The lawyers and staffers in K&L Gates’s Pittsburgh headquarters won’t have any trouble finding their new offices when they move in a few months. In fact, it would be hard for any Pittsburgh resident not to know where the firm is relocating–”K&L Gates” blares from the top of a 37-story building that was formerly One Oliver Plaza. When K&L Gates signed the 200,000-square-foot lease in 2007, chairman Peter Kalis boasted that the new offices reflected the Pittsburgh-born firm’s growth–it has gone through eight mergers domestically and internationally since he became boss more than a decade ago–as well as its commitment to the city. But behind the PR and hometown pride was something old-fashioned for a firm of K&L’s size: It has spent millions of dollars to build out the Pittsburgh space without borrowing a cent from a bank.
More than 70 percent of large law firms have some form of debt on their balance sheets in 2008, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Yet even though K&L Gates has 33 offices with currently more than 1,800 lawyers around the world, it is financing its operations solely through partner capital contributions.
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