Our Team

John H. Snyder is a trial lawyer and strategic advisor who begins by defining the resolution that must be achieved, then works backward to shape the conditions that make it inevitable.

He approaches disputes as systems governed by incentives, timing, information, and human behavior — not as sequences of arguments.

His work draws on more than two decades of civil litigation, experience founding and advising artificial intelligence companies, and sustained study of institutional decision-making under conditions of information overload.

Over his career, Snyder has operated across roles rarely combined in a single practice: federal judicial clerk, big law associate, solo practitioner, general counsel, founder, investor, mediator, and trial lawyer on both sides of the docket.

That range produces a practical advantage. Strategy is not derived from theory. It is built from experience across legal, financial, and operational domains.

His recent scholarship addresses a central problem in modern litigation: courts are increasingly unable to process factual records at scale. His proposed framework, FRCP 2.0, integrates computational methods into discovery while preserving adversarial discipline and human accountability. Read the article →

Federal civil procedure was designed for a world of information scarcity. That world no longer exists. Modern disputes generate volumes of data that exceed the capacity of traditional discovery to produce intelligible factual records. Snyder’s scholarship proposes FRCP 2.0 — a reconstruction of civil discovery grounded in procedural realism — to restore the conditions under which courts can exercise responsible, visible, and accountable judgment.

Procedure, Responsibility & Institutional Design →

Thomas Sima is a cross-border transactional attorney with over 20 years of experience working with international clients, primarily from the former Soviet Union and East Asia. He began his career in the New York and Hong Kong offices of Shearman & Sterling, where he focused on international finance, mergers & acquisitions, and corporate governance.

Sima serves as General Counsel to Junto Opportunity Fund I LP and advises the firm’s institutional clients on cross-border structuring, fund formation, and international transactions. He composes legal documents in English and Russian and is comfortable reviewing documents in several additional languages.

His practice spans the corporate and structural dimensions of complex disputes — governance, capital structure, and transactional leverage that often determine outcomes before litigation resolves. He coordinates closely with litigation and forensic teams to align corporate decision-making with strategic pressure.

Sydney Lanyon leads the firm’s forensic and investigative work and serves as Chief of Staff across John H. Snyder PLLC and Junto Club. She is responsible for factual reconstruction, financial modeling, damages analysis, and evidentiary analysis in matters where credibility, motive, and narrative coherence determine outcomes.

Lanyon has passed CFA Level I and has performed damages analysis in high-profile civil RICO litigation. Her work focuses on disputes involving personal misconduct, conflicting accounts, and incomplete or degraded records — situations where precision matters more than volume.

Co-author with John H. Snyder of Rocket Docket Practice, an econometric analysis of how procedural velocity can be engineered within existing federal rules to compress case duration, invert defense cost structures, and transform litigation into a disciplined, measurable asset class. The paper demonstrates that duration elasticity exceeds recovery elasticity — that pace is more valuable than size — and models the mechanisms by which proof-first preparation converts into compounding returns.

She coordinates across litigation, capital, and research workstreams and builds and maintains the operational infrastructure of the firm — the systems, the fund engine, and the coordination architecture that keeps the platform running.

Prior to joining the firm, Lanyon lived and worked in Sub-Saharan Africa with non-governmental organizations on sensitive matters requiring discretion — experience that informs her approach to factual reconstruction in environments where trust, confidentiality, and careful handling of information are essential.