Public Defender of Marion County Partners with Reduct to Optimize Evidence Management with Limited Attorney Time

Public Defender of Marion County and Reduct partnership

Reduct is excited to announce our partnership with the Public Defender of Marion County, Inc. (PDMC) in Salem, Oregon. Established in 2007, the non-profit law firm represents indigent clients in criminal trials and civil commitment cases in Marion County, OR.

Redefining the standards for representation

The Public Defender of Marion County team is committed to providing unwavering, compassionate, client-centered representation and community-based services. Executive Director Shannon Wilson has worked as a defense attorney in over 14 Oregon counties and advocated in the legal system for years to treat defender workloads as a constitutional issue, instead of just a funding one.

In 2023, Wilson asked the Oregon Supreme Court to stop trial courts from assigning new cases to already-overloaded defenders, arguing that indigent defendants have a right “not just to a lawyer in name only, but to a lawyer who provides adequate assistance.”

In 2025, PDMC sued the Oregon Public Defense Commission (OPDC) over Oregon’s Maximum Attorney Caseload quota contracts and sought a preliminary injunction to block OPDC’s quota system and related financial incentives addressing public defender shortages.

In 2026, the court ruled in their favor, declaring that the OPDC cannot impose caseload quotas that prevent public defense attorneys from effectively representing low-income Oregonians. The ruling is expected to have a national impact on public defenders and the clients they serve.

Reduct is proud to support PDMC’s mission to ensure access to fair and effective legal representation, as well as efforts to improve the well-being of public defenders.

Discovery overload before trial

Body-worn camera video, dash cam footage, recorded interviews, and last-minute jail call dumps are part of the discovery review for the defense teams at PDMC.

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In one complex litigation case, over 1000 jail calls were dumped just weeks before the trial start date. Having Reduct on board to review and sift through jail call dumps really helps our attorneys deal with seemingly impossible situations before trial.

Shannon Wilson, Executive Director at PDMC

Marion County's attorneys recognize the importance of reviewing all of the digital discovery in their cases. The challenge is finding the moments that matter without devoting all of their time to reviewing the discovery for a single case.

Getting the time back to build the case

PDMC has adopted Reduct.Video to improve the discovery review process for the attorneys, investigators, paralegals, and the discovery team.

Reduct is steadily becoming a critical component of PDMC's workflow. By quickly generating a transcript of body-worn camera video and witness interviews, PDMC's attorneys can quickly locate and review what matters while keeping analysis grounded in the original recording.

In one case, Shannon used Reduct’s transcription for a field witness interview and caught statements they had missed in every previous review. One of those statements helped them get access to previously undisclosed witness-involved reports that gave the defense grounds to challenge the witness's reliability. Time that would have been spent scrubbing through footage went back to building the case.

PDMC uses Reduct for their discovery review workflow by:

Turning bodycam footage, interviews, and jail calls into searchable transcripts in minutes

Enabling keyword and fuzzy search across recordings to quickly find relevant moments

Syncing multiple bodycams for side-by-side review

Automatically summarizing documents and recordings

Speaker labels, voice activity detection, and translation features

Creating court-ready clips directly from transcript text

With Reduct’s support, PDMC attorneys can spend more time focusing on building their case on behalf of their clients and less time scrubbing through hours of footage.

Secure, defense-focused casework

Marion County was searching for a vendor that provided data privacy as a non-negotiable, and Reduct met that standard.

Reduct doesn't use customer data to train AI models, and it runs on Google Cloud Platform with SOC 2 Type II certification and HIPAA compliance. On the legal side, Reduct works exclusively with defense teams, not prosecutors or the police.

Knowing that Reduct is at the forefront of Ethical AI practices in public defense discovery management allows the PDMC team to use Reduct with confidence.

The Reduct team is proud to partner with PDMC and to support their essential and impactful work.

Shannon Wilson

Executive Director at PDMC

This partnership allows PDMC to do something in response to Oregon's growing neglect of public defenders' workload needs...

Shannon Wilson, Executive Director at PDMC

Testimonial red quote The pressure to handle excessive caseloads is growing in Oregon with no signs of stopping. All the time, public defenders are asked to do more and more with no additional funding for IT support or discovery management. This partnership allows PDMC to do something in response to Oregon's growing neglect of public defenders' workload needs and ethical responsibilities.