Suffolk Law Student Builds Digital Tools to Assist Veterans
Somewhere in the middle of the Panama Canal, Jack Brandt remembered his paper was due. He had crossed a time zone and lost an hour. He ran below deck and submitted it by midnight. He was starting a master’s degree program at Michigan State, which he earned entirely online, while serving on a Coast Guard cutter running counter-narcotics missions in the Caribbean.
That was 2020. A year later, Brandt, now a lieutenant, was operations officer on a 154-foot cutter in the Arabian Gulf, planning missions to disrupt smuggling networks that funded extremism. Then in 2023 he enrolled at Suffolk Law, where he learned to code, building digital tools that have helped more than 2,100 veterans and military families navigate their benefits—an achievement that helped earn him Law Student of the Year honors from National Jurist.
Ask him about his law school journey, and Brandt still marvels about “the little things like being able to go home every day. I loved my time at sea, but it’s nice that the floor doesn’t move while I’m working.”
His path toward a slate of classes in legal innovation and technology began, improbably, with a tuition bill. While pursuing his online master’s degree on his first cutter, Brandt paid out of pocket for a semester before a supervisor told him he was eligible for military tuition assistance. As education services officer on his second cutter, he worked one-on-one with his crewmates to help them use their benefits—making sure they didn’t make the same mistake. “I didn’t know I could use that benefit,” Brandt says. “I didn’t want that to happen to anybody on my crew.”
At Suffolk Law, he set out to build tools that could do at scale what he had done on the ship person by person. The decision to build tech tools wasn’t at all preordained, he admits. “I am not a tech guy,” he says. “But I saw technology as a way to help more people.”
Through Suffolk Law’s Legal Innovation & Technology Clinic, he learned the coding language Python and helped prototype a smart form for the Massachusetts Appeals Court designed to assist self-represented litigants with appellate briefs. Then he turned his attention to the needs of the military community, creating the Military Benefits Assistant, an online platform that connects veterans and families to personalized benefit information in plain language. He also built the Coast Guard Mutual Assistance Program Finder, which helped 1,366 Coast Guard families connect to emergency aid during the recent Department of Homeland Security shutdown.
“Jack is distinguished by his blend of discipline, empathy, and the speed he brings to making an impact,” says Quinten Steenhuis, co-director of the Suffolk Law Legal Innovation & Technology Lab. “He turns real user challenges into working tools, then keeps iterating.”
This spring, as a Pro Bono Scholar at Veterans Legal Services, Brandt got a small taste of how Suffolk Law’s legal innovation work travels. His supervising attorney told him he’d need to learn to use MADE, a smart tool for eviction defense. Brandt smiled. “I don’t mean to interrupt,” he said, “but actually, I’ve had some practice with this.” The tool was built by Professor Steenhuis.
After graduation, Brandt will serve as legal counsel for the US Coast Guard Intelligence Coordination Center, the service’s national-level intelligence hub. He plans to expand the Military Benefits Assistant to include federal, state, tribal, and nonprofit resources—so that more veterans can spend less time deciphering systems and more time getting the help they’ve earned.
“I find people at other schools who wish they had been exposed to the things I was taught,” says Brandt. “Suffolk set me on this path to be ten steps ahead of everybody.”