Vexing Legal Problem? Try the LIT Lab

Student R&D lab offers new approach

Starting this spring, Suffolk Law students in the new Legal Innovation and Technology Lab—LIT Lab for short—will be working with practicing attorneys, courts, and legal aid agencies to offer legal tech and data science solutions to vexing legal problems.

David Colarusso, a Fastcase 50 legal visionary and nationally recognized expert in legal tech solutions and data science, will direct the new consultancy and R&D shop. 

It doesn’t seem like hyperbole to call Colarusso a Renaissance man, given his wide-ranging interests in computer coding, astronomy, the law, data science, history, carpentry, and physics. Colarusso was a high school physics and astronomy teacher in Lexington, Mass., for six years, co-founded a software business before going to law school, and, most recently, served as a public defender and data scientist at the Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS). 

The ABA’s Legal Rebels column calls Colarusso “a hacker” who’s “happiest when doing a deep dive into an information system, finding problems and creating fixes.” In 2014, CPCS assigned Colarusso to determine how many defendants had been affected by Massachusetts’ drug lab scandal, in which a state chemist falsified results of thousands of drug samples, tagging them positive.

His wide-ranging work in the areas of politics, the law, and design have been featured in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the New York Times, and on MSNBC and NPR. 

Colarusso graduated from Cornell University in 2001 with a self-designed major in physics and science education. Then came a master’s degree in education from Harvard University and a law degree at Boston University.

The LIT Lab is affiliated with the Law School’s Institute on Legal Innovation and Technology (LIT Institute) and its top 20-ranked Clinical Programs. Learn more about the LIT Lab at suffolklitlab.github.io.