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Growing up as the daughter of two lawyers, Lily Decatorsmith (HUM 4th Year) didn’t think a career in law was for her. In fact, she remembers her parents telling her that’s exactly what she shouldn’t do.

“I grew up with them telling me not to be a lawyer,” she says. “The only things I’d hear were, ‘Lily, you can be anything! Just don’t be a lawyer.’”

So how did Lily find herself in Illinois Tech’s honors law program, just a couple years away from earning her Juris Doctor? It all stems from her love for language, with a dash of ambition thrown in to feed her competitive nature.

It turns out that competitive writing suits her well.

Lily won the Edwin H. Lewis Prize for Nonfiction during the Department of Humanities’ 59th Annual Writing Contest for her research project using a natural language processor (NLP) to analyze detectable differences in defamation cases that were won compared against those that were lost.

In her analysis, she found that the cases containing more contingent phrases—phrases such as if, although, perhaps—were more likely to have won.

“That led me to believe that the winning cases were making more references to the opposing argument, which is what I found when I went through the briefs myself,” says Lily. “It was a really interesting project, something interesting you can do with NLP.”

Since then, she’s worked to expand her research to defamation cases over the past 10 years that were recorded in the PACER legal database. She hopes that the larger sample size will help her shed more light on what constitutes a winning argument.

Ideally, she plans on putting her writing and argumentative skills to work as an intellectual property attorney.

“I’m really looking forward to seeing how we’re going to copyright, trademark, and legislate around [artificial intelligence],” says Lily. “I feel like the legal field is very much going to be up in arms about where we’re going with AI. How do we copyright and trademark these different types of things that are now becoming a part of our daily lives?”

Lily is positive that she’ll be able to handle any curveballs the legal field will see when dealing with technology, such as AI, because of her confidence in living outside her comfort zone.

And she credits Illinois Tech’s Interprofessional Projects (IPRO) Program with helping her to expand her range. A tight course schedule meant that her first IPRO course was the XPRIZE Rainforest competition, which she originally didn’t believe was relevant to a career in law.

Lily was one of five Illinois Tech students to travel to Brazil in summer 2024 to compete in the competition’s finals.

“I didn’t quite know what I was doing, but I knew that this was the only one that fit into my schedule, and I needed two of these under my belt before I was able to apply to law school,” Lily says, adding: “We were in this global competition that was a really cool experience to have. It’s really been a defining moment in my career. I was able to work on the report and apply the writing skills I’m used to working with in a completely different way than I had thought about.”