In the United States, the Sixth Amendment protects the right to legal counsel in criminal prosecutions, but for many Americans, hiring a private defense attorney is financially prohibitive.
Nearly 90% of federal defendants rely on public defenders, who juggle overwhelming caseloads, making it difficult to provide each client with adequate time and attention. As a result, many defendants accept plea deals even when better legal strategies exist.
“We are principally a social venture, inspired by the goal of equitable defense.”
— Iris Gupta, founder and CEO of CounselAI
Iris Gupta witnessed the strain on the system during her 2022 summer internship in the juvenile division of the Maryland Office of the Public Defender in Baltimore. There, she saw attorneys receive cases just days before trial, leaving minimal time to interview witnesses, meet clients, and build a strong defense.
With each case came mountains of discovery documents—photos, videos, transcripts, medical records—yet the office relied on manual methods to process them. “They were printing and sorting hundreds of thousands of pages by hand,” she recalls. As a computer science and economics major at Johns Hopkins, Gupta realized that AI could be a game-changer for public defenders and their clients.
Now a Whiting School senior with law school aspirations, Gupta is founder and CEO of CounselAI, a digital discovery tool she developed with fellow computer scientist Atharva Barve, the company’s chief technology officer. After about a year of working closely with public defenders to refine the platform, they began beta testing.
To navigate the business side, Gupta connected with Xavier Indeglia, Bus ’24 (MS), through the Pava Marie LaPere Center for Entrepreneurship in fall 2024. A Hopkins graduate with a master’s degree in health care management, Indeglia now serves as chief operating officer, overseeing financial planning, capitalization, and customer outreach.
CounselAI allows attorneys to create AI-powered case folders where they can upload raw discovery materials. Built on Amazon Web Services, the secure platform automatically identifies and organizes documents, summarizes key details, and enables users to pinpoint critical evidence. It transcribes audio, describes images, and extracts text from handwritten notes and scanned PDFs.
Unlike ChatGPT and other generative AI models, CounselAI employs ex- tractive summarization, meaning it only pulls information from upload- ed discovery materials, preventing hallucinations and ensuring data security. A chatbot feature enables users to ask questions of the database in natural language and cites original sources for transparency.
Gupta says that support from Johns Hopkins and the Pava Center has been instrumental in CounselAI’s growth. In 2024, the team won the $20,000 Singhal Family Entrepreneurship Award, which funds student-run software ventures. A collaboration between the Department of Computer Science and the Pava Center, the award also includes mentorship and networking opportunities.
“The grant has been extremely helpful to us,” says Gupta, noting that the funds helped cover critical production and software development costs, including the ability to pay Barve and a team of three software development interns for their work. “Now that we’re beta testing, there’s a need to make a lot of rapid iterations,” she says. “Being able to afford a team of developers on-deck allows us to respond to feedback within a day or two.”
In addition to the Singhal Family award, CounselAI secured $5,000 in funding at the Pava Center’s Fall 2023 Fuel Demo Day, a student venture accelerator competition, as well as $25,000 from Texas Christian University’s Values and Ventures competition.
CounselAI is currently in beta testing with 20 law firms, with the team refining its platform ahead of a planned launch early this summer. The team is prioritizing accessibility for public defenders and small criminal defense firms before scaling to private and corporate firms. “We are principally a social venture, inspired by the goal of equitable defense,” says Gupta.
With a flexible pricing model designed to support attorneys with budget constraints, CounselAI is poised to transform legal representation for those who need it most.
— ERIN D. LEWIS
illustration by Rohan McDonald