A Legal AI Stack for the Solo Criminal Defense Practice
The solo math
A solo criminal defense practice runs on one non-renewable resource: the lawyer’s hours. Legal AI is worth exactly what it returns of that resource and nothing more. The stack below is built on that arithmetic, anchored by the workload that eats the most hours in a modern defense practice, which is recorded evidence.
The anchor: evidence review
Discovery now arrives as hours of bodycam, dashcam, jail calls, and 911 audio in every serious case. This is where AI pays for itself first and most obviously: full-recording indexing, transcripts with speaker labels, flagged defense issues, and exports that drop into motions. BodyCamAI’s Solo plan is $95 per month for 40 hours of processing, which prices the entire month’s evidence review below a single billable hour for most defense practices.
The rest of the stack
- Legal research with AI-assisted search, if your state bar library or current subscription does not already include it.
- Dictation that has become genuinely good, for notes, letters, and first drafts on the drive back from court.
- A general-purpose AI assistant for drafting scaffolding, correspondence, and summarizing your own notes, never for unverified citations.
- Calendaring and conflict checking in whatever practice management you already run; AI does not fix a broken calendar.
The ethics baseline
What not to buy
Skip anything sold on fear of falling behind, anything priced by opaque quote, and anything that duplicates a capability you already pay for. The stack above is deliberately short. A solo practice does not need twelve subscriptions; it needs the two or three that return hours every single week, starting with the one aimed at the largest pile on your desk. Start with the free videos and let the results argue.