NAPD Changemakers Forum 2026: Your Valuable Time Back, Your Best Case Forward.

In April 2026, the National Association for Public Defense hosted its Changemakers Forum in Atlanta, Georgia. Changemakers is a working lab built around Spark Presentations and Open Space Sessions where defenders think, build, and plan together.

We were there. Prabhas Pokharel, our co-founder, gave a Spark alongside Maya Reisman, our Public Defense Engagement Lead and former trial attorney at DC's Public Defender Service. The session was titled ‘Your valuable time back, your best case forward.’ It focused on one problem defenders know well: you're buried in discovery, and there's never enough time.

What we showed

We talked about a recent Criminal Law Innovation Program (CLIP) case involving a homicide trial where Reduct played a direct role in moving things forward. The case had hours of jail calls, surveillance footage, body-worn camera footage, and medical records. The defense team was under serious time pressure with late discovery coming in through trial.

One of the things that made the biggest difference was being able to ask questions to the jail calls directly. You can ask questions like "Does the speaker ever mention coaching the witness?" Reduct returns the exact timestamp and the exact words from the recording. You click the link, watch the video, and decide how to move forward.

We also showed how multicam surveillance holds up in Reduct. Reduct already lets defenders sync body-worn camera footage across multiple officers. The same feature translates really well to surveillance footage from multiple angles. Defenders can also upload documents alongside recordings, police reports, witness statements, and search across all of it at once.

Key observations

Here is what kept coming up, and how we think about it at Reduct.

1. The volume of digital discovery is not slowing down. Defenders are spending hours on body-worn camera footage, jail calls, and surveillance video before they can do any actual legal work. We built Reduct to take that off their plate. The lawyer still thinks. The lawyer still decides. We just give them the hours back.

2. AI safety and hallucination were the biggest conversation in the room. Defenders are right to be skeptical. We have been very intentional about how we use AI in Reduct. Every summary or search result is tied directly back to the source video. The defender sees where it came from and decides how to use it. We do not let AI stand between a defender and their evidence.

3. Data safety came up a lot. Who owns the files, what happens under subpoena, whether the vendor serves law enforcement. Our answer is in our Terms of Service: you own your data, we don't train on it, and we don't serve prosecution or law enforcement. That commitment is in the contract, not just the marketing.

All public defenders and private defense lawyers are invited to try Reduct free on a case with no commitment and no duration limit.

Reach out to sales@reduct.video to get started.