Non-originating tax lawyers are among Kirkland's highest-paid partners due to deal expertise
Jon Ballis · Jon Ballis – In the Room Where Private Equity Happens at Kirkland & Ellis (Capital Allocators, EP.277) · Oct 24, 2022 · at 21:52
Jon Ballis, Chairman of Kirkland & Ellis, explains that merit-based compensation rewards critical execution specialists, not just deal originators.
0:00 / 0:11exact quote · 11.5s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We have tax people, who in a traditional sense, you might say, generate no business. They help on deals, but they're some of our highest paid people. Why? Because we can't do what we do without their skill set.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Jon Ballis
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”