Kirkland Brings 'Whole Institution' to Lateral Integration Process

Alli Brown, Kim Bueno and Kristen Fournier discussed Kirkland’s seamless lateral integration process and the role it played in their overall success with The American Lawyer. 

Kirkland & Ellis, known for its private equity prowess, has made waves this year in building its litigation department. Besides adding more than 140 lateral hires and at least 100 new associates in the department, it also hired high-profile partners Alli Brown from Skadden Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and Kristen Fournier and Kim Bueno from King & Spalding. These partners went on to notch major wins in bellwether cases for clients like Uber and Johnson & Johnson.

But even top talent needs to be set up for success. And at a time when staffing ratios are on the decline, automation is increasing, and firms are contending with the “free agency” era of lateral movement, where firm loyalty cannot be counted on, it’s becoming a larger business imperative for big firms to have a seamless integration process for laterals. That integration process is both for the administrative side and the practice side of transitioning client cases and relationships.

For their part, Brown, Bueno and Fournier pointed to personnel continuity, as well as the quick integration efforts of Kirkland’s nonlegal staff, as critical to their wins in their cases and overall success.

“Someone called and said, ‘I’m in charge of contacting all the courts you’re admitted to and getting your address updated and changed,’” Bueno recalled, speaking on the “seamless” process of what happened after she landed at Kirkland.

The Kirkland additions are also a case study of why scale is such a differentiator, and how firms continue to dial in on integration to gain an edge in a hypercompetitive environment.

“Kirkland was the sort of platform that had resources to support us the minute we arrived,” Fournier said in a recent interview, alongside Bueno and Brown. She added: “There’s a whole institution in place that can absorb big teams.”

Indeed, having the financial capacity to hire individual marquee lateral names but also large lateral groups who port over with them is crucial in the legal business now. Industry observers say even high-end laterals can take three to four months before they start becoming accretive at a new firm and that current partners have to essentially “front” that cost.

“So large-profit and large firms have an advantage. They can cover those talent costs more easily. That allows for bigger-ticket lateral hiring,” said Kristin Stark, a principal at consulting firm Fairfax Associates. But that goes for non-partners, as well.

“Let’s say you want to add counsel or senior associates. It’s just easier to make those investments and take that talent on when you’re spreading those costs across a larger number of timekeepers,” Stark added.

Roughly 30 lawyers came over with each of the two teams that came with Brown, Bueno and Fournier (Brown came over from Skadden in January; Fournier and Bueno joined from King & Spalding in May). “They’re critical to the work we do,” Fournier said about the lawyer teams who joined them. “They know our clients and know our cases. We didn’t drop in and have to wholesale create new teams.”

But it’s not just those legacy team members who are involved in their cases. Fournier said when it comes to the core engagements on that work, they have about 175 people working on them at any given time, at all seniority levels — associates, partners, paralegals and specialists. And, she added, the people who lateraled with the lead partners are integrating onto other teams, as well. “So it’s a huge operation that’s only growing, because we continue to add laterals pretty regularly.”

Other large firms, like Latham & Watkins, have also put significant stock in their lateral integration and retention process for partners and their teams. At Latham, for instance, the firm's integration elements include encouraging laterals to visit multiple offices and take calls with major clients on day one or before, as well as pairing laterals with designated mentors, Law.com reported earlier this year.

Neither firm, of course, is immune from departures. Kirkland, for instance, recently lost longtime restructuring partner Ryan Blaine Bennett to Willkie, Farr & Gallagher, and also recently saw a couple partner departures in investment funds in Houston and private equity in London.

‘No Red Tape’

Industry-wide, law firms have seen staff support shrink over the last decade. According to the most recent Thomson Reuters Staffing Ratio Survey, the number of support staff full-time equivalents for every one lawyer had decreased by about 14.7% between 2017 and 2023.

But Kirkland has grown enough on the staffing front that it hired its first-ever chief operating officer, Gary Levin, this summer. The firm has heads of HR, real estate, and technology, among other senior roles, firm chair Jon Ballis noted in an interview this summer.

He also said the nonlegal staff, which numbers more than 3,500, would benefit from more clarity, and that the firm had grown too big not to have someone dedicated to the task. “You need someone to be ultimately responsible for decisions on the staff side of the house, and it’s too hard for practicing lawyers to do on a day-to-day basis,” Ballis said at the time, speaking on the need to hire a chief operating officer.

The firm’s staffing organization has helped, Brown said, because all three litigation partners “came over with imminent deadlines.” They all had laptops shipped to them, and the laterals had employees dedicated to their billing and filing operations upon arrival, she said. “I think I arrived [at Kirkland] on a Tuesday, and I was in trial on Friday in Texas for Johnson & Johnson,” Brown, who is based in Philadelphia, added. “Not only did all of my documents arrive in Texas, other Kirkland partners were there waiting to assist.”

All three partners added that another valuable piece of operations that’s helped their practice is Kirkland’s ability to pull together data quickly. They said working on multidistrict litigation, in particular, there’s plenty of information they try to compile to understand the case and evaluate potential strategic options. There can be tens of thousands of filings that contain information on particular claims, particular plaintiffs’ firms, in particular jurisdictions, for instance.

At plenty of law firms, it’s tough to make the case to spend time building a database of all of that. “It takes 1,000 trips to the technology committee and 1,000 people asking, ‘Is it really worth it?’” Fournier said. When you’re the No. 1-ranked firm in the Am Law 100 revenue ranking, you have “the ability to be agile and creative and say ‘Yes’ in the first instance instead of ‘No, prove it to me,’” she added.

For Brown, she said she was impressed there was “no red tape” in her transition to Kirkland, noting “there is not a limitation in terms of your creativity when it comes to business development, when it comes to creating teams, technology, whatever it is you think is important to your practice in my experience is not only supported here, it is quickly implemented.”