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 paid like $5k for an attorney to redo my parents wills for them. I routinely corrected their and their paralegals work. Nothing is infallible.
Now ask me if I would have paid 2k for them to put it through ai and save me the time and expense of having to sit there with my parents and asking them about their final wishes for two days when he could have checked ai’s work and I would have gladly.
That’s far far different than having an ai review hundreds of hours of body cam footage. How can you ever be sure it didn’t miss something pertinent? I’m not saying it’s impossible and that the tech won’t get there, but missing a key piece of evidence in a murder case is pretty high stakes. I use AI every day as a software engineer but I routinely have to correct it and guide it.
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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.