July 23, 2026
Read Time ·
5 min
As Chief Public Defender of the Lehigh County Public Defender's Office, Kimberly Makoul leads a team of nineteen attorneys, two investigators, and four administrative assistants. The office handled over 5,500 matters in 2024, roughly double the average Pennsylvania county’s criminal cases.
Kimberly’s office handles a high volume of cases and the evidence that comes with them. Body camera footage, recorded interviews, and surveillance video are now standard in even routine matters.
Before JusticeText, working through hours of footage meant scrubbing video, rewinding, and scribbling timestamps on a legal pad. For a double homicide with multiple witnesses and days of recorded interviews, that would typically mean an enormous amount of manual review before the defense team could even begin building a case.
Kimberly brought on JusticeText to support her team on a complex and emotional double homicide trial where one of the victims was an infant. Through it all, their client maintained his innocence.
"We used JusticeText through the whole thing. Having that just to be able to find things, to be able to hone in on things, was just amazing."
The case brought multiple witnesses, hours of recorded interviews, and police reports, along with testimony that didn't always match what was on record.
There were multiple instances throughout the trial where JusticeText helped Kimberly and her team surface inconsistencies.
At a pretrial hearing, a witness testified to something the defense knew wasn't true. Kimberly searched JusticeText, pulled up the report where that person had been interviewed, and confirmed on the spot that the witness's testimony didn't match what was on record.
At trial, a key witness also changed his story.
"He had said things in a couple of interviews, then something a little different at a hearing, then something way different at another hearing. We uploaded all that to JusticeText and it gave me this neat chart of all the inconsistencies. It was great."
Kimberly then used that chart to impeach him on cross-examination.
JusticeText proved its value again when a police officer testified that a witness had never told him something, Kimberly knew otherwise. "I would click and get right to their police report, or to the video where this witness specifically told the police officer this thing. That was the real-time usage we were doing."
Another aspect where JusticeText proved valuable was witness prep. The prosecution didn't provide a witness list until the morning of trial, leaving Kimberly and her colleagues to anticipate who might testify and be ready for anyone.
They asked MirandaAI, JusticeText’s AI assistant, to identify likely witnesses from the discovery, and it delivered a list they could use to divide responsibility across the team. MirandaAI also suggested lines of questioning for potential witnesses. Having that starting point meant Kimberly could confirm they hadn't missed an important area of questioning.
The team organized their discovery in JusticeText's workspace structure, creating dedicated folders for different categories of evidence including interviews, police documents, and photographs.
"We'd search, and instead of just searching one document on that homepage, we search, and it's searching everything for us. It's searching everything to look for inconsistencies, consistencies, or whatever we need it to look for, Is there any evidence of this? And it will tell us where there is, or if there isn't. It was really invaluable."
The result was a defense team that walked into court prepared and it showed.
"It enabled us not just to do our work more efficiently and better, but to look more prepared and professional as well. We weren't looking through pages and back and forth, not knowing where things were.”
After the verdict was in, one of the alternate jurors told someone that Kimberly’s team was so 'on it' and professional. “A lot of that was just being able to specifically pinpoint things — even our transcripts. With a few clicks, we could pull up the pages,” Kimberly mentioned.
All of this preparation, including the searches in JusticeText during testimony, the witness list, the inconsistency charts, and the resulting impeachments, led to the result that Kimberly's team had been working so hard for: a not guilty verdict for their client.
The use of JusticeText with this case was just the start for the office, spurring greater adoption and changing how they approach casework.
"This is a tool that everybody must use, during really any case, and especially when you're prepping for trial. If you're not using it, you're totally missing the boat."
Beyond the tool itself, Kimberly mentioned how she appreciates the partnership and the responsiveness of the team and how JusticeText genuinely understood what it meant to be in trial, to receive a verdict at 6:30 on a Friday night and need the tool to have worked reliably through the whole week.
"You appreciate the time deadlines that we're in and the volume of work and how it comes up so rapidly. To work with somebody who is really responsive to that is just really amazing."
