Professor Katz is a scientist, technologist and law professor who applies an innovative polytechnic approach to teaching law, meshing litigation and transactional knowledge with emerging software and other efficiency-enhancing technologies to help create lawyers for today's challenging legal job market. 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 Civil Procedure, E-Discovery, and Entrepreneurial Lawyering 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 work has been featured in a wide variety of multidisciplinary academic outlets, including the Emory Law Journal, Ohio State Law Journal, Iowa Law Review, Illinois Law Review, Virginia Tax Review, Cornell Journal of Law & Public Policy, Journal of Law & Politics, Journal of Legal Education, Artificial Intelligence & Law, and Physica A.
His work has been highlighted in a number of media outlets, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, 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). He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for Law Technology News and is a member of the ABA Task Force on Big Data and the Law.
Professor Katz is actively involved in the rapidly growing legal technology industry. He is the Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer of LexPredict (a Legal Analytics company). He also serves as a formal and informal advisor to a large number of legal 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.
Professor Katz is a former member of the IAALS Board of Advisors.