2019 Awards Announced

Siskind Susser, PC—Visalaw.ai

Key Team Members: Greg Siskind, Josh Waddell and Jason Susser

Siskind Susser is an immigration law firm based in Memphis that has been using Neota Logic’s AI-based expert system studio for more three years to replicate legal analysis and automate routine and complex tasks and document generation. Some apps are free and public-facing and have been developed rapidly to assist people deal with recent news events. Others have taken two+ years to develop and have involved hundreds of hours of work. The apps will soon be incorporated into case management systems and we’ve just signed a distribution agreement with the American Immigration Lawyers Association to market the apps to its 16000 members. Here are few of Visalaw.ai’s apps:

• An H-1B Public Access File generator that makes it easy for employers to meet the 24-hour deadline to create this series of documents and notify labor unions;
• A 50-state immigration advisor which assists rural and inner-city hospitals assess whether they qualify to recruit international physicians to work in their facilities;
• An app that advises people born abroad whether they are considered citizens at birth; and
• An app rolled out in one day in Spanish and English that assisted DACA recipients understand how President Trump’s revocation announcement affected them individually.

Suffolk University Law School—Legal Innovation and Technology (LIT) Lab
Key Team Members: Kim M. McLaurin, Sarah Boonin, Gabriel Teninbaum and David Colarusso

In October 2017, Suffolk Law created the Legal Innovation & Technology (LIT) Lab, a joint project between the school’s Clinical Programs and its LIT Institute. The Lab aims to prepare students for innovative practice through experiential education. It provides students the opportunity to apprentice alongside legal tech and data science professionals while working on projects for internal and external clients (e.g., nonprofits, courts, and small firms). In addition to serving clients, this work acts as the foundation and inspiration for independent scholarship and innovation. This can be seen in work like the Lab’s partnership with Stanford’s Legal Design Lab. Together we created an online game (Learned Hands) to help AI improve access to justice by crowdsourcing issue spotting for lay peoples’ legal questions. This labeled data can then be used by AI developers for training and a benchmarking. The LIT Lab is currently building on this work, training machine learning classifiers to spot issues in novel texts that once published will help better connect folks with legal services. The Lab’s unique structure allows it to share best-of-class technology and process insights while leveraging existing institutional infrastructure, chiefly, the pedagogical expertise of clinical educators paired with the perspective of legal scholars.

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