Law Professor Named a Top Legal Innovator

Date

Author

By Kayla Molander
Daniel Katz

Chicago-Kent College of Law Professor has been named among the , which was recently published by and Wickard.

The list recognizes 50 educators and academic leaders who are working to modernize legal education.   

The evaluation panel included esteemed members of the academy, judiciary, and members of industry. 

The National Law Review cited the interdisciplinary model that Katz has built at Chicago-Kent, which 鈥渋ntegrates law, data science, machine learning, engineering, and entrepreneurship.鈥� It also pointed to his research testing GPT systems on the bar exam, which the publication said 鈥渉elped establish a concrete benchmark for evaluating large language models in legal reasoning and became one of the most widely cited studies in the field.鈥�

鈥淟egal education has to keep pace with what is actually happening in legal practice,鈥� says Katz, who also serves as the director of Chicago-Kent鈥檚 Law Lab. 鈥淥ur students are going to spend their careers working alongside these technologies, and we need to help prepare them for the technologically driven future.鈥�

Katz has spent more than a decade teaching Chicago-Kent students how to use technology and entrepreneurship in their legal careers. As director of the Law Lab, he leads research and teaching at the intersection of technology and law.

His paper, 鈥�,鈥� co-written with 273 Ventures co-founder Michael Bommarito and Casetext鈥檚 Shang Gao and Pablo David Arredondo, was in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A in 2024. His recent work includes several papers applying artificial intelligence methods to contract drafting and analysis.

The honor follows another recent recognition for Katz. In late 2025, the Financial Times and RSGI named him as one of the 鈥溾�� for his work in legal artificial intelligence and legal entrepreneurship.