Katten has invested in a full-time innovation team to bring efficiency and value to client engagements and operations. Our mission is to turn ideas into reality. Our capabilities include process review, applied technology and leveraging data. The group partners with Katten attorneys and clients to determine goals and objectives and works with the entire team to find solutions that benefit our clients.

Our Philosophy

The Katten Innovation Team is not an extension of the IT team or marketing group. It is an independent group that brings decades of experience in law firm operations, legal process improvement and legal technology to our clients. We facilitate collaboration between our clients, attorneys and in-house legal teams by designing new, client-focused solutions that allow us to focus on client priorities, while providing more efficient, high-quality legal services.

The Innovation Team helps our client teams identify challenges and opportunities in how we engage and operate and provides solutions using new processes and software, as well as leverages new sources of data. While technology is an important tool, we first explore process changes and talent allocation before determining how to add efficiency and value.

The Innovation Team also participates in the Institute for the Future of Law Practice (IFLP) and employs a full-time law student as an intern to experience our hands-on innovation and modernization work.

Overall, we are dedicated to choosing commercially-focused projects that provide real value to both our firm and clients.

Capabilities

  • Using internal and external collaboration tools
  • Developing solutions using machine learning and natural language processing
  • Establishing and tracking new data resources
  • Evaluating process and solutions, including leveraging technology, where appropriate

Enabling collaboration

The Innovation Team is helping to improve client team communication by leveraging commercial and collaboration tools that ensure our knowledge is available to all. Through these tools, we are able to make teams more efficient when new members or clients join a project. These tools are flexible, allowing client teams to share documents, data, schedules, tasks and other important information through a single, web-based page.

Our team is considered a though leader in the innovation space and over the past few years have spoken at the following events:

  • Presenter, “NLP for Timecard Analysis,” Strategic Knowledge & Innovation Legal Leaders Summit (SKILLS) Conference, January 2022
  • Panelist, "Time and Tide: New and Evolving Job Roles in the Legal Profession," July 2020
  • Panelist, "Entrepreneurship and Innovation Leadership," University of Chicago Booth School of Business, March 2020
  • Guest Lecturer, "Law Practice Technology and Business Operations," University of Illinois College of Law, February 2020
  • Panelist, “Discerning AI Reality from Fiction: What Does the Advent of AI Hold for Professional Services Firms,” The Legal Executive Institute Augment Conference 2019, Chicago, June 6, 2019
  • Panelist, “Innovationville: How Law Firm Innovation Heads are Making an Impact,” P3 Conference, Chicago, June 13, 2019
  • Panelist, “Now to Next: Leaders of Future,” Summit on Legal Innovation and Disruption (SOLID), San Francisco, February 2019
  • Panelist, “Innovation: An Emerging Law Firm Function,” The Law Firm Innovation Summit, Boston, November 2018
  • Presenter, “Great Expectations — Balancing Priorities & Swatting Away Market Hype,” Janders Dean Horizons, London, May 2018
  • Speaker, Corporate Legal Innovators, London, May 2018

Key Contacts