ZLS.app is a sponsor and presenter at the 2026 NAPD Tech Expo, the National Association for Public Defense’s two-day virtual conference on technology in public defense, held September 17 and 18, 2026. Our session runs Friday, September 18 at 11:30 a.m. Eastern, and it is a live demonstration: one felony case, from day-one assignment through
AI for public defenders is arriving one tool at a time, and that pattern carries a cost most offices never put in the budget. NACDL’s new white paper, Parity in Practice: The Defender’s Duty to Ethically Use AI, argues that defenders have an ethical obligation to close the technology gap with prosecutors. It also, without
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
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
