Speakers et al.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER
SPEAKERS, PANELISTS, & INSTRUCTORS
HACKATHON JUDGES EMCEES & ORGANIZERS
STUDENT PRESENTERS

KEYNOTE: Rachael Rollins, Suffolk County District Attorney

Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins is the chief law enforcement official for Boston, Chelsea, Revere, and Winthrop, Massachusetts, and oversees an office of approximately 300 people handling approximately 35,000 new cases each year. She took office on Jan. 2, 2019, as Suffolk County’s 16th district attorney, the first woman to be elected to that position in Suffolk County history, and the first woman of color ever to serve as a Massachusetts district attorney.

In 2018, the people of Suffolk County chose District Attorney Rollins to represent them as their district attorney – and to effect meaningful, substantive reform to the criminal justice system. She pledged to pursue that mission tirelessly by reducing incarceration, correcting racial and ethnic disparities, adopting alternatives to traditional prosecution, focusing the offices limited resources on serious and violent crimes, and improving relationships between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve.

Among her first and most impactful initiatives, District Attorney Rollins implemented a policy of presumptively dismissing and/or diverting certain low-level misdemeanor charges. These offenses are often symptomatic not of criminal intent but of mental illness, substance use disorder, and poverty. Instead of using her limited resources to prosecute and incarcerate these offenders, District Attorney Rollins seeks to hold them accountable while providing access to services and treatment to address the underlying issues that likely led the individual to offend. This progressive approach is designed to reduce the likelihood that an individual will reoffend and improve the safety and wellbeing of impacted communities.

Upon taking office, District Attorney Rollins recognized that immigrant victims, witnesses, and offenders were often afraid to appear in court due to federal authorities’ use of state courts to conduct civil immigration arrests. As a result, prosecutors have been unable to prove criminal cases where witnesses and victims did not appear for trial and vulnerable immigrants lacked access to the vital protections of the court, such as restraining orders, and services of the probate and housing courts. Additionally, violent offenders charged but not yet prosecuted in Suffolk County were being removed by ICE. This was done with no communication with the District Attorney’s Office or the victims of the crime. In response, District Attorney Rollins helped lead the charge in filing an injunction in federal court to end civil arrests in state courthouses and ensure that all community members have equal access to justice through the courts. Read Full Profile...

Suffolk County DA's Office | Twitter

 Alphabetical List (Speakers, Organizers, et al.)

Diego Alcala, Solo-Attorney

Diego Alcala is a solo-attorney that represents court-appointed indigent defendants and working as counsel for various start-ups in the Puerto Rico ecosystem.

He launched Tiago - an online legal market place for the Puerto Rico community - closed 2018; the Puerto Rico Legal Tech Community which brings together software developers, entrepreneurs and lawyers discuss opportunities and build new products; and he is learning about AI, ML and Data Science. He is interested in technology and criminal justice reform, and has survived Hurricanes Irma, Maria, and the earthquake of 2020!

Twitter | LinkedIn

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Adrian Angus, Staff Attorney, Committee for Public Counsel Services

Adrian Angus is a public defender in the Worcester Superior Court Office of the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services representing clients in the Superior and District Courts. He received his J.D. from Boston University and a B.A. (Honors) from McGill University. Prior to working for CPCS, he clerked for the Public Defender Service of the District of Columbia. He was selected in 2016 to be a Massachusetts Bar Association Leadership Fellow. He is a member of the Massachusetts Bar Association and the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

LinkedIn

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Anthony J. Benedetti, Chief Counsel for the Committee for Public Counsel Services

Anthony J. Benedetti is the Chief Counsel for the Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS), the Massachusetts agency responsible for providing legal services to the indigent. CPCS provides legal representation to 285,000 indigent clients annually in criminal, delinquency, children/family law, and mental health cases through 725 staff, including 425 staff lawyers and 2,800 assigned private lawyers. Since being selected as the head of the agency, he has overseen rapid growth in the size of the agency in response to a legislatively mandated adjustment in how the delivery of services to clients is provided. From 1998 to 2010, he was the CPCS General Counsel, representing the agency before the executive, legislative, and judicial branches on budget and legislative issues. Prior to this, he spent five years as a public defender trial lawyer in the CPCS Brockton office where he represented hundreds of clients in the District and Superior Courts. He began his career at CPCS as an Audit Specialist in their Audit & Oversight Unit while pursuing his law degree.

He is a member of the National Association for Public Defense, National Legal Aid and Defender Association, the American Council of Chief Defenders and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL). He is a long time member of the Massachusetts Bar Association House of Delegates and the Executive Management Board and a member of the Boston Bar Association. He is a former member of the Massachusetts Criminal Systems History Board and the former Chair of the Massachusetts Firearm Law Review Board.

Anthony has been an adjunct professor in the Suffolk University Criminal Justice Sociology program since 2002, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in Legal Issues, Criminal Justice Policy, Child Welfare and the Development of Delinquency, Introduction to Criminal Justice, and a Seminar on the Death Penalty.

Anthony was recognized in 2005 by the Suffolk Lawyers for Justice Board of Directors for his advocacy on behalf of legislation to ensure access to justice for all and in 2017 by NACDL with the Champion of State Criminal Justice Reform Award for his efforts advocating for progressive criminal justice reform in Massachusetts.

Committee for Public Counsel Services | Twitter

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Sarah Boonin, Associate Director of Clinical Programs and Clinical Professor of Law

Sarah Boonin teaches in the areas of mental health and disability law, women's reproductive health, and legal ethics. She designed and teaches Suffolk's first Health Law Clinic. The Clinic provides students with an opportunity to hone their legal skills under close supervision through live client practice in the areas of guardianship, Social Security disability practice, and healthcare benefits. Professor Boonin and her clinical students specialize in serving clients with complex mental health needs. Professor Boonin serves as the Associate Director of Clinical Programs. She is a member of the Access to Administrative Justice Sub-Committee, which advises the Supreme Judicial Court's Access to Justice Commission.

LinkedIn | University Profile

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Amanda Brown, Founder & Executive Director, Lagniappe Law Lab

Amanda Brown is the founder and executive director of Lagniappe Law Lab, a new legal aid technology nonprofit serving Louisiana’s justice community. She is the co-chair of the Louisiana's Access to Justice Commission's technology subcommittee, and is a member of the Legal Service Corporation's Emerging Leaders Council. She is also active in the ABA, serving as the Vice Director of the YLD's Disaster Legal Services Team and as a member of the ABA Center for Innovation's Governing Council. Most recently, Amanda was a legal technology consultant for the Louisiana Bar Foundation on its statewide triage portal, the Louisiana Civil Legal Navigator. Prior to that, she served as the inaugural Microsoft NextGen Fellow for the American Bar Association's Center for Innovation, and was a disaster recovery attorney at Southeast Louisiana Legal Services. She is a graduate of Loyola University New Orleans College of Law.

Personal Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | Lagniappe Law Lab

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David Colarusso, Director of the Legal Innovation and Technology Lab, Clinical Fellow

David Colarusso is the Director of Suffolk University Law School's Legal Innovation and Technology Lab. An attorney and educator by training, he has worked as a public defender, data scientist, software engineer, and high school physics teacher. He is the author of a programming language for lawyers, QnA Markup, an award winning legal hacker, ABA Legal Rebel, and Fastcase 50 honoree. In 2017 he was named one of the ABA's top legal tweeters.

Personal Website | Twitter | LinkedIn

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Bobby Constantino, Chief of Innovation & Strategy for District Attorney Rachael Rollins

Bobby Constantino is the Chief of Innovation & Strategy for District Attorney Rachael Rollins. Since graduating from Suffolk University Law School in 2003, he has worked as an assistant district attorney, a public defender, and in various local and national nonprofit, program, and policy roles.

Personal Website | Twitter

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Cynthia Conti-Cook, Technology Fellow, Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice

Cynthia Conti-Cook is a tech fellow, working with the Ford Foundation’s Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice team to help build grantees’ capacity to respond to the expanding use of surveillance technologies against immigrant communities, as well as the potential use of technology to criminalize people who seek or aid abortions.

As a civil rights litigator and public defender, most recently at the Legal Aid Society of New York, Cynthia led class and individual civil rights federal and state actions, bringing impact litigation on a range of policy matters. She also pioneered a first-of-its-kind public database (CAPstat) that tracks misconduct by New York City police officers, providing a critical means of transparency to an issue that has historically been shrouded in secrecy. Her work on CAPstat has been featured in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and El Diario, and is being replicated by other public defender offices across the country. Cynthia’s work at Ford also includes supporting the mass incarceration team’s efforts to help the field leverage technology to advance police accountability, and to help the team better understand and respond to algorithmic bias in bail, sentencing, and parole considerations.

Cynthia served as a 2018-19 Data & Society fellow, working on a variety of topics related to surveillance and the intersection of technology and social justice.

Ford Foundation Profile | LinkedIn

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Tina Eliassi-Rad , Associate Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University

Tina Eliassi-Rad is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. She is also a core faculty member at Northeastern University's Network Science Institute. Prior to joining Northeastern, Tina was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University; and before that she was a Member of Technical Staff and Principal Investigator at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Tina earned her Ph.D. in Computer Sciences (with a minor in Mathematical Statistics) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research is rooted in data mining and machine learning; and spans theory, algorithms, and applications of big data from networked representations of physical and social phenomena. She has over 100 peer-reviewed publications (including a few best paper and best paper runner-up awardees); and has given over 200 invited talks and 14 tutorials. Tina's work has been applied to personalized search on the World-Wide Web, statistical indices of large-scale scientific simulation data, fraud detection, mobile ad targeting, cyber situational awareness, and ethics in machine learning. Her algorithms have been incorporated into systems used by the government and industry (e.g., IBM System G Graph Analytics) as well as open-source software (e.g., Stanford Network Analysis Project). In 2017, Tina served as the program co-chair for the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (a.k.a. KDD, which is the premier conference on data mining) and as the program co-chair for the International Conference on Network Science (a.k.a. NetSci, which is the premier conference on network science). In 2020, she is serving as the program co-chair for the International Conference on Computational Social Science (a.k.a. IC2S2, which is the premier conference on computational social science). Tina received an Outstanding Mentor Award from the Office of Science at the US Department of Energy in 2010; and became a Fellow of the ISI Foundation in Turin Italy in 2019.

Personal Website | Twitter | University Profile

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Gipsy Escobar, Director of Innovation, Measures for Justice

Dr. Gipsy Escobar has extensive multidisciplinary criminal justice research experience designing and managing complex research projects, mentoring staff, and communicating research results to varied audiences. As Measures for Justice's Director of Research and Analytics (2015 to 2018) she worked with national experts to design and validate a system of performance measurement for local criminal justice and to develop a robust methodology to standardize the management of criminal justice data from varied sources across jurisdictions in the United States. Currently, as MFJ's Director of Innovation Research, she focuses on developing partnerships with practitioners and organizations in the criminal justice space, exploring innovative ways to improve upon the performance measurement system (from data intake to publication), and providing expertise to states working on legislative and executive initiatives to close the criminal justice data gap. She also directs the Data Fellowship Team that is providing technical assistance for the implementation of criminal justice data transparency legislation in a Judicial Circuit in Florida.

Before joining MFJ, Dr. Escobar was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology and a faculty member of the Graduate School at Loyola University Chicago. She received her Ph.D. from John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research interests include crime and justice measurement, court case processing, prosecutorial decision-making, program evaluation, and the spatial study of crime correlates at the community level.

Measures for Justice Website | Twitter | LinkedIn

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Ivy B. Grey, Vice President of Strategy & Business Development for WordRake

Ivy B. Grey is the Vice President of Strategy & Business Development for WordRake. Prior to joining the team, she practiced bankruptcy law for ten years. Ivy was recently recognized as a 2020 Influential Woman in Legal Tech by the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA). She has also been recognized as a Fastcase 50 Honoree and included in the Women of Legal Tech list by the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center.

Twitter | LinkedIn


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Darrell Malone Jr., Director of the Tubman Project

Darrell Malone is a cutting edge technologist, software engineer,and changemaker. Co-founder of crypto-currency distributor CoinValut ATM and legal tech innovator. Darrell has always found himself breaking new ground. Darrell moved to Austin, TX in 2007 as an unknown with nothing to his name. In a few short years, he had become a prominent figure in the startup community by assisting in the development of multiple new software companies. Darrell is a blockchain software engineer who has worked primarily with financial technology. He is currently a lead developer of Factom and the Executive Director of the Tubman Project.

Tubman Project Website | Twitter | LinkedIn

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Kim McLaurin, Associate Dean for Experiential Learning, Director of Clinical Programs and Clinical Professor of Law

Kim M. McLaurin received her undergraduate degree from Hampton University and she is a graduate of Brooklyn Law School. Following law school graduation, Professor McLaurin accepted a position at the Legal Aid Society of New York City and was employed in various legal positions within the Legal Aid Society until June 2008. Professor McLaurin most recently served as the Attorney in Charge of the Juvenile Rights Division within the Queens Office of the Legal Aid Society. In this position, Professor McLaurin was responsible for the operation of an interdisciplinary trial office of approximately forty staff members. Professor McLaurin was directly responsible for the office’s representation of children involved in Family Court matters, including juvenile delinquency and child protective cases.

LinkedIn | University Profile

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Cynthia Mousseau, Staff Attorney, New England Innocence Project

Cynthia is a staff attorney for the New England Innocence Project. She graduated from University of Rochester in 2005 with a degree in Biology and University of New Hampshire School of Law in 2008. Following graduation, she clerked for two years with the justices of the New Hampshire Superior Court. Following her clerkship, she joined the Committee for Public Counsel Services in Lowell, Massachusetts before moving back to New Hampshire and becoming a New Hampshire Public Defender. She joined the New England Innocence Project in February 2019, becoming the first New Hampshire staff attorney. She is a member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the New Hampshire Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Dyane O'Leary, Co-Director of the Legal Innovation and Technology Concentration

Professor O’Leary’s scholarship focuses on integrating technology competence into the legal practice curriculum. She has published on topics such as artificially intelligent legal research and writing tools and designed an advanced writing class to build skills in areas such as e-discovery, research analytics, word processing for lawyers, and typography and digital design of legal documents. Professor O’Leary previously taught at Northeastern Law School and New England Law Boston. She graduated summa cum laude from Villanova University and Suffolk University Law School and practiced complex commercial and intellectual property litigation at WilmerHale, LLP in Boston.

Twitter | LinkedIn | University Profile

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Andrew M. Perlman, Dean, Suffolk University Law School

Dean Andrew Perlman is a nationally recognized voice on the future of legal education and law practice. Dean Perlman was the chief reporter of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Ethics 20/20, which was responsible for updating the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct to reflect changes in technology and increased globalization. He also served as the vice chair of the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services, which produced projects and recommendations designed to improve how legal services are delivered and accessed. Most recently, he was appointed by the president of the American Bar Association to serve as the chair of the governing council of the ABA’s new Center for Innovation. More from University profile »

Twitter | LinkedIn | University Profile

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Sheriece M. Perry, Acting Co-Director of the Department of Support Services for the Massachusetts Trial Courts Office of Court Management

SHERIECE M. PERRY, ESQ. is the Acting Co-Director of the Department of Support Services for the Massachusetts Trial Courts Office of Court Management. Within this position, Sheriece provides state-wide oversight of the Court Service Centers, Law Libraries and Judicial Response System. Prior to her appointment, Sheriece developed and managed the Boston Court Service Center, which was one of the first Court Service Centers to open in Massachusetts.

In addition to Sheriece’s departmental responsibilities, she also works on a variety of access to justice initiatives for the self-represented litigant populations, and she serves on multiple court committees including committees on public outreach; governance; trauma; and leadership capacity building.

Sheriece has taught Street Law at Bunker Hill Community College as Adjunct Faculty in the TRiO Talent Search Program at Chelsea High School. She has led various trainings on guardianship and family law matters. She also has served as faculty and presented at the 1st and 2nd Legal Services Conferences, and the Probate and Family Court: Lawyer of the Day Trainings hosted by the Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education. Sheriece authored a chapter on Guardianship of Minors in Guardianship and Conservatorship Practice under the Massachusetts Uniform Probate Code.

Sheriece is the Immediate Past President of the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association, and was appointed by Massachusetts Governor Charles Baker to the Boston Finance Commission in August 2018 and Roxbury Community College Board of Trustees in January 2020. Sheriece has received numerous awards for her accomplishments in the legal community and community engagement work, Sheriece graduated from George Washington University and Suffolk University Law School.

LinkedIn

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Kelli Raker, Managing Director of the Duke Law Tech Lab

Kelli Raker supports the Duke Program in Law & Entrepreneurship and the Duke Center on Law & Technology as a program coordinator at Duke University School of Law. She serves as the Managing Director of the Duke Law Tech Lab, a remote pre-accelerator for early-stage legal tech startups with a mission to increase access to justice. She also supports law students enrolled in the LLM in Law & Entrepreneurship from application to graduation. She received her BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from The College of William and Mary; MA in Higher Education and Student Affairs from The Ohio State University; and a Certificate in Technology and Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Kelli has worked in multiple higher education and nonprofit startup environments, and currently volunteers on the Board of Directors of the North Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Organizing Against Racism Durham.

LinkedIn | University Listing

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Damien Riehl, Managing Director, Factcase Legal Research Platform

Damien Riehl is a technology lawyer with experience in software design, data privacy, and cybersecurity. After working for the chief judges of state and federal courts, as well as practicing in complex litigation for 15 years, Damien currently leads the design, development, and expansion of the Fastcase Legal Research Platform, integrating AI-backed technologies to improve legal workflows and to power legal data analytics.

Twitter | LinkedIn


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Nicole Siino, Consultant at Fireman & Company

Nicole is 2018 Suffolk Law alumni. While in law school, she was part of the Legal Innovation and Technology Lab which focused on the intersection between technology and the law. It was through this program that Nicole found her passion for helping lawyers discover ways to use technology to make them work more efficiently. She created a website application that houses a master list of juvenile justice resources throughout the Boston area while working in the lab as a Legal Innovation and Technology fellow within the Juvenile Defenders Clinic. Following graduation, Nicole served as a NextGen Fellow within the American Bar Association’s Center for Innovation where she expanded the website application to include all criminal justice resources throughout the entire state of Massachusetts.

Nicole is currently a consultant at Fireman & Company, a legal-industry-focused management consulting firm. She works with law firms across the country to develop document management and knowledge management systems. She assists in the requirements gathering process by speaking with attorneys and law firm business associates.

Twitter | LinkedIn

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Quinten Steenhuis, Clinical Fellow Suffolk University Law School

Quinten Steenhuis is a clinical fellow at Suffolk Univeristy Law School in their Legal Innovation and Technology Lab. Quinten has practiced housing and eviction defense law since 2008, and has been a professional programmer and web application developer since 2001. He speaks at area law schools and blogs frequently on the topic of legal technology. He works on projects addressing social justice and access to justice with technology focusing on the topic of housing and evictions. Quinten is an active member of his local community, serving as an appointed member of the City of Cambridge's Recycling Advisory Committee, serving on the Access to Justice Commission's working group on housing through the Justice for All initiative, founding a neighborhood political action group, and serving as the long-time president of a Scrabble club in Somerville, MA. He received his B.Sc. in Logic and Computation with an additional B.Sc. in Political Science from Carnegie Mellon University and J.D. from Cornell Law School.

Personal Website | Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn

Jason Tashea, Journalist and Entrepreneur

Jason is a law professor, journalist and entrepreneur making sense of law and technology. A lawyer by training, he is an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches a practicum on criminal justice technology, policy, and law, and is the law and technology reporter for the ABA Journal. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Law Committee, an inaugural member of the Legal Services Corporation's Emerging Leaders Council and co-founder of the Baltimore Legal Hackers. For five years, he operated Justice Codes, a consultancy he founded that helped build, deploy and study tech in the criminal justice system. He has also worked as a criminal justice policy expert at the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime in Austria and the American Bar Association in Armenia. He was a 2012 Fulbright recipient to research justice reform in the Republic of Kosovo.

Personal Website | Twitter | LinkedIn

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Gabriel Teninbaum, Director of the Institute on Legal Innovation and Technology & Professor of Legal Writing

Gabe Teninbaum is a professor and legal technologist at Suffolk University Law School. He serves as Director of the Institute on Legal Innovation & Technology (“LIT”), the LIT Concentration (akin to an undergraduate major), and the LIT Certificate (an online program for legal professionals). During his time at Suffolk Law, he has taught more than 10 different courses (including classes held in Hungary, Sweden, and at MIT) and published more than 30 law review pieces and other articles. In addition to his work at Suffolk Law, Prof. Teninbaum has also - simultaneously - held appointments as a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, as a Visiting Professor at the MIT Media Lab, and as a Visiting Fellow at the Yale Law School Information Society Project.

He is the founder of an educational technology startup, SpacedRepetition.com, which was named one of the Top 20 Legal IT Innovations in the world by ALM/Legal Week Intelligence; is a former trial attorney at Sugarman in Boston; and, before law school, protected dozens of dignitaries – including two sitting U.S. presidents—while serving as an Operations Support Technician in the U.S. Secret Service.

He has been named to the FastCase 50, which "honors the law's smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders,” and called “perhaps the most tech-savvy law professor in the country” by the ABA Journal, which named him to the Web100 (the top 100 legal professionals to follow on social media).

Twitter | LinkedIn | University Profile

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John Tredennick, Executive Director, The Merlin Foundation

John Tredennick spent the first twenty years of his professional life as a trial lawyer and partner at a national law firm. He then founded Catalyst Repository, a a leading e-discovery and AI software provider where he served as CEO and Board Chair for the next twenty years (the company was recently sold to OpenText). Not ready to retire at this young age, Tredennick formed the Merlin Legal Open Source Foundation, where he serves as Chair and Executive Director until a new generation steps in to carry on the mission. Tredennick also runs Merlin Digital Magic, a cloud software development company that helps corporations and law firms manage legal and regulatory compliance.

Tredennick is a prolific speaker and writer. Over the past thirty years, he has written eight books and countless articles on legal technology topics, including “TAR for Smart People” (3rd Ed.), “The Legal Hold Handbook (for Smart People)” two ABA bestsellers “Winning with Computers” (Vols. One and Two), “How to Prepare For, Take and Use a Deposition at Trial (James Publishing), and several editions of “The Lawyer’s Guide to Spreadsheets.” John’s is a past Chair of the ABA’s Law Practice Management Section, was Editor in Chief of its flagship magazine and is currently active with the Sedona Conference, acting as co-drafting team leader for the new Sedona Guidelines on Legal Hold and as a member of the research team for the International Legal Hold Guidelines.

John’s legal and technology acumen has earned him numerous awards including being named by the American Lawyer as one of the top six “E-Discovery Trailblazers,” named to the FastCase 50 as a legal visionary and named one of the “Top 100 Global Technology Leaders” by London CityTech magazine. He has also been named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Technology in the Rocky Mountain Region, and Top Technology Entrepreneur by the Colorado Software and Internet Association.

LinkedIn

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 Alphabetical List (Student Presenters)

  TBD