YouSaid · the spoken record

Jon Ballis

lines on the record: 60
first: 2022-10-24
most recent: 2022-10-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“One of the reasons I really enjoyed private equity more than you might say representing the Fortune 500. Because when you represent the Fortune 500, your clients are lawyers. When you represent private equity teams, your clients are investment professionals. Oftentimes very young investment professionals, and they're looking for you to make the call. Tell me what I should do. That is a different way of practicing law. So we try to attract people that are willing to do that. You have to retain them. How do you retain great talent? You have to give them responsibility and opportunities, and you have to pay them compensation. That's just a reality of the world. If you don't give your highest performers opportunities and responsibility, you're going to lose them. And those are your playmakers. Those are the people that move the needle. If you don't give them those opportunities, they're going to go somewhere else to find them.”
2022-10-24 · Capital Allocators · Jon Ballis – In the Room Where Private Equity Happens at Kirkland & Ellis (Capital Allocators, EP.277) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not tremendously, at the end of the day law firms are a talent driven business. It's like a sports team in many ways. So while not a certainty, usually the best players in the field win. They certainly have a really big advantage if they're the more talented group. So be a successful law firm, and I imagine other professional service firms got to attract talent, got to be able to retain the talent, and you got to get the most out of your talent. We try to attract people that fit what we do. The private equity side of things, you have incredibly smart people, incredibly motivated people, incredibly hardworking people, people that are willing to make a call. I don't say take risk. That may be not the right way to say it, but they're willing to make a call and go with it. And that isn't always lawyers' mindsets. Lawyers' mindsets are often, well, I'll just give you the advice. It's your decision to make.”
2022-10-24 · Capital Allocators · Jon Ballis – In the Room Where Private Equity Happens at Kirkland & Ellis (Capital Allocators, EP.277) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So typically I'd conceive of the professional services model of a law firm as that pyramid structure, people to work their way up to partner and then you have different layers below them. You see that in management consulting and a bunch of different fields. How does the model change when you're making more and more lateral hires to address these opportunities?”
2022-10-24 · Capital Allocators · Jon Ballis – In the Room Where Private Equity Happens at Kirkland & Ellis (Capital Allocators, EP.277) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not like we decided let's put more and more in this basket and see if we can do better. The speedboat was going faster and faster, stupid in metaphor analogy. We just decided we needed bigger water skis because the boat was going faster. It wasn't like we'd said, oh, if we get bigger skis, the boat will go faster. No, no, no. It was going. We decided to stick with it. And again, to do that, we had to do things that were a little unconventional for the legal industry. The biggest one is going out and hiring a lot of lateral talents, more senior talent, because if we didn't, there was no way we could keep up. We would lose market share with our own clients probably and certainly lose market opportunities. In today's world, many law firms are doing that, but for a long time they had decided, again, to stick with more traditional draft choice model.”
2022-10-24 · Capital Allocators · Jon Ballis – In the Room Where Private Equity Happens at Kirkland & Ellis (Capital Allocators, EP.277) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a little bit of what's going on today. There are tailwinds that are really hard to replicate in anything else we see out there. It's become a fixture of our economy, a capital allocation, and in its maturity, it's not slowing down. It's doing more and more different things. You see more and more capital being allocated to it, and you see more and more opportunities that the private capital community is getting into. So when we stand back and look, all of our business has grown very nicely over the last couple of decades, but nothing compares to the private capital for us. When I got to Kirkland, I bet private capital was 40%, and now it's 65%, sixty-six percent. Part of it is because we invested heavily in it, but part of it is just because it's grown just so much faster. What we decided to do was lean into the growth of the private capital space.”
2022-10-24 · Capital Allocators · Jon Ballis – In the Room Where Private Equity Happens at Kirkland & Ellis (Capital Allocators, EP.277) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capital clients care about quality more than anything else. Quality, getting it done on time, and then cost. Of course, everyone cares what things cost, but they care more about the service component than anything else, and because they are so smart and hardworking themselves, they want to see that on the other side of the line. So it's a tremendous business for a service provider, at least the way we operate, which is people will pay if you deliver an outstanding product. Sometimes can be a hard job to be on the other side of that. And while I love the private equity community, it's why I gravitated towards it. I think the most interesting clients in the world, you won't be surprised to hear not always the easiest clients in the world. They can be quite demanding themselves, but it's a great business. And the leaders of Kirkland in the 70s and the 80s realize what a tremendous business it was because of these factors. Fast forward,”
2022-10-24 · Capital Allocators · Jon Ballis – In the Room Where Private Equity Happens at Kirkland & Ellis (Capital Allocators, EP.277) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kirkland and Ellis fell into private equity in the early to mid nineteen seventies. It came out of the first National Bank of Chicago, which now is part of the JP Morgan Chase world. But First National Bank of Chicago had this risk equity department, and it was led by people who eventually went on to form Golder Toma, which is now GTCR and Toma Bravo and Cresse, and Madison Dearborn Partners. That unit called over to Kirkland and said, need someone to help do this deal? The legend has it. It was a $250,000 investment in the early 70s. Kirkland was smart enough to realize how lucky they were. They capitalized on the luck and the opportunity. Why is private equity such a great business for service providers? And by the way, this is way back before the tremendous growth of the industry in the 90s, 2000s, and let alone what we're seeing today.”
2022-10-24 · Capital Allocators · Jon Ballis – In the Room Where Private Equity Happens at Kirkland & Ellis (Capital Allocators, EP.277) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recruit people from law school, you train them up, and they decide to stay and their skill sets fit and they tend, 15 years later a partner. But we saw this big market opportunity where the private equity industry was growing by leaps and bounds. And candidly, much faster, as the saying goes, than our lawyers were aging. The only way that we could capture those market opportunities was to go out into the laddwell market, free agency, so to speak. We did our draft. Kids out of law school, that's sort of your draft, but we decided to go into the free agency market. In 2005, I was one of the early acquisitions, you might say. And the reason that we have continued to do that is that we see more and more opportunity, and our lawyers aren't aging quick enough. So we go out and we grab talent to take care of those market opportunities.”
2022-10-24 · Capital Allocators · Jon Ballis – In the Room Where Private Equity Happens at Kirkland & Ellis (Capital Allocators, EP.277) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So, yes, we have grown quite a bit. I think in the last decade, we've tripled our revenue, grown from a thousand lawyers to now almost three thousand. We have 19 offices across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Technically, it's $6 billion of revenue, three and a half billion dollars of distributable profit. We are the largest law firm in the world, if you want to measure it that way. Private equity is about two-thirds of our business today. The rest is high-end litigation. That's about a quarter of our business, restructuring is the remaining, although restructuring bounces between more or less than more depending on the cycle that we're in. There wasn't an intent to grow, but we saw market opportunity, particularly in the alternative capital private equity space, and we decided to capture that opportunity. Some of the great law firms in the space stuck to a more traditional model. And what I mean by that is...”
2022-10-24 · Capital Allocators · Jon Ballis – In the Room Where Private Equity Happens at Kirkland & Ellis (Capital Allocators, EP.277) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guy named J Commun Even though I wasn't representing him, we started hit it off on that deal. And then I started working with him on all his deals. And through that and the network, I woke up 10 years later and I had this practice. And I had a great run at Sidley. It's a great place. I made partner there. But I quickly realized if I really wanted to do this for a living and the private equity stuff fit my personality and skill set much better than traditional big law work, then I needed to go to a place whose core competency was private equity, and then I made the move to Kirkland after eleven years in two thousand five.”
2022-10-24 · Capital Allocators · Jon Ballis – In the Room Where Private Equity Happens at Kirkland & Ellis (Capital Allocators, EP.277) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source