Kirkland & Ellis announced on May 18 the creation of its integrated Real Assets Practice Group, bringing together the firm’s Real Estate, Infrastructure, Energy, and Minerals/Mining practices. The new group consists of more than 600 lawyers across Kirkland’s global offices.
The move aims to align with client needs and industry trends by providing coordinated advice across capital raising, structuring, financing, development, and governance for assets with long time horizons and complex regulatory considerations. “We’ve been seeing clients integrate real estate, infrastructure, energy and digital assets in increasingly sophisticated ways,” said Jon A. Ballis, Chairman of Kirkland’s Executive Committee. “Our teams already have been operating collaboratively across these areas for the past few years, but now bringing these practices together under the ‘real assets’ umbrella will formalize our approach — highly coordinated advice across capital raising, structuring, financing, development and governance — particularly for assets with long time horizons, regulatory considerations and complex stakeholder dynamics.”
According to the firm’s leadership team members cited in the announcement release text provided herewith (no external factoids), surging demand in digital infrastructure was a major factor behind formalizing this cross-disciplinary approach. Andrew Calder of Kirkland’s Executive Committee said: “Kirkland has always adopted a team approach to serve our clients and that is exactly the approach we continue to take now within real assets – it is the best way to create meaningful value for our clients.”
In 2025 alone Kirkland led more than 615 real assets deals worth approximately $650 billion. The firm highlighted its involvement in several high-profile transactions including Brookfield Infrastructure Partners’ $30 billion joint venture with Intel Corporation; GLP’s $18.7 billion sale of its U.S. logistics business to Blackstone; Constellation Energy’s $26.6 billion acquisition of Calpine; CPP Investments’ stake in Sempra Infrastructure Partners valued at $31.7 billion; KKR-led consortium’s acquisition of CyrusOne Inc.; and Ares Management Corporation’s merger with Whitestone REIT.
The announcement also emphasized Kirkland’s leadership role in data center-related work over recent years—advising on more than 450 data center transactions involving over 140 unique sponsors or developers within five years—and cited major recent deals such as AI Infrastructure Partnership’s acquisition of Aligned Data Centers ($40 billion), Global Infrastructure Partners/EQT’s purchase of AES ($33.4 billion), and Blue Owl Capital’s joint venture with Meta Platforms ($27 billion).
John Pitts—a partner focused on energy and infrastructure—said: “Each transaction presents novel issues…which really necessitates having experts in all of the areas – M&A, real estate, financing, power…under one roof…to ensure advice to our clients is aligned to how the market continues to mature.” Kevin Ehrhart added: “Meeting clients where they are is core to how Kirkland operates across market cycles…Integrating our real assets offering is a natural next step in continuing to deliver cutting-edge solutions as the industry continues to grow.”
