Katherine Starr September 29, 2025
Katherine Starr is a two-time Olympian and the legal theorist behind the concept of negligent digital architecture — a new legal lens for identifying how platform structures themselves enable exploitation. Her work defines how system logic, design defaults, and embedded trust mechanisms create harm pathways long before user interaction or content violations occur.
With early-career roots in Silicon Valley at Netscape, AOL, and Sun Microsystems, Katherine brings a rare synthesis of technical insight and legal foresight. She translates architectural decisions — the unseen coding of power and access — into admissible analysis for litigation and systemic accountability.
Her frameworks have reshaped how legal teams and institutions evaluate digital harm: not as isolated user failures, but as foreseeable outcomes of engineered systems. Katherine is setting the standard for how structural negligence is defined, named, and litigated in the digital age.
As digital systems shape behavior at scale, I evaluate whether a platform’s structure, policies, and design decisions create conditions in which harm is foreseeable.
Katherine assesses platform architecture, interface logic, and system defaults to expose how design choices create pathways to harm. She supports litigation with design-based liability analysis and structural causation.
Katherine evaluates whether platforms failed to implement structural safeguards, such as escalation protocols or informed user pathways. Her findings help expose where exploitation is embedded in the system not just in its users
As the theorist behind Negligent Digital Architecture™, Katherine provides expert frameworks that translate technical design into legal logic. Her work supports admissibility and systemic accountability arguments.
Katherine offers deposition and trial support for cases involving systemic design flaws. Her testimony reframes intent-based defenses by emphasizing architectural negligence and system-enabled risk.
Katherine originated the legal framework for evaluating architectural risk in digital platforms. Her work defines how design decisions, defaults, and interface structure can create foreseeable harm.
She translates intricate design systems into clear, expert opinion for litigation and policy. Katherine helps legal teams argue causation and foreseeability rooted in design not user behavior alone.
With roots in tech and legal reform, Katherine bridges the gap between platform infrastructure and legal strategy. She identifies how policy, UX design, and operational logic expose platforms to institutional liability.
Her perspective strengthens cases involving school systems, dating apps, and tech platforms by reframing digital harm as the result of system design not isolated intent or content.
Examining how user interface structure and default workflows systematically enable exploitation without user awareness. Katherine identifies how harm patterns are encoded through repetition and design.
Developing standards for foreseeability based on platform structure, risk exposure logic, and interaction models. Supports legal arguments that harm was not accidental—it was built in.
Evaluating entire systems (not single decisions) to demonstrate how harm results from orchestrated platform architecture. Positions digital harm as an institutional failure, not a policy gap.
Identifying where internal policies embedded in UX or code bypassed safety, consent, or escalation. Provides expert grounding for arguing negligence baked into platform operations.
Need expert insight on platform-based negligence, structural liability in digital systems, or emerging legal frameworks for online harm?
Use the form below to share your inquiry. I specialize in matters involving negligent digital access, structural and policy design failures, and the intersection of law, technology, and foreseeability. Whether your focus is platform risk, institutional accountability, or broader digital governance, I assess each request for strategic alignment and legal significance.
My role is to support law firms, investigative teams, and select media professionals in framing platform design and access decisions as legal liability — translating system-level choices into admissible legal logic. If your inquiry fits within my docket, I’ll respond directly or through my team.
For time-sensitive matters, including active litigation or urgent investigative timelines, please include relevant context and documentation to expedite review.
