Financial Times Recognizes Chicago-Kent Law Professor as a Top 20 Legal Market Shaper of Past 20 Years
“From a technical perspective, I have long felt as though the legal sector is really behind most of the rest of the economy in terms of the utilization of modern technological methods,” says Daniel Martin Katz, professor of law and director of the Law Lab at Chicago-Kent College of Law.
Katz has dedicated much of his career to closing the gap between the legal industry and its embrace of leading technology including artificial intelligence.
He has spent the last decade teaching Chicago-Kent students how to leverage technology and entrepreneurship in their legal careers. Katz was also the co-founder and chief strategy officer of LexPredict, a legal technology and analytics company that was acquired in 2018 by Elevate, and he recently co-founded 273 Ventures, a legal artificial intelligence company.
“I have spent lots of time helping both individuals and legal organizations on their AI and technology modernization journey,” says Katz.
Recently, Financial Times and RSGI named Katz one of the “top 20 legal market shapers of the past 20 years” for his work in legal AI and legal entrepreneurship. For the last 20 years, Financial Times and RSGI have released an “Innovative Lawyers” series, which are special reports that assess lawyers on their innovation for clients and their own businesses.
In 2025 Financial Times released “Special Report,” a 20-year retrospective of innovation and adaptability in the legal sector. The list of market shapers was a part of the report.
“It’s nice to have the recognition alongside people who are some of the leading people in the whole field who’ve done a lot to contribute to the advancement of and modernization of the legal world with respect to technology and AI and business models,” says Katz. “I think everybody on that list has contributed materially to advancing the modernization of the legal field. It’s great to be recognized alongside them.”
In particular, Katz says he is honored to be recognized among key academics such as Harvard Law School Lester Kissel Professor of Law David Wilkins, Society for Computers and Law President Richard Susskind as well as leading entrepreneurs such as Andrew Seija (Relativity), Liam Brown (Elevate/Integreon), Dan Reed (UnitedLex), and Neil Araujo (iManage), among many others. While he appreciates the recognition, Katz says the biggest benefactor of his and the other honorees’ work is the modernization of the legal function, which he says is a benefit to all humanity.
“It helps both individuals and organizations pay less money to get the help they need,” says Katz. “It helps accelerate the quality of the legal advice or guidance that they receive. It’s about both quality and efficiency.”
“It’s not useful to the world to spend resources unnecessarily on law and compliance. If you’re a pharmaceutical company, it’s better to use it to develop an X-grade drug that saves a bunch of people’s lives.”
In addition to his work in legal entrepreneurship, Katz is also a prolific author and scholar.
His paper, “GPT-4 Passes the Bar Exam”—co-written with 273 Ventures co-founder Michael Bommarito as well as Shang Gao (Casetext) and Pablo David Arredondo (Casetext)—was the most downloaded and cited paper of the year in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A in 2024.
In 2025 he was the co-author of several papers applying AI methods to contract drafting and analysis, including “Software Engineering Meets Legal Texts: LLMs for Auto Detection of Contract Smells” and “GRAPH-GRPO-LEX: Legal Contracts Graph Modeling via Reinforcement Learning with Group Relative Policy Optimization,” authored with a team which includes Moriya Dechtiar and Hongming Wang of Harvard University. His co-authored paper “LLM as a Judge for Evaluating Contract Graphs: Multi-Judge Benchmarking and Agentic Uncertainty-Aware Refinement” will be presented at ACLing 2025 in Dubai.
