If you have ever tried to reconstruct a crucial exchange from a jail call or a chaotic body‑worn camera clip, you know the problem. Multiple voices, overlapping audio, poor quality, and a generic transcript that reads “SPEAKER_00,” “SPEAKER_01,” and “SPEAKER_02” down the page. It is technically a transcript, but it is not yet advocacy‑ready. Public […]
There’s a particular kind of dread that comes with a discovery packet containing six hours of CCTV footage. No audio. No timestamps you can trust. Just a timestamp counter and the quiet resignation that someone has to scrub every second of it. In 2024, Colorado’s Office of the State Public Defender found digital evidence in […]
If you’re running a managed assigned counsel program or contract attorney office, you’re familiar with a frustrating reality: your invoicing software doesn’t understand criminal cases, and your case management system can’t handle billing. You’re likely piecing together spreadsheets, manual logs, and legacy “voucher” systems to track both the legal work and the financial accountability that counties […]
The digital tsunami of body-worn camera (BWC) footage has become one of the quietest but most disruptive forces in public defense. You open discovery and find hours of video from five, six, eight different officers—many of them standing in the same place, at the same time, capturing the same scene from slightly different angles. Instead […]
Mississippi’s new Day One public defender pilot is showing early proof of concept: when lawyers get into rural jails on day one, people go home sooner and cases move faster. Defend the Fifth is doing that work with ZLS.app as their case management backbone from the moment they opened their doors. “This pilot is working […]
ZLS.app is excited to join Hunter Parnell on the Public Defenseless podcast for a wide-ranging conversation on how public defense leaders can better use data to tell their own stories and drive change in their jurisdictions. The episode focuses on a question that comes up repeatedly in our work with defender offices: “What story could […]
