Law · Ordinary People
Noella Sudbury wrote the law, then built the app that makes a clean slate fast
United States
A former public defender spent years passing Utah's Clean Slate law, then built an AI tool that checks eligibility in three minutes instead of hours.
The person and the place
Noella Sudbury, a former Utah public defender and Salt Lake County criminal-justice policy advisor, now founder and CEO of Rasa Legal in Salt Lake City.
The problem she cared about
criminal records that keep blocking people from jobs and housing long after they've served their time, in a system where clearing one record the old way took a lawyer 10 to 12 hours.
The agency moment
she spent years leading the bipartisan campaign that passed Utah's Clean Slate law in 2019, then turned the same instinct on her own caseload. "Could I build an app? Could I use technology to reduce my time? I just believed it was possible," she said.
What changed, with evidence
she built an app that checks expungement eligibility in about three minutes and helps draft the petition, and says it has brought the time a lawyer spends on a case down from 10 to 12 hours to about five. By Rasa's own account, relayed but not independently audited, the company has helped clear the records of 34,000 people across Utah, Arizona, and Pennsylvania since its 2022 launch, with more than 90% of filed petitions approved. One of those people is Virginia Mireles, who spent 17 years incarcerated across Arizona's prison system on five felony convictions before Rasa cleared every one. She now works on Rasa's onboarding team, telling prospective clients her own story.
The move worth copying
Sudbury didn't stop at writing a better law, she went back and automated the part that was still slow. "We are decreasing that time every day as we're automating more and more," she said. A rule you fought to change that's still too slow in practice is the second half of the fight.
"Could I build an app? Could I use technology to reduce my time? I just believed it was possible." — Noella Sudbury, NPR
Sources
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Curated by Good in Progress from the public record.
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