Lancaster County Public Defender’s Office Switches from Manual Transcription to Reduct.Video

About the Lancaster County Public Defender’s Office

The Lancaster County Public Defender’s Office in Nebraska is dedicated to giving every client strong, high-quality legal support, no matter their situation.

They believe that a fair legal system depends on professional independence and creative representation. To support this, the office prioritizes recruiting top-tier attorneys and support staff, ensuring they have stable funding, continuous training, and access to essential resources, such as modern evidentiary tools, necessary to handle complex cases. By maintaining reasonable caseloads and a visionary management style, they provide a full-service defense that protects the constitutional rights of the Lancaster community.

The Challenge: "We just have our eyes at this point."

The team at the Lancaster County Public Defender’s Office was facing a mountain of video discovery. In one of their recent drug possession cases, a single stop involved two initial officers, followed by four more who "happened to show up." That meant the defense attorney had to sit through hours of footage from eight different cameras (both cruisers and body cameras), watching the same videos repeatedly, and taking manual notes.

The daily workload was just as heavy for the support staff. Their legal secretary was often manually typing up investigator interviews and witness recordings. They tried using a few workflows in Google Docs, but found it wasn't accurate enough for the specific needs of a legal case.

Without a way to search through the audio, finding a specific moment, like when a client was read their rights, was a slow and manual process.

“

We just have our eyes at this point. We do not have any kind of software to speed it up other than just for us to make the video go faster.

Kristi J. Egger, Public Defender

The need for a secure tool

Beyond just needing faster tools, the office needed a partner they could trust with sensitive data. A major concern for the team was ensuring that their clients' information stayed confidential and wouldn't be used to "teach" an AI or be shared with outside systems.

Lancaster County Public Defender’s office adopts Reduct.Video

By bringing in Reduct.Video, Lancaster County Public Defender’s Office has changed how they tackle these piles of discovery. Instead of typing by hand, they can now get a rapid transcription of all their discovery files.

Better teamwork: Legal secretaries can now upload files and get them transcribed in minutes. Investigators can now tag attorneys in a specific part of a video to say, "Hey, look at this." This allows the Lancaster defense team to use a single cloud space for active collaboration.

Finding the "Needle in the Haystack": Instead of combing through hours of footage, they can now search for keywords like "Miranda" or "consent" and jump straight to that moment in the video.

Seeing every angle: With the multicam sync feature, attorneys can look at recordings from different officers side by side. This allows attorneys to streamline their review process, and view the discovery from a different perspective through the video.

Trial-ready clips: With Reduct, attorneys can highlight words in the transcript and download video clips instantly (without a complex video editing tool).

Kristi J. Egger

Public Defender

Adopting Reduct has been a game-changer for our office...

Kristi J. Egger, Public Defender

Testimonial red quote Adopting Reduct has been a game-changer for our office. By removing the technological hurdles associated with reviewing massive volumes of discovery, our staff can spend less time searching for that “needle in a haystack” and actually find it, thus helping our clients much sooner. The ability to pull up all of the pertinent videos in one place is also a great time saver. Thank you, Reduct, for helping us help our clients!

Welcome, Lancaster County Public Defender’s Office

We’re proud to help the Lancaster team cut through the noise so they can spend more time on their real mission: advocating for their clients.

Our commitment to Lancaster 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.