We make the law accessible so everyone can make the right decisions

Democratizing access to the law by making state trial court records and legal data more accessible is a necessary step in bringing greater transparency to our judicial system, and is central to our core mission here at Trellis.
Whether you want to see how specific legal issues are decided across counties and states, understand how judges have ruled on similar motions, or gain strategic insights on your opposing counsel ... Trellis is strategic research for smart practitioners.

Get to know the founders

Nicole Clark

Nicole Clark


CEO & Founder

Nicole Clark developed Trellis as her own secret weapon. After graduating from Rutgers Law School in 2011, she entered into private practice, working as an associate at O’Connell, Attmore & Morris (2012), Liner (2014), Andrews Lagasse Branch + Bell (2015), and Newmeyer & Dillion (2016). Over the course of her legal career, she specialized in business litigation and labor and employment matters, representing multinational corporations in high-profile trade secret disputes and complex class-action cases.

The idea for Trellis was born late one night as Clark was trying to write a complicated motion for summary judgment. She didn’t know much about the judge assigned to the case, which left her unsure about how to structure the document. That’s when a colleague let her browse through his old case files, where she stumbled upon a past ruling by her judge, on her issue, on her motion. It felt like finally having a detailed study guide to a final exam. She won her motion for summary judgment and everything changed.

With the help of a few software developers, Clark began aggregating state trial court data to use in her own private practice, slowly accumulating an ever-expanding database of tentative rulings issued by the judges in Southern California. This helped solve her own need for access to state trial court data and analytics. Clark used these rulings to structure and organize every motion that came across her desk, weaving the facts of each case into the types of arguments highlighted by her specific judge. The results? Her motion practice proliferated.

Clark knew her secret weapon couldn’t—and shouldn’t—stay a secret forever. It quickly became obvious to her that there was a massive opportunity to build a thriving, scalable legal analytics platform, one that would help democratize access for state trial court data. And she wanted to be the one to build it. Clark continues to share everything she has learned over the years about legal analytics with other legal professionals, authoring articles for ABA Journal, New York Law Journal, Texas Lawyer, and Santa Barbara Lawyer. She is also regularly featured as a legal expert for Southern California Record, and she has appeared as a guest on podcasts produced by Above the Law and Corporate Counsel Business Journal.

With an unconventional upbringing, Clark skipped high school and began her college coursework when she was sixteen years old, earning an associate’s degree from Bard College at Simon’s Rock (2003) and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2007). While admitted to practice law in California, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, Clark and her daughter reside in Los Angeles. Wherever she is, there’s a plant in every corner, on every surface. And she’ll tell you all about them.

alon shwarts

Alon Shwartz


CPO & Founder

A career entrepreneur and prominent tech executive, Alon Shwartz is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Trellis, where he mentors, advises, and leads cross-functional teams across the platform’s organization.

Shwartz earned a bachelor’s degree in math and computer science from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 1997. He spent the next two years working as the Director of Solutions Development at Sophisticated Technologies before co-founding Synthean, a business process monitoring solution. Then, in 2007, Shwartz co-founded .docstoc, one of the largest digital repositories of content for small businesses and professionals. The repository was collaborative, a space where attorneys, accountants, real estate brokers, and other professionals could sell their commercial documents to other users on the platform.

This was just the beginning. The company was eventually acquired by Intuit, propelling Shwartz into a post-acquisition life at home with his family. He suddenly found himself waging a relentless battle to manage how much time his three children spent on their electronic devices. That’s when the idea for unGlue hit him. What if there was some kind of application that would do more than just restrict their screen time? What if there was a tool that would help empower his kids to develop healthier habits as they engage with their connected devices?

Over the next few years, unGlue quickly transformed from an idea into a complete platform. The product, which has been featured on USA Today, Mashable, and OZY, allowed parents to limit screen addiction issues by monitoring, controlling, and rewarding the amount of content their children consumed across any given screen. His journey with unGlue has been chronicled on The Pitch, a podcast that recounts the story of how the platform went head-to-head with one of the biggest tech companies in the world.

Shwartz had promised himself that unGlue would be his last startup. But then, while working as a technical advisor to Trellis, he remembered he’s a builder—not a consultant. So he joined the company as its Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer in 2019. Shwartz continues to mentor startups throughout Los Angeles, where he has nurtured the local tech community as an advisor for companies like Caroo, Revolution RE, SnackNation, Pulse, MedRepublic, Stick, Flo Technologies, and HAAWK. He also shares some of his entrepreneurial secrets at Alon Shwartz.

Shwartz lives in Los Angeles alongside his wife and their three children. If you’re fast enough, you might find him cruising the freeways on his motorcycle. He has also started flying airplanes.

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