Every wave of legal technology has reached public defense last. Prosecutors got integrated digital evidence systems while defenders got file cabinets and burned DVDs. Private firms got e-discovery platforms while public defender offices got Access databases held together by one heroic IT person. Now frontier AI is arriving, and the pattern threatens to repeat, but
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
