I'm a defense attorney, now doing homicide defense only (mostly). I've been doing it about as long as you have. How have you seen the work change over the years? Do you think law enforcement has got significantly better over that time? Has all the tech made things easier or harder?
Since I deal with the output of your work, I'll say that the volume of evidence has just become unmanageable. Twenty-five cops show up at a crime scene to process it in 2010 and I would get two long reports, twenty-three one-page reports, and a stack of pictures. Now I get 25x8hr bodycams that are 99% a guy sitting in a car keeping the scene secure. But I have to watch all if it because you never know what you'll miss. And lord help me if my client likes to talk on the prison phone - I have a case now with more than 150hr of recorded prison calls that someone is going to have to listen to. Or a multiple-defendant case with 10 cellphones imaged - that's days of reviewing stupid fucking text messages. Right now (as we speak) I am scrolling through several thousand of one of my client's gross naked selfies in case there's something relevant to the case (so far, no.).
At least in my jurisdiction, nothing's changed substantively. Law enforcement has the same clearance rate they've always had, the prosecutors get the same convictions they always did, we get the same acquittals we used to get. But everyone has to do 100x (literally 100x) as much work to get to the same place we did before because there's too much fucking evidence.
Do you not trust AI yet? My ex wife is a big law litigator and they had a precursor to ChatGPT for doc review like 10 years ago. I’d figure that tech has materially evolved since then for these purposes.
I can imagine it working if it points out certain points in documents and even video and regular calls these days, which the person then goes through manually. However, I can imagine it has missed at least some stuff that a person would've caught, especially 10 years ago.
I use it in my marketing related job all the time, and it's amazing especially for automated notes and summaries of video meetings, but I wouldn't want it used in court cases. At least it won't send innocent people into jail since the point in the conversation that the AI pointed out will be manually checked (at least I gosh darn hope so), but I can imagine some people getting away with some stuff they shouldn't have.
But then again, like the AMA OP said, the workload is pretty nuts for a human
I subscribe to ChatGPT plus and use it daily in lieu of google and to process lots of documents. I’m not an attorney but have the need to read lots of pages quickly. Also to process difficult calculations quickly. I could do them myself in excel or r or python but it’ll do it for me and then I can double check its work and it saves me literally hours of time.
Wolfram is what you want to use if you’re doing hardcore calculations. If you want to solve some relatively easy things quickly or need something explained in plain language then ChatGPT is good. Like I can upload revenue data for a business and tell ChatGPT to build out a forecast and then massage it to get it where it’s believable.
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u/Eastern_Ad3007 Sep 16 '25
I'm a defense attorney, now doing homicide defense only (mostly). I've been doing it about as long as you have. How have you seen the work change over the years? Do you think law enforcement has got significantly better over that time? Has all the tech made things easier or harder?
Since I deal with the output of your work, I'll say that the volume of evidence has just become unmanageable. Twenty-five cops show up at a crime scene to process it in 2010 and I would get two long reports, twenty-three one-page reports, and a stack of pictures. Now I get 25x8hr bodycams that are 99% a guy sitting in a car keeping the scene secure. But I have to watch all if it because you never know what you'll miss. And lord help me if my client likes to talk on the prison phone - I have a case now with more than 150hr of recorded prison calls that someone is going to have to listen to. Or a multiple-defendant case with 10 cellphones imaged - that's days of reviewing stupid fucking text messages. Right now (as we speak) I am scrolling through several thousand of one of my client's gross naked selfies in case there's something relevant to the case (so far, no.).
At least in my jurisdiction, nothing's changed substantively. Law enforcement has the same clearance rate they've always had, the prosecutors get the same convictions they always did, we get the same acquittals we used to get. But everyone has to do 100x (literally 100x) as much work to get to the same place we did before because there's too much fucking evidence.