By Michael Fisch
innovation
During law school, Aubrie Souza, JD ’22, may have impacted more court cases than any other law student in the country, says David Colarusso, director of Suffolk Law’s Legal Innovation & Technology Lab (LIT Lab).
Souza’s work on behalf of thousands of pro se litigants and her impact on the Massachusetts court system caught the attention of National Jurist, which named her a “Law Student of the Year” last spring—one of just ten honorees nationally.
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Photograph by Michael J. Clarke
winter 2023
Opening the doors to the justice system
National Jurist highlighted Souza’s path-breaking work in the LIT Lab, teaching law students and volunteers how to build digital court forms that are way smarter than your typical PDF. How smart? These digital forms present complex legal questions simply, sequence a user’s arguments in a way that helps judges, and format the court documents—all on a cellphone or laptop. Imagine TurboTax, but for innumerable legal issues that people face, from eviction to child support.
Because of the “smartforms,” thousands of citizens each month, most of them pro se litigants, are able to fill in court forms even when courts are closed.
Over the years, Souza has thrown herself into the LIT Lab’s efforts, learning Python and other programming frameworks from Lab faculty. Says Colarusso: “No student has contributed more to our court forms projects than Aubrie.”
Souza says the forms achieve some goals that lawyers can’t reach on their own—massive scale, for example. “Pro bono and legal aid attorneys will be the first to tell you that they don’t have enough hours in a day to help people who are desperate for assistance,” she told National Jurist. “With the smartforms, judges receive filings that contain the topics they actually need to make a decision, without as much extraneous information.”
She notes a perfect example: a litigant who was able to use a smartform to fill out a restraining order application at 3 a.m. “You don’t know when people are going to confront their legal emergency. It could potentially be one of the most dangerous days of their lives, and the smartforms are there to provide guidance.”
As a 2L training in the LIT Lab, Souza met weekly with court clerks to map out, create, and troubleshoot appellate-level smartforms so that they worked well for both the users and court personnel. Later, as a 3L, she helped frame the Lab’s ongoing work on what she calls “a massively challenging beast”—a smartform that will one day walk a pro se litigant through the creation of an appellate brief. “Appellate attorneys will tell you what a challenge briefs are. The idea of helping a non-lawyer get through one without an attorney assisting is a lot to wrap your head around,” she says.
‘A Massively Challenging Beast’
As a LIT Lab Fellow in Suffolk’s Juvenile Defenders Clinic, Souza represented clients and also worked on an app that can make it easier to gain access to critical client information. The app allows student clinicians to fax requests from a phone to doctors (for example) in order to gain access to HIPAA-compliant medical records. The new tool is critical because student attorneys at a courthouse often need such information within minutes to argue for bail or other relief. Armed with official documentation that a client, for instance, has been compliant with a doctor’s orders for medicines, a judge may decide that supervised release is appropriate. It’s the kind of practical, “I need it now” technology that can change the course of a client’s life, she says.
Paul Tuttle, a clerk for the Massachusetts Appeals Court, called the Lab’s work “amazing.” Because of the forms, “the lack of a professional advocate will be less of an obstacle for parties to a decision on the merits of their motion,” he said.
Souza’s cutting-edge work also helped her land her current job—as a court management consultant at the National Center for State Courts. She says her Suffolk Law peers, mentors, and clients offered her many opportunities to grow. “They trusted me,” Souza says. “That trust from my community has also taught me to trust myself.”
Changing the course of a life
