Jon Ballis, Chairman of the Executive Committee at Kirkland & Ellis, explains how the law firm structures partner career lifecycles to promote and retain rising talent.
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“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 certainly in the private equity, private capital side.
That's fairly atypical for law firms, but we think it is the only way to recycle those opportunities and the related compensation
To the younger people coming up.”
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