About

I'm a Juris Doctor and AI Solutions Architect based in Rochester, NY. My day job is the Advisory Tier at Thomson Reuters, where I design and deliver training, workshops, and applied-AI programming for attorneys, law firm staff, and government professionals — across Am Law 100 firms, Fortune 500 corporations, and federal agencies including the U.S. Department of Justice. I hold an active U.S. federal security clearance for the DOJ work.

Before the Advisory Tier, I was a Solutions Engineer on Thomson Reuters' Customer Delivery and CoCounsel Innovation team, where I served as technical lead for a small engineering group delivering CoCounsel implementations into enterprise legal environments. The work I'm proudest of from that stretch is the playbook-driven NDA review pipeline I designed and deployed for Shell and the Thomson Reuters General Counsel Office, projected to reduce attorney review time by 60% or more.

My positioning sits at a specific intersection: doctrinal grounding in criminal and constitutional law — my JD thesis was on international money laundering: transnational crime, financial regulation, global governance — and practical fluency in the AI systems reshaping investigations, evidence review, and legal practice. Most of the people I work with sit on one side of that line or the other.

Clinical experience

Three years inside Suffolk's clinical program — first as a Summer LIT Fellow, then as a Clinical LIT Fellow and Legal Coder, and finally as an SJC Rule 3:03 Student Attorney representing clients in guardianship petitions through advocacy, negotiation, and case management. I presented on guardianship alternatives to healthcare professionals during that stretch.

Out of the same program came the civic legal tech work I still point to most often: a Late Docketing Statement form adopted by the Massachusetts Appeals Court, a WCAG audit tool presented at LITCon '23, and a jury instruction comparison program built for publicresource.org. The longer story is on the Suffolk Clinical Program project page.

Independent work

Simon — an autonomous trading system I'm building independently of the day job. Combines XGBoost-driven prediction with an LLM-driven strategy layer. The architectural thesis is honest separation: prediction stays prediction, strategy is decoupled, and the system reports its real performance — not the cherry-picked numbers.
The Olive Branch Review — a community writing platform I founded and run through Royal Coast Media LLC. I built and maintain the full technical stack: authentication, content management, moderation. On the publication side I work with contributors and on the editorial standards the community operates by.

Background

Juris Doctor, Suffolk University Law School, Boston, MA (2020–2023) Thesis: International Money Laundering. VP, Suffolk Legal Podcast Club. Founding Member and Treasurer, Legal Innovation & Technology Student Association. Liberty Mutual Legal Design Challenge, second place (2022). Certified Legal Observer (2020–2023).

B.A. English, minors in Legal Studies and Computer Science, University of Rochester (2015–2019) Coursework spanned Business Law, Industrial Organization, Technical Computing, and JavaScript. Graduate coursework at the Simon School of Business in Computational Information Systems and Marketing.

Skills, briefly

Generative AI applications, LLM architecture, prompt engineering, API integration. Python, SQL, JavaScript, HTML/CSS/PHP. Legal platforms: Westlaw, Practical Law, CoCounsel, HighQ, Lexis, Casetext, Relativity, Intelligize, Everlaw.

Contact

Email is the fastest route: regisjosephacosta@gmail.com. I'm also on LinkedIn and GitHub.