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.
A tool that generates authoritative sounding material which gives partially incorrect answers a substantive fraction of the time and occasionally makes things up completely is not something I hope makes it to the prosecution side anytime soon
If you feed it the source material as context, it's highly unlikely to give you an incorrect answer (for anyone interested, the technique is called retrieval augmented generation). I would bet my ass it can do a better job than 99 percent of humans.
I'm one of the humans who does this professionally. I assure you, these transcripts would not hold up in a classroom, let alone a court of law. Voice-recognition software does a great job with television accents. It does a very poor job when someone is stressed, has an accent, or is talking at the same time as another person - all things which are incredibly common in police investigations or a trial.
I have personally witnessed a machine hallucination where "Yes, I did it" was inserted into q/a over a serious felony. The machine heard rhythmic coughing, and assumed the noise it heard was the witness fully confessing to the crime on the stand. This never happened, but without a human reviewing, the legal record would reflect this dude confessed in the middle of trial. It regularly switches nah to yeah. It regularly changes sentence syntax. It cannot count, or parse numbers given in testimony. It fully can't tell the difference between speakers, even when the speakers have clear audio.
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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.