Month: October 2019

The infamous Chris Dale, perhaps the leading e-disclosure commentator across the pond, gave the Merlin Legal Open Source Foundation a nice mention in his eDisclosure Insights Blog today. Here is what he had to say: Merlin Legal Open Source Foundation “Early this year, John Tredennick sold Catalyst to OpenText. I have heard nothing from him since then …

Merlin Foundation gets nice mention on eDisclosure Insights Blog Read More »

The Techno Legal Centre Of Excellence For Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) In India (TLCEODRI), just featured the Merlin Foundation in an article entitled “Open Source Is The Foundation For Global LegalTech And EduTech Projects.” The group is doing some interesting projects using open source software to promote better access to justice. Here are a few …

Open Source Is The Foundation For Global LegalTech Read More »

We first started building litigation support extranets in the mid-1990s (that’s what we called them back in the day). At the time there were only a few people who understood the power of linking a database to a web browser for collaboration and document management. Neil Aresty was one of those few. He was an …

Interview with Neil Aresty, an Open Source Pioneer Read More »

Law Technology News published a feature story on the Merlin Legal Open Source Foundation. You can read the story here. Click here to download a PDF copy.

Noted reporter and blogger (and Advisory Board Member) Bob Ambrogi covered the formation of the Merlin Foundation in his widely-read blog: LawSites. You can read the article here.

Jonathan Pyle is an attorney and contract performance officer at Philadelphia Legal Assistance, which has been providing free civil legal services to low-income residents of Philadelphia since 1996. In his spare time (nights and weekends) he also developed an open source document assembly system called Docassemble, which is a featured open source project at the …

An Interview with Jonathan Pyle, creator of Docassemble Read More »

Advisory Board Member Shawn Curran, from the London-based law firm Travers Smith, is featured in Law Technology news for his open source email management software. You can read the story here. He recently gave a talk about how the project got started and how the new system works here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHOmBV4js_E

To a purist, you can’t open source the content of financial documents, just as Wikipedia is not an open source encyclopedia (despite what I wrote in another blog post). The reason for this is that a purist defines open source as referring only to software that is distributed for free accompanied by the underlying source …

Cooley and Fenwick Open Source Financing Documents Read More »

By John Tredennick I was talking with several legal professionals recently about open source software. “What is that?” one of them asked me. “It’s a new way to make software,” I said. “People around the world collaborate on a software project and when it is finished they make it available for free. And then more …

Wikipedia: An Open Source Encyclopedia Read More »

The Merlin Foundation was launched in October 2019. We are excited to see this idea take shape. You can read the Press Release launching the Foundation here. John Tredennick Welcome to the Merlin Legal Open Source Foundation Blog. For years, we have been watching the evolution of the open source movement and the rise of …

The Merlin Foundation is formed Read More »