Ugo’s Career Story

Kirkland’s culture revolves around two things: teamwork and the pursuit of excellence. At Kirkland, you’re trained on best practices and consistency, all for the purpose of working together to deliver the desired results for clients. Kirkland employs the best and brightest and is a top law firm for private equity firm clients. As an associate in the Investment Funds Practice Group, I’m proud to help add to and maintain that prestige.

The partners I’ve worked with here have been great mentors to me. I’ve been fortunate to work with people who have given me a chance to work on substantive matters at an early stage in my career, while offering guidance along the way.

As a third-year associate, I was working on a fundraise for a large private equity sponsor. We were about a third of the way through when the client let us know they made an investment in the fund that had quickly, somewhat unexpectedly, become a huge winner for them. For certain business reasons, they would need to close around $1 billion in capital commitments into the fund by the following Tuesday, a hard deadline. We faced several major obstacles before that deadline, including needing to draft, negotiate and finalize nearly 50 side letter agreements.

I view this as a turning point in my career because not only did we close the funding round on the client’s requested timeline and on good terms, but I also stepped up and led more substantive workstreams. This was my first opportunity to negotiate material agreements on my own and in an extremely high-pressure situation. It was an incredibly rewarding experience for me.

I’ve grown immensely as an attorney at Kirkland. I started here as a summer associate who knew little about the practice of law, let alone the transactional practice. Today, I feel confident in my skills as a legal and strategic advisor, contract drafter and negotiator, and I’m energized by the prospects of becoming even more experienced in these areas as my career continues to progress.

I am a purpose-driven individual who thrives on accomplishing goals in high-pressure situations, and Kirkland has given me ample opportunities to test my skills at the highest level early on in my career.