Legal Innovator Joins Clinical Team
Legal technologists seeking models for their own work often turn to the software of coder and housing lawyer Quinten Steenhuis. He will join Suffolk University Law School’s Clinical Programs as a Legal Innovation & Technology (LIT) Fellow starting March 16. The LIT Fellow position was made possible due to the generosity of Suffolk Law Dean’s Cabinet Member Deborah Marson, JD ’78, the Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of Iron Mountain.
For the past 11 years, Steenhuis has worked as a housing attorney and IT systems administrator at Greater Boston Legal Services, where he has represented people facing eviction and trained others to represent themselves. Through his work, Steenhuis discovered that many people were unable to attend his four-hour training session, either because of a job or disability, so he came up with a new approach.
Steenhuis built a user-friendly website for people facing eviction that they can use on their own or with a social worker. It contains step-by-step instructions as well as document assistance—no need to arrange childcare or take time off from work to travel to a legal aid office.
“It helps them with the very basics,” Steenhuis told National Public Radio, “filling out paperwork that they can use to lay out their case and to explain to the judge, and to the other side, why they should not be evicted.”
Preparing Students for the 21st Century
By contributing to the creation of the LIT Fellow position, Marson wants to ensure that Suffolk Law students are prepared for the modern legal profession. “It is increasingly important for our future lawyers to embrace technology and innovation and make this a part of their everyday approach to legal work,” Marson said. “I’m excited to support Suffolk Law’s nationally leading programs in this area by teaching students the knowledge and skills they’ll need for success in the 21st century.”
At Suffolk Law, Steenhuis will train students to build guided interviews—like his eviction defense tool. Collaborating with key stakeholders—clinic clients, attorneys, and court administrators, for example—makes the technology more useful and facilitates its adoption, he says, so that will be an important part of the learning. He will also write code to improve open source software that the legal tech community depends on for innovation. The framework for Steenhuis’ app was an open source platform, Docassemble, which has also been the starting point for cutting-edge bankruptcy filing and divorce tools.
“Helping someone face a wrongful eviction has a tremendous impact, not just for the individual but for the whole community,” says Professor Gabe Teninbaum, director of the Law School’s nationally leading Institute on Legal Innovation & Technology. “Quinten’s work proves that it is possible to increase access to justice and change lives for the better by marrying cutting-edge technology and traditional law practice. We’re thrilled to have him teaching our students how to use that game-changing template.”
Helping Unrepresented Tenants Through Tech
In Massachusetts, according to housing court statistics, more than 60 percent of landlords have legal representation in eviction cases, while less than 10 percent of tenants do. About a quarter of the judgments resulting in eviction occur because the defendant failed to respond to the complaint on time.
Steenhuis’ tool, which can be accessed on a mobile phone, or any device with internet access, educates tenants about their rights, helps them file customized court documents which they can print out themselves, and sends text-message reminders about follow-up documents and court dates.
The app takes from 25 to 90 minutes to work through, starting with a video explaining that landlords must take tenants to court to remove them. “The tool really is a tour de force,” says David Colarusso, director of the LIT Lab, Suffolk’s legal tech and data science consultancy. “Quinten saw the need for a guided interview that would allow more people to get eviction defense, something that people would actually use and that legal aid attorneys and court service center administrators all could get behind. So instead of building a tool for those people, he built a tool with those people.”
That meant providing the tool in languages besides English, easy-to-follow translations of legalese, user-friendly video explanations, and audio for the visually impaired. Steenhuis watched users navigate the tool to figure out the biggest sticking points and to make tweaks.
The Impact on Students
Steenhuis looks forward to teaching students how to build similar tools, both to help unrepresented litigants and to learn how to innovate their own law practices in a rapidly evolving legal marketplace. “There’s an energy and passion to innovate legal services at Suffolk,” he says. “The school is a national leader in harnessing technology and innovation to make legal services more efficient and more accessible. I’m excited to join the effort.”
National Jurist ranked Suffolk Law as the top school in the nation for legal technology. Among other efforts, the school is building a machine-based AI-powered issue spotter called Spot. The tool enables people to describe their problems in a simple search box using plain language and then receive actionable legal information and resources. For example, someone might type, “I’m getting kicked out of my apartment,” and then receive information about eviction as well as eviction-related resources in the relevant jurisdiction. Spot can also be used by legal aid providers and non-profits as a free triage tool, allowing them to address more of the public’s unmet legal needs.