reSee.it Podcast Summary
Devshi Mehrotra's arc spans from a Beijing lab to a courtroom technology startup that aims to change how justice is practiced. Her first exposure to AI came in 2016 during a Beijing internship where she built a cancer cell image analysis prototype, learning gradient descent and neural networks while feeling overwhelmed yet hooked by the idea that math could drive real-world tasks. She later joined Google Brain, Microsoft Research, and DeepMind, contributing to NLP, computer vision, and robotics. Those experiences laid the foundation for Justice Text, which she co-founded with Leslie after meeting in the University of Chicago's computer science program and sharing a commitment to social justice.
Justice Text emerged from a direct request: public defenders overwhelmed by video, transcripts, and jail calls needed tools to sift through footage and extract evidence. The platform automates transcription, offers searchable summaries, flags key moments such as miranda warnings or arrests, and lets attorneys assemble video exhibits for court. A Northern California case involving a Spanish-speaking client showed how a clip could reveal rights violations and help dismiss a charge. Mehrotra emphasizes that Justice Text is funded through customer relationships with government bodies, not charity, with durable, scalable adoption through procurement.
Today, Justice Text serves around 60 public defender agencies, including statewide systems in Tennessee and Massachusetts, and major cities like Portland and Houston, with a delivery model that combines training, office hours, and in-person visits to fit varied county structures. Mehrotra describes a future of expanded partnerships, additional statewide deployments, and features such as Miranda AI, which summarizes large discovery folders and lets lawyers poll the data with natural-language questions, cross-referencing answers to exact files and timestamps. She notes governments are increasingly surveying AI use, demanding data safeguarding and interoperable APIs, and foresees growth into adjacent defense contexts and private criminal defense. She cites the Indian film Queen as a source of optimism about bold, independent paths.