The following is an excerpt from Practice Perspectives: Vault's Guide to Legal Practice Areas.
Tyler Ambrose, Associate—Transactional
Tyler Ambrose is a second-year corporate associate in the Houston office of Kirkland & Ellis. He graduated from Harvard Law School and received his B.A. with Honors from the University of Virginia.
Tyler served as an intern for the Honorable Chief Judge Michael Urbanksi in the United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia.
Describe your practice area and what it entails.
As a general corporate associate, I get to work on assignments across several transactional practice groups, including mergers & acquisitions, debt finance, capital markets, and investment funds.
I appreciate that the open assignment system lets me identify teams I enjoy working with for repeat deals.
What types of clients do you represent?
I have worked with large private equity clients and their portfolio companies, as well as smaller, closely held companies.
What types of cases/deals do you work on?
My deals have ranged from topics including software companies, drug diversion monitoring technology, energy and renewables, transportation, construction, and infrastructure services.
How did you choose this practice area?
I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do when I started practicing, so the general corporate option offered the professional flexibility that I needed to explore which practice areas suited me.
The opportunity to work with highly skilled deal teams and individuals I enjoyed collaborating with also played a significant role in shaping my trajectory within our firm’s open assignment system.
What is a typical day like and/or what are some common tasks you perform?
Typical tasks for junior associates can vary, but an average day could include:
- reviewing contracts in a virtual data room
- drafting due diligence memoranda on potential targets
- engaging insurers and bankers
- advancing a pro bono project
- attending training sessions to get familiarized with a universe of documents that you’ll be seeing (often for the first time!)
What training, classes, experience, or skills development would you recommend to someone who wishes to enter your practice area?
For law students interested in mergers & acquisitions, I’d recommend taking a corporations class or participating in a transactional law clinic for a preview of and exposure to the work. With respect to useful skills more generally, try to develop an ability to identify and replicate good process management for each assignment that comes across your desk.
And remember to be patient with yourself as you learn! Incremental mastery of small tasks will become a huge value-add to your deal teams, so don’t feel pressured to know everything all at once.
What misconceptions exist about your practice area?
You don’t need a finance or business background to become skillful in this practice area. Those backgrounds can certainly help you better contextualize certain tasks and work with specialists, but the volume and sophistication of the work that Kirkland sees provides plenty of on-the-job training.
Many of the traits and skills that make for a successful deal team—being personable, having a solid command of process management, and identifying the strengths of your various deal team members—are things that you could already bring to the firm or that you could develop while you’re here.
What is unique about your practice area at your firm?
Each deal can vary greatly. I’ve been afforded many opportunities to peek into a variety of industries in a relatively short period of time.
What kinds of experience can summer associates gain in this practice area at your firm?
Summer associates can expect meaningful project exposure. Summer associates can sit in on client and management calls and regularly meet with associates and partners for lunch, dinner, receptions, and more; plus, they will have time outside of the office to explore.
What has been the most surprising aspect of dealmaking to you?
I was surprised at how soon I started engaging clients directly. Of course, it looks different for each deal, but even by my second year, I’ve appreciated opportunities to run with client communications and the internal confidence that that experience builds in my own lawyering ability.