Jon Ballis, Chairman of the Executive Committee at Kirkland & Ellis, discusses the law firm's cross-partisan composition across successive US presidential administrations.
Insight
Ballis: Kirkland scaled private equity by hiring lateral partners over slow internal promotion
“Some of the great law firms in the space stuck to a more traditional model, and what I mean by that is you recruit people from law school, you train them up, and they decide to stay, and their skill sets fit, and they, 1015 years later, are partnered. But we s…”
Disclosure
Kirkland cycles out PE partners in their fifties to recycle equity
“Ensuring that our younger superstars are compensated properly, the way to do that is we don't have a lot of people in their sixties, let alone seventies, stay around our firm, particularly on the private equity side.
Litigation can be a little different, but c…”
Disclosure
Kirkland avoids political issues due to asymmetrical downside with clients and staff
“We decided that it was best to stay apolitical, stay neutral on highly politically charged topics, which, by the way, happened not to be the core of what we do. That's not what we do as a business. We decided it's asymmetrical downside, because if you get invo…”
Disclosure
Ballis: Kirkland has 25 dedicated non-client-facing partners
“We now have 25 partners whose sole job is to make the revenue generating partners better. Those 25 partners are not client facing. They facilitate revenue generating. They're just not client facing. They make all of our jobs easier. They create best of class f…”
Opinion
Ballis: Regulating institutional private equity contracts is inefficient
“With institutions that hire law firms like Kirkland and Ellis and large financial advisors, does a large sovereign wealth fund need ultra protection to negotiate against a private equity institution? They know what they're doing, and they can hire people to un…”
Assertion Supported
Kirkland & Ellis reached $6B in revenue and $3.5B in profit
“I think in the last decade, we've tripled our revenue, grown from a thousand lawyers to now almost 3000. We have 19 offices across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Technically, it's six billion dollars of revenue, three and a half billion dollars of distri…”