Extract from George Socha’s article “eDiscovery Leaders Live featuring Carolyn Southerland of Construction Discovery Experts”
Carolyn Southerland, a senior eDiscovery consultant with CDE Legal, joins George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, for ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive.
With over 25 years of electronic discovery experience, Carolyn is a leader in developing processes and strategies for electronically stored information. She has extensive experience in the law and process regarding eDiscovery in litigation, arbitration, and governmental investigations. Carolyn arrived at CDE following her time as a managing director at Huron Consulting Group and Morae Global. Before that, she expertly guided major construction and pharmaceutical companies, as well as large municipal entities, through eDiscovery challenges for 20 years at the Baker Botts LLP. Today, Carolyn is a senior eDiscovery consultant with CDE, working with ENR-100 construction companies in gathering, Âfiltering, and producing data required in litigation and arbitration.
Carolyn started the session discussing what motivated her to move from business litigator to eDiscovery consultant. She then talked about where eDiscovery fits in the bigger picture, which took us to how ESI could be used for depositions – and how it usually is used. Next, Carolyn focused on the particulars of eDiscovery in construction litigation: the different data sources, the different ways in which those involved in construction use and share data, and different approaches required once we get to discovery, and ultimately what can be done with construction data at hearings and trials. We turned to ChatGPT, examining Carolyn’s ChatGPT : eDiscovery AI :: Terminator : Ironman analogy. That took us to a discussion of various ways to use AI when examined construction data produced by the other side. Carolyn closed with some words of praise of construction attorneys – always a welcome way to end.
