Over the last decade the volume of evidence in a typical case has grown roughly twelvefold. More devices with more storage, more body cams, more jail calls, more discovery,” says Rev CEO and Founder Jason Chicola. “Meanwhile there are still 24 hours in a day, agency headcount is flat or shrinking, and operational budgets have not moved. That is not a failure of the people doing the work, it is arithmetic. And the result is always the same: a fact nobody found is a fact that didn’t count.”
We sat down with Chicola to discuss the evolution of Rev from a transcription platform in 2010 to a full investigative platform for the legal industry that helps ensure no fact goes unfound.
“A lawyer answers for the advice they give. Rev’s job is to make sure that judgment has the full picture to work with. Getting people closer to the truth is the only reason we are in this business.”
AALM: Tell us about the goals when you launched Rev in 2010 and about the company’s evolution. When did you realize Rev could be a solution for the legal industry?
JC: Rev started with a straightforward idea: build the most accurate transcription platform in the world, and create real work for the skilled people who would do it.
Underneath that was a purpose that has not changed since, which is getting people closer to the truth. A transcript is the most literal version of that. Here is exactly what was said, timestamped, complete, and you can check it yourself. Everything we have built since is the same purpose applied to more of the work.
We were handed the hardest audio anyone had. Jail calls, hearings, interviews in rooms with bad acoustics and worse microphones. The people who found us first were researchers, academics and investigative journalists, and then attorneys and investigators started showing up on their own. That is really the answer to when we realized it: we didn’t decide to enter the legal space, we noticed we were already in it.
What made us commit was realizing what the legal standard demanded of us. A transcript that gets read into evidence, challenged by opposing counsel and relied on by a judge has to be right in a way that no other use of the written word does. So we built for that standard, and it raised the floor on everything else we do.
Then our customers told us the second thing, which was more important. The transcript was never the whole job. It was one step in a much longer piece of work, and everything before and after it was manual: pulling the relevant moment out of 40 hours of body cam footage, comparing what a witness said across three interviews, building the chronology, drafting the report or the affidavit, getting it to the other people on the case.
Getting closer to the truth was still the goal, but the transcript only got you to the doorstep. So we built the rest of it.
Today, everything in Rev sits on one record for the case. It is now an investigative platform that includes: multi-file evidence analysis, prebuilt AI template workflows for legal teams, a document editor, image analysis, and transcription and clipping.
AALM: Tell us about the way Rev cites sources for its findings, how it avoids hallucinations, and how you protect confidentiality.
JC: Every finding Rev produces carries a citation back to where it came from: a timestamp in a recording, a location in a document, a moment in a video. One click and you are standing in front of the source. That is the design constraint we started from rather than a feature layered on afterward, because in this industry a finding you cannot trace is a finding you cannot use.
Rev is a closed system that reads only your evidence and nothing else. That is the single biggest reason the hallucination risk here is structurally and dramatically reduced from a general purpose AI tool.
There is zero data sharing with third party models. We are CJIS compliant, along with SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA and GDPR, and we offer single sign-on and advanced privacy controls for teams that require them.
AALM: Can you tell us about some of your typical clients?
JC: Historically we have served more than 1.3 million users across a lot of different high-stakes investigative industries. Today, over 2,000 law firms and government agencies use Rev.
The core of it is criminal. Criminal defense, both private firms and public defender offices. Prosecution and district attorney offices. Law enforcement, including detective bureaus and internal affairs units. Those three sit on different sides of the same case, which is unusual in this category when most tools only serve one side of the table.
We deliberately build for every side. Every one of our users should be as close to the facts as the record allows. That is not a neutrality pose, it is the only way this works. A record that only one side trusts is not a record, it is an argument.
We heard both ends of it in the same week recently. A public defender told us what she valued most was knowing the tool was not built against her. A county investigator told us, unprompted, that he does not care whether somebody is innocent or guilty, he cares about the truth. Same requirement, opposite chairs. Put plainly: no outcome should depend on who was better resourced.
AALM: Looking ahead, what is the next step for Rev?
JC: We are still building toward the one idea that a case should have one record. Not a folder of transcripts here, a report drafted in Word there, and an evidence packet emailed to the DA as an attachment. One record. Every piece of evidence in it, every conclusion drawn inside it, every citation live, and every party who needs it on it.
That changes three things at once. All the evidence goes in one place. The work happens where the evidence is, so the analysis and the drafted document keep their links back to the source. And the record itself is what you share, so the receiving side gets the evidence, the analysis, and the ability to check both.
Most customers are on rung one with us. They send audio and get it back readable and that is where our relationship started 15 years ago. The goal we have is to get to the next rungs where the full workflow is built into the platform with one single, cited record. Moving people up that path is the work.
None of it is AI magic and we are not claiming the machine solves the case. We are handing a trained professional a set of components. Every one of them is doing work a person used to do by hand, and the value compounds. Someone using one component gets a faster transcript. Someone using all of them gets a better case, in less time, to a higher standard than they could have produced alone.
The goal we have set is to make Rev the investigative platform criminal justice runs on, so no fact that could change a case goes unfound. Same purpose we started with, applied to the whole case instead of one recording.
For more information, visit rev.com.
