My name is David Colarusso.† I founded and co-direct Suffolk University Law School's Legal Innovation & Technology (LIT) Lab. By training I'm an attorney & science educator. By experience, I'm a data scientist, craftsman, and writer. Mostly, I build things: furniture, software, reasoned arguments...
Currently, my work focuses on NLP/AI, data standards, document automation, and increasing access to justice. I'm also interested in using games to power crowdsourcing efforts and foster learning. If I'm being cute, I might say I teach sand to "think" about the law and law students how to work with and think about "thinking" sand.
I taught high school physics & astronomy for six years before going to law school, five of those were in Lexington Massachusetts, with one in Edinburgh Scotland on a Fulbright teacher exchange.
While teaching I produced a physics serise on YouTube that did pretty well (over 7 million views). I also ran a small software company. The latter side hustle continued through law school—running for eight years and closing in the black.
After law school, I became a public defender and stayed with the agency for six years. As an attorney, I started asking questions about how we used data; this led to me making suggestions, and before long, I moved from my role as a line attorney to that of data scientist. I started freelance writing, took on some Suffolk Law students as interns, and began teaching there as an adjunct professor. In 2017, I left the defenders and joined Suffolk full-time to start the Lab.
My "AI" hot take goes something like this. I am a contextual contrarian. If you are on the AI Hype Train™ I will try hard to derail you—pointing out the very real dangers people are facing in the here & now from "AI" tools. But if you dismiss the pro-social uses of "AI" out of hand, I'll point out where it can be used to help those in need.
I live outside Boston with my wife and two children. I like drawing and painting, playing with LEGO, and fidgeting with Rubik's Cubes. On weekends my kids and I read the Sunday comics, go on adventures in Minecraft, and play the role of tiny-wildlife photographers on walks around our neighborhood. To round out the "book jacket bio," I'm the author of a programing language for lawyers, QnA Markup, an award-winning legal hacker, inventor, Eagle Scout, ABA Legal Rebel, and Fastcase 50 honoree. Back when Twitter still existed, and before I left, the ABA thought I was a good follow, and I was briefly worth interviewing about online political videos.
This website is a place for me to share some of my work and play, along with thoughts that don't fit nicely into a social media post. If you're looking to talk, or follow my work, I suggest finding me on Bluesky @davidcolarusso.com.
† My full name is David Anthony Colarusso, and in the twilight of the 20th Century when the internet and I were young, I entered my full name into an online anagram generator—hence this website's domain name. Sadly, even decades later, I still can't shake the image of some poor soul breaking the news to that dinosaur.