By Michael Fisch
innovation
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Illustration: Adobe Stock
winter 2023
Suffolk’s Legal Innovation & Technology (LIT) Lab recently received a national award for high-impact law practice innovations, an honor given to just three firms, legal organizations, or law schools across the country.
Although originally conceived to help the public while courthouse doors were closed during the pandemic, the court forms project has continued “improving the efficiency of the legal system in Massachusetts and beyond,” COLPM said. Jurisdictions in Louisiana and Illinois are also using smartforms built with the Lab’s help, and courts or nonprofits in six other states are training with the Lab to do likewise. (In most jurisdictions, court forms are still paper or static PDFs that are not easy to fill out.)
Helping other states go from paper to phone
In selecting the LIT Lab’s Document Assembly Line Project for its InnovAction Award, the College of Law Practice Management (COLPM) applauded Suffolk’s “novel and disruptive” mobile-friendly app. The TurboTax-style tool creates court forms that provide increased access to legal services.
COLPM called the Lab’s work an illustration of “what can be created when passionate professionals, with big ideas and strong convictions, are determined to make a difference.”
Many Suffolk Law LIT graduates are finding jobs at law firms and legal tech companies that didn’t even exist a few years ago. In its cover story this past spring, National Jurist turned to Suffolk Law experts, including Assistant Dean Gabriel Teninbaum, to analyze the trend.
Teninbaum, author of the book Productizing the Law, explained that law firms are seeking tech-savvy innovators with law degrees. “Increasingly law firms want to know how to deliver their services in the most efficient, productive manner,” he told the magazine; for example, Microsoft set up a Legal Innovation Challenge, inviting law firms to compete for its business.
Explaining new types of legal jobs
The National Jurist article also reported on Teninbaum’s former student, Julia Rodgers, JD ’15, who successfully pitched the venture capitalists on the ABC reality show Shark Tank. Rodgers co-founded a legal tech business that offers online prenuptial agreements. The magazine profiled other Suffolk graduates, including Vedika Mehera, JD ’15, an innovation adviser at Orrick, a global law firm regularly featured on The Financial Times’ Most Innovative Law Firms list.
Money from Shark Tank
Suffolk Law’s LIT programs are arguably among the most impactful in the nation at solving real-world legal problems and training students to be at the center of those solutions. The school was ranked No. 1 for legal technology on two consecutive occasions by National Jurist, including in its most recent ranking in 2021. The school’s expansive LIT ecosystem includes the LIT Institute, LIT Lab, LIT Concentration, and the LIT Certificate Program.
A legal innovation ecosystem