The following is a selection of Lab faculty, staff, and student work, including classes and publications.
Court forms
The Document Assembly Line
Open-source tools for court forms, guided interviews, and e-filing.
Form Explorer
A database of court forms from multiple jurisdictions to make it possible for courts, legal aid organizations, and other folks to turn them into online guided interviews.
Spot, an AI issue spotter
Give Spot a plain-language description of a situation and it returns a list of relevant legal issues. Developers can use Spot to guide people in need of legal assistance to available resources.
Academics
Law lab directory
A directory of legal innovation and technology labs—academic programs for experiential and experimental learning.
AI in dispute resolution
Allows users to practice their negotiation skills with AI bots that talk back. The AI negotiators aren’t so much confrontational as well-prepared and strategic. Such tools will potentially transform how attorneys and students prepare for and approach dispute resolution. Unlike typical AI assistants that tend to be extremely accommodating, Suffolk’s tool presents users with AI negotiators that are programmed to employ a variety of tactics and strategies used by experienced lawyers.
Find My Cite
A Zotero tool for searching your libraries using plain-language descriptions and ideas instead of keywords.
Turn spreadsheets into flashcards
Serve and order a stack of virtual flashcards based on how well you’ve learned them.
Other projects
Geography-based youth service finder
A tool to help juveniles facing delinquency charges to find community programs that satisfy the conditions of their probation. Created by the LIT Lab, Dismas House of Massachusetts, the Crime Justice Institute, and the Criminal Justice Task Force of Northeastern University, with financial support from The Shaw Foundation. Maintained by Dismas House and CJI.
QnA Markup
A markup language for building interactive question-and-answer tools (QnAs) like standalone expert systems or rule-based document assembly, designed for people with little or no programming experience.
Course materials
Coding the Law
Explore the technical, legal, and ethical implications of the computer algorithms used by legal practitioners and in the justice system through projects ranging from simple document review and automation tools to expert systems and narrow AIs. This class is for non-programmers and coders alike.
Legal Tech Class
A collaboratively built textbook for teaching legal technology, including theories, principles, and practical exercises.
Publications
Speaking the Same Language: Data Standards and Disruptive Technologies in the Administration of Justice
50 Suffolk U. L. Rev. 387 (2017)
While the legal profession is coming to grips with technological disruption, practitioners serving the needs of those with low and moderate-incomes find themselves struggling to keep up. Insufficient resources clearly impede large scale technological improvements. Yet, the rise of civic coding and the growing legal technology sector suggest an untapped pool of civic and private resources ready to help address this shortfall. We argue that state trial courts are best positioned to leverage these resources for the benefit of low and moderate-income individuals by addressing a key structural impediment to innovation: the lack of clearly-defined judicial data standards.
