THE JUNTO SHOW

Snyder grew up in Ephrata, Washington, a small agricultural town in the high desert basin of the Columbia Plateau, where the sky stretches wide and the land yields wheat under a relentless sun. His father was a tradesman, a Vietnam veteran, and a man who took his son to an antiwar protest in a Safeway parking lot before the first Gulf War. His mother stayed home to raise four children. No one in the family had been to college.

As a teenager, Snyder ran away with the Wenatchee Youth Circus — a touring company that has crossed the western United States for more than seventy summers. He walked the high wire. The lesson he took from it has stayed with him: you don’t survive by panicking. You survive by balance.

He left Ephrata for Brown University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and went on to Harvard Law School. After graduating, he clerked for a federal judge in Pennsylvania and spent seven years as a litigation associate at Proskauer Rose in New York. In 2010 he opened his own trial practice in Manhattan, where he has since tried complex cases in front of New York juries for nearly two decades.

In 2018 he co-founded Agnes Intelligence, an artificial intelligence company built around a breakthrough in unsupervised machine learning — a way to make sense of vast piles of disorganized information that the human brain alone cannot process. The company placed fourth out of more than a thousand entries in the IBM Watson Build competition for North America. What he learned in the course of building it turned out to be less about computers than about how thinking works under pressure.

He has spent the last several years writing on the reform of civil procedure — the rules that govern how American courts adjudicate disputes — in the lineage of Roscoe Pound’s 1906 critique. He treats litigation as a civilized society’s substitute for bloodshed, and the courts as institutions that must be engineered to function despite human limitations. He lives in Manhattan with his wife Amy and daughter Agnes.