Straight answers to the discovery problems attorneys actually hit: files that won't open, links that die, formats from another decade, and how to use AI on a case without stepping on your duty of confidentiality.
A phone dump lands in your discovery as something like an .exe reader, a .ufdr file, or a folder full of pieces, and double-clicking gets you nowhere. Here's what you're holding and how to actually read it.
Security camera footage in discovery loves to arrive as .dav, .264, or a folder with its own crusty player from 2009. Windows won't play it, VLC might not either, and your hearing isn't moving.
You opened the email a week late and the download link is dead, or the portal says access expired. You're not the first, and the fix is usually a request away.
The State produced your client's jail calls and they're in some format your computer shrugs at, or a player that wants to install itself. Meanwhile there are 240 of them.
AI is genuinely useful on a case file: timelines, contradictions, cross prep. It's also a confidentiality landmine if you feed client material into the wrong tool. The line between the two is knowable.
Short answer: the recording is the evidence, the transcript is the map, and how good the map must be depends on what you're using it for.
More and more agencies produce bodycam through Axon's Evidence.com portal. The share email looks simple, the access is real, and it quietly disappears on a schedule you don't control.
Half the laptops sold in the last five years have no disc drive, and plenty of DA offices still produce discovery on burned DVDs. So the evidence sits in a paper sleeve on your desk, technically produced, practically unreadable.
Every Texas defense lawyer knows the bind: your client is entitled to understand the evidence against them, and article 39.14 says they can look but can't keep. The meeting where you bridge that gap is some of the most important work in the case.