From Body Cam to Courtroom: Building an Airtight Timeline with AI Transcription

Making a good timeline of events is perhaps the most important step in making sense of a case. Any experienced attorney knows that building that timeline isn’t simple. It requires a precise, dynamic understanding of not only your client’s testimony, but also of discovery – spread across jail calls, witness interviews, police reports, and hours of video footage. Historically, attorneys have to dedicate countless hours to taking this on manually, scrubbing through evidence file by file, often late into the night. Attorneys currently lose 2,100 billable hours annually to manual evidence processing – that's nearly 25% of your year spent on review, not strategy. Like so many of the most tedious and labor-intensive parts of attorney work, AI is transforming this process for the better. 

"Rev has cut down on the amount of hours I'll spend reviewing body cam. So if there's four hours of body cam, maybe that four hours can be condensed down into 15 really important minutes."

— Brian Anderson, Criminal Defense Attorney, Anderson Law LLC

Few tasks benefit more from AI than building a comprehensive case timeline. Timelines depend on locating and aligning key moments across multiple sources of evidence – transcribing that evidence quickly and accurately is where AI excels. Take body cam footage, for example. It can capture the moment a client invokes their right to counsel, an offhand remark that contradicts a report, or a critical lapse in procedure.

With AI transcription, any piece of media – whether video, interview, or recorded call – can be converted into a searchable, time-stamped transcript in minutes. From there, AI can pull from all available sources to automatically construct a detailed, chronological narrative. Body cam footage becomes one element in a much larger sequence, as AI identifies and connects moments across jail calls, dispatch recordings, and witness statements. The result is not just faster review, but a structured timeline that makes sense of what happened and when, without the enormous lift of the attorney needing to build it by hand.

The Old Way: Endless Manual Review

Before AI, building a case timeline was a slow and labor-heavy process. For many slow-to-adopt firms, it still is. Attorneys or senior staff manually constructing timelines must scrub through jail calls, rewatch body cam footage, take notes by hand, and try to stitch everything together from scattered PDFs, spreadsheets, and videos. It’s enormously tedious. 

There was no single system to search across files. No easy way to compare quotes from different sources. Every piece of evidence had to be reviewed in full, often more than once.

Even for experienced teams, this process introduced risk because time constraints, human error, and inconsistent formats made it easy to miss key details. Attorneys were forced to make strategic decisions while still buried in discovery, especially as caseloads grew. 

Manual review also pulled on morale and staff burnout. How many summer clerks have spent three consecutive months looking through medical records? AI evidence review accelerates this process dramatically, alleviating burnout, increasing morale, and improving results for clients.  

How AI Helps to Build the Timeline

At its core, AI tools for lawyers are built to alleviate the immense workload that firms handle daily, taking on the kind of work traditionally done by hand. Evidence review can now largely be reliably automated. To many experienced attorneys, this seems impossible – but to those who have experimented with AI and incorporated it into their practice, using AI evidence review to secure justice for their clients has become second nature.

"We used Rev on a jail case involving drug smuggling, and the transcript completely changed the game. Once I reviewed it, I realized I had enough evidence to charge four people instead of just one."

— Senior Deputy District Attorney

When it comes to constructing timelines, it couldn’t be simpler. Attorneys can give the AI the context for their cases by uploading whatever files they have. Then they can simply ask for transcriptions. AI will take the media evidence – from body cam footage to depositions to jail calls – and transcribe it all. When using Rev, these transcriptions will be 96+% accurate, or 99+% and court-admissible with optional human transcription. These transcriptions become the foundation for building a complete case narrative.

When that same attorney is ready for a timeline, all that needs to be done is to ask for one. With a good prompt entered, the AI will start identifying patterns and connecting moments across files. It will look for:

• References to specific dates and times
• Mentions of people, places, or recurring subjects
• Event descriptions that align across different sources
• Potential contradictions or sequencing issues
• Any relevant details across thousands of words of transcription 

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AI then organizes this information into a timeline. For example, a witness statement might be matched to a jail call from the same day. A time mentioned in a dispatch log might correspond to a moment captured on video. These pieces are automatically aligned in chronological order, giving attorneys and senior staff a clear view of how the case unfolded.

This whole process can take well under an hour, shrinking what was historically weeks of work into little more than a lunch break. 

Attorneys and their teams are most effective when they aren’t buried in administrative tasks. With AI giving hours back every day, attorneys are delivering justice to their clients with renewed efficiency, focus, and workload capacity.

Is AI Accurate and Reliable?

Not all AI tools are perfectly reliable, but at Rev we know that accuracy is not optional for law firms. The reality is that AI is only useful if its output is precise, consistent, and verifiable. There is no point to speeding up work if it’s not done accurately – that would do more harm than good.

What sets Rev’s system apart is that every result can be traced back to the original source. Time-stamped transcripts, searchable records, and speaker labels ensure attorneys know exactly who said what and when. Even manually checking the AI output can be done quickly thanks to thorough source citations in timelines. 

‍"I appreciate Rev because I'm using it all the time. I have an upcoming trial and as an example, I've watched a confession/interview of a client several times and I got an AI transcript. And as I'm reading the transcript, I'm like, 'did he really say that?' And then I go back to that piece on the video and I realize he actually asked for a lawyer and they said, 'we'll do that later.' Well, that's a big no-no."

— Will Helixon, Lieutenant Colonel, The Law Firm of Will Helixon

On top of these measures, attorneys can also help minimize the risk of errors by feeding the system a complete record. The more case files AI has access to, the better its ability to find patterns, confirm consistency, and place events in context. With only fragments, any tool will struggle to draw accurate conclusions. 

This is why learning how to use AI well is a vital step in adoption. Learning the details of what makes AI work well helps attorneys surface case-changing moments faster, without compromising the integrity of the record.

Beyond accuracy, Rev also prioritizes security. Our tools meet the standards of attorney-client privilege requirements. Rev is SOC 2 Type II certified and HIPAA-compliant, with no third-party AI training on client data.

Try Rev for Lawyers for Free Today

The demands on modern law firms continue to grow, especially as discovery becomes more complex and time-consuming. When timelines are central to case preparation, attorneys need fast, accurate ways to process and organize multimedia evidence from the start.

For attorneys balancing tight deadlines with complex casework, Rev offers a way to move faster, stay organized, and prepare with greater clarity. 

‍Rev's partnership with Axon – the global leader in law enforcement technology – means our AI transcription technology already powers mission-critical evidence processing systems. From body cam footage to courtroom presentations, Rev is the competitive edge criminal defense teams need.

Don't let your team continue drowning in manual evidence review. Rev helps  attorneys reclaim 87 workdays per year, process 12X more cases, and save $700K annually in manual review costs.

START YOUR FREE TRIAL See why thousands of legal professionals trust Rev for their most critical evidence review needs.