Kirkland & Ellis LLP has formed a real assets practice group with more than 600 attorneys by combining areas such as real estate and infrastructure to align with industry trends and the needs of clients.
Kirkland & Ellis said in a Friday press release that the integrated group brings the firm’s energy, materials and mining, infrastructure and real estate practices under the same umbrella. Amid rising demand for digital infrastructure, the firm is seeking to reflect clients’ businesses with its practice organization.
“We’ve been seeing clients integrate real estate, infrastructure, energy and digital assets in increasingly sophisticated ways,” Jon A. Ballis, chairman of Kirkland’s executive committee, said in a statement. “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.”
Kirkland said it led more than 615 real assets deals worth a combined $650 billion in 2025.
Data center-related work has been a recent locus of activity for the firm, with Kirkland advising more than $81 billion in financings and $169 million in data center-related joint venture deals and mergers and acquisitions in 2025.
“Each transaction presents novel issues, and the landscape is constantly changing, which really necessitates having experts in all of the areas — M&A, real estate, financing, power, project development, regulatory, intellectual property, funds and more — under one roof and working together in total lockstep to ensure advice to our clients is aligned to how the market continues to mature,” John Pitts, a Kirkland energy and infrastructure partner and member of the firm’s executive committee, said in a statement.
Recently, Kirkland advised BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners and other infrastructure investors on a $33.4 billion acquisition in March of clean energy supplier AES.
Kirkland also advised a joint venture’s purchase of Aligned Data Centers for $40 billion in October, the largest-ever digital infrastructure acquisition. Kirkland advised the purchasers, a consortium of companies including BlackRock, GIP, Microsoft and NVIDIA.
Meanwhile, Kirkland guided a Meta joint venture with Blue Owl Capital in October to fund the development of a $27 billion data center campus in Louisiana.
Over the years, Kirkland has also advised a variety of foundational digital infrastructure transactions, according to the firm’s press release.
In the past five years, Kirkland lawyers have advised more than 140 sponsors and developers on some 450 data center transactions.
In 2022, Kirkland advised a $30 billion, first-of-its kind joint venture between Brookfield Infrastructure Partners and Intel Corp. to fund an Intel semiconductor fabrication facility in Chandler, Arizona.
“Meeting clients where they are is core to how Kirkland operates across market cycles, asset classes and deal structures,” Kirkland real estate partner Kevin Ehrhart said in a statement. “Kirkland has been involved at every stage of the growth of real estate private equity and the digital infrastructure evolution.”
