Mr. Kalis provides strategic advice to many of the nation's largest corporations. In that capacity he has worked extensively with chief executive officers, boards of directors, and general counsel in the development and execution of proactive or defensive litigation strategies and strategies to preserve and access corporate insurance programs in response to a variety of novel and substantial claims. Mr. Kalis has also served as an arbitrator in arbitrations sited in the United Kingdom, Bermuda and the United States.
Mr. Kalis is a Rhodes Scholar, he received his Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) from Oxford, and during law school at Yale University he was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal. After law school, Mr. Kalis served as law clerk to the late J. Skelly Wright, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and for the late Associate Justice Byron R. White of the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Mr. Kalis is Chairman and Global Managing Partner of K&L Gates. After law school, Mr. Kalis served as law clerk to the late J. Skelly Wright, Chief Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and for the late Associate Justice Byron R. White of the US Supreme Court. The Lawyer — a leading U.K. legal industry publication — recently named Mr. Kalis as among the ten individuals in the global profession who will shape the international market for legal services in the next decade, and Law360 recently selected Mr. Kalis as one of the profession's “Most Innovative Managing Partners.” He has been selected by his peers for inclusion in The World’s Leading Insurance and Reinsurance Lawyers, The Best Lawyers in America (Bet-the-Company Litigation, Business Litigation, Commercial Litigation, Environmental Law, and Insurance Law), and Law Dragon Magazine’s "500 Leading Lawyers in America" and "500 Leading Litigators in America." Mr. Kalis has also been included in Euromoney’s Legal Media Group Expert Guides – Best of the Best, in which his peers have identified him as one of the top 30 insurance and reinsurance lawyers in the world. He is on the Board of Advisors for Best Lawyers. Professional/Civic ActivitiesMr. Kalis is a member of the American Law Institute. He has served on Task Forces of the American Bar Association, and routinely addresses professional congregations on both practice and law firm leadership topics. He served as the ABA's National Law Day Chair and served ex officio on the ABA's Commission on Civic Education and Separation of Powers and the Standing Committee on Public Education. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity, the West Virginia University Foundation, Inc. and its Audit Committee. He formerly served on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors and chaired the Finance and Investment Committee of the Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute. He is a past director of the Duquesne Club, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Museum of Art, The Children's Center of Pittsburgh, the Three Rivers Young Peoples Orchestras, the National Kidney Foundation of Western Pennsylvania and the National Pancreas Foundation. Additional InformationMr. Kalis has published over 50 articles in professional journals and in academic law reviews on a variety of subjects, and he is an author of Policyholder’s Guide to the Law of Insurance Coverage (with T. Reiter & J. Segerdahl) (Aspen Law & Business: 850 pp., 1997), an editor of Tobacco Litigation and Insurance (American Bar Association: 387 pp., 1997), and served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Insurance Coverage (a quarterly publication of Aspen Law & Business published from 1998-2002).