Our Value Proposition
Our Global Platform • Our Approach to Client Relationships • Our Value-Added Services • Our Commitment to Diversity • Our Experience as Preferred Legal Counsel
In today's 24-hour global marketplace, your ability to tackle legal challenges quickly, in locations both far and near, is crucial.
At K&L Gates, we understand that a law firm with the resources to counsel on a variety of issues around the world can help you gain two valued assets: time and peace of mind. By working with one firm as preferred legal counsel, you have a cost-effective partner that knows your business, your industry, your strengths, and your challenges.
Through our experience as preferred legal counsel for companies such as DuPont, United Technologies, and Philips, we are strongly positioned to serve as an effective and comprehensive service provider. We offer a broad global platform, ensuring that we can meet our clients' legal needs no matter the issue or location. As a matter of course, we collaborate with clients, using standard tools and systems to build a successful legal team.
Drawing on our worldwide resources and seamless service capabilities, we deliver value to our clients through efficient and effective representations.
Our Global Platform
K&L Gates is positioned at strategic intersections of the global economy, with strong local presence in key capital cities and world commercial and financial centers. Our more than 1,800 lawyers across 35 offices and dozens of significant practice areas create a worldwide network to serve our clients' growing international needs. This global presence enables clients to mobilize their outside legal team quickly in response to diverse legal issues around the globe through the services of one law firm, with one phone call.
In the United States, we have coast-to-coast coverage with East Coast offices from Boston to Miami, including New York, Newark, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Washington, D.C., Charlotte, Raleigh, and Research Triangle Park; West Coast offices from Anchorage to San Diego, with lawyers also based in Los Angeles, Orange County, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Portland, Seattle, and Spokane; and offices in major cities in between, including Chicago, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Austin. Our Asia presence includes Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, Singapore, and Tokyo, while in Europe we are located in London, Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Moscow. We operate out of the Middle East from our office in Dubai.
Our Approach to Client Relationships
Successful preferred provider relationships require the active involvement of both parties. We approach client relationships with a one-company, one-team mentality, consistently seeking proactive ways to add value to our client work. We constantly strive to listen to and strengthen our relationships with our clients so we can continue to be responsive to their business needs domestically and abroad. Thanks to this philosophy, in 2010 the BTI Consulting Group named K&L Gates one of the top 30 law firms in client service as compared with more than 500 other leading firms. The firm is also the first and only law firm to receive PPG Industries' Excellent Supplier Award.
Client Teams
Client teams serve as our mechanism to manage large clients across the firm, without added cost to the client. While we have supported informal client teams for decades, K&L Gates has invested in developing and sustaining a formal client team initiative that is devoted to providing even greater service to our clients. This initiative places a high level of emphasis on understanding the ongoing needs of our clients through the consistent analysis of information about clients, their industries, and current socioeconomic trends in the marketplace.
Client teams comprise lawyers in multiple offices and practices across the firm, and are not limited only to those lawyers that currently work for a client. In this way, the firm can share thoughts and ideas related to the business of a client, without focusing only on those areas that we currently serve. At no additional expense to the client, team members actively collaborate on ways the firm can add value to the client relationship, whether that is creating an in-house CLE program, developing an alert/white paper on a critical legal topic, or conducting a face-to-face client feedback interview to learn more about the key issues the client considers most relevant.
Clients also benefit from the substantial investment in technology K&L Gates has made over the years. Teams have developed client extranets and enhanced internal communications through the use of intranets, customer relationship management tools, and news alert systems to track information and cases related to our clients.
Staffing
As a global law firm with more than 1,800 lawyers located in 35 offices in North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, our seamless cross-office capabilities ensure that K&L Gates staffs its client engagements with the most experienced and cost-effective personnel regardless of location.
Our ability to match resources to a particular matter's demands, neither over- nor under-staffing any project, is key to successful engagements. As a result, work often is performed, in coordination with inside counsel, by K&L Gates lawyers from across our network of offices. A core cross-disciplinary team, consisting of a relationship manager and supervising partners from each applicable practice area, works closely with in-house counsel to understand business needs and objectives and to provide ongoing performance monitoring.
Technology
Continuous investment in the use of technology is crucial to keeping pace with our clients' requirements for enhanced communication and service delivery. Consequently, our systems and processes are state-of-the-art and fully tested for efficiency, reliability, and practicality.
Our sophisticated extranet allows clients to view and share documents with their K&L Gates client team. Created to provide real-time access to information and materials related to legal matters in progress, our extranet is a password-protected, client-specific portal that contains a calendar of events, document and image libraries, matter-related contacts, and billing history. The platform is highly customizable and can be adapted to the particular needs of a client or case.
In recognition of our technological innovations, CIO magazine awarded the firm its annual CIO Award four times and presented the firm with its CIO 100 Plus One Award in 2007. In 2009, K&L Gates was named among the top 250 companies in the InformationWeek 500, an annual listing of the United States' most innovative users of business technology. The firm was one of only three law firms ranked.
Accountability
We recognize that our clients are in the best position to define satisfaction, to set priorities on service issues, and to evaluate our performance in those areas. To that end, we conduct regular appraisals and monitor all of our professionals to ensure that our performance continues to satisfy our clients' requirements and that we provide consistent, measurable, first-class service throughout our relationship. We use the information gained from these appraisals as benchmarks for future improvement. We also use these periodic reviews to explore additional opportunities to increase value and reduce costs.
On a per-matter basis, accountability to get the job done rests with a single lawyer or a small group of lawyers approved by the client. While a client may regularly communicate with a primary relationship partner, and a team of lawyers may be working for a client, we designate a responsible lawyer for each matter.
Planning
Open communication is at the core of successful business relationships. This consists of mutual feedback, including a candid discussion of each party's core competencies. We engage in joint planning sessions with the client, set goals and objectives for the relationship, develop standardized procedures for handling all cases and matters, and identify expectations. Our goal is a work plan that allocates resources in the best-suited and most cost-effective manner for the specific issue at hand, and in keeping with the clients' larger business objectives.
Transparency
Keeping surprises to a minimum is a key tenet of our client relationship approach. Through regular communication, we strive to keep our clients fully informed about matters as they develop, advising them on what will happen and preparing them for what might happen. We do the same with respect to fees and staffing. This communication takes the form of informal updates and reports in the format that best suits our clients' preferences.
Early Cost Assessment
For many litigation engagements, K&L Gates employs an Early Cost Assessment (ECA) strategy to evaluate, plan, and implement cost-effective litigation resolution strategies. The ECA approach is a collaborative effort with in-house counsel to build a strategic litigation plan with a corresponding budget and a realistic definition of what constitutes a favorable resolution of a case. K&L Gates uses the ECA process to ensure proactive lawyering, and consideration and evaluation of resolution options, early and often.
Alternative Fee Arrangements
We approach alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) by collaborating with our clients so we are both held accountable and rewarded for high-quality legal work delivered economically, predictably, and in accordance with our clients' expectations and internal budgeting demands. K&L Gates has been proactive in developing and implementing a variety of AFAs for a wide array of engagements.
Our Value-Added Services
We regularly produce seminars designed to update our clients on recent changes in the law, new areas of practice, and emerging trends. We encourage our clients to participate in our in-house programs, either in person or via webcast. In addition, we present programs, customized to clients' particular needs, on-site at clients' places of business. Seminar topics range from employment law updates to the latest in mortgage banking regulations to risk management issues applicable to every company. Our e-DAT lawyers who address issues relating to e-discovery and records management are some of our most active presenters. They also offer a training module and foldering guide for email users, a training module for litigation holds, and an interactive instructional program for training corporate personnel about e-discovery issues.
In addition, we have built a broad collection of work product that practice groups can use to a client's advantage. One of the benefits of a substantial firm that spans three continents is that we have the resources to maintain state-specific, multi-state, national, and international surveys, databases, analyses, and other work product.
Several practice groups within the firm also maintain blogs with in-depth information on topics ranging from construction law to climate change. Two of our most notable blogs are our e-Discovery Law blog at www.ediscoverylaw.com, and our Global Financial Market Watch blog at www.globalfinancialmarketwatch.com.
Our Commitment to Diversity
We know that clients' needs can best be met by a diverse workforce. To that end, K&L Gates has implemented a number of programs to promote diversity.
K&L Gates is an industry leader. For example, in 2003, the firm appointed the profession's first Chief Diversity Officer. Similarly, the firm's appointment of the industry's first Director of Professional and Personal Life Integration and the launch of our innovative Balanced Hours initiative received acclaim throughout the profession.
At K&L Gates, diversity starts at the top. The firm is governed by a firmwide Management Committee whose Executive Committee is believed to be among the most diverse governance bodies in the legal profession. Minority, women, disabled, and GLBT lawyers also have become increasingly engaged at K&L Gates by taking on leadership roles that include service on the Management Committee and its Executive Committee and as Practice Group Coordinators.
Establishing and maintaining a diverse and fully inclusive workforce is essential to a strong law firm. At K&L Gates, we are committed to fostering diversity to enrich the experience of our lawyers, reflect the communities in which we live and work, and better serve our clients.
Our Experience as Preferred Legal Counsel
For more than a decade, K&L Gates has been part of DuPont's Global Primary Law Firm Network. Prior to 1992, DuPont had more than 350 law firms and scores of service providers and consultants. During a three-and-a-half year convergence process, the company transformed this group into a select legal network, with each member serving as a true long-term strategic colleague. K&L Gates worked with DuPont throughout the process and was chosen to become a part of the network.
We have served as counsel to DuPont on insurance coverage litigation, commercial litigation, outsourcing and commercial transactions, real estate, and investment management issues. Our service to the company earned the firm DuPont's "Meeting the Challenge" Award in 1998, 1999, 2001, 2004, 2006, and 2007, recognizing K&L Gates for its progressive policies and legal performance.