Every day public defenders are being asked to review more evidence in more formats while working under the same constraints: hours and resources. A criminal discovery production that once may have contained police reports, photographs, and a limited number of recordings can now include body cam footage from multiple officers, surveillance video, 911 calls, jail calls, witness interviews, photographs, handwritten forms, PDFs, phone extractions, social media records, and thousands of additional files. The volume alone creates a problem, but volume is only the start. The harder problem is that the key piece of evidence is often buried deep in a mislabeled file.
That is where AI discovery software can be especially useful for public defenders. The best use of AI in discovery is not asking an LLM to write a summary of a single file. It is giving the defense a way to understand the entire scope of the case without having to review every file one by one before meaningful case analysis can start. TrialKit was built around that problem. A public defender can upload the discovery and have the files organized, transcribed, indexed, and made searchable across the case. That includes video, audio, documents, phone extractions, photographs, and the other forms of evidence that increasingly define modern criminal cases.
How can public defenders find the same witness across a large discovery production?
The difference becomes even more obvious in large cases. Let’s say a witness appears in a police report, on body camera, in a 911 recording, during a later interview, and in a set of text messages pulled from a phone. A traditional review workflow requires the attorney to find those appearances manually and keep track of the relationships between them. With Entity Center, TrialKit can now identify that person across the case and give the attorney a way to review the witness as a person rather than as five unrelated files. If the witness changes their story, adds a detail later, gives a different account of timing, or says something that does not match the video, the defense has a much better chance of finding it.
The same approach applies to case chronology. Criminal cases are rarely produced in the order they happened. Reports are written after the fact, body camera recordings begin at different times, dispatch records follow their own timestamping, and phone evidence can add another layer of activity before and after the incident. TrialKit's AI Assistant can work across those materials and help the attorney reconstruct a timeline from the underlying discovery. The lawyer can ask for the sequence of events around an arrest, identify when a particular witness first appears in the record, or narrow the analysis to a specific officer, person, source, or subset of the evidence. Because the answers are connected back to the file, page, or timestamp, the lawyer can move directly from the AI-assisted analysis into the source material.
Why do source citations matter when using AI for criminal discovery?
That connection to the source is especially important in public defense. Public defenders do not need software that just sounds great. They need software that helps them find the evidence that can be used in court. If TrialKit identifies a statement in body camera footage, the attorney can go back to the video and review the statement in context. If it points to a passage in a report, the attorney can open that page. If the system builds a timeline from several sources, the lawyer can inspect each of those sources and decide whether the sequence is accurate and useful. The AI Assistant is doing the grunt work of finding and organizing information. The attorney stays in control of the legal analysis.
AI discovery software can also reduce one of the biggest disadvantages created by large cases: the relationship between evidence volume and staffing. The prosecution has detectives, investigators, and entire agencies behind its case. A public defender is working the same volume of discovery with far fewer resources. That should not mean the important fact stays buried simply because one side had more people available to look for it.
FAQ
What is AI discovery software for public defenders?
AI discovery software helps public defenders organize, search, and analyze large criminal discovery productions that may include reports, body camera footage, phone extractions, audio, video, photographs, and other evidence. TrialKit also connects findings back to the underlying files so attorneys can verify what they find.
Can AI help public defenders review body camera footage?
TrialKit transcribes body camera footage and makes the spoken content searchable, which can help attorneys locate relevant conversations before reviewing the original video in context.
Can TrialKit help build a criminal case timeline?
TrialKit can work across reports, recordings, phone evidence, and other discovery to help identify the sequence of events while keeping each finding connected to the source material.