The American Lawyer - Sample Issue

A LOT OF LAWYERS have become evangelists for technology; Tredennick is more of a seer. First as a litigator at Denver’s Holland & Hart, then as the firm’s CTO, and finally as CEO of Catalyst Repository Systems, Tredennick early on spotted the potential of the big tech trends: the Web, the cloud, and Big Data. And he ran with them.

and foresightful in leading that effort.”
In 2000 Holland & Hart and Treden-
nick spun off their secure, Web-based
repositories as a separate business—
called CaseShare. That eventually be-
came Catalyst, with Tredennick and oth-
er investors buying out the firm’s share.
From there, Tredennick looked into his
crystal ball and, once again, got it right.
Anticipating dramatically increased data
sets, he leveraged cloud and distributed
storage technology, and moved away
search and retrieval. It created a hypo-
thetical universe with fictional com-
plaints, fictional requests to produce
documents, and databases of millions
of documents (for these, TREC used
public collections from cases involving
tobacco companies and Enron). Partici-
pants would complete the discovery re-
quests using different retrieval methods.
The idea was to quantify how well the
approaches worked. After all, if no one
knew how accurate a method was, how

“TREC was the most exhaustive objective comparison
about legal search methodology ever undertaken,”
says Hausfeld partner and Sedona Conference member William Butterfield.

Tredennick was already well-known in legal tech circles in the mid-1990s— having written books on litigation and computers—when he had his first eureka moment. He had built a docketing system, called EasyDocket, for Holland & Hart, but he was frustrated by the complexity and problems of connecting 10 offices together.

Tredennick had heard people talking about the Internet—a technology that for the legal profession, at least, was still relatively new and unexploited. This, he realized, was the answer. Tredennick put a Web-based interface on his firm’s docketing system so that location became irrelevant. Any Holland & Hart lawyer with Internet capability could access it, no matter where he was. It’s a routine concept today (think hosted services and the cloud). But this was 1996.

Tredennick saw that the same idea could be applied to documents, with online repositories facilitating access not just for Holland & Hart’s lawyers, but for clients and cocounsel. Tredennick was a pioneer in creating early law firm “extranets”—Holland & Hart’s first one, created in 1998, was centered around a dozen or so oil and gas cases and would ultimately have more than 300 outside users. “He was ahead of the curve by a mile,” says Mark Brennan, counsel at Bryan Cave. “There were tools out there, but none of them were Web-based. John was insightful

from the highly structured forms that data traditionally had to be stored in. Instead, he designed flexible, scalable systems. To put it in layman’s terms: It’s the approach that Google hit on, too.

JASON R. BARON U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION

IN 2002 BARON began a quest—or, one
might say, obsession—to find an effi-
cient way to retrieve relevant electronic
information. As director of litigation for
the U.S. National Archives and Records
Administration, he was asked to search
tens of millions of White House emails
as part of a discovery request by big
tobacco companies in a RICO lawsuit
against them. “It was definitely the dark
ages,” Baron recalls. “If you picked key-
words ad hoc, you certainly didn’t get all
the relevant documents, and you got a
lot of false positives . . . you got junk.”
Baron’s quest for a better approach led
him to the Sedona Conference, an indus-
try group, where he edited several publi-
cations on e-discovery practices. It also led
him to to cofound, in 2006, with Univer-
sity of Maryland professor Douglas Oard,
the Legal Track at the Text Retrieval Con-
ference (TREC).