Chicago-Kent College of Law Professor Daniel Martin Katz recently delivered the keynote address at the Royal Society’s conference on AI and the Law in London on September 23, 2025. The event, hosted by the Royal Society—an independent scientific academy in the United Kingdom and recognized as the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence—focused on how artificial intelligence is poised to impact the justice system.
Professor Katz addressed the challenges facing judicial systems globally, referencing India’s significant backlog of more than 50 million pending criminal and civil cases. He noted, “I recently heard of a saying in India, something along the lines of, ‘Your grandfather has a dispute, which will be ultimately settled by your grandson.’ It’s hard to talk about the rule of law in a context where people wait decades to get solutions for their problems.” Katz emphasized that court backlogs are not unique to India, as many countries experience similar issues.
Katz, who also directs Chicago-Kent’s Law Lab, discussed public concerns about algorithms within justice systems. “People get concerned when you think about algorithms in the justice system, and I do not think criminal law is probably the place for all of this,” he said. “But in commercial disputes, people are basically trying to get out of the traditional judicial system—and into ADR or other alternatives—because it takes forever and it’s very expensive.”
His research centers on how AI may change the justice system. In 2024, Katz published a paper titled, “GPT-4 Passes the Bar Exam,” with co-authors Michael James Bommarito, Shang Gao, and Pablo Arredondo. The paper became the most downloaded and cited work of the year in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.
Katz acknowledged concerns about AI's broader social and economic effects. “I think that people are concerned about what AI is going to mean not only for the justice sector specifically, but also for society more broadly,” he said. “I think there’s been concerns about economic disruption when we think that there are these jobs, these tasks that a computer can kind of do and is likely to be able to expand its mandate.”
Despite such worries, Katz highlighted potential benefits: “I do think we have this problem in the justice sector that the scale of the number of disputes and issues, it sort of exceeds the public sector’s resources.”
He also commented on post-Brexit developments affecting London’s role as a global legal hub. “The UK post-Brexit has been very focused on maintaining its position economically with respect to London being a central financial and legal hub of the globe,” he said. “What England wants to do is be the place where you take your disputes, and there’s concern in the post-Brexit world that these things will go to other global dispute resolution hubs.”
Katz's recent work includes two papers co-authored with Moriya Dechtiar and Hongming Wang from Harvard University. These papers explore how large language models can be applied to contract analysis, drawing parallels between contract language and software code. Katz explained, “The idea is can we begin to automate some of the things that people are looking for when they go through these agreements. These papers begin to demonstrate how engineering ideas combined with large language models can provide meaningful improvements.”