Use your AI legal assistant to streamline prep and even give real-time courtroom help

As a criminal law practitioner, you’re likely all too familiar with heavy caseloads and tight timelines. Compared to other practice areas, the time to prepare for preliminary hearings and put on a trial is typically much shorter, making it difficult to devote the hours and attention you’d like to each case.

But generative AI tailored to the practice of law can help—a lot. With legal AI assistants such as CoCounsel you can streamline preparation for client interviews, hearings, and trials, as well as legal research and brief writing. You can even use CoCounsel in real-time in the courtroom. Read on to learn how to take advantage of CoCounsel for critical tasks in your criminal practice. 

Expedite legal research and prepare persuasive arguments

With CoCounsel’s Legal Research Memo (LRM) skill you can prepare for hearings and write better briefs much more quickly. CoCounsel draws from Casetext’s database of primary law sources, including case law, statutes, and regulations across all fifty states. 

Getting on-point case law is simple. Tell CoCounsel your issue, briefly state the facts of your case, and then specify your jurisdiction to narrow results. You can also follow our simple prompting tips for optimal results. 

CoCounsel retrieves results so quickly that you can even use it when in the courtroom. 

If an issue arises during trial and you need to find supporting case law for your argument, plug the issue into CoCounsel during a break and get a memo that answers your question with supporting case law.

LRM can also be used to stay up-to-date on ever-changing areas of criminal law, such as evolving case law around Fourth Amendment issues related to new technology. CoCounsel is also valuable when arguing an issue of first impression in your jurisdiction—you can use LRM to get an overview of how courts in other jurisdictions have handled the issue and develop persuasive arguments based on those precedents.

Accelerate hearing and trial prep

Though there are few depositions in criminal proceedings, CoCounsel’s Prepare for a Deposition skill can be used to step up preparation for trials, evidentiary and preliminary hearings, and more. 

Say you’re representing a defendant who fled the scene, was injured in an accident, and then taken to the hospital, where a police officer questioned them. CoCounsel significantly reduces the time needed to prepare for cross-examination of the interviewing officer by generating a thorough outline with questions in minutes—or less.

Enter relevant case information, such as who you’re representing (defendant in a criminal case), who you’re questioning (police officer), relevant facts (questioning while in the hospital), and the goal of your questioning (to suppress your client’s hospital statement). CoCounsel will return topics germane to the issue (such as whether the officer followed proper protocol when questioning your client at the hospital). After you  remove or add topics, CoCounsel generates an outline with a set of questions for each topic (such as whether the officer followed proper protocol when questioning your client at the hospital). 

One area where this skill is particularly valuable is when questioning a witness on unfamiliar subjects, such as an expert witness during voir dire or trial. CoCounsel will indicate what topics you should cover. It’s also an excellent tool for junior attorneys. 

Additionally, the Summarize skill can be used to summarize and break down dense and complex documents, such as jury instructions, motions, pleadings, witness statements, police reports, transcripts, and medical records, potentially saving you hours of prep time.

Efficiently search databases and review documents

The Search a Database and Review Documents skills enable more effective document search and review. Review Documents performs a thorough, word-by-word review of a small set of documents to answer a set of questions, while Search a Database is valuable for searching a collection of documents to answer a particular question or set of questions.

Use Review Documents to prepare for questioning at trial, answer questions about your own discovery, or review opposing counsel’s motion to quickly get up to speed on your adversary’s arguments. For example, perhaps you want to know whether any Miranda issues might arise based on the content of your client’s police statement in anticipation of a preliminary hearing. Upload your client’s statement to CoCounsel, ask questions about Miranda issues (e.g., whether the police read a Miranda warning and what the substance of the confession was), and get answers to each question with links to specific pages with the answer source. 

You can even ask a subjective question, such as “Did the police minimize the Miranda warning?” and CoCounsel will provide information that might alert you as to whether there is an issue. 

Search a Database is beneficial when you’re dealing with a collection of documents (not just a single document), such as thousands of pages of discovery, but don’t have time to read through every document. 

With this skill, you create your own database tailored to your needs. This could be a database for one case, a collection of frequently used jury instructions, or a database of briefs. Once you’ve created your database, you can quickly get answers to questions about your documents (such as testimony related to a particular issue) or locate specific documents (such as a particular set of jury instructions). 

With CoCounsel, you don’t have to waste time sifting through brief banks. If, for example, you need a brief on an officer exceeding the scope of a consent search, ask CoCounsel and it will quickly pull all relevant briefs for you.

You can also use CoCounsel to answer specific questions about a particular issue. For instance, if part of your defense is based on the description of a firearm in an arrest for robbery, ask CoCounsel to search a database of case documents—such as pleadings, witness statements, police reports, transcripts, and other discovery—for all references to firearms in the entire collection of documents. You’ll get a memo summarizing the references, complete with linked page references.

Whether you’re a seasoned criminal law attorney or just starting out, CoCounsel can help you more effectively prepare for cases, draft briefs, and advise clients, so you can make the most of your time. 
Visit our help center for a video demo of CoCounsel’s skills with criminal law examples.