Your Hosts
John Tredennick
John has been following the rule of twenty and is on round four. After 20 years pretending to grow up, he became a partner and trial lawyer with Holland & Hart. After twenty years at the law firm, he founded Catalyst. Then, twenty years later he sold Catalyst and started Merlin Digital Magic, which builds automation workflow for legal and regulatory compliance. .
Older than he looks in this picture, John has written or edited eight books and countless articles on legal technology topics, including (with Tom and others) TAR for Smart People (2nd ed.), a User’s Guide to TAR and several others for the ABA and private publishers. Showing that you can fool some of the people some of the time, John has won a number of awards–from being named an e-discovery trailblazer to legal visionary to top 100 global technology leader. When he is not sitting on his virtual porch, you will find him competing on the national equestrian show jumping circuit or playing drums and singing in a classic rock jam band.
Tom Gricks
Before he joined Catalyst, Tom was a trial lawyer with the law firm Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis, where he was a partner and chair of the e-Discovery Practice Group. During his tenure, he acted as lead e-discovery counsel in Global Aerospace v. Landow Aviation, the first case in the U.S. to authorize the use of TAR over the objection of opposing counsel.
Tom’s work on that case was highlighted in a 2013 Wall Street Journal article, “How a Computer Did the Work of Many Lawyers.” In his spare time, Tom hides out in a cozy cabin in the woods, a few hours from Pittsburgh where neither phones nor computers work well but the huntin’ is good.
Dr. Jeremy Pickens
Jeremy Pickens, Ph.D. is one of the world’s leading information retrieval scientists and a pioneer in the field of collaborative exploratory search, a form of information seeking in which a group of people who share a common information need actively collaborate to achieve it.
As Principal Data Scientist at Catalyst (prior to its acquisition by OpenText), Dr. Pickens spearheaded the development of Insight Predict, the first at-scale vendor TAR
platform based on continuous active learning. His ongoing research and development at OpenText focuses on methods for continuous learning, and the variety of real-world TAR workflows that are only possible with this approach. In addition to product development responsibilities, Dr. Pickens serves as an advisor to clients on workflow and defensibility issues, provides training, and runs simulations for clients to provide empirical feedback on their workflows and practices.
Before joining Catalyst, Dr. Pickens spent five years as a research scientist at FX Palo Alto Lab, Inc., where he pioneered a new branch of research into algorithmic mediation in support of Explicitly Collaborative Information Seeking and filed numerous patents for Fuji Xerox (FX) on a range of areas, from slide-stream indexing to improved relevance feedback for unstructured text information.
Dr. Pickens is a renowned speaker on information retrieval topics and continues to organize research workshops and speak at information retrieval and legal AI scientific conferences around the world including the LegalAIIA (formerly DESI), IEEE Legal Big Data, ECIR, SIGIR, TREC, DESIRES, HIPstIR, and ISMIR. He was awarded best presentation at the ECIR 2019 Industry Day on the topic of eDiscovery and Information Governance: The Forgotten Frontier of
Information Retrieval, and new product of the year, Insight Predict (Legaltech News Innovation Award). Dr. Pickens has seven patents and patents pending in the field of search and information retrieval.
Dr. Pickens holds a B.S., double major in Computer Science and International Relations, from Brigham Young University and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval). He conducted his post-doctoral work at King’s College, London.
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