Daniel Martin Katz

Professor of Law, Director of the Law Lab

Professor Katz is a scientist, technologist and professor who applies an innovative polytechnic approach to teaching law - to help create lawyers for today's biggest societal challenges.  Both his scholarship and teaching integrate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. 

Professor Katz's forward-thinking ideas helped to earn him acknowledgement among the Fastcase 50, an award which "recognizes 50 of the smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders in the law."  He was also named to the American Bar Association Journal's "Legal Rebels," a prestigious group of change leaders in the legal profession.

Professor Katz teaches Practice & ProfessionalismE-Discovery, Legal AnalyticsBlockchain + Cryptocurrency & Law, Introduction to Legal Technology & InnovationLegal Project Management + Legal Process Improvement and Civil Procedure at Chicago-Kent and spearheads new initiatives to teach law students how to leverage technology and entrepreneurship in their future legal careers. He joined Chicago-Kent in 2015 from Michigan State University College of Law, where he co-founded the ReInvent Law Laboratory, an innovative multi-disciplinary center that focused on the intersection of entrepreneurship, informatics, programming and design thinking to better understand, analyze and design the law.

Professor Katz has published or forthcoming work in a wide variety of academic outlets, including SciencePlos OneScientific ReportsJournal of the Royal Society InterfaceJournal of Statistical PhysicsFrontiers in PhysicsPhysica A, Proceedings of the ACL and Artificial Intelligence & Law. In addition, his work has been published in legal journals including Cornell Journal of Law & Public PolicyEmory Law JournalVirginia Tax ReviewIowa Law ReviewIllinois Law ReviewOhio State Law JournalJournal of Law & Politics, and Journal of Legal Education. Professor Katz is currently working on two book projects including an edited volume entitled Legal Informatics (Cambridge University Press - 2021) and a book on technology + innovation in law. Professor Katz has an Erdős Number = 4

His work has been highlighted in a number of media outlets, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, BBC Radio, Wired, Vox, National Public Radio, Slate Magazine, Huffington Post, 538, Bloomberg Businessweek, ABA Journal, Law Technology News and The American Lawyer.

Professor Katz is an external affiliated faculty at CodeX—The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. In addition to teaching and researching, Professor Katz serves as an editor of the International Journal of Law and Information Technology (Oxford University Press) and as a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence & Law (Springer Scientific).

Professor Katz is actively involved in the rapidly growing legal technology industry.  He is the Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer of LexPredict (a legal technology and analytics company that was acquired by Elevate in 2018).   He also serves as a formal and informal advisor to a number of legal tech startups.  In addition, he is a member of the advisory board of NextLaw Labs - a global collaborative innovation ecosystem organized with Dentons (the world’s largest law firm). 

Professor Katz received his Ph.D. in political science and public policy with a focus on complex adaptive systems from the University of Michigan. He graduated with a Juris Doctor cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School and simultaneously obtained a Master of Public Policy from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.  During his graduate studies, he was a fellow in Empirical Legal Studies at the University of Michigan Law School and a National Science Foundation IGERT fellow at the University of Michigan Center for the Study of Complex Systems.

Education

Ph.D., University of Michigan
J.D., University of Michigan Law School
M.P.P., University of Michigan
B.S., University of Oregon

Publications

Projects in Progress

Daniel Martin Katz, Dirk Hartung, Lauritz Gerlach, Abhik Jana & Michael Bommarito, Natural Language Processing in the Legal Domain < SSRN >

Jillian Bommarito, Michael J Bommarito, Jessica Katz & Daniel Martin Katz, GPT as Knowledge Worker: A Zero-Shot Evaluation of (AI)CPA Capabilities  < SSRN > < arXiv >

Daniel Martin Katz, Michael Bommarito, Tyler Sollinger & James Ming Chen, Law on the Market? Abnormal Stock Returns and Supreme Court Decision-Making  < SSRN > < arXiv > < Slides >

Daniel Martin Katz, Michael Bommarito & Josh Blackman, Crowdsourcing Accurately and Robustly Predicts Supreme Court Decisions  < SSRN > < arXiv > < Slides >

Daniel Martin Katz & Michael Bommarito, Regulatory Dynamics Revealed by the Securities Filings of Registered Companies  (Project In Progress) < Slides >

Michael Bommarito & Daniel Martin Katz, GPT Takes the Bar Exam  (Working Paper) < SSRN

Selected and Forthcoming Publications

Daniel Martin Katz, Michael Bommarito, Shang Gao & Pablo David Arredondo, GPT-4 Passes the Bar Exam, 382 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (2024) < Phil Transactions A >  

Corinna Coupette, Dirk Hartung, & Daniel Martin Katz,  Legal Hypergraphs, 382 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A  (2024) < Phil Transactions A >  

Pierpaolo Vivo, Daniel Martin Katz & JB Ruhl (Editors), A Complexity Science Approach to Law and Governance, 382 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (2024) < Phil Transactions A >

Ilias Chalkidis, Nicolas Garneau, Catalina Goanta, Daniel Martin Katz & Anders Søgaard, LeXFiles and LegalLAMA: Facilitating English Multinational Legal Language Model Development, In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the ACL - Association for Computational Linguistics (2023)  < ACL 2023 > < arXiv >

Corinna Coupette, Dirk Hartung, Janis Beckedorf, Maximilian Bother & Daniel Martin Katz, Law Smells - Defining and Detecting Problematic Patterns in Legal Drafting, 30 Journal of Artificial Intelligence & Law (2022)  < Springer > < SSRN >

Ilias Chalkidis, Abhik Jana, Dirk Hartung, Michael Bommarito, Ion Androutsopoulos, Daniel Martin Katz & Nikolaos Aletras, LexGLUE: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in English, In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the ACL - Association for Computational Linguistics (2022) < ACL 2022 >  < arXiv >  < SSRN >

Daniel Martin Katz, Ron Dolin & Michael Bommarito (Editors), Legal Informatics, Cambridge University Press (2021)  < Cambridge >

Corinna Coupette, Janis Beckedorf, Dirk Hartung, Michael Bommarito, & Daniel Martin Katz, Measuring Law Over Time: A Network Analytical Framework with an Application to Statutes and Regulations in the United States and Germany, 9 Front. Phys. 658463 (2021)  < Frontiers in Physics >  < Supplemental Material >

Pierpaolo Vivo, Daniel Martin Katz & J.B. Ruhl (Editors), The Physics of the Law: Legal Systems Through the Prism of Complexity Science, Special Collection for Frontiers in Physics (2021)  < Frontiers in Physics >

Michael Bommarito, Daniel Martin Katz & Eric Detterman,  LexNLP: Natural Language Processing and Information Extraction For Legal and Regulatory Texts in Research Handbook on Big Data Law (Edward Elgar Press) (Roland Vogl, ed.) (2021)  < Edward Elgar >  < Github >  < SSRN > < arXiv >

Daniel Martin Katz, Legal Innovation (Book Forward) in Mapping Legal Innovation: Trends and Perspectives (Springer) (Antoine Masson & Gavin Robinson, eds.) (2021) < Springer >

Daniel Martin Katz, Corinna Coupette, Janis Beckedorf & Dirk Hartung, Complex Societies and the Growth of the Law, 10 Scientific Reports 18737 (2020) < Nature Research >  < Supplemental Material >

Edward D. Lee, Daniel Martin Katz, Michael J. Bommarito II, Paul Ginsparg, Sensitivity of Collective Outcomes Identifies Pivotal Components, 17 Journal of the Royal Society Interface 167 (2020)  < Journal of the Royal Society Interface >  < Supplemental Material >

Michael Bommarito, Daniel Martin Katz & Eric Detterman,  OpenEDGAR: Open Source Software for SEC EDGAR Analysis,  MIT Computational Law Report (2020) < MIT Law > < Github >

J.B. Ruhl & Daniel Martin Katz,  Mapping the Law with Artificial Intelligence in Law of Artificial Intelligence and Smart Machines (ABA Press) (2019) < ABA Press >                                  

J.B. Ruhl & Daniel Martin Katz, Harnessing the Complexity of Legal Systems for Governing Global Challenges in Global Challenges, Governance, and Complexity (Edward Elgar) (2019)  < Edward Elgar >

J.B. Ruhl & Daniel Martin Katz, Mapping Law’s Complexity with 'Legal Maps' in Complexity Theory and Law: Mapping an Emergent Jurisprudence (Taylor & Francis) (2018) < Taylor & Francis >

Michael Bommarito & Daniel Martin Katz, Measuring and Modeling the U.S. Regulatory Ecosystem, 168 Journal of Statistical Physics 1125 (2017)  < J Stat Phys >

Daniel Martin Katz, Michael Bommarito & Josh Blackman, A General Approach for Predicting the Behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States, PLoS ONE 12(4): e0174698 (2017) < PLoS One >

J.B. Ruhl, Daniel Martin Katz & Michael Bommarito, Harnessing Legal Complexity, 355 Science 1377 (2017) < Science >

J.B. Ruhl & Daniel Martin Katz, Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Legal Complexity, 101 Iowa Law Review 191 (2015) < SSRN >

Paul Lippe, Daniel Martin Katz & Dan Jackson, Legal by Design: A New Paradigm for Handling Complexity in Banking Regulation and Elsewhere in Law, 93 Oregon Law Review 831 (2015) < SSRN >

Paul Lippe, Jan Putnis, Daniel Martin Katz & Ian Hurst, How Smart Resolution Planning Can Help Banks Improve Profitability And Reduce Risk, Banking Perspective Quarterly (2015)  < SSRN >

Daniel Martin Katz, The MIT School of Law? A Perspective on Legal Education in the 21st Century, Illinois Law Review 1431 (2014) < SSRN > < Slides >

Daniel Martin Katz & Michael Bommarito, Measuring the Complexity of the Law: The United States Code, 22 Journal of Artificial Intelligence & Law 1 (2014)  < Springer > < SSRN >

Daniel Martin Katz, Quantitative Legal Prediction - or - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Preparing for the Data Driven Future of the Legal Services Industry,  62 Emory Law Journal 909 (2013)  < SSRN >

Daniel Martin Katz, Joshua Gubler, Jon Zelner, Michael Bommarito, Eric Provins & Eitan Ingall, Reproduction of Hierarchy? A Social Network Analysis of the American Law Professoriate, 61 Journal of Legal Education 76 (2011) < SSRN >

Michael Bommarito, Daniel Martin Katz & Jillian Isaacs-See, An Empirical Survey of the Written Decisions of the United States Tax Court (1990-2008), 30 Virginia Tax Review 523 (2011)  < SSRN >

Daniel Martin Katz, Michael Bommarito, Juile Seaman, Adam Candeub, Eugene Agichtein, Legal N-Grams? A Simple Approach to Track the Evolution of Legal Language  in Proceedings of JURIX: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (2011)   < SSRN >

Daniel Martin Katz & Derek Stafford, Hustle and Flow: A Social Network Analysis of the American Federal Judiciary, 71 Ohio State Law Journal 457 (2010)  < SSRN >

Michael Bommarito & Daniel Martin Katz, A Mathematical Approach to the Study of the United States Code, 389 Physica A 4195 (2010)  < SSRN > < arXiv >

Michael Bommarito, Daniel Martin Katz & Jonathan Zelner, On the Stability of Community Detection Algorithms on Longitudinal Citation Data in Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Applications of Social Network Analysis (2010) < SSRN > < arXiv >

Michael Bommarito, Daniel Martin Katz, Jonathan Zelner & James Fowler, Distance Measures for Dynamic Citation Networks 389 Physica A 4201 (2010)  < SSRN > < arXiv >

Michael Bommarito, Daniel Martin Katz & Jonathan Zelner, Law as a Seamless Web? Comparing Various Network Representations of the United States Supreme Court Corpus (1791-2005)  in Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (2009) < SSRN >

Marvin Krislov & Daniel Martin Katz, Taking State Constitutions Seriously, 17 Cornell Journal of Law & Public Policy 295 (2008)  < SSRN >

Daniel Martin Katz, Derek Stafford & Eric Provins, Social Architecture, Judicial Peer Effects and the 'Evolution' of the Law: Toward a Positive Theory of Judicial Social Structure, 23 Georgia State Law Review 975 (2008)  < SSRN >

Daniel Martin Katz, Institutional Rules, Strategic Behavior and the Legacy of Chief Justice William Rehnquist: Setting the Record Straight on Dickerson v. United States, 22 Journal of Law & Politics 303 (2006)  < SSRN >

Professional Activities

Computational Legal Studies™

Go to Computational Legal Studies™

Affiliations

J.D. Certificate Program in Legal Innovation + Technology; LL.M. Program in Legal Innovation + Technology; The Law Lab

Expertise

Compliance; Empirical Studies and Empirical Methods; Entrepreneurship; Law and Artificial Intelligence; Law and Economics; Legal Education; Legal Profession and Professional Ethics

Media Appearances

A Champion of Generative AI Innovation, Chicago-Kent’s Daniel Martin Katz Stands Out for Guiding Legal Teams on How to Use the Latest Tools

When Daniel Katz, a law professor at Illinois Tech’s Chicago-Kent College of Law, set out to challenge the abilities of Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s GPT-4, he knew his team had to choose a task that would capture the attention of lawyers. What could be better than the bar exam? “If I picked a very narrow area of law, people wouldn’t get their head around it,” he says. In March, it emerged that the AI model passed the test, scoring in the 90th percentile.

Financial Times

Many Law Firms Remain Skittish About Adopting AI, Says Professor Daniel Martin Katz

When market pioneer ChatGPT first became available, many prospective users of legal generative AI tech — law firms and in-house legal departments — suffered from “Fomo”, or fear of missing out, according to Dan Katz, a professor at Chicago Kent College of Law, who leads the school’s legal tech centre. But that early enthusiasm has given way to “Fud” — fear, uncertainty and doubt — he says.

Financial Times