K&L Gates

Global Managing Partner: James R. Segerdahl

Chairman of the Management Committee, Lead Practice Area Leader – Asset Management and Investment Funds: Michael S. Caccese

K&L Gates Offices

Austin, Beijing, Berlin, Boston, Brisbane, Brussels, Charleston, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Doha, Dubai, Dublin, Fort Worth, Frankfurt, Harrisburg, Hong Kong, Houston, Kansas City, London, Los Angeles, Luxembourg, Melbourne, Miami, Milan, Munich, Nashville, Newark, New York, Orange County, Palo Alto, Paris, Perth, Pittsburgh, Portland, Raleigh, Research Triangle Park, San Francisco, São Paulo, Seattle, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney, Taipei, Tokyo, Washington, D.C., and Wilmington.

Firm Overview

K&L Gates is a global law firm with lawyers located across five continents. The firm comprises a fully integrated network of lawyers and legal professionals who believe that clients need more than technical legal skills; they need insightful and practical advice on the diverse issues that affect their businesses, delivered with unparalleled client service. K&L Gates’ combination of practice strength, global platform, and unwavering commitment to client service is its true differentiator in the legal services marketplace. The firm takes a client-first approach to delivering legal solutions, thinking beyond its internal structure and constantly examining the broader industry, regulatory, and economic issues. Lawyers identify potential issues based on deep industry knowledge and alert clients to what they may face in the future.

K&L Gates represents a broad array of clients in every major industry, including consumer goods and services, energy, financial services, healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing, technology, and transportation and logistics. Beyond unsurpassed service and universal experience, K&L Gates has one of the largest contingents of lawyers and offices across the United States of any law firm, with over 20 offices nationwide. The firm’s extensive network includes more than 300 legal professionals in Europe’s largest economies, and it is one of the largest fully integrated US law firms in the Asia-Pacific region, with approximately 500 legal professionals.

Main Areas of Practice

Asset Management and Investment Funds

The firm represents a broad cross-section of clients, including both financial service providers—such as broker-dealers, investment advisers, banks and trust companies, and insurance companies—as well as investment vehicles and other institutional investors, such as open- and closed-end registered investment companies (and their independent directors), exchange-traded funds, hedge funds (onshore and offshore), retirement plans (ERISA and governmental plans), and collective investment funds sponsored by banks and trust companies. The firm also has a diverse national and international bankruptcy and insolvency practice that serves a broad range of clients on both the debtor and creditor sides.

Corporate

K&L Gates’ Corporate practice is global, integrated, and one of the most substantial in the legal industry, delivering full-service corporate counsel to facilitate the structuring, financing, and successful completion of domestic, international, and cross-border transactions—including mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, joint ventures, recapitalizations, and public and private debt and equity offerings—across multiple industries. K&L Gates is the firm of choice for clients in the mid-market on both sides of transactions, representing an array of Global 500, Fortune 100, and FTSE 100 corporations; privately held and venture-backed companies; partnerships; private equity firms; and other investment funds, management groups, and entrepreneurs.

Energy, Infrastructure, and Resources

K&L Gates leverages experience from a wide variety of legal disciplines to serve clients in the global energy, renewables, infrastructure, and resources sectors, including climate change and carbon finance. The firm advises on the financing, development, permitting, and construction needed to build large infrastructure; the operational issues of power generation and resource extraction activities; joint ventures; capital markets transactions and mergers and acquisitions of infrastructure and resource companies; and litigation and arbitration related to business activities of clients in this industry.

Finance

Encompassing the core practice groups of banking and asset finance, debt capital markets, and restructuring and insolvency—and with lawyers located in key financial centers around the world—K&L Gates’ Finance practice is well positioned to assist lenders and borrowers in achieving their financing objectives, mitigating transaction risks, and complying with regulations. Areas of practice include structured finance, securitizations, derivatives, structured products, real estate finance, marketplace lending, and municipal finance, as well as mezzanine, leveraged, and acquisition finance.

Intellectual Property

K&L Gates advises prominent global companies, helping to develop and protect their intellectual property assets worldwide and handling complex, high-stakes litigation in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. More than 200 lawyers and 100 USPTO-registered professionals devote their practices to protecting and commercializing intellectual property assets in the form of patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. Patent lawyers, many with PhDs, handle cases involving biotechnology innovations, hospital equipment, medical devices, computer networking equipment, and sports equipment, among others.

Labor, Employment, and Workplace Safety

Lawyers in the Labor, Employment, and Workplace Safety practice advise domestic and international clients on a wide array of employment matters, including personnel management and statutory compliance, employment litigation defense, business transactions, immigration issues, and wage and hour disputes, among others. K&L Gates’ full-service Global Employer Solutions® offering draws on the experience of this team—as well as its employee benefits, executive compensation, taxation, immigration, and investigations teams—to help global clients navigate the full spectrum of workplace risk.

Litigation and Dispute Resolution

The Litigation and Dispute Resolution practice includes international arbitrations, civil and criminal trials, class actions, multidistrict and multinational litigations, and appellate work. It has litigated and arbitrated major cases in almost every industry and market sector. The highly regarded litigators in this practice have resolved disputes in the most nuanced and complex areas, including commercial contracts, construction law, product liability, employment, toxic tort, antitrust and trade regulation, and securities enforcement. The firm helps clients to resolve conflicts through arbitration, mediation, or other alternative dispute resolution methods and handles arbitrations under all the major institutional rules.

Policy and Regulatory

K&L Gates’ Policy and Regulatory practice counsels companies on matters involving antitrust and competition, education, environmental law, financial services, food and drug matters, government enforcement, government contracts, healthcare, international trade, telecommunications, and public policy, as well as corporate compliance, internal investigations, and white collar crime. The firm’s regulatory lawyers, many with governmental backgrounds or experience in regulated industries, advise through the regulatory processes at all jurisdictional levels. K&L Gates consistently ranks among the nation’s most influential law firms in lobbying and government policy work.

Real Estate

The K&L Gates Real Estate practice is one of the largest, most diversified real estate practices of any global law firm, with extensive experience in handling large and complex real estate transactions spanning multiple jurisdictions in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and key markets in the Asia-Pacific region. Lawyers in this practice advise clients on real estate needs related to land use, planning and zoning, development and construction, acquisitions, dispositions, financing and leasing, tax advice, joint venture structuring, and real estate-related litigation.