Justice Story

Increase Your Advocacy Client Satisfaction Efficiency

Add consistency and depth to your mitigation advocacy for better plea negotiation, sentencing arguments, and client understanding.

• Great advocacy requires a deep knowledge of your clients. Justice Story helps you easily gain an enormous amount of background information about your clients.
• Criminal defense clients often feel like they aren't being listened to. Justice Story empowers clients to proactively participate in their defense.
• Presentence investigative reports (PSIs/PSRs) are expensive and time consuming. Justice Story provides comprehensive client interviews and mitigation reports at a fraction of the cost.

How It Works

Justice Story is elegantly simple and easy to use.

• 1

  Invite Your Client

  We'll send them an invitation by email or text message. And we'll follow up with them if they don't respond.
• 2

  Your Client Completes a Survey

  We walk your client through a thorough biographical survey. They also complete up to 13 validated health, AODA, and trauma screens.
• 3

  Download the Mitigation Report

  We let you know when your client has completed the survey and provide you with a complete mitigation report as an editable Microsoft Word document.

• What is a mitigation report?

  A Justice Story Mitigation Report is a comprehensive, biographical document about each client. The reports include information about the client’s family, relationships, employment, education, health, substance use, hobbies, joys, and hardships. Our reports help to uncover each client’s unique background to aid your plea negotiations, sentencing arguments, and overall client understanding.

  Each Justice Story Mitigation Report is downloaded as a formatted, organized, editable Word document. You decide how to best utilize each report to further your client’s goals.

• How is a Justice Story mitigation report different from a government presentence investigation report?

  Our reports mirror the format and organization of a government PSI/PSR. However, our focus is to uncover information about each client’s background that is useful for mitigation purposes. As such, we do not ask about the current offense or prior criminal conduct.

  Further, once the Justice Story Mitigation Report is generated, you decide how to use it – whether to file it as a sentencing memorandum, to use in an email to a prosecutor, or as notes for an oral argument or subsequent client interview.

• Does using Justice Story replace my own client interviews?

  No! Building rapport and hearing directly from your client is an important part of representation. Justice Story allows these interactions to be more meaningful – as topics of discussion are identified and explored.

  We know there has been a change in our clients' relationship with technology over the past decade. Many younger people have no issue sharing much of their lives on Facebook or Instagram, their professional resumes on LinkedIn, their dating interests on Tinder, and any number of other social media sites.

  In fact, younger people are often more apt to share personal information via technology than in person. One key factor in willingness to share personal information is whether the person or program being used can be trusted.

  We built Justice Story’s client-facing interface to exhibit trust, professionalism, privacy, and security.

• Are Justice Story mitigation reports privileged?

  Absolutely. Justice Story is a tool sent directly by defense attorneys to their clients – much like a privileged email exchange. Everything shared with Justice Story falls under attorney-client privilege. Justice Story LLC will never disclose attorney or client information with a third party and would fight any attempt to subpoena documents.

• Is Justice Story private and secure?

  Yes! Our software has bank-level security keeping survey results and mitigation reports secure, private, and confidential.

• Do clients like Justice Story?

  Yes! Clients want to be treated like real people – not a statistic. We know that clients often feel helpless and want some way of aid in their own defense. Giving them a specific task, with an explanation as to why, helps to empower clients and to make them feel as their experiences and life stories matter. Justice Story gives clients the ability to speak about themselves as unique individuals. Often, our survey is the only time the client has ever been asked to talk about themselves at length.

• How many mitigation reports does my subscription include?

  Unlimited. We want you to use this tool for all of your clients.

• Is Justice Story easy to use?

  Yes, very. It takes just a few minutes to create an attorney account. After an account is created, you will be able to instantly send surveys to your clients in a one step process – merely typing in your client’s name and contact information (email and/or cell number).

  After each client completes their survey, you’ll receive an email notifying you that their Mitigation Report is ready to download.

• What are the 13 validated screens included in Justice Story surveys?

  We have included 13, widely-accepted and scientifically-validated screening tools in our software – each of which the attorney has the option of including in any of their client’s surveys. These screens help uncover AODA, mental health, general health, relationship, and/or trauma in your client’s background. When you enter your client’s information to invite them to take the survey, you are asked which, if any, of the screens to include in the survey. The screens are built into the questioning and the client will not be informed of the screen as it is being presented.

• How do clients complete their surveys?

  After the attorney invites the client to complete the Justice Story survey, clients simply click a link, enter a password of their choosing, and begin taking the survey. This process is simple. Our software automatically saves the client’s responses so they can close and reopen the survey as many times as they want and work at their own pace.

  Clients may use a computer or their smartphone to complete their survey.

• What if my client forgets to finish their survey?

  Justice Story allows you the option to set up an automatic message to remind your clients to finish their survey. The reminder option requires a single click to initiate.

• Can Justice Story be used with in-custody clients?

  Not currently. We are working on a solution for this important need.

• Does Justice Story ask clients about their current offense or prior criminal conduct?

  No. We deliberately do not query clients about these subjects.