Jamie Slaughter has taken the reins as managing partner of Keker, Van Nest & Peters. In an interview with Law360, Slaughter emphasized preserving the firm’s culture, its measured growth strategy, and the effectiveness of Keker’s single-office model.
“That means continued lean teams, training elite trial lawyers, giving our lawyers early responsibility, continuing to emphasize a culture of deep collaboration and having the courage to take on hard fights. This is not a firm that needs to be reinvented,” Slaughter said.
Noting that Keker expanded from about 40 lawyers to 140 since he joined, Slaughter said the firm remains committed to disciplined, organic growth rather than scale for its own sake.
“We hire excellent attorneys, young attorneys. We give them real responsibility and hope that they will become our partners,” he said.
Slaughter also discussed the opportunities presented by AI while reinforcing the importance of lawyers’ judgment, strategy, credibility, and advocacy. He added that Keker is well positioned to adapt to technological change while continuing to attract clients facing high-stakes disputes.
“I think the demand for litigation work is strong,” he said. “The problems clients are facing are increasingly technical, novel, public, and high stakes. Whether that's copyright, AI, or privacy, clients are confronting problems that the law is often still developing, and so the reputational and business consequences can be significant. That places judgment, experience, and the ability to tell a story in a really powerful way at the heart of what our clients need.”
Read the Law360 interview here. (subscription required)