National Jurist named Suffolk University Law School Dean Andrew Perlman one of the country’s most influential people in legal education for 2025 and third year law student Jack Brandt one of the 2026 law students of the year.
Perlman, who landed a number 18 spot on the top-25 list alongside leaders from several of the country’s top law schools, the American Bar Association and other major legal organizations, received the honor from the national legal publication for his work advancing legal technology in training the next generation of lawyers.
“At the end of the day, as flattering as it is, I really do view this as a community recognition,” Perlman said of the honor. “It’s something that we should feel such pride in not because of my individual accomplishment but because of what it means for the Suffolk community.”
After becoming a professor of law in 2001, Perlman took over as Dean of Suffolk Law School in 2015 and Vice President for Academic Innovation for the whole university in February 2025. Much of Perlman’s honored work has been in developing Suffolk Law’s Institute on Law Practice Technology and Innovation, which was founded in 2013. Suffolk launched the country’s first Legal Innovation and Technology concentration under Perlman’s deanship.
The Institute and the concentration serve as a training ground for law students to become adept in using the latest technology in their work to expand their abilities while also establishing Suffolk’s place as a leader in legal education, said Perlman.
“A lot of students arrive with no programming knowledge and not particularly savvy when it comes to legal technology, so it’s incredibly rewarding to introduce them to what technology can do for their chosen profession and how they can better serve their clients,” said Perlman. “We find a lot of students are able to pick it up quite quickly because of the wonderful faculty we have.”
These strides taken by Perlman and his colleagues in the Law School’s leadership opened the doors for students like Jack Brandt to become graduates equipped for the 21st century legal workforce and to take tech-forward approaches to modern problems.
Brandt, who was named one of National Jurist’s law students of the year for 2026, designed a solution to a problem he had seen firsthand serving in the United States Coast Guard: finding and understanding military benefits.
After learning to code and train large language models at Suffolk Law’s Legal Information and Technology Lab, Brandt started testing out custom GPTs on ChatGPT in the summer of 2024. From experimenting with the bots, he realized he could build up a close-trained model on benefits information only. Through trial and error, he was able to narrow down a customized AI bot that gives accurate information, creating the Military Benefits Assistant, a website where service members and their families can input their information and receive personalized benefits eligibility.
“It gives people the opportunity to take advantage of these things on their own, which is my goal for this, for people to take control of their own careers,” said Brandt. “You need to know somebody sometimes, and I think there’s an opportunity for this technology to be that somebody for people who don’t have the person over the shoulder helping them out.”
Brandt’s goals are set high for this technology as he hopes it can do even more for veterans and their families – filling out applications and providing highly personalized information on benefits to fully provide equal access to them.
“What I’m most excited about with the Military Benefits Assistant is that it’s a work in progress,” said Brandt. “It’s nowhere near finished. I hope that every time I look back at it I think, ‘Wow, that was a really bad product,’ because I’m excited for what it’s going to do next.”
Originally, law school was never part of Brandt’s plan – he loved his work in the service, but when he found out he was accepted to the Coast Guard’s Advanced Education Program while stationed in the Middle East, attending Suffolk Law quickly emerged as the perfect choice.
“I can’t imagine it any other way,” said Brandt. “I feel very fortunate to have this opportunity because I feel like I’m right where I should be and I think I’ve found where I can make an impact in and outside of the service.”
National Jurist’s most influential people list is selected through the votes of American Law School Deans, and law students of the year are nominated by law schools before being selected as finalists by National Jurist editors.
