Aaron Katzel is an award-winning legal innovator, advisor and chief operating officer, who has  been helping companies solve their most vexing legal and operational challenges for over twenty years.  Since 2017, he’s served as a trusted partner to businesses and law firms seeking to navigate the changing legal marketplace as the founder and CEO of The Better Legal Infrastructure Project LLC.  In this capacity, Aaron helps clients identify and pursue opportunities to obtain better outcomes and value in their use and delivery of legal services.  By leveraging his deep understanding of the legal marketplace, and his expertise in legal procurement, data and analytics, IT systems, and alternative legal delivery models, Aaron has designed and led initiatives that saved clients more than $1 billion while maintaining or improving legal outcomes.

Aaron began his career as a transactional lawyer, practicing for ten years in New York, Frankfurt and Paris before joining international insurer AIG in 2006 as a divisional Deputy General Counsel.  In 2011, Aaron had the opportunity to join the growing legal operations field, when he was promoted to serve as the company’s Head of Legal Operations.  Between 2011 and 2017, Aaron developed and led one of the industry’s most recognized and innovative legal operations teams, consisting of more than eighty professionals responsible for managing the procurement of more than $2 billion in annual legal services, as well as the IT systems, data, analytics, and transformation programs used by the company’s legal and claims litigation management groups.  In that role, Aaron and his team pioneered award-winning strategies that deployed highly automated, data-driven, market-based tools to price legal services at scale.  They also created the industry’s first real-time, national, self-service legal analytics platform, automated over 100 separate legal processes, and managed the largest legal e-billing implementation ever completed.

Aaron lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Jacquie, the Assistant General Counsel and Deputy Corporate Secretary at PayPal, and their two sons.