The public defender who turned down the AI tools on the market, then had one built for public defense
Trenton, New Jersey · Jennifer Sellitti, Peter Henderson, Dominik Stammbach
Published August 11, 2026
Commercial AI could not meet the demands of New Jersey's public defenders, so Jennifer Sellitti's office and a team of Princeton researchers built their own: a plain-language search across 3,000 briefs, 200 internal documents, and 350 directives.
The story
The person and the place
Jennifer Sellitti is the New Jersey Public Defender, and the office she runs has been accumulating hard-won knowledge for decades. Briefs, motions, legal research, training materials, the collected instinct of people who have argued these cases before.
The problem she cared about
All of it sat scattered across separate offices, servers, and databases. A defender who wanted an argument a colleague had already made well had to go find it first, and that search costs time that belongs to clients.
The moment they decided not to settle
The easy path was to buy something off the shelf. Instead her office and researchers from Princeton stress-tested the commercial AI systems against what public defense actually demands, and the answer came back plain: those tools were not designed for the language, the legal reasoning, or the security this work requires. In the office's own announcement, Sellitti named the choice. "When the existing technology couldn't meet the demands of public defense, we didn't lower our standards. We raised them."
What changed
The OPD Resource Library opened on July 8, 2026. A defender asks a question in plain language, and the library searches 3,000 briefs, 200 internal documents, and 350 directives, returns the passages that matter with a summary for context, and hands back the original PDF with the exact section highlighted so the lawyer can check the work themselves. It runs inside the state's own secured systems, so client files stay where they belong. Princeton's Peter Henderson and Dominik Stammbach built it around how defenders actually search. By Sellitti's own account, gathering the core legal arguments went from hours to seconds.
The move
She did not wait for a vendor to make something safe enough for public defenders. She brought in the researchers who study the work and had them build it alongside the people who do it. Know a public servant who got tired of waiting and built the thing themselves? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"I always say that AI should be making our lawyers more human, not less. If I can automate the mundane, I give them the opportunity to spend more time sitting across the table from a client, and that's not only what we should be doing, it's what lawyers came to this work to do." (Jennifer Sellitti, New Jersey Public Defender, to Law360, via ABA Journal)
Verified sources
Sources
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Sources last verified August 11, 2026.