S2 Ep. 5: The Forensics Expert Who Changed His Mind About AI

Описание: We brought Steve Davis back to the National eDiscovery Leadership Institute NeLI Pod podcast ... and he delivered!

Steve is VP of Forensics & Investigations at Purpose Legal (a wonderful sponsor of the NeLI conference!), and when we had him on last season, the response was strong enough that we had to have him back. In this episode, we went deeper into what is actually keeping forensic investigators up at night.

A few things Steve said that stuck with our hosts, Daniel Gold, Esq. & Brandon Mack:
1️⃣ Deletion: it used to be that if someone deleted a file, you had real options to recover it. Slack space carving, header/footer reconstruction on spinning drives. That world is fading fast. Solid-state drives, double-deletion, and ephemeral messaging apps have changed the calculus. Steve was blunt about it: if someone has flushed twice, in many cases, the data is just gone. That matters enormously for how investigators plan their work from day one.

2️⃣ Data complexity: We are way past the era of "corporate email is the treasure trove." Structured databases, JSON output from collaboration platforms, third-party chat apps, geolocational data, and SQLite on mobile devices. The data types are now as much of a challenge as the volume. And none of it plays nicely with standard downstream review platforms.

3️⃣ AI in forensics: This was genuinely surprising. Steve has been skeptical of the impact of generative AI on forensic work. He changed his position on this episode. He now sees real potential in using AI to cross-reference artifacts during migration and exfiltration investigations, collapsing what used to take days of analyst time into a far more manageable process. Not giving you answers, he said, but surfacing the right questions.

4️⃣ Gen AI as evidence: prompts, outputs, and source code from large language model platforms. Steve broke down all three as distinct categories of collectible data, and explained why, with the right credentials and permissions, this is not actually a heavy lift. That is a conversation the legal community needs to be having right now.

Steve takes genuinely complex subject matter and communicates it in a way that lands for everyone in the room.

#eDiscovery #DigitalForensics #LegalTechnology #NeLIPod #GenerativeAI

🎧 Listen to the full episode with Steve Davis here:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0N2l...
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast...
YouTube:    • S2 Ep. 5: The Forensics Expert Who Changed...  

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you are in the legal tech or eDiscovery space and want to learn something every episode, NeLI Pod is built for you.