed this smart algorithm that it could change how we do search. Now I have a long way to go before I can convince the world of that vision but I assure you I am ready to make that trek. Once you try out algorithmic search you are never going to want to go back to keyword search alone again. It’s just as simple as that. 

When asked why he didn’t choose to retire after selling Catalyst, Tredennick responded:

Frankly what inspired me was the thought and the hope that we could bring an answer to this long standing problem of how bad keywords are. Frankly keyword search sucks except when you considered the alternatives, as Winston Churchill would say. But there were no alternatives so we were stuck. The chance to bring new technology to address this issue, the chance to bring new machine learning algorithms and deliver them through a secure cloud environment was just too exciting to me to pass up. I didn’t want to be watching it happen from a rocking chair on my front porch. 

Ari Kaplan is an attorney, author, and leading legal industry analyst. He has been sharing interviews with industry leaders shaping the next generation of legal and professional services since 2009. A two-time Ironman triathlon finisher, he is teaching himself to code (poorly) in python and writing a new book about reimagining business and careers in the next decade.