[rayiner]

Legal technology is pretty much totally inapplicable to the work public defenders do. There's pretty much no documents to speak of in those cases, and the technology won't interview your client for you and piece together a detailed timeline of his version of the events. And since their clients are getting charged with the same sorts of crimes over and over, they already have the relevant cases handy in their previous filings.

[aadraple]

Perhaps legal technologies in their current forms are not as applicable to the work public defenders do but to say all LegalTech is inapplicable to the work public defenders do is a stretch.

To use your example, you could actually build technology that would help with the interview process and aid in mapping out a detailed timeline of their version of the events.

While repeat offenders may offend in the same pattern the same cannot be said about all offenders.

Public defenders develop their list of handy relevant cases through experience on the job. Tech can help train new hires quicker so that they would be able to jump in and start giving proper legal representation sooner. The system clearly needs more public defenders.

Legal research does play a key component when it comes to the sentencing of offenders. Two offenders can be charged with the same crime however it could have occurred in two entirely different circumstances with the offenders having starkly different backgrounds and motivations. Due to these differences, public defenders should do a deep dive in research in order to provide proper representation rather than relying on only their own personal list of applicable cases. Effective legal research software would go a long way in helping over-worked defenders such as Tina Peng.

[rayiner]

I really struggle to think of what sort of legal tech would help you interview a poor client that may not speak english better than a good grasp of Spanish and a pad of paper. These are not complex cases with tons of moving parts. As for legal research--your example of finding factually on-point cases is exactly what existing search algorithms do the worst job of.

Maybe I'm pessimistic. But the gap between promises and actuality in the legal tech field is very wide, at present, so I'm really skeptical when I hear about how it will help solve what is really a political/social problem.

[aadraple]

Well, if the public defender doesn't know Spanish using software which helps them to understand their client is a start.

I definitely agree with you on just how bad existing legal research software is at finding factually on-point results. This was part of my motivation to help found ROSS Intelligence, which is building better legal research software with ML and NLP at its core.

And while pessimism and skepticism does help identify the difficulties in implementing different solutions, it's optimism that helps find the opportunities imbedded in the difficulties found :)