Last month I had a chance to sit down with Pete Kalis, Chairman and Global Managing Partner of K&L Gates, for nearly two hours—and don’t think for a moment that we even scratched the surface of all we wanted to discuss. The pretext for our meeting was the January 1st formal closing of the merger of K&LNG with Preston Gates & Ellis, but our conversation ranged far beyond that.
If you don’t know Pete, he comes from the same West Virginia roots as Ralph Baxter of Orrick and Greg Jordan of Reed Smith; there must be something in the water. After getting his BA at West Virginia University, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and he pursued that laid-back and unambitious course with a JD at Yale Law, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal. Continuing on the same elevated plane, he clerked for the late J. Skelly Wright of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, followed by clerking for the late Associate Justice Byron White on the Supreme Court.
What did we talk about? Globalization and consolidation, the war for talent, the difficulty of cracking the New York market, and the challenges of managing a global law firm in the 21st Century. For starters.
That said, Pete is as self-deprecating and engaging as they come—until he off-handedly drops a perfectly chiseled insight into the topic at hand with such casualness that you need a moment to comprehend the distilled truth that’s just been revealed.
Suffice to say, the meeting was far too rewarding not to write up: So you, Dear Reader, get to be the ex post fly on the wall and read all about it.
Lest you doubt whether it’s interesting, early on in our conversation Pete floated this thought experiment:
Q: How will we know when law firms have truly evolved to the corporate model?
A: When they look outside their own four walls for a firm chair.
But as they say, just go read the whole thing.
