[Editor’s Note: For the seventh year, The National Jurist recognizes 10 law students who have made outstanding contributions to their schools or communities this past year. To determine the Law Students of the Year, we asked each law school to nominate one student. We then whittled the list down to 10, which was not an easy task. All were featured in the Spring 2022 issue of The National Jurist magazine.]
Aubrie Souza
Suffolk University Law School
Class of 2022
Since the summer of her first year of law school, Souza has been working on mobile-friendly “smartforms” for state courts and other related projects. Little by little, she’s been learning Python, YAML and other coding languages.
During that time, Suffolk University’s Legal Innovation & Technology Lab’s free TurboTax-style tool has been used by pro se litigants to create 16,000 court documents via phones and the internet. The tool formats the documents properly, and then users can email them to the court.
Souza said the system achieves some goals that lawyers can’t achieve on their own: massive scale, for example.
“Pro bono and legal aid attorneys will be the first to tell you that they don’t have enough hours in a day to help people who are desperate for assistance,” she said. “With the smartforms, judges receive filings that contain the topics they actually need to make a decision, without as much extraneous information. And litigants can fill them out on a phone anytime, night or day, right in the moment when help is most needed.”
