Carolyn Purwin Ryan

Carolyn Purwin Ryan is a partner at Mullen Coughlin and chair of the Litigation practice. She focuses her practice on defending organizations in single-plaintiff and class action litigation against claims related to violations of various data privacy statutes and regulations. She is licensed to practice in Pennsylvania federal and state courts, as well as those in New Jersey.

Her experience serving as national coordinating counsel and trial counsel for both US and international organizations allows her to effectively and efficiently coordinate a defense to obtain a favorable resolution for her clients.

In addition to her litigation practice, Carolyn also serves as breach counsel for organizations suffering (or who have suffered) through a data privacy and security incident. This includes incidents such as ransomware attacks, business email compromises and fraudulent wire transfers, inadvertent disclosures, and other unauthorized network intrusions. As breach counsel, she leads the response and investigation into incidents while coordinating third-party vendor support such as digital forensics; data mining; law enforcement reporting and liaising; and public relations, notification, and identity/credit monitoring. She also assists her clients in responding to subsequent regulatory investigation from state, federal, and industry-specific regulators. While generally industry-agnostic, she routinely represents organizations in the financial services, manufacturing and distribution, healthcare and life sciences, professional services, retail, and technology industry groups.

She also devotes her practice to assisting organizations with implementing preincident and proactive advisory compliance solutions such as incident response planning and incident response plan development, provision of data privacy and security tabletop exercises, and assessment of legal and regulatory compliance requirements related to data privacy and information security.

Carolyn is often sought after by firm clients and partners, as well as national and international organizations, to speak and present at regional, national, and global conferences and events. She routinely speaks on panels with incident response vendors and cyber insurers and brokers to provide insights into data privacy and security incident response, cyber insurance, data breach litigation trends, and general cyber resilience. She also has numerous publications to her credit.

As a leader in data privacy and security law and incident response, Carolyn was awarded the Cyber Risk Industry Person of the Year—Attorney award by Zywave in 2024 and named a Pennsylvania Rising Star by SuperLawyers in 2018 and 2019.

Prior to joining Mullen Coughlin, Carolyn was the cochair of the Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Department at her previous firm. She previously clerked for the Honorable Joseph Rosa in the Superior Court of New Jersey and Honorable Richard Berman in the United States Court, Southern District of New York.

Carolyn earned master of law, taxation, and juris doctor degrees from Villanova University School of Law and a bachelor of science, health studies, degree from Georgetown University. She is a member of the American Bar Association, serving as vice chair, Tort Trial & Insurance Practice Section Cybersecurity and Data Privacy General Committee; American Health Lawyers Association; Defense Research Institute; International Association of Privacy Professionals; and Pennsylvania Bar Association. She is also admitted to the US Tax Court.