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Sharing Evidence Outside Without Sharing Everything
Suffolk Legal Aid Society runs casework across a criminal bureau, family court and children's law. Evidence moves to prosecutors before trial and to requesters under FOIA, and those two audiences are not entitled to the same thing.
At a Glance
3 bureaus
Criminal, family court, children's law
Pre-trial
Evidence shared with prosecutors
FOIA
External requests answered with redaction
Admin-controlled
Access managed rather than ad hoc
The Situation
Access alone was not enough
The previous platform let the team reach evidence but not edit or collaborate on it, and lacked annotation and indexing, which made working across bureaus difficult.
Sharing outside had no controls
Attorneys needed to give prosecutors evidence before trial, without the tools to manage what changed or who reached it.
Only one bureau was served
The existing system worked for the criminal bureau and did not extend to family court or children's law, leaving those teams without access to evidence they needed.
FOIA sat on top of all of it
Requests had to be answered with sensitive information removed for an external audience.
What Was Deployed
Redaction is what makes the outbound path safe: sensitive information is removed for external audiences while the case file itself stays intact internally. Around it, the evidence platform added annotation, indexing and transcription the team could generate and present in court, extended across all three bureaus rather than one.
Why It Works
Family court and children's law are the hardest disclosure problems in this list. The material routinely identifies minors and third parties who have no part in the matter, and the obligation to protect them does not pause because a file has to be shared. Redaction on the outbound path, rather than a second sanitised copy maintained by hand, is what keeps one case file authoritative.
Related
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