Whereas finding out laptop science on the College of Chicago, Devshi Mehrotra and Leslie Jones-Dove had been impressed to construct tech that centered on the wants of communities traditionally marginalized by regulation enforcement. They ended up reaching out to native public defenders, who informed them that they had been being overwhelmed by hours of jail calls, physique cams and different types of recorded proof.
As per one estimate, the common officer’s physique digital camera will report about 32 recordsdata, 7 hours and 20GB of video monthly at 720p decision. Multiply these figures by the lots of to tens of hundreds of officers in a police drive, and it rapidly provides up.
“On the one hand, physique cams and different gadgets are crucial for holding regulation enforcement accountable and offering the most effective protection potential,” Mehrotra informed me in an e mail interview. “Nevertheless, they exacerbate workload challenges for public defenders, who’re dealing with caseloads 3 to 10 occasions the beneficial quantity.”
So Mehrotra and Jones-Dove based JusticeText, one of many startups taking part within the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. JusticeText is designed to mechanically transcribe physique cam footage, interrogation movies and extra for public defenders, enabling attorneys to take time-stamped notes, create video clips and share proof with their colleagues.
Picture Credit: JusticeText
JusticeText presents a function that gives several-sentence summaries of every piece of uploaded proof. In the meantime, its ChatGPT-powered instrument, MirandaAI, permits attorneys to ask free-form questions on their discovery (e.g. “Had been any implicit guarantees made to the consumer?” or “What’s the timeline of occasions the witness described?).
“Public defenders owe their shoppers the absolute best protection. Nevertheless, digital discovery evaluate requires an more and more giant share of restricted sources,” Mehrotra mentioned. “Saving discovery evaluate time frees up crucial sources that may be spent working the case and constructing relationships with shoppers. From a technical perspective, it additionally means much less IT sources devoted to technical problem-solving — issues like determining how you can play movies in distinctive proprietary codecs or creating video clips for an upcoming trial.”
Whereas that’s all high-quality and dandy in idea, the concept of importing proof to a platform like JusticeText may give some public defenders pause. There’s the chance of exposing proof to potential knowledge breaches, for one factor. Past that, attorneys may rightly be involved any uploaded knowledge might be utilized in ways in which they and their shoppers don’t essentially consent to, like coaching JusticeText’s AI fashions.
I additionally fear concerning the accuracy of JusticeText’s transcriptions — notably given that transcription tech doesn’t are likely to carry out equally nicely throughout completely different accents and languages. The summaries that JusticeText gives might be off-base, as nicely; nuance isn’t precisely AI’s robust go well with.
Mehrotra did her greatest to allay my fears, claiming that JusticeText solely generates a abstract for transcripts above a sure confidence threshold and gives a means for customers to redact confidential data from transcripts. The place it considerations privateness and knowledge storage, JusticeText — which locations knowledge in “safe cloud servers” and encrypts it each in transit and at relaxation — doesn’t use uploaded knowledge for mannequin coaching except it has express permission to take action, Mehrotra says.
These steps have been sufficient to win over shoppers, apparently.
Within the time JusticeText closed its $2.5 million funding spherical (which had participation from Bloomberg Beta, True Ventures, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and former Stockton, California mayor Michael Tubbs), it’s expanded its buyer base of public defender places of work, which now consists of the state-wide public defenders techniques in Massachusetts and Kentucky.
Picture Credit: JusticeText
Mehrotra claims that JusticeText now has a relationship with over 100 public defender companies, nonprofit service suppliers and personal observe legal protection corporations throughout the U.S. — and $1 million in annual recurring income. That’s a big bump in deal movement since we final spoke with JusticeText (in September 2022), when the startup had between 50 to 60 partnerships.
Mehrotra tells me that the main focus for JusticeText within the close to time period can be introducing a Spanish to English translation functionality and help for “multi-language” recordings — e.g. recordings with speech in each English and Spanish. (As AI isn’t a perfect translator, both, I’d hope that the workforce is cautious in implementing this.) JusticeText additionally plans to develop its workforce of seven workers to round 10 within the new 12 months, with an emphasis on increasing its advertising and marketing and communications operate.
“The pandemic has affected our finish consumer by making a backlog within the legal courtroom system,” Mehrotra mentioned. “Taken collectively, this creates a burning platform for change — even when key decision-makers could also be tougher to achieve amid these challenges.”