Evidence Management for Defense Attorneys

How to Review 40 Hours of Bodycam Footage Without Losing a Weekend

Evidence Copilot turns your discovery dump into timestamped, citable transcripts and an AI evidence agent that answers questions with citations to the exact second of video or page of the PDF.

Why Discovery Review Is Breaking Defense Teams

• Caseloads leave no time for real review — 286 hours per LWOP case vs. a 47-felony caseload cap — A RAND study found the time needed per case ranges from 13.5 hours for probation violations to 286 hours for life-without-parole cases, and new Washington workload standards cap public defenders at 47 felony and 120 misdemeanor cases a year. Under caseload triage, something has to give — and it's usually the 40 hours of bodycam footage, the jail calls, and the 911 audio that nobody has time to actually review before the preliminary hearing.
• Triage means report-vs-bodycam inconsistencies stay buried until trial — or forever — Overburdened attorneys are forced to triage, letting some cases resolve without appropriate diligence. When the police report, jail calls, and 911 audio sit in separate files named X13qrt9__x3455, the impeachment material — a report line that doesn't match the bodycam audio, a statement that contradicts the jail call — stays buried until the night before trial, when there's no time left to build cross-exam questions around it.
• Digital discovery keeps growing while 1973-era caseload standards don't differentiate — Expanded obligations — advising clients on collateral consequences, reviewing growing volumes of digital discovery like bodycam video, interrogation footage, and scanned police reports — keep increasing workload. Yet the 1973 NAC caseload standards remain overly broad and fail to differentiate among felony types, and chronic underfunding and fragmented oversight make effective assistance of counsel harder to deliver on the Sixth Amendment's promise.

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

• Every citation lands on the exact moment — Every citation lands on the exact moment. Upload the discovery dump — bodycam, interrogation footage, jail calls, 911 audio, police report PDFs — and get timestamped, diarized transcripts plus an AI evidence agent whose answers carry clickable citations into the exact video second or PDF page. When you pull a quote for cross-exam prep or a motion to suppress, you're not scrubbing 40 hours of footage to find the line.
• Ethics-first by design — Ethics-first by design. Every AI output is marked AI-generated and pending human review; nothing is auto-applied. Redaction suggestions file as suggestion cards you approve, multi-camera sync proposals come with match evidence and never apply automatically, originals are immutable, and every action is audited — the tool never makes legal conclusions, so attorney judgment stays where it belongs.
• Published pricing that fits a defender's budget — Published pricing that fits a defender's budget. Solo is $39/user/mo with 15 media-processing hours; Firm is $99/user/mo with 60 hours and a priority queue; the PD Office tier is $750/attorney/yr with 100 hours — undercutting JusticeText's ~$1,200/attorney/yr by roughly Overage is hard-capped at 3x included hours so runaway intake can't overbill, and every plan includes the full workspace with no feature tiers.

What's included

• Transcription with speaker diarization and word-level timestamps: Deepgram Nova powers one-click speaker renaming that propagates across every segment — so the interrogation footage, 911 call, and jail calls are all searchable and quotable.
• AI evidence agent with clickable citations: full-text search across transcripts and documents, transcript window reads, video frame grabs, clip extraction, and notes/timeline events/tasks — every answer seeks the exact video moment it came from.
• Agent playbooks for defense motions: Suppression Motion Prep drafts a motion outline with both sides quoted and cited; Miranda Timeline builds a chronological custodial-interrogation timeline; Exhibit List Builder drafts an exhibit list tied to real files.
• Redaction that protects originals: manual frame-accurate video redaction (black or blur), word-exact audio muting, and image/PDF redaction — every redaction is a new derived file, originals are never touched, and every action is audited.
• Two-way email intake: [email protected] creates a case from the subject line and ingests attachments; case+{id}@evidencecopilot.com accepts new evidence and answers your questions by email with citations and deep links.
• Exports built for turnover and trial prep: an exhibit pack zip of video clips, still frames, and quoted excerpts plus a MANIFEST.md citation index, and a review memo — gated by per-member export permission.

Quick wins

• Use the Miranda Timeline playbook to build a chronological custodial-interrogation timeline from interrogation footage and police reports — every event tied to a cited source moment.
• Run the Exhibit List Builder to draft an exhibit list tied to the real evidence files, then export an exhibit pack with video clips, still frames, quoted excerpts, and a MANIFEST.md citation index.

How it works

1. Dump the discovery in — Upload video, audio, images, and PDFs up to 2 GB by web — or forward attachments to your per-case inbound email address. [email protected] even creates a new case from the subject line and ingests every attachment automatically.
2. Let the workspace do the first pass — Get Deepgram Nova transcripts with speaker diarization and word-level timestamps, OCR'd text from scanned reports and photo exhibits, and auto-signals flagging candidate inconsistencies between the report and the bodycam.
3. Work the case with citations in hand — Ask the AI evidence agent questions, draft cross-exam questions tied to quoted sources, build the Miranda timeline and exhibit list, redact frame-accurately, and export an exhibit pack with a MANIFEST.md citation index for discovery turnover.

How Evidence Copilot <span class="gradient">Grounds</span> Every Answer in Your Actual Evidence

• Auto-signals on ingest: every new file is compared against earlier evidence in the case, so candidate inconsistencies (report vs bodycam, statement vs call audio) surface as unreviewed review signals before anyone asks.
• One-click Case Brief: a grounded markdown brief with overview, evidence inventory, key moments, inconsistencies, and follow-ups — your preliminary-hearing prep starting point in minutes, not weekends.
• Agent playbooks for the motions you actually file: Suppression Motion Prep sweeps consent, search scope, stop duration, K-9, and Miranda issues and drafts a motion outline with both sides quoted and cited.

Why we're different

• Every AI answer cites the exact video second or PDF page it came from
• Defense-only by design — no prosecutor or law-enforcement use cases
• Auto-signals surface report-vs-bodycam inconsistencies before you ask
• Frame-accurate redaction with immutable originals and a full audit trail
• Multi-camera sync of bodycam, dashcam, and interview-room footage on one master clock
• Read-only MCP server: query your cases from Claude Desktop or Claude Code
• Published pricing with no feature tiers and hard-capped overage billing
• Cross-exam drafts tie every suggested question to a quoted source — no credibility conclusions

Built for US criminal-defense practitioners — solo defenders, firms, investigators, and public-defender offices. Defense-only by design, with every AI answer marked for human review and every citation landing on the exact source moment.

What clients say

The auto-signals caught a line in the police report that didn't match the bodycam audio before I'd even finished my first pass. That's the report-vs-bodycam inconsistency I would have found at 11 p.m. the night before trial — or never.

— Marcus Delgado

I forwarded the discovery email to my case address and every attachment just showed up as evidence. The word-level timestamps meant my law clerk could pull exact quotes with citations instead of scrubbing 40 hours of bodycam all week.

— Renee Whitfield

The Suppression Motion Prep playbook swept the stop-duration and Miranda issues and gave me an outline with both sides quoted and cited. I reviewed every question myself — it's a workspace, not a replacement for judgment.

— Daniel Okafor

Frequently asked questions

Book a 20-minute walkthrough at evidencecopilot.com/book, or start on the Solo plan at $39/user/mo at evidencecopilot.com/signup.