By Michael Blanding
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Suffolk is among the few law schools offering classes that help students suss out how to overcome the challenges of running a law firm. Stumbling blocks with marketing, networking, finding customers, and hiring staff come quickly for new lawyers, says Suffolk Law Adjunct Professor Andrew Garcia, JD ’91, who teaches in the Accelerator seminar. Garcia made many rookie mistakes himself when he hung up his own shingle fresh out of Suffolk Law—part of the reason he came back in 2011 to teach a new course in the Business of Law.
Three years later, he joined the new A2P program, a multiyear clinical track launched in 2014 to teach Suffolk Law students business, legal technology, and client-relations skills that could make or break their experience, says the faculty director, Professor James Matthews, JD ’14. The program culminates in a clinic where students take on real cases involving housing issues under the supervision of a faculty member or other lawyer, often for low- to moderate-income clients.
In an effort to give students even more real-world experience, Garcia came up with the new case study project with the Lawyerist this year.
Students conducted market research and multiple interviews with members of their partner firms, performing a comprehensive analysis that included commentary on software, data collection, form automation tools, and digital marketing approaches.
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winter 2024
Using coding to Untangle Legal Knots
Photograph by Michael J. Clarke
Attorney Karol Brown has been running a thriving immigration practice in Seattle, handling cases such as green cards, work visas, and foreign marriages. “We do some asylum cases and victims of crimes, but mostly we do happy cases,” she says. With a healthy social media presence on LinkedIn, X, and Instagram, Brown’s firm, World One Immigration Law Group, has had a steady stream of clients, mostly in their 30s and 40s. Recently, however, she started making videos on TikTok, and tapped a stream of new clients in their 20s. “It’s given me a whole new universe of people that we can target, and generated a new client market,” Brown says.
The idea for the new social media strategy came from Suffolk Law student Océane Roux, JD ’23, who participated in a unique partnership between the Law School and the Lawyerist, a consulting agency serving small law firms. The Lawyerist recruited attorneys from across the nation to partner with Roux and the rest of the students in Suffolk Law’s Accelerator-to-Practice (A2P) seminar. At the end of the semester, the students offered a detailed case study on each firm’s strengths and weaknesses, including suggestions for innovations.
As part of this work, Roux did a deep dive into World One’s business, looking for ways it could improve. “Expanding into TikTok seemed like a great thing to do, especially because they already had other platform presence,” she says.
Roux performed market research showing that TikTok was a source for young people in seeking out services such as legal representation, with a low barrier to entry. “TikTok doesn’t necessarily rely on follower count or past performance when suggesting videos to users, so even if you don’t have a big audience you can still get your content out there,” says Roux, who is now working as a staff attorney with Massachusetts-based Central West Justice Center, an affiliate of Community Legal Aid. She counseled Brown on how to craft videos and tag them with proper hashtags to appear in searches.
Until Roux explained the strategy, Brown had discounted TikTok as a venue better suited to sharing memes and dance videos, not legal topics. “She made me realize that so many young people were using this platform for information that I thought of as a toy,” she says. At the same time, she learned she could make relatively simple videos to educate users and pique their interest to come to her as potential clients. “I don’t have to go into the intimate details of the Ninth Circuit ruling about a particular element,” she says. “I can just talk about some of the basics, and if people trust me about those basics, they can come to me for the more complicated questions they have.” Already, she’s seen an uptick in clients based on the content. “We can see from our website how people are coming into the practice, and more of them are coming from TikTok than were before.”
In addition to giving students a chance to offer advice to lawyers, the case studies also exposed them to innovative practices that firms are already pursuing. For her case study, Kendall Heward, JD ’23, interviewed Mathew Kerbis, an Illinois-based lawyer who runs a virtual practice called Subscription Attorney LLC. Kerbis’ innovative business model dispenses with billable hours, charging clients as little as $20 a month to subscribe to his services, and then transparent flat fees for services, such as $50 a page for legal documents, or $400 for a simple estate plan.
The model, Kerbis says, gives peace of mind to clients worried about ballooning unknown costs of hourly fees. “Imagine if you went to a restaurant and ordered the fish at market price, and the server says, ‘I can’t tell you what it costs until you’ve eaten the fish, because we have to calculate how long it takes to catch, deliver, and prepare it,’” Kerbis says. “And it’s going to be different every time. That’s what it’s like when we bill our time. It’s not client-centric.” The beauty of the model, however, is that it is also beneficial for attorneys, incentivizing them to use technology to automate processes so they can use the same hour to assist multiple clients, allowing them to scale up without adding additional staff.
“He is really able to use technology to the utmost, and make his services more accessible to more people at lower cost,” says Heward, who found the experience of analyzing the firm eye-opening. “The possibilities are endless—if you learn about the legal tech and take your time to research what your clients want, you can mold the subscription model or other innovative models to a specific practice area.”
Heward is now an associate with small Boston-based firm Bletzer & Bletzer. When she interviewed, she mentioned the Accelerator program and her legal tech background to her future boss. “He was immediately excited about the process of digitizing a lot of their paper documents and putting them onto a cloud-based system,” says Heward, who has since helped design a digital solution for the firm to make its work more efficient.
Having these kinds of skills can give Suffolk Law’s graduates a leg up when it comes to entering the legal profession, says Garcia, whether they are going into practice for themselves, or helping an existing firm innovate with new practices and tools. The Lawyerist’s CEO Stephanie Everett agrees: “The program is doing more than just teaching some fundamental business concepts; it is exposing students to problems facing the profession—and some new potential solutions,” she says. “We know that simply building firms the way we have in the past won’t solve our access to justice problems. We need more programs like Suffolk’s, and I’m excited to see what these students accomplish next.”
Karol Brown
After graduation, one Accelerator student used her knowledge of cloud-based case management systems to help her small firm improve its billing and time management processes.
Océane Roux, JD ’23
Professor James Matthews, JD ’14
Adjunct Professor
Andrew Garcia, JD ’91
Some young attorneys are experimenting with subscription models.
Mathew Kerbis, Subscription Attorney LLC
Kendall Heward, JD ’23
Stephanie Everett, CEO, The Lawyerist
Nini Sprinkle, JD ’23, used new coding skills to build an app that walks self-represented litigants through an uncontested divorce.
Before she joined the Legal Innovation & Technology Concentration at Suffolk Law, Nini Sprinkle, JD ’23, never thought she’d be good at coding. “Math and I have always had a strong disliking for each other,” she says. “I was super-surprised that it was really more like learning a language.” With the help of Suffolk Law mentors, Sprinkle learned to speak that language so well, she became a Legal Innovation & Technology (LIT) Fellow embedded in the Family Advocacy Clinic and tasked with designing an innovation to improve the clinic’s outcomes. Sprinkle obliged with an app that helps people navigate the difficult bureaucracy of an uncontested divorce—without a lawyer.
Sprinkle collaborated with Elicia Inman, JD ’23, who designed the interface for the app, while Sprinkle used Python coding to automate the assembly of documents on the back end. Her efforts helped her earn the 2023 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Scholarship from the Massachusetts Bar Association, where she now serves on the Solo/Small Firm Practice Management Council. Sprinkle is director of compliance for special education for Boston Public Schools and works part time at Boston-based divorce practice Turco Legal.
Ana Morrissette, JD ’23, completed a LIT Fellowship while embedded in the Accelerator-to-Practice Clinic, using the experience to create an app to help low-income housing voucher recipients track apartment searches. Some landlords and real estate agents illegally discriminate against voucher recipients, making it difficult for them to find rental housing during their allotted time period. Morrissette, an associate at McEvoy & Stuntz LLC, designed the app to help people track rental applications and rejections, so they can demonstrate a good-faith housing search if they need to apply for an extension. “When someone’s struggling with the housing search, that can be really overwhelming,” Morrissette says. “If I can make just ten people’s lives easier, it’s worth it to me.”
Itzel Santiago, of World One Immigration Law Group, was featured in a social media video made in cooperation with Suffolk Law's Accelerator.