By Michael Blanding
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winter 2025
Aubrie Souza, JD ’22, has quickly established herself as a rising star in legal technology, leveraging her work in Suffolk Law’s Legal Innovation & Technology (LIT) Lab to transform access to justice. Named one of National Jurist’s Law Students of the Year, she worked on groundbreaking “smartforms” that empower self-represented litigants to navigate complex court processes. Now, as a senior court management consultant at the National Center for State Courts (NCSC), she is helping to reshape court systems across the country.
Tell me about the work you are doing for the state courts.
I came to NCSC right from Suffolk, and it’s been kind of a dream job for someone wanting to work in access. Among a wide range of access efforts, we are trying to customize ways that people are finding legal information by what we call virtual companion tools. Instead of seeing the entire world of information, the tool narrows it down to results that are more individualized.
What are some projects you’re excited about?
In Philadelphia, we created a digital tool for landlord-tenant cases. Typically, if pro se litigants visited a court website to learn about their case, they would be faced with a massive amount of information, some of it not relevant to their particular situation. Our tool provides customized legal information about relevant next steps to make the process a lot simpler and easier to undertake. In Salt Lake City, we made one for their traffic court, which has multiple diversion programs to help people keep citations off their record, but they weren’t finding that information very well. Just by answering a few questions about your ticket and your driving history, it shows you which programs you are eligible for. In the past, the traffic docket was larger than it needed to be—our hope is that the court is now more efficient.
What are some of the benefits these tools provide?
Individuals can use these tools online 24/7, and they’re in a form that’s easily understandable. The tools are there through the whole process, so they’re not just providing information about the first hearing, but also what happens after that, including what your options are after a judgment. As a result, the courts are able to do what they do better. You still have a self-help center where a clerk is answering questions, but the questions are better because the initial questions have already been answered.
You are very clear that you are not providing legal advice. Why is that?
Courts have to be neutral, so we are providing legal information, not advice. You can think of legal information as the rules of the game, whereas legal advice is how you “win” the game. We tell litigants all the information they need to know and are able to empower them to make good decisions, but the decisions they make are their own.
Were there mentors at Suffolk Law who were particularly inspiring to you?
David Colarusso and Quinten Steenhuis—the co-heads of LIT Lab—changed my life and how I think. They not only teach students how to do really cool and unique things, but they also truly value their students as collaborators and people ready to do this work. I joined the LIT Lab as someone who didn’t know how to code at all, and by my second year they allowed me to be the project manager, showing other students how to do the work. Law school can be a hard place, and they created a really collaborative environment where we were sharing with each other and helping each other with bugs in the code. It was amazing!
Photograph courtesy of Aubrie Souza
