John Tredennick, executive director, Merlin Legal Open Source Foundation. Courtesy photo

John Tredennick, founder and former CEO of e-discovery company Catalyst Repository Systems, has accepted the challenge of bringing free, open source legal tech to an industry notoriously known as a slow tech adopter.

After stepping down as the CEO of Catalyst in January, which followed Catalyst being acquired by OpenText for $75 million, Tredennick said he wanted to bring open source tech to the legal market. Nearly a year later, he's officially launched the Merlin Legal Open Source Foundation as its executive director.

Tredennick said the nonprofit will serve as a platform to spark collaboration among legal professionals with open source development projects. The platform will share open source software for free and provide information regarding open source software's advantages and the benefits of secure cloud computing on its website. 

Tredennick, who previously founded a compliance and regulatory workflow software developer company,  said the free, open source legal technology shared on his foundation will include access-to-justice software. He cited software similar to DoNotPay as an example, i.e., tools that automate simple legal services that would be too expensive if a lawyer were retained.

Additionally, the foundation will highlight legal and regulatory compliance open source tools that streamline tasks faced by most lawyers. 

"The key to this relies on our mission, which is improving access to justice and regulatory compliance, [and making it] more effective because this stuff is not the core of any company's business or law firms and the fact that you do it won't make you stand out in the market," Tredennick explained.

Tredennick's remarks mirror those of Shawn Curran, head of legal technology at U.K. law firm Travers Smith and a member of the foundation's advisory board, when he explained in September why his firm made its email management software open source. 

"We certainly don't see ourselves competing with other law firms on email management, so it made sense to share it," Curran told Legaltech News at the time. "We hope that many other law firms openly share projects that don't provide a competitive advantage."

Tredennick hopes more lawyers will share and leverage open source technology, but he acknowledged it is an uphill battle convincing some lawyers of open source software's safety and abilities. Still, he said lawyers are usually surprised when he informs them that the Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge browsers they use are built on open source platforms. "In other words, they are already using it," he said.

What's more, Tredennick noted that open source software's potential cost-savings is beginning to thaw lawyers' icy reception.

"I think there's been a rise in interest among legal people saying, 'Wait a minute, this code is as good or better than the code we pay for.'"

In addition to Curran of Travers Smith, the foundation's advisory board also includes legal reporter Bob Ambrogi, Cooley tech transactions partner Adam Ruttenberg and Mary Mack, former executive director of the Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists.