The basics:

• NJOPD launched a secure AI platform to streamline legal research
• Tool searches thousands of briefs, internal documents
• AI helps automate routine work while attorneys retain legal judgment
• Officials say AI can give public defenders more time with clients

The New Jersey Office of the Public Defender is tapping artificial intelligence to streamline one of the most time-consuming parts of practicing law. Thanks to a partnership with Princeton University, the New Jersey Innovation Authority and New Jersey Office of Information Technology, the statewide agency is rolling out a secure, proprietary platform designed to help public defenders efficiently draft legal briefs.

Through the OPD Resource Library, attorneys can quickly access years of briefs, motions, training materials and institutional expertise from one unified, searchable system that provides a reliable starting point for legal research.

Before the platform’s launch, New Jersey Public Defender Jennifer Sellitti said attorneys “did something that I lovingly refer to as Frankenbriefing.”

Because this knowledge previously only existed across NJOPD offices, servers and databases, public defenders had to spend hours combing through legal briefs, motions and other legal documents before manually piecing together drafts.

Under the new system, the process of finding and assembling relevant language from expert-vetted language now takes only “seconds,” according to Sellitti.

“So much of the fear around AI is that it’s going to take over and it’s going to make us less human,” Sellitti said. “But, the more we automate the mundane tasks and the more we automate processes that are going on behind the scenes and are just super time-consuming for everybody – support staff, investigators and attorneys – that time is going to come back as creativity, one-on-one client experiences, and with lawyers that feel like they can breathe and do their jobs,” she said.

Embracing AI

While public defense remains a people-driven profession, attorneys are increasingly balancing high caseloads and growing administrative demands. As a result, there’s less time for the client relationships and advocacy that matter most in this line of work, according to the American Bar Association’s 2023 National Public Defense Workload Study.

Amid growing adoption of AI tools across all industries, New Jersey is among the first public defender offices in the U.S. to deploy a custom platform tailored to public defense work.

The legal profession appears to be rapidly embracing AI. Thomson Reuters’ 2026 Future of Professionals report found that 74% of professionals now use AI several times a week, while one-third use AI tools their employers have not approved — underscoring the demand for secure, enterprise-grade systems.

At NJOPD, the hope is that by helping attorneys spend less time on routine work, it will allow more time for advocacy, client engagement and case preparation, according to Sellitti.

“The inspiration for the project really came from this kind of realization around public defense and public defense resourcing — we are always in a place where we could use more lawyers. And I have to say that in New Jersey, we’re not particularly understaffed compared to other jurisdictions, but there’s always this sense of, you want to give your lawyers the most time they can spend per client. And we can do that in a lot of ways. We can do that by asking for more lawyers to lower caseloads, but we can also look at ways that we can use technology to give lawyers more time to do the things that we want them to be doing,” she explained.

“But, if we can use technology to automate the more mundane tasks that lawyers do, we give them back time where they can do the more creative thinking, the more strategic thinking, or most importantly, sitting and holding space for a client and being face-to-face with their clients,” she explained.

Taking back time

Sellitti said, “So, when I started looking at AI and imagining all of the things that AI could do for public defense, I started looking at what are points of pain for our lawyers that take up a lot of time that don’t need to.”

That prompted her to consider how AI could speed up the task of reviewing past briefs and assembling a starting draft so that attorneys could focus on higher-level legal strategy.

She said, “That was sort of the place that we started as something that we could automate pretty easily without compromising the thought process that we expect our attorneys to go through.”

While the platform automates the process of assembling research, attorneys are still responsible for the legal analysis, writing and case strategy, according to Sellitti.

One of the largest in the U.S.

Sellitti was sworn in as New Jersey’s public defender in February 2024 after nearly two decades with the agency. She previously held several leadership roles within the office, including director of training and communications and deputy of the Middlesex Trial Region.

With 1,300 attorneys, investigators, social workers and professional staff across 66 offices serving all 21 counties in the state, NJOPD is one of the nation’s largest public defense systems.

New Jersey’s office was also the first in the U.S. It formed in 1967, four years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Gideon v. Wainwright decision guaranteed the right to legal counsel for criminal defendants who cannot afford an attorney.

In addition to representing indigent defendants in criminal cases, the agency has grown to handle juvenile, family, mental health and appellate matters for those who cannot cover the cost of private counsel. On an annual basis, NJOPD sees more than 100,000 cases across its various divisions.

Modernizing the office

Since taking office, Sellitti has prioritized modernizing NJOPD and strengthening client-centered representation across the state.

That’s included advancing one of the nation’s first statewide holistic representation models to connect clients earlier with services such as housing, treatment, employment, healthcare and benefits while supporting better outcomes for clients, communities and the justice system. Sellitti has also expanded interdisciplinary representation, youth defense practices and community-based services, including expungement clinics and outreach initiatives.

Sellitti doesn’t consider herself tech savvy but says she’s “always tended to be an early adopter of things that I think can improve my work and my life.” So, Sellitti said she wanted to examine ways NJOPD “could automate because we were kind of behind when it came to automation.”

If we can use technology to help eliminate some of the pain and the time-consuming tasks, what we’re giving them back is the stuff that brought them to the work in the first place.
– Jennifer Sellitti, New Jersey public defender

“I have always been a public defender as a lawyer … We have large caseloads, we have serious cases. We are very much people who have to learn how to triage work so that we can make sure that every client is getting everything they need and getting the best defense,” she said.

“So as a person now running the agency, it’s not just about good client service. It’s like, how do I keep lawyers? How do I keep people from burning out? How do I make people love their jobs? How do I make them fall in love with their job again? If we can use technology to help eliminate some of the pain and the time-consuming tasks, what we’re giving them back is the stuff that brought them to the work in the first place,” Sellitti said.

Human connections

When she started looking for potential partners, Sellitti was led to the New Jersey State Office of Innovation during the summer of 2024.

During those initial conversations with then-New Jersey State Chief Innovation Officer Beth Noveck, Sellitti said she emphasized wanting to find ways to adopt AI “make my lawyers’ jobs easier and to allow them more human connection with their clients.”

Sellitti recalled, “She perked up and was like, ‘All I’m hearing is doom and gloom and how people are afraid of AI, so this is exciting.’ And that started our partnership with them.”

“One of the things that the Innovation Authority does is that it works with organizations and institutions within the state in order to fulfill some of the demands of these projects,” Sellitti said.

Thanks to the coordination of the OOI, Princeton was looped in to work on the project.

Calling on Princeton

As part of the process, Princeton professor Peter Henderson and postdoctoral research fellow Dominik Stammbach studied public defense real-world workflows and identified where AI could meaningfully support that work.

While stress-testing commercially available AI systems against the unique demands of NJOPD, they learned those existing tools were just not designed for the language, legal reasoning, search needs or security requirements of public defense.

That led to the decision to build a customized AI-powered tool that checked all those boxes.

Described as an “AI-enhanced search engine for legal briefs,” the OPD Resource Library allows users to search public and internal agency materials using questions or plain-language phrases.

The system then surfaces relevant sections from prior briefs and provides AI-generated summaries to contextualize the findings. To ensure accuracy and ease of review, the tool supplies the original PDF with the specific, relevant section automatically highlighted for immediate verification.

Princeton researchers spent several months working with the NJOPD public defenders to test and refine the system’s results to ensure it surfaces the most relevant source materials.

Ensuring confidentiality

Unlike off-the-shelf AI models that risk data leaks or provide generic information, this tool was built to search NJOPD’s internal library of 3,000 briefs, 200 internal documents and 350 directives.

Bringing the platform into a secure, statewide production environment was possible through NJOPD’s collaboration with the New Jersey Innovation Authority and the New Jersey Office of Information Technology.

While the New Jersey Innovation Authority familiarized the team with policies, best practices and tools surrounding AI, NJOIT provided the technical expertise necessary to integrate and host the platform within the state’s secure, internal infrastructure. The partners noted that all data within the OPD Resource Library remains confidential.

By keeping the system within state-managed boundaries, the platform operates with strict data-safety protections to preserve the confidentiality of NJOPD’s research and client files, the partners said.

Henderson said, “It is exciting to show a blueprint for how artificial intelligence, implemented responsibly through such impactful partnerships, can empower civil servants and improve public services.”

‘You’re still responsible’

As part of its broader strategy, NJOPD is expanding use of AI to support daily public defense work “while keeping human judgment at the center.” That includes piloting tools to aid investigators, support service staff and administrative personnel with organizing discovery, building timelines, summarizing documents and tracking internal case needs.

Attorneys are also using AI-assisted legal research tools within secure commercial databases, such as Westlaw, to analyze case law, summarize opinions, compare legal standards and verify citations.

While those platforms can help with certain actions, Sellitti said, “The message is always you still have to do the thinking. You still have to watch the discovery. You still have to read the discovery. You still have to do all of those things and you’re still responsible for the work.”

“I always say to people … you wouldn’t just take a brief that an intern gave you and file it. You would read it, you would change it, you would incorporate it, you would make sure that it’s right. You should treat the AI the same way. It’s just like a person who works a lot faster,” she said.

“We’re being really creative about how we’re using it and where we’re using it because it is where we’re going and you definitely don’t want to be behind it,” Sellitti said. “I think we got out early in terms of trying to embrace it. At our core as public defenders, we want to spend as much time we can with the people we serve and with the people we represent. I see technology as a way to make us more human, not less, because if we can automate the mundane, we can spend more time doing what AI cannot do.”

“Public defenders are always swords and shields. We are always both people who are trying to advance arguments in court, but we are also trying to stop opponents or our adversaries from advancing arguments in court,” she said.

“The more my lawyers know about AI and the better that they can use it in their daily life, the better they’re going to be at spotting bad AI when it’s coming into court against their client. AI is now becoming much more influential and being used much more in forensic applications, for example, in changing or tampering with evidence potentially. All of those things we have to be on the lookout for. And if we’re not teaching our lawyers how to use it offensively, there’s no way we’re going to be able to mount a good defense,” Sellitti said.

Opportunities ahead

Because Sellitti envisions AI as more than a tool for attorneys, its adoption has required broader organizational changes that have included new roles and training to allow the agency to adapt more quickly.

After noticing that some support staff were “really, really good at using technology,” Sellitti said the agency restructured to help roll out the system statewide.

“And within state government, the secretarial path eventually bumps out because we’re civil service, and you get stuck in this track where you can’t really get promoted anymore and you can’t really get more money,” she said. “We would lose a lot of really good secretaries going to private firms, prosecutor’s offices and things like that.

“We decided to take some of those positions, turn them into IT positions and allow the secretaries to apply to those positions. And technically now they’re reporting to IT where they have an opportunity to make more money and be in a different civil service track, but they’re staying in their offices and their role is changing from more basic secretarial duties to being the technology liaison,” she said.

AI isn’t just changing the way individuals are doing their work … it’s going to fundamentally transform the way organizations do business.
– Jennifer Sellitti, New Jersey public defender

“So, they liaise between IT and the staff and can teach an attorney maybe who’s not great with technology how to use the brief bank or do trainings within the office. And literally their job being helping the attorneys in the office maximize the tools that we’re giving them,” Sellitti said.

“AI isn’t just changing the way individuals are doing their work … it’s going to fundamentally transform the way organizations do business,” she said, adding, “We believe in our people. We’re not going to let people go because a portion of their job is done. We have to reconfigure what their job is … It is an opportunity to be able to more quickly adapt to technology, but also to give people who feel stuck an opportunity to advance in the agency.”

‘We are incredibly lucky’

While Sellitti doesn’t get the sense that the legal industry or other state agencies are hesitant about AI, she thinks there may not always be a practical way for those sectors to incorporate it.

“We are incredibly lucky in New Jersey – first with Gov. [Phil] Murphy who birthed this Office of Innovation and to the Sherrill administration that made the commitment to make it permanent,” she said. “The Innovation Authority enables a government agency to act like a startup, which is really, really rare.”

Boosting the state’s innovation economy was a top priority for Murphy. Before leaving office in January, one of his final acts was signing legislation creating the New Jersey Innovation Authority. With that move, New Jersey became the first state in the nation to codify a state innovation office into law.

In her Fiscal Year 2027 $60.7 billion budget, Gov. Mikie Sherrill included $23.5 million for the New Jersey Innovation Authority. That’s $13.3 million more than the prior spending plan set aside to support government technology modernization initiatives.

Sellitti said, “Government agencies cannot think like government agencies if they’re going to meet the demands that are going to come with AI. You have to start thinking like private businesses.

“You’ve got to put that hat on of thinking about, ‘How would I do this if this was a private company and I could do anything?‘ And then figure out how to do it within your existing state government structure. And again, we’re lucky because Gov. Murphy and then Gov. Sherrill gave us a way to do that, but it’s an example other states should take because we can develop technology through the Innovation Authority in about a quarter of the time that you could do it under the regular [NJ]OIT process,” she said.

‘Start small’

“But I recognize that when I talk to public defender offices [outside of New Jersey], even if they’re a statewide system, that is something that’s just not available to them,” Sellitti explained.

“The states that have the biggest challenges when it comes to caseload and burnout are probably the states that aren’t going to be able to afford it … There are very few statewide public defender agencies and there’s a power in being large and being part of state government that these county-based systems just don’t have, particularly in certain parts of the country,” she said.

Only about two dozen states operate centralized statewide public defender agencies, giving New Jersey a scale that Sellitti said makes projects like the AI platform more feasible than in county-based systems.

“Often, in other states you have small county-based systems and certain systems in states that are resource poor. And just the idea of doing anything like this seems impossible,” Sellitti said, adding, “I’m concerned for that sort of population of public defender offices.”

“So, when I talk to people in those jurisdictions, I say you can start small,” Sellitti said.

She suggested that organizations can use free or low-cost generative platforms – as long as they are anonymizing sensitive information.

Keeping up

Another group that Sellitti is concerned may not keep pace are smaller law firms.

“The other people that I see falling behind are mid-sized law firms. The big firms can buy tools. We can create and we can buy tools because we’re a big state agency. It’s the solo practitioner and the small firms that can’t afford these high-cost tools,” she said.

“I don’t know what the solution to those problems are, but I think that states are soon going to have to reckon with this gap that is being created by people who can’t afford to either build or buy this kind of technology falling behind and being worried about those people falling behind,” she said.