Opportunity: Multiply impact

Based in San Diego, The Innocence Center, a member of The Innocence Network, is a national independent nonprofit organization dedicated to freeing innocent people as possible from prison, supporting the exonerated as they re-enter society, and advocating for systemic reform. To date the six-person team has freed 43 people who had collectively spent 622 years in prison for crimes they did not commit.

In the U.S., an estimated six to 15% of prisoners have received wrongful convictions — 138,000 to 350,000 people. Undaunted by these statistics, The Innocence Center team focuses on the knowledge that every single person exonerated is another life restored. Because they depend on grants and donations, they continually seek ways to increase their impact while staying lean. “We always have to be looking at the latest technology to figure out how to do more work with the same amount of resources we have,” says Executive Director Michael Semanchik.

Demand for post-conviction attorneys far outstrips supply. Most jurisdictions don’t guarantee the right to counsel in post-conviction proceedings, and many attorneys understandably don’t want to take on this taxing and even traumatic work. The result is a significant need for counsel, making any increase in productivity meaningful.

At any given time, The Innocence Center is investigating or litigating 60 to 65 cases, with hundreds more in the intake phase. Post-conviction work requires examining everything that happened in the trial court, the appellate courts, and any prior post-conviction proceedings. An attorney could have two trials and multiple appeals to comb through, looking for the details that indicate wrongful conviction. This demands exacting analysis of a wide variety of documents, including trial transcripts, police reports, and legal precedents. It requires months and even years of manually reviewing dozens or hundreds of boxes of information, conducting complicated legal research, and drafting lengthy documents. The longer exoneration takes, the longer their innocent client remains in prison.

When generative AI (GenAI) emerged in late 2022, the team was eager to apply it to their work. But because they needed to both increase efficiency and ensure quality and confidentiality, most GenAI-powered tools weren’t suitable. They either didn’t keep client information private and secure, or they addressed only some of the tasks constituting complex wrongful conviction cases. Above all the team needed a solution that was also built on verified legal content, so they could trust its answers.

Solution: Do better work, faster 

The Innocence Center chose professional-grade AI legal assistant CoCounsel. CoCounsel can accomplish a full range of jobs while protecting all information entered, using industry-leading security policies, standards, and practices. It’s also integrated with Westlaw and Practical Law content, all backed by the expertise of 1,200 attorney editors. “When I talk about CoCounsel with other lawyers,” says Staff Attorney Claudia Salinas, “They often say, ‘Haven’t you heard that lawyers are getting sanctioned for using AI?’ But then I tell them CoCounsel is built specifically for the legal profession, is secure, and makes it easy to check your work — and once I show them what it can do, they all want it, too.”

The team started by using CoCounsel for step one of the exoneration process — reviewing applications for representation. They then used it for petition preparation, for tasks including:

• Analyzing trial transcripts and police reports
• Comparing witness statements across multiple trials
• Conducting research into federal and state law
• Summarizing scholarly articles and case law
• Generating structured legal arguments and filings
• Preparing for hearings and oral arguments

Within weeks of incorporating CoCounsel into their workflow, the team’s productivity had noticeably increased. Because CoCounsel always cites sources, whether in legal research, document review, or timeline results, the attorneys could easily check their work. CoCounsel’s output consistently proved thorough and accurate. 

Not only was the team progressing through work faster, but they were also more confident in what they produced. As Semanchik says, “We can certainly build a stronger case with CoCounsel because it can identify issues that might have been missed by a human. Now we’re not missing issues.” Considering that little to no litigation is more complex than post-conviction criminal litigation, the fact that CoCounsel noticeably helps teams doing innocence work means it likely will make a clear impact for any litigation team.

They also realized CoCounsel’s power to help them run and promote the organization, using it to write case summaries for public awareness, create internal education programs, and draft grant applications. Grant writing with CoCounsel took a fraction of the time — 6% as much time, in fact. When The Innocence Center unexpectedly lost a significant amount of federal funding, CoCounsel was there to help draft a grant termination appeal.

Outcome: Closing the justice gap

By adopting CoCounsel, the team has been able to more than triple their annual per-attorney filing rate, from three to 10. In a field without enough attorneys to meet demand, this is a significant increase that could have widespread effect. They also can now review twice as many applications each month. The attorneys also feel more confident in the thoroughness and accuracy of their filings, knowing they’ve built stronger cases

CoCounsel helps The Innocence Center advance toward their goal of serving more people, more effectively — while freeing their team to do more of the vital work AI can’t do. “We’re trying to reimagine the way this work is done, so that we’re able to do it well and give more to the community, and to other legal professionals in this field, so they can do more, as well, while still having a life outside work,” says Salinas.

In fact, Salinas recently used CoCounsel from the beginning to end of preparing a 160-page petition. With CoCounsel, she:

• Completed the foundational research 88% faster; in a week as opposed to two months
• Completed the writing in half the time — in six months, not 12
• Identified vital nuances in testimony, using AI-assisted analysis of scholarly literature and witness statements
• Felt markedly more confident in her arguments’ strength and completeness, through citation tracking and document comparison

Of course, most importantly, the sooner the team frees a wrongfully convicted person, the more years of their life that person gets back. According to Semanchik, “CoCounsel has certainly revolutionized the way we work on cases and is going to revolutionize the way innocence work is done on a national and probably international level.”