About Kate Sills

Hi, my name is Kate Sills. I'm a software engineer, and I've worked at the intersection of law and computer science for most of my career.

I'm the founder of CitationClerk, a citation checker for legal briefs. CitationClerk is regular software, not AI.

I also worked for my local public defender's office, and I'm applying to law school in fall 2026.

Before CitationClerk, I worked for Starling Lab (Stanford Engineering and the USC Shoah Foundation) on how to authenticate digital records, including digital evidence. Since June 2022 I've also run a small consulting business, teaching object-capability programming and designing image verification and decentralized identity architecture. More on consulting here.

In 2018, I was the first hire at a startup called Agoric, founded by pioneers in computer security, distributed systems, and computational law, who authored pieces such as Computer Security as the Future of Law (1997), Capability-based Financial Instruments (2001), and The Digital Path (2003). At Agoric I built the smart contract framework layer, called Zoe. Zoe lets users design and create their own digital assets and exchange them securely in auctions, financial options, and decentralized exchanges. Unlike other smart contract platforms, Zoe manages the escrow of digital assets, so users can experiment with custom code written by others knowing that their assets are safe even if the custom code has a bug.

I've spoken at Dartmouth, Stanford, and in New York, London, San Francisco, and Australia about my work.

I studied cognitive science and computer science at UC Berkeley, graduating in 2012. Before any of that, I was a farm kid just north of Sacramento. In 2024, I edited and published a collection of short stories and poetry, including a few of my own stories alongside a number of local authors. In 2015 and 2016 I built a tiny house myself, learning construction from YouTube; it currently rests on my parents' organic farm. I'm an avid hiker and live in the mountains in Sonora, CA, near Yosemite, about two hours from the Bay Area.