Barrow County, GA adopts Reduct to Navigate the Challenges of Terabytes of Discovery

About the Barrow County Public Defender’s Office

The Barrow County Public Defender’s Office, led by Circuit Public Defender Donna Seagraves, provides legal representation to indigent clients across Barrow and Jackson Counties within the Piedmont Judicial Circuit.

The team handles a diverse caseload, including felony and misdemeanor cases in Superior Court, juvenile delinquency cases, probation revocations, Probate Court matters, Accountability Court participation, and direct appeals.

This type of broad caseload brings a constant flow of digital evidence, much of it video. With limited staff and increasing reliance on recorded material, efficient review has become a critical part of their day-to-day work.

The need for an easy, user-friendly tool to handle video evidence

With so much of their caseload tied to video, the office needed ways to make review more manageable. The systems they relied on weren’t built for public defense, forcing the team to work around tools that made tasks as basic as transcribing and translating interviews more time-consuming than necessary.

This created real friction in their evidence review workflow.

According to Sheila Rainville, Investigator at the Barrow County Public Defender’s Office, reviewing video evidence, isolating key moments, and managing discovery came with a range of challenges:

1. Too much video for a one-investigator office: The office needed a faster way to find key moments, especially when a single investigator was responsible for supporting multiple attorneys. Each time a client said, “Oh, no, this didn’t happen this way,” they had to reconstruct the event from scratch.

2. Clipping and zooming multi-person videos in VLC: One challenge came up repeatedly: isolating what the victim actually said while an officer continually interrupted:

3. Discovery with non-English-speaking clients: Barrow County is also encountering more and more recordings in various languages, adding another layer of complexity. The office tried to find alternative tools to overcome these challenges, but most demanded hours of onboarding, which they simply didn’t have.

“

The ability to search a transcript for a specific word and have the program instantly locate every instance where it, or a similar term, was used has been an invaluable resource during jury trials.

Sheila Rainville

Investigator at the Barrow County Public Defender’s Office

Finding the right fit with Reduct.Video

After testing several options, the office found that many tools were built around law-enforcement needs, not theirs.

What stood out about Reduct was its simplicity:

Organize case files and keep all evidence in a secure, centralized location

Transcribe and translate discovery in 90+ languages

Search across all video and audio to find keywords or contradictions instantly

Jump to important moments using timestamped transcripts

Sync multiple camera angles for faster, more comprehensive review

Clip precise segments from the videos even with crosstalk

Share key moments with attorneys without rewatching everything

Welcome, Barrow County Public Defender’s Office!

We’re proud to be part of your work, helping you save time and focus on building the strongest possible defenses for your clients.

Our commitment to Barrow County Public Defender’s Office is to deliver a secure, defense-first workspace where your team stays in control of your cases and your clients’ data.