Law Professor Named a Top Legal Innovator
Chicago-Kent College of Law Professor Daniel Martin Katz has been named among the 2026 Top 50 Legal Innovators in Academia, which was recently published by National Law Review 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 “integrates law, data science, machine learning, engineering, and entrepreneurship.” It also pointed to his research testing GPT systems on the bar exam, which the publication said “helped establish a concrete benchmark for evaluating large language models in legal reasoning and became one of the most widely cited studies in the field.”
“Legal education has to keep pace with what is actually happening in legal practice,” says Katz, who also serves as the director of Chicago-Kent’s Law Lab. “Our students are going to spend their careers working alongside these technologies, and we need to help prepare them for the technologically driven future.”
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, “GPT-4 Passes the Bar Exam,” co-written with 273 Ventures co-founder Michael Bommarito and Casetext’s Shang Gao and Pablo David Arredondo, was the most downloaded and cited paper of the year 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 “top 20 legal market shapers of the past 20 years” for his work in legal artificial intelligence and legal entrepreneurship.
