#20: David Colarusso, Hacking for Justice

In today’s podcast, David Colarusso, a lawyer and data scientist for the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services, talks about what a legal hacker is, how he incorporates hacking into lawyering, and why lawyers should learn to code.

But first, Sam and Aaron try to figure out whether lawyers who bill after working 55 hours in a week are just padding their hours.

When we first discussed legal hacking in episode 17, Sam got a little stumped when Aaron asked what it meant. So we brought in David Colarusso to talk about what legal hacking is, including examples from his own experience.

We already talked about one of Colarusso’s projects, QnA Markup. He also talks about hacking around simple challenges, like finding all the defendants affected by a chemist in the state’s drug labs who was falsifying her reports. Technology definitely isn’t the solution to every legal problem (or even most of them, probably), but Colarusso demonstrates that technology can absolutely solve some important legal problems.

If you’re interested in joining or starting a legal hacker group, visit LegalHackers.org. If you are interested in learning to code and you can spare about 10 hours over the next couple of weeks, visit Codecademy.