Kirkland & Ellis

Overview

Kirkland & Ellis is the first law firm in history to make $10 billion in a year — and it got there by turning the traditional law firm into something closer to a sports franchise. The Chicago-founded firm, whose origins trace to 1909, has industrialised the premium end of the legal market: it poaches star partners from rivals, promotes associates to a salaried-partner tier far earlier than its peers, and then runs those new partners through an up-or-out tournament that many do not survive (Hindustan Times; The Lawyer). In 2025 it posted about $10.6 billion in revenue — an industry record, more than double what it made in 2020 — and paid its 595 equity partners an average of $11 million each, the first firm ever to reach eight figures in average partner profits (Bloomberg Law). Rivals have a word for what is happening to their industry: “Kirklandisation” — the process of every other firm being forced to become more like Kirkland (Hindustan Times).

The machine: leverage, laterals, and up-or-out

The economics of the $10 billion figure are worth understanding, because the mechanism is the story. Kirkland is known as one of the most highly leveraged firms in the country — a small equity-partner group atop a much larger salaried workforce (Top-Law-Schools.com). The 2025 numbers show it: 595 equity partners against a 1,228-strong salaried lawyer tier and more than 4,000 lawyers in total (Bloomberg Law). Those salaried partners, unlike equity partners, hold no ownership stake — a structural advantage the firm shares with almost no rival of its vintage (Hindustan Times). The direction is one-way: in a single year the salaried tier jumped 11% while equity partners rose only nearly 4% (Bloomberg Law).

The firm grows the top line by buying talent rather than breeding it slowly. It is one of Big Law’s most aggressive lateral hirers — The Lawyer credits its lateral-market success, including poaching Freshfields private-equity heavyweight David Higgins at the end of 2017 to become London co-managing partner, as a driver of its rise (The Lawyer). The traffic runs both ways: in 2016 the firm lost two big partner groups in London and Munich to rival Sidley Austin (The Lawyer). And the internal tournament is brutal by design: associates are typically made up to salaried partner level at around 6PQE — much earlier than most peers — but then have only a few more years to make equity or ship out, and many end up leaving (The Lawyer). The firm’s culture has powered its success and is not for everyone: in The Lawyer’s own 2017 poll, Kirkland overwhelmingly emerged as the firm London law students and associates would least like to join (The Lawyer).

What funds all of this is the private-equity business. The firm’s rise rests on two advantages over the last upstart that tried this playbook — the 1980s poaching machine Finley Kumble, which collapsed in 1988: Kirkland’s dominance of the lucrative business of advising private-equity titans, and its salaried-partner tier with no ownership stake (Hindustan Times). Blackstone alone paid the firm roughly $88 million in a single year (Bloomberg Law). Its litigation practice, grown into a $3 billion-plus segment focused on mass torts work requiring large teams, is the other pillar (Bloomberg Law). Notably, all of this was achieved as an outsider: from day one, the Chicago-founded firm positioned itself apart from the world’s biggest legal market, and ask any New York corporate partner — the only non-Manhattan firms that have managed to crack that city are Kirkland and arch-rival Latham & Watkins (The Lawyer).

From defending the press to suing it

The irony at the heart of Kirkland’s history is that this most corporate of firms began as a newspaper lawyer’s shop — and its free-speech legacy produced the defamation litigators who would later make their name suing publishers. The firm was founded in 1909 by Robert R. McCormick, the Northwestern graduate and military officer who would become publisher of the Chicago Tribune; McCormick eventually left the firm to run the paper, leaving it to Weymouth Kirkland and Howard Ellis (Top-Law-Schools.com). Beginning with its representation of the Tribune, Kirkland carved out a legacy in early free-speech and libel cases, and litigation remained its heart even as the practice expanded (Top-Law-Schools.com).

The landmark of that era bears a Kirkland name. Weymouth Kirkland argued Near v. Minnesota for the publisher Jay Near and The Saturday Press, telling the Supreme Court that Minnesota’s “gag law” — which let judges block publications deemed a public nuisance — silenced the press in advance of publication (ThoughtCo). On 1 June 1931 the Court agreed 5-4, holding that prior restraint on publication violates the First Amendment as applied to the states — the first great press case, and the foundation for New York Times Co. v. United States four decades later (ThoughtCo).

A century later, two Kirkland partners walked out and built the mirror image. In 2014, Thomas Clare and his wife Elizabeth “Libby” Locke — both Kirkland & Ellis partners — founded the defamation boutique Clare Locke in Alexandria, Virginia, remaining its only equity partners (Bloomberg Law). Their firm became co-counsel to Dominion Voting Systems in the case that produced the landmark $787.5 million defamation settlement from Fox News in 2023, and had earlier won a $3 million jury verdict against Rolling Stone (Bloomberg Law). Kirkland’s own pipeline keeps feeding the boutique: two of Clare Locke’s departing partners, Megan Meier and Andrew Phillips, were former Kirkland associates, as was the partner who stayed, Joseph Oliveri (Bloomberg Law). The firm that argued the press’s right to publish trained the lawyers who extracted three-quarters of a billion dollars from a publisher.

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state Kirkland’s current office count: figures ranged from 13 to 23 across sources, and no fully-read source gave a current number, so only the offices The Lawyer verified (London, Munich, Hong Kong, Shanghai) are named. It does not name the firm’s current chairman or list claimed notable alumni, both reported only in snippets not read in full. It does not state precise current M&A league-table positions, which appeared only in snippets. It does not repeat the widely cited $125 million pro bono figure for the 2025 Trump-administration deal — reported only in snippets — stating only what Bloomberg Law verified: that Kirkland was among the nine major firms that struck deals to avoid a possible executive order. The founding narrative relies on a 2011 tier3 source for historical detail, corroborated where possible by tier2 sources; anything that source alone asserted about the firm’s modern finances or rankings is not used.