Neighborhood Defender Service of Texas Uses Reduct to Navigate Bilingual Video Discovery

About NDS Texas

NDS Texas opened in January 2022 as an expansion of the Neighborhood Defender Service. The Hays County Public Defender's Office took its first cases in March 2023. The office serves residents of one of the fastest-growing counties in the state of Texas.

NDS Texas previously ran the Operation Lone Star defense program and a Harris County eviction defense program. Both closed in 2025. NDS Texas continues to serve the Hays County community.

The NDS Texas Hays County Criminal Defense Team provides "client-centered, collaborative, holistic public defense representation and related services" to residents of Hays County.

The challenge: drowning in the volume of discovery

The NDS Texas team handles cases that come with a steady flow of digital evidence, including body-worn camera footage, dashcam footage, and jail calls, mostly in English and Spanish.

The team relied on manual processes to watch every bit of recording with VLC Player. When the discovery came in Spanish, the work doubled. The team had to wait for interpreters to translate the video, then depended on those translations to understand the context. This made every review longer.

“

With the volume of cases and the number of videos we get per case, I feel like we're drowning.

Kristin Dow, Supervising Attorney, Hays County

NDS Texas was looking for a discovery review solution and tried several tools on the market. Every tool they looked at had a gap in how it handled Spanish video.

Navigating video by using the transcript in Reduct

The Program Manager of NDS Texas, Omar Saucedo, found Reduct through a colleague. After a quick demo, Omar saw that Reduct was the right fit for the office.

He liked the idea of using a transcript to navigate video and get to the right moment. That is how the NDS Texas team works today: search the transcript, find the moment, watch the video.

NDS Texas uses Reduct to:

Get transcripts of all their discovery files, including Spanish audio and video

Translate Spanish files to English for faster review

Run a fuzzy search to find close matches of a search term across hours of video

Clip videos by highlighting the transcript

Import directly from their cloud platforms without manually downloading and re-uploading

During a training session, one team member said, "This is what AI should be doing." The team was delighted by Reduct's other AI features, including summaries, ask the recording, and multicam syncing.

Omar Saucedo

The Program Manager of NDS Texas

Adopting Reduct has completely transformed our daily workflow...

Omar Saucedo, The Program Manager of NDS Texas

Testimonial red quote Adopting Reduct has completely transformed our daily workflow. Tasks that used to take our team hours now happen in clicks, allowing us to focus our energy on high-impact strategy rather than tedious processes.

About Reduct

Reduct is a video transcription, search, and editing platform. It helps public defenders turn hours of recorded content into something they can search, review, and clip. Reduct takes on the time-consuming tasks for defenders, so attorneys can focus more of their time on actually defending their client.

We design Reduct for defense teams and never work with prosecutors or law enforcement. This is our firm commitment.

Welcome, NDS Texas!

We are thrilled to see NDS Texas using Reduct and proud to support their mission.

Our commitment to NDS Texas is to deliver a secure, defense-first workspace where your team stays in control of your cases and your clients’ data.