Discovery Review for Criminal Cases: A Grounded Workflow

How to Review a Criminal Discovery Dump Without Losing the Buried Detail

Evidence Copilot turns bodycam, jail calls, and scanned police reports into timestamped, citable transcripts so every answer links to the exact second or page it came from.

Why Discovery Review Breaks Down Before the Preliminary Hearing

• Discovery dumps hit 40+ hours of bodycam while arraignment and motion deadlines loom — Solo defenders juggling 30-50 active cases get one discovery dump — bodycam video, interrogation footage, jail calls, 911 audio, police reports, scanned forensic analyses — and then face preliminary-hearing and suppression-motion deadlines in rapid succession. Scrubbing raw footage and reading non-searchable scanned PDFs by hand means the report-vs-bodycam inconsistency that wins the motion to suppress stays buried until it's too late.
• Caseloads of 100+ cases force triage over diligence — Public defenders often carry 100+ cases, and the 1973 national caseload standards were widely criticized as too high and not empirically based. RAND's modern workload studies put hours like 167 for a sex-crimes case — far beyond what most offices can staff. The result: triage. Some files get real scrutiny; others get skimmed between court appearances and admin work, and buried details decide outcomes without anyone seeing them.
• A life-without-parole case took 286 hours to review — most files get a fraction of that — Research on capital-quality defense found 286 hours spent on a single life-without-parole case. Most misdemeanor and mid-level felony files get minutes. The inconsistency between a police report and the bodycam, or a client statement and a jail call, is often pages or hours deep into the file — and missing it between appearances is how cases resolve without appropriate diligence.

Why Defenders <span class="gradient">Choose Evidence Copilot</span>

• Every answer carries a citation — Every answer carries a clickable citation into the exact second of bodycam video or page of the PDF. Ask 'what did the officer say about consent to search?' and the agent quotes the transcript window and seeks the video moment — so you verify before you rely on it. Nothing makes legal conclusions; every AI output is marked AI-generated and pending human review, and originals stay immutable.
• Built for the caseload reality — Auto-signals on ingest compare every new file against earlier evidence in the case. A police report that conflicts with the bodycam, or a witness statement that conflicts with the jail call, surfaces as an unreviewed signal before anyone asks — with both sides' quotes cited. From there, cross-exam drafts suggest questions tied to quoted sources, and the Suppression Motion Prep playbook sweeps consent, search scope, stop duration, K-9, and Miranda issues into a motion outline with both sides quoted and cited.
• Redaction you can defend — Redaction you can defend in discovery turnover: frame-accurate video redaction (drag a rectangle, black or blur), audio redaction that mutes the exact spoken words, and image/PDF redaction with OCR bounding boxes. Every redaction produces a new derived file — originals are never touched, and every action is audited. AI-suggested regions (bystander faces, PII screens, license plates) file as suggestion cards marked 'AI-suggested — needs review'; nothing is ever auto-applied.

What's included

• Timestamped, diarized transcription with one-click speaker renaming that propagates across every segment — no more guessing who's talking in a four-hour interview-room video.
• OCR turns scanned police reports and photo evidence like receipts and screenshots into searchable, citable text, with bounding boxes kept for redaction.
• The AI evidence agent does full-text search, reads transcript windows, grabs video frames, extracts clips, and writes notes, timeline events, and tasks — every answer carries a citation.
• Multi-camera sync links bodycam, dashcam, and interview-room footage to a single master clock with interleaved transcript playback, with auto-sync proposals reported with match evidence and never auto-applied.
• Agent playbooks including Suppression Motion Prep, Miranda Timeline, and Exhibit List Builder draft grounded work product tied to real files.
• Exhibit pack exports bundle video clips, still frames, and quoted excerpts with a MANIFEST.md citation index, gated by per-member export permission.

Quick wins

• Run the Case Brief playbook on a fresh discovery dump: one-click grounded markdown brief with evidence inventory, key moments, inconsistencies, and follow-ups — a working file you can hand a law clerk in minutes.
• Use the per-case inbound email address so investigators and co-counsel email bodycam files, jail call audio, and scanned reports straight into the case — every attachment ingested with an activity-feed record.

How it works

1. Upload the discovery dump — Drag in bodycam, interrogation footage, jail calls, 911 audio, police reports, and scans — or forward everything to your per-case inbound email address and let [email protected] create the case from the subject line.
2. Review grounded transcripts and signals — Get diarized, word-level timestamped transcripts and OCR'd document text. Auto-signals flag candidate inconsistencies like report-vs-bodycam, and the agent answers questions with citations that seek the exact video moment.
3. Build the motion and the exhibit pack — Run the Suppression Motion Prep or Miranda Timeline playbook, draft cross-exam questions tied to quoted sources, then export an exhibit pack with a MANIFEST.md citation index.

A Grounded Workspace for <span class="gradient">Discovery Review</span> in Criminal Cases

• Every new file is auto-compared against earlier evidence in the case — report-vs-bodycam and statement-vs-call inconsistencies surface as unreviewed review signals before anyone asks.
• One-click Case Brief generates a grounded markdown overview: evidence inventory, key moments, inconsistencies, and follow-ups.
• Agent playbooks like Suppression Motion Prep and Miranda Timeline draft outlines with both sides quoted and cited — suggested questions only, never legal conclusions.

Why we're different

• Every AI answer cites the exact video second or PDF page
• Defense-only by design — no prosecution or law-enforcement use
• Auto-signals flag report-vs-bodycam inconsistencies on ingest
• Playbooks draft suppression outlines with both sides quoted
• Redaction never touches originals; every action is audited
• Published pricing with no feature tiers or sales wall
• MCP integration to query cases from Claude Desktop or Code
• Two-way email intake creates cases and answers by email

Built for defense-side review only — solo defenders, firms, investigators, and public-defender offices. Published pricing, no feature tiers, no sales wall.

What clients say

The auto-signals caught a report-vs-bodycam inconsistency on ingest that I would have missed scrubbing footage the night before the preliminary hearing. Every quote clicked straight to the second of video, so I could pull the clip for the suppression hearing without re-finding it.

— Marcus Delgado

The Miranda Timeline playbook gave me a chronological custodial-interrogation timeline with both sides quoted and cited to the transcript. It's a review draft, not a conclusion — which is exactly what I want before I sign my name to a motion.

— Priya Raghavan

We intake everything by email now — the per-case address creates the case from the subject line and ingests every attachment, including the 911 audio and scanned reports. The diarized transcripts with word-level timestamps and OCR'd PDFs changed our review workflow; the investigator and the law clerk work the same case in the same workspace.

— Tom Whitaker

Frequently asked questions

Book a 20-minute walkthrough at evidencecopilot.com/book, or start on the Solo plan at evidencecopilot.com/signup.