Our Website, Rebuilt: defendshelbyco.org

We have redesigned defendshelbyco.org from the ground up. Same address, same office, same work — a very different experience for anyone trying to find something in it.

Why we rebuilt it

This office was founded in 1917, the first public defender office east of the Mississippi River. Today we are the largest criminal defense firm in Tennessee — roughly 140 lawyers and professionals representing more than 20,000 clients a year. That scale is easy to state and hard to see. For a person who has just been appointed a lawyer, the more urgent questions are smaller and more personal: Who is my attorney? What happens at my next court date? What do I do about my license, my record, my job? Our old site had a lot of that information, but it made you hunt for it. The rebuild started with those questions and worked backward.

If you or someone you love is our client

The site now walks through a case from appointment to resolution, in plain language, so you know what to expect before you walk into court. You can look up an attorney by name or by division. And you can read about the help this office provides beyond the courtroom — re-entry services like expungements, driver’s license restoration, and certificates of employability; representation in treatment courts; and the Jericho Project, our jail diversion work for people in mental health crisis. None of that is new. Being able to find it is.

If you are considering joining us

The Join Us pages are now the front door for attorneys, investigators, social workers, and law clerks, along with our law student internship program. You will also find what we train on and how we develop lawyers here — because the promise we make to clients depends entirely on the people who keep it.

What we stand for

The redesign also gave us room to say plainly what this office is for.

Courage: we do not choose our clients, and we do not back away from a hard case.

Protection: we stand between the people we serve and the power of the government, and that does not change with the charge, the client, or who is watching.

Fairness: the system only works if someone makes it work the same way for everyone.

Those three ideas are the measure we hold ourselves to, and putting them in public is part of the point.

Take a look

We hope you will look around our redesigned site and tell us what is missing. A redesign is a version, not a finish line. If you came looking for something and did not find it, we want to know — that feedback is how the site gets better, and it is the same standard we bring to the rest of our work.