Transcription in public defense: overcoming challenges with technology
January 2025
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3 min read
The transcription workflow in public defense was slow in the past (still is), but it was more manageable because you didn’t have to deal with as much footage as you do today.
To transcribe regular court hearings, witness statements and interrogations, you either rely on your paralegals (or sometimes interns and law students), or hire court reporters to transcribe important footage even today.
But each method has its drawbacks:
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The verbatim transcripts from paralegals are prone to human errors and they consume a lot of their time.
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Interns and law students alleviate some of the workload but also have varying levels of quality and accuracy in the transcripts, so you cannot completely rely on them either.
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Transcripts from professional court reporters are accurate, but costly, and not always feasible for the volume of material that needs to be processed.
Fast forward to 2025, defending clients is only getting harder—there’s just too much volume.
Public defenders handle 60-80% of state felony cases and nearly 90% of federal felony cases, and 8 out of 10 cases have some form of audio/video evidence from body-worn cameras, surveillance cameras, dashcams and other modern devices.
As a result, public defenders are drowning in digital discovery.
Thankfully, it’s not just hardware like body cams and surveillance cams that’s new and modern; we now have dedicated transcription software that can generate transcripts of 100s of hours of footage in the time it would take a paralegal to send their attorneys an email update on case progress.
The technology works by dividing large audio files into sections and distributing the workload across multiple servers so that transcription time remains consistent regardless of the length of the recordings.
Most legal transcription software also use data security measures like encryption, role-based access control, regulatory compliance, and confidentiality agreements to protect sensitive information, so you do not need to worry about data breaches either.
"But we do not have the budget for another software," you might say.
AI transcription is way more cost-effective now because it eliminates the cost associated with human transcribers, has fixed pricing, and is highly scalable.
The cost for an original court transcript is approximately $4.40 per page for ordinary 30-day delivery. So for an hour of footage (approx. 30 pages), this would amount to about $132 (30 pages x $4.40) for ordinary delivery.
Now if we take $0.25 as the average rate of AI transcripts per minute, then it’d cost you $15 for one hour of footage.
The comparison between the two would look something like this:
Some transcription software providers, like Reduct for instance, don’t charge you for long periods of silence in the footage, like a defendant falling asleep during an interrogation break or dashcam footage of a police officer driving to the scene where no speech is detected.
Features like this make AI transcription an affordable option if you’re dealing with large volumes of footage.
Once you have the AI transcripts, most transcription software also provide you with either all or a combination of these extra features at no additional fee:
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Get a summary of the footage with timestamps so you know if it contains critical evidence before even skimming through it
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Search for any words or phrases your defendant or plaintiff has used without having to watch the entire footage
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Highlight, add tags, and leave comments for your investigators, paralegals and co-counsel
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Extract important sections to create court-admissible, captioned video exhibits
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Redact sensitive information of witnesses, defendants and suspects from the footage
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Export the transcripts and captioned video exhibits in legal format
The standard methods of transcription, while once sufficient, can no longer keep up with the needs of modern legal practice. You and your paralegals cannot sit around watching endless hours of footage for each case; it is practically impossible.
You can, however, lessen the burden of transcription with the help of a transcription software, and focus on providing high-quality representation for your clients instead.
Dedicated legal transcription software like Reduct.Video not only helps with the transcription process, but also lets you manage your cases and find what matters to build a strong defense.
