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 6 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 where I got to work building legal AI. This was back when AI meant machine learning.
In 2020, the pandemic spurred the Lab to create the Document Assembly Line, and forced me to move my Coding the Law class online. Recently, I've been doing a lot of work for my course on AI and the Law, which just happens to be a great excuse to play a law-themed tabletop role-playing game once a week in the fall.
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, fidgeting with Rubik's Cubes, and writing mini crosswords. 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 what's starting to sound like a "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.