From Fragmented to Fast: MSPD Simplifies Discovery Workflow With Reduct

The Missouri State Public Defender System (MSPD) handles nearly 90,000 cases every year. High caseloads, unpredictable disclosure timelines, and manual workflows were overwhelming public defenders in dozens of offices statewide.

MSPD started using Reduct.Video to streamline discovery review and give defenders their time back to build their cases.

About the Missouri State Public Defender System

MSPD provides legal representation to indigent Missourians accused or convicted of crimes at the trial, appellate, and post-conviction levels.

The system has 33 Trial Division offices statewide to ensure every client has a comprehensive, skilled, and dedicated defense team at every stage. They employ around 700 staff members, including hundreds of dedicated attorneys.

The challenge: “We’re kind of drinking from the firehose.”

Before using Reduct, MSPD teams worked through discovery in a manual, fragmented way. They downloaded files, moved them across systems, and transcribed them either by hand or routed them to the one person who could.

Defenders often faced hours of bodycam footage, interviews, and jail calls. These arrived at unpredictable times, sometimes right before the trial and in tricky formats.

Attorneys had no way to search through the discovery files. Every relevant moment had to be found by going through every single piece of discovery. The team described the workload as:

“

We’re kind of drinking from the firehose, trying to figure out what to do.

Travis Martin, Legal Technology Strategist at MSPD

MSPD tried internal fixes using open-source transcription models. The results didn’t hold up. Background noise turned into text, speaker labels fell apart, and more complex reviews, like tracking multiple camera angles, still demanded heavy manual effort.

Cases like this made it clear: defenders needed a faster way to navigate discovery and build their defense. MSPD had looked at other AI tools but held back due to data privacy concerns, specifically the risk of discovery data being used to train AI models.

Reduct ensures that the data stays yours. This means there’s no model training or external sharing of your data. That clarity moved things forward.

How MSPD upgraded its discovery workflow with Reduct

With Reduct, MSPD now has a single workflow for everything discovery-related, including transcription, search, review, and case preparation.

The transcript sits at the center of the work, but not as a replacement for the source material. It's a way to locate what matters quickly, while keeping every decision grounded in the actual recording.

No more bottlenecks at transcription: Defenders can transcribe hours of bodycam footage, recorded interviews, and jail calls in minutes. No more manual typing or waiting for the one person who knows how to handle it.

One source of truth for the whole team: Legal staff, investigators, and attorneys share workspaces and collaborate across projects. They can comment on exact moments, highlight, and label recordings. No more version confusion.

Search that gets to the moment: Reduct’s keyword search and fuzzy search let attorneys find terms (like "Miranda" or "gun") and jump directly to that point. No more scrubbing through hours of footage.

Multi-camera review without the manual work: When there are multiple recordings of the same incident, attorneys sync those files and review them side by side. Work that previously took hours.

Court-ready clips made from the transcript: Defenders can highlight text and generate video clips on the spot. No separate editing tools or back-and-forth.

Clearer structure across long recordings: When there are multiple speaker labels, voice activity detection, punctuation, and topic-based summaries help attorneys move through long recordings without losing the thread.

Note: This blog post is for informational purposes only. MSPD and the State of Missouri do not make endorsements or recommendations of products or services. No endorsement or recommendation by MSPD or the State of Missouri is intended.

About Reduct.Video

Reduct helps public defenders manage hours of discovery, making things easy to search, review, and share. We take care of the grunt work so you can focus on building a strong defense.

Reduct runs on Google Cloud Platform and doesn’t use customer data to train AI models. Customers keep full rights to their data. Reduct is SOC 2 Type II certified and HIPAA compliant.

We serve the defense side only, not the prosecutors or the police.

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We believe the people building tools for defenders should understand what it actually takes to be one. So we have former public defenders helping us build the product. Have a question about whether Reduct fits your office? We’d love to talk to you.