When Kirkland & Ellis comes up in conversation among leaders of elite law firms, a particular response recurs with striking consistency. It goes something like this: “Yes, but they just got in early on private equity.”

The tone is rarely hostile. It is something more subtle — a kind of professional reasonableness that acknowledges Kirkland’s success while simultaneously explaining it away. The implication is clear: Kirkland was in the right place at the right time. What followed was momentum, not mastery. Fortune, not strategy.

I want to challenge that view. Not because it is entirely wrong — Kirkland did get in early — but because it is so incomplete as to be misleading. And because the story it obscures is, in my view, one of the most instructive brand stories in professional services today.

Early access to a market is a necessary condition for what Kirkland achieved. It is nowhere near a sufficient one.

Early doesn’t explain anything

Let us start with the “got in early” argument, because it deserves to be taken seriously before it is dismantled.

It is true that Kirkland’s relationship with private equity dates to the industry’s inception. In the early 1970s, a young Kirkland attorney named Jack Levin formed a relationship with the head of a fledgling venture capital unit at First Chicago Corp. Neither of them knew at the time what they were building. Levin went on to develop the legal frameworks that underpinned the entire private equity industry — structures for carried interest, limited partner agreements, management fee arrangements. Kirkland, in that sense, did not merely enter the market early. It helped create it.

But here is what the “lucky break” narrative cannot explain: plenty of other firms were early. Private equity was not invisible. The major Wall Street firms, the large London practices, the powerhouse firms from other major US cities such as Chicago, Atlanta, and LA — all of them saw the same market developing. Many of them pursued it seriously. Some built credible practices. None of them built what Kirkland built.

The pattern is not unique to professional services. Xerox developed the graphical user interface before Apple. Steve Jobs visited their Palo Alto research centre in 1979, saw the future, and built the Macintosh around it. Being first is not the same as knowing what to do with it.

Early access to a market is a necessary condition for what Kirkland achieved. It is nowhere near a sufficient one. The question that the “lucky break” dismissal is specifically designed not to ask is this: what did Kirkland do differently?

What Kirkland actually did

Ten years ago, Kirkland was a respected but regional/national US firm. Well regarded in litigation. Growing in private equity. Not yet dominant. Not yet the firm that set market terms. Not yet the name that, in certain circles, is spoken in the same breath as McKinsey and Goldman Sachs.

That matters. Because McKinsey’s dominance and Goldman’s authority feel, to most of today’s senior professionals, like natural facts. Their reputations are so deeply embedded in the professional consciousness that it is difficult to imagine a world in which they were not what they are. Nobody on a leadership team today remembers a time when McKinsey was a good but unremarkable consultancy, or when Goldman was simply one of several ambitious investment banks.

Kirkland is different. Its transformation happened in real time — within the professional lifetimes of the people reading this. A decade ago, the managing partners, senior partners, and CMOs who lead today’s elite professional services firms were already in their careers. They remember a Kirkland that was good but not dominant. They have watched, in real time, what followed.

That makes Kirkland’s story simultaneously more instructive and more threatening to comfortable narratives. It cannot be explained by heritage. It cannot be attributed to a century of compounding reputation. It happened recently, deliberately, and in plain sight.

Kirkland’s transformation happened in real time — within the professional lifetimes of the people reading this. It cannot be explained by heritage. It happened recently, deliberately, and in plain sight.

The brand story that nobody calls a brand story

What Kirkland did — and what its rivals, for the most part, have not done — is build what I describe as a Big B Brand: a positioning so specific, so consistent, and so deeply embedded in how the firm actually operates that it becomes indistinguishable from the firm’s strategy itself.

Most law firms have little b brands — visual identities, websites, award submissions, carefully crafted mission statements. These are not unimportant. But they are, in the end, decorative. They sit alongside the firm’s strategy rather than expressing it. They tell the market what the firm would like to be thought of as, without changing what the market actually experiences when it encounters the firm.

Kirkland did something different. It built a positioning from the inside out — not from a branding exercise, but from a series of structural choices that expressed a single, consistent conviction: total commitment, complete alignment with the client’s interest in winning.

That conviction began in litigation. In a 2002 profile, The American Lawyer described a firm where the internal ethos held that you were a wimp if your case was not tried. Kirkland was unapologetic about its aggressiveness. It preferred to lead rather than co-counsel. It was described by peers as unnecessarily aggressive — a characterisation it regarded as a competitive advantage rather than a criticism.

That same conviction was then carried into private equity. Not merely as a practice area, but as a positioning. Partners invested in clients’ funds alongside them. The firm built a proprietary database of deal terms and market intelligence, hiring data scientists to build analytics capabilities that rivals could not replicate. It tied partner rewards entirely to performance. It operated its own internal secondary market, allowing partners to trade stakes in client funds.

Every one of these choices expressed the same underlying idea: we are not your advisers at arm’s length. We are aligned with you. We win when you win.

This is what I mean by a mass-niche position — a concept I have written about in the context of professional services positioning more broadly. Kirkland did not try to be all things to all people. It chose a territory — high-stakes litigation and private equity — that was specific enough to be genuinely ownable and large enough to support extraordinary growth. The niche was not small. It was vast. But it was chosen, defined, and defended with a discipline that most firms never achieve.

That is not a lucky break. It is a discipline. And it is, in the end, what separates the firms that the market chooses from the firms it simply considers.

The flywheel that followed

What distinguishes Kirkland’s story from a fortunate sequence of events is what happened next — the self-reinforcing dynamic that turns a strong position into a dominant one.

The more private equity work Kirkland did, the more proprietary intelligence it accumulated — deal terms, market precedents, counterparty behaviour — building a database that rivals simply could not replicate. The firm hired data scientists to exploit that knowledge. The result was a position of such market prevalence that Kirkland was not merely advising on deals but helping to set the terms on which the market itself operated. Dominance became self-reinforcing.

This is what happens when the way a firm operates becomes the most powerful expression of what it stands for — what I have written about elsewhere as a brand symbol at its most powerful. Not a claim the market is asked to believe, but a reality the market cannot avoid encountering.

The partnership challenge Kirkland solved

Most partnerships, faced with the question of what they stand for, arrive at something that offends nobody and inspires nobody. The instinct to qualify, hedge, and moderate is structurally reinforced in consensus-driven environments — and the result is a brand position that the market cannot quite get hold of.

Kirkland solved this problem not through persuasion but through structure. Its meritocratic compensation model rewards performance rather than seniority, attracting and retaining people who want to compete and win. Its culture is explicit about what it is and what it demands. It does not pretend to offer work-life balance in the conventional sense. It says, clearly and honestly, what the firm is — and attracts, in large numbers, the people for whom that is exactly what they are looking for.

I have described at length why this is so difficult in partnerships and why most firms never fully resolve it. What makes Kirkland’s version of the answer so instructive is that it did not require a change management programme or a series of partner workshops. It built the answer into the firm’s architecture — into how it pays, how it promotes, and how it recruits — so that the positioning and the culture became indistinguishable.

That internal clarity is inseparable from the external brand. A firm that is honest about its identity attracts people who genuinely share it. People who genuinely share it embody it in every client interaction. Every client interaction reinforces the market’s perception of what the firm stands for. The internal and external brand become one.

What Kirkland’s story actually means

The leaders of elite professional services firms who dismiss Kirkland’s success as a function of timing are, I suspect, doing so at least partly because the alternative is more demanding. If Kirkland’s rise is luck, no lessons need to be drawn. If it is strategy, the question becomes uncomfortable: what are we doing with equivalent deliberateness?

The answer does not require a firm to replicate Kirkland’s specific choices, but the mechanisms are available to any firm willing to use them.

Define a position that is specific enough to be genuinely distinctive and large enough to support ambitious growth. Express that position not merely in words but in structural choices — in how the firm compensates, recruits, invests, and operates. Build symbols that make the positioning tangible to clients, to recruits, and to the market. Hold those choices consistently over time, resisting the partnership instinct to moderate and qualify, until the position compounds into something the market cannot ignore.

That is not a lucky break. It is a discipline. And it is, in the end, what separates the firms the market chooses from those it simply considers.

Kirkland did not stumble into dominance. It built it — one deliberate choice at a time.