Master of Science
in Information Systems

Northwestern's Master of Science in Information Systems develops the technical depth and organizational leadership capabilities demanded of enterprise technology leaders. The curriculum combines rigorous software development, data systems architecture, and enterprise strategy — preparing graduates to drive meaningful change at the intersection of technology and business. The program is designed for working professionals, and every course in this degree was completed while actively practicing law and deploying AI systems inside some of the world's largest law firms.

This specialization addresses enterprise demands at the full data infrastructure stack — from the design and administration of relational and NoSQL databases to distributed application architecture, web systems development, and applied machine learning. The curriculum is built around real-world application: translating technical decisions into measurable business outcomes. For a practicing attorney building AI systems in AmLaw 100 firms, this specialization provided the infrastructure fluency to do more than advocate for Legal AI — to architect it.

Ethically Implementing Generative Artificial Intelligence in Prosecution · Advisor: Sunil Kakade · June 2025

This thesis examines how prosecutors' offices can implement generative AI in an ethically sound and economically feasible way — with a focus on one of the most routine yet consequential tasks in criminal practice: the prosecutorial summary.

Using actual police reports obtained through a protective order with the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department, the research applied iterative prompt engineering techniques to generate AI-drafted case summaries, which were then evaluated and rated by six practicing prosecutors across dimensions of accuracy, completeness, and legal utility.

BigLaw's next generation of AI and innovation leadership will not be filled by technologists who learned to read a brief — it will be filled by lawyers who learned to build systems. Completing the MSIS while actively deploying AI at Cleary Gottlieb, McGuireWoods, and LexisNexis was a deliberate choice: technical credibility and legal expertise are not competing qualifications, they are compounding ones. This degree provided the database architecture intuition, the engineering vocabulary, and the machine learning foundation to hold a peer-level conversation with any CTO — while understanding precisely what that deployment means for legal risk, governance, and institutional accountability.