At a moment when law firms are combining across cities, countries and continents, Kendall Brill & Kelly is making a different bet by purposely staying small.
Seventeen years after Richard "Dick" Kendall and four other lawyers launched the Los Angeles litigation boutique, KBK has grown to about 29 lawyers, broadened its practices and assembled a partnership spanning several generations.
But nobody seems particularly interested in turning it into a 100-lawyer firm.
"We want to sort of do it our own way," said Robert "Bob" Dugdale, one of the firm's co-managing partners.
"Growth for growth's sake has never been sort of my goal, or at least my vision for what happens," he added.
Instead, Dugdale said, the objective is to assemble enough experienced trial lawyers "to handle any case that could come in the door" while retaining the advantages of a boutique: lawyers who know one another, fewer layers of management, considerable partner autonomy and opportunities for associates to take significant responsibility early in their careers.
And there is another requirement.
It should still be fun.
"I actually enjoy the people that I work with here," Dugdale said. "I enjoy the matters that I work with."
That ambition -- maintaining the capabilities and clients of a major law firm without becoming one -- dates to KBK's beginning.
The firm started with five lawyers, with much of its early work coming from Kendall's relationships in media and entertainment and with financial institutions.
Kendall had spent portions of his career at Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP and what was then Irell & Manella LLP. When he founded his own firm, he drew inspiration from what those firms had been when they were much smaller.
The model he admired was not principally about economics or size. It was about talent.
The philosophy, Kendall recalled, was "to find the very best lawyers that they could and let the quality of the work that they do on their desk every single morning be the basis for the firm's growth forward."
"I thought that was a terrific philosophy to try to emulate," he said.
Just as important was deciding what KBK would not become.
Kendall never wanted to develop a transactional practice. Major deals require armies of lawyers across specialties who must be available when a transaction arrives, he said, creating staffing demands and economic distinctions between rainmakers and service partners that he did not want to replicate.
Instead, KBK built around disputes.
Bert Deixler brought a substantial practice representing bands, managers and other music-industry clients. The firm expanded its white-collar work and developed a significant practice defending other law firms.
Underlying the different practices was one common denominator: trials.
"The primary objective was to build practice areas that rely on trial skills and trial experience," Kendall said.
Dugdale estimates the firm's lawyers collectively have tried somewhere between 150 and 200 cases.
That matters, he said, because an adversary has to believe the threat of trial is real.
A client hiring KBK isn't getting "an empty threat from a partner who's never seen the inside of a courtroom or stared 12 jurors in the eyes," Dugdale said.
Few areas illustrate the firm's evolution better than white-collar defense.
When Dugdale arrived in 2016 after more than 19 years in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California, including service as chief of its Criminal Division, white-collar work at KBK was largely the province of veteran lawyer Robert Corbin.
Dugdale had considered joining a large firm. One large firm lawyer warned him that moving instead to a small boutique would mean giving up the kind of consequential matters he had handled as a prosecutor.
The prediction, Dugdale said, lasted about a week.
His first week at KBK put him on a matter that appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. By his second, he was interviewing a client in connection with the investigation into musician Prince's death.
"That turned out to be completely wrong," Dugdale said.
A decade later, white-collar defense and government investigations are a major part of KBK's identity.
The firm has deliberately recruited lawyers with substantial government courtroom experience. Jeffrey Chemerinsky, for example, previously served as chief of the Violent and Organized Crime Section in the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney's Office and tried 16 cases to verdict as a federal prosecutor.
Dugdale said he believes breadth gives the practice resilience. White-collar enforcement priorities change with presidential administrations, leaving practices built heavily around one type of corporate enforcement vulnerable when Washington changes direction.
KBK's lawyers instead handle matters ranging from financial fraud and public corruption to national security investigations and conventional criminal cases.
"When the tide turns," Dugdale said, the firm has lawyers with experience in the areas likely to return.
KBK generally does not hire lawyers directly from law school. Instead, Dugdale said, it looks for third- and fourth-year associates at large firms who have begun to realize that the conventional Big Law progression may not give them the responsibility they want quickly enough.
"We target people who want to be lawyers who lead cases, who want to be lawyers who want to walk into court and represent clients," Dugdale said.
A smaller firm can staff cases so relatively junior associates receive significant assignments instead of disappearing deep inside large teams.
Artificial intelligence could make that model even more consequential.
Kendall believes AI can already produce research roughly comparable to what a good second-year associate might generate, although experienced lawyers still must check and refine the work. Because KBK does not depend on large classes of junior associates, he sees less disruption to its training model.
More significantly, AI could eliminate one of the historical disadvantages of being small.
Kendall recently received roughly 30,000 pages of documents the night before a deposition. In the past, reviewing the production would have required a team of lawyers working through the night -- and they still might not have finished.
AI allowed the material to be triaged so lawyers could identify the documents requiring closer review.
For most of KBK's existence, Kendall said, litigation involving multiple terabytes of documents could make a boutique think carefully before accepting the case because it could consume an enormous share of the firm's lawyers.
AI could "level the playing field," Kendall said, allowing boutiques to handle document-intensive litigation with far fewer people.
If so, one of Big Law's most obvious advantages -- scale -- could become less important.
KBK nevertheless remains selective about where it expands.
Transactional work remains off the table. Traditional insurance-defense work generally has been unattractive because of its economics. Litigation funding remains largely peripheral, and Kendall is wary of potential tension between a funder's economic interests and a client's objectives.
Dugdale sees employment litigation as one possible area for growth. The firm already handles workplace misconduct matters, and he believes KBK's economics could make it attractive for significant employment cases that are difficult to handle profitably at the rates charged by the largest firms.
But neither man talks about expansion primarily in terms of adding practice groups.
The question is whether new work fits the firm's central asset: lawyers comfortable trying difficult cases.
That approach has allowed its oldest practice areas to evolve with clients.
Kendall has represented media and entertainment clients for roughly four decades. When KBK opened, disputes were still emerging over whether old grants of rights extended to DVDs. Then came streaming. Now artificial intelligence is generating new labor and copyright disputes.
The technology changes, Kendall said, but the litigator's role largely does not.
"There are always going to be these evolutions of different delivery mechanisms to the consumers, and litigators are going to be called upon to fight over how rights that were granted years ago apply to these new platforms," he said.
The larger question is whether a boutique built around prominent trial lawyers can become an institution that outlasts them.
KBK's partnership now deliberately spans generations. Dugdale describes its senior lawyers as the firm's "Hall of Famers," followed by lawyers of his generation and a younger group that includes Chemerinsky, Cassie Palmer and Charles Snyder.
"What we've really filled out in the past several years especially has been the tier in that not only Dick has somebody to pass the torch to, but we have somebody to pass the torch to afterwards," Dugdale said.
That may ultimately be the biggest test of KBK's strategy.
Dugdale wants the firm to grow somewhat, but not simply for the sake of getting bigger. He wants lawyers capable of handling whatever difficult dispute arrives. And he wants KBK to remain competitive with the country's largest firms without adopting their structure.
Eventually, he wants to face the same problem its founder faces today.
"I would love the day, whenever that day may come -- and it's not going to be for a while -- to be able to be confident that, like Dick, I can pass the baton to somebody and that this firm is still around," Dugdale said.