eDiscovery Leaders Live: Caroline Sweeney of Dorsey & Whitney
Caroline Sweeney, Director, Knowledge Management/Innovation at Dorsey & Whitney, joins George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, for the first in a special set of ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive sessions broadcast from the Reveal stage at Legalweek 2023.
Caroline is responsible for the delivery of Dorsey’s eDiscovery services, including LegalMine Managed Review services, litigation technology support, and trial technology support. Caroline is a member of Dorsey’s Electronic Discovery Practice Group and the Cybersecurity, Privacy and Social Media Practice Group. She has extensive experience consulting with attorneys and clients with regard to eDiscovery, including identification, preservation, collection, processing, review, and production of electronically stored information. Her 25+ years of experience in the litigation support industry include working in the law firm and litigation support vendor environments.
Caroline reflected on the changes she has seen in Legalweek and legal technology since she began working in this area. From there, she talked about what is happening today, particularly with the use of AI, and where she sees it going in the future – and how her firm uses AI and trains their attorneys in the use of it.
Key Highlights
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- [1:04] Caroline, her role at Dorsey, and her responsibilities.
- [2:00] Caroline’s first Legal Tech – and how much has changed since then.
- [3:50] The buzz around AI and the potential of ChatGPT.
- [5:01] The AI and analytics we’ve been using in eDiscovery for years.
- [5:35] Fear and distrust about what AI is going to do to the practice of law.
- [6:15] But we are a long way from there.
- [6:35] AI on everyone’s minds as an opportunity.
- [7:04] Where this could go: better witness kits, chronologies.
- [7:40] An opportunity to reassess how much human intervention is needed in CAL.
- [8:18] How extensively they use CAL and other AI capabilities: integrated into their standard processes.
- [9:28] Dorsey’s eDiscovery day for new associates.
- [11:15] Using AI tools for privacy.
- [12:10] Using AI in law firms: a ripple effect.
- [13:36] A barrier that is disappearing: additional fees to use AI.
- [14:08] An exciting time!
Key Quotes
- “Over the years, I’ve seen the cycle of all the exciting things in legal tech, whether it was document automation or when we moved away from mainframes and started having tools like Concordance and Summation, the predictive coding phase, the moving to the cloud phase, and then of course this year AI, AI, AI.”
- “What I’m excited about is how that technology or that functionality [ChatGPT] has the potential to transform a lot of what we’re doing, maybe in the eDiscovery realm – I don’t know if doc review is the first place I would be applying that – but think about taking your key documents and getting ready for a deposition and using ChatGPT to help you formulate a chronology of the events and what sort of questions to ask a potential witness.”
- “At our firm, we huge users of continuous active learning, a form of AI, and then of course we use AI when it comes to contract review. There you are seeing the evolution of some of the tools that will help with drafting first iterations of a contract.”
- “I read an article last week that I thought phrased it well: that AI is more about automating tasks that it is about taking on jobs. I also think it creates other job opportunities for those of us in this industry…. It’s going to enhance your work, not replace your work, I hope.”
- “One of the things that we do that I’m really proud of…. New associates coming into the litigation practice … have one full day, eDiscovery day, where they spend the day with us learning.”
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