Khurram’s Quorum – Ep 025: Kalpana Srinivasan on hip-hop dancing and gut decisions in career
Kalpana Srinivasan is one of the top trial lawyers in the country and co-chair of Susman Godfrey, one of the leading trial firms in the country. She built her career on a string of decisions that didn't look obvious on paper — taking a job with the Associated Press wherever they wanted to send her, staying in Los Angeles after a clerkship even though she'd planned to return to DC, and joining a four-person Susman Godfrey office at a time when most peers were heading to large, established firms.
I met Kalpana through the South Asian legal community, and we've crossed paths enough times that I knew there were two threads I wanted to pull on in this conversation. The first is hip-hop dancing — a serious, sustained part of her life outside the practice that has reshaped how she thinks about focus, discomfort, and meeting people from different walks of life. The second is the role of gut decisions in her career, and how those instincts have interacted with luck, narrative, and the unusually homegrown culture at Susman Godfrey.
We get into how she vets cases, how she runs a trial team while co-managing the firm, what Steve Susman drilled into her about witness prep and hot documents, and the case she makes for showing rather than telling in business development. Keep reading below for the full episode and the complete transcript of our conversation.
Top Insights
Below are the highlights of our conversation:
- Dance as Mental Discipline, Not Just a Workout: Kalpana started taking hip-hop choreography classes in West Hollywood about four or five years ago after walking past a studio enough times to talk herself into it. The thing that hooked her wasn't the exercise — it was that she literally couldn't think about work for an hour, because if she missed two eight-counts of choreography she was lost. She frames it as training a different way of thinking and meeting people from very different walks of life, which she sees as part of being a human, not just a tactic for jury work.
- Gut Decisions, Then Backfilled Logic: The biggest moves in Kalpana's career — accepting an AP job sight unseen, staying in LA after her clerkship, joining a four-person Susman Godfrey office, marrying a partner who lived in Ireland — were all instinctive in the moment, then rationalized later. She isn't anti-analysis. She's making the case that for lawyers in particular, the universe of risk is so narrow that what looks like a leap is usually a modest, reversible bet, and taking more of those bets is what positions you to be the beneficiary of luck.
- Diligence the Role, Not the Logo: Kalpana's advice to associates and partners interviewing at growing offices: do not let a brand name supersede your understanding of what your individual path will look like. Ask five associates what they actually did in the last week, month, and six months. As a partner, get clarity on the compensation structure and whether you'll be in a leadership role with the support to develop business externally. Clients ultimately hire individuals, not firms — so know what you'll be doing, not just what the firm does.
- Save Room for the Fat Pitches: Selectivity is a skill. Kalpana turns down income-generating cases on purpose so she has the bandwidth for the bet-the-company matters that come in unexpectedly — and so her case mix stays varied enough to keep her sharp. She runs the same evaluation at the firm level: aligning fee structures with what the client actually defines as a win, then folding the business analysis of the case (damages, monetization, contingency math) into the legal analysis from day one.
- Show, Don't Tell — You Are the Thing: Kalpana's strongest BD channel isn't networking dinners or elevator pitches. It's panels, conferences, co-counsel relationships, and increasingly Zoom hearings — anywhere referring lawyers and clients can see her in action rather than hear her describe what she does. The principle: you are the thing you're trying to market, so the most productive move is to give clients more access to you doing what you do, not more polished pitches about it.
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Full Transcript
Khurram Naik: All right, Kalpana, I am so excited to pick up this conversation. Thanks for sitting down with me today.
Kalpana Srinivasan: Thank you so much for having me, Khurram. I'm really excited, and I've really enjoyed the opportunity getting to talk to you in advance of this.
Khurram Naik: I have to start with this part of your life because I think it's going to be so interesting to explore. A lot of people observing it — I pull up your bio, super impressive trial lawyer, all these different accolades — they're not going to guess that one of your big things is hip-hop dancing. I want to spend a little time learning about that. What's the story of how you came to this kind of dance, and what part of life is it for you now?
Kalpana Srinivasan: Sure, and it's a subject I like to talk about these days. Four or five years ago I started spending a lot of time walking down in my neighborhood past this dance studio, and I thought to myself, oh, that's so cool. I'd always enjoyed dance casually, but I was like, I probably can't go into a studio and start taking classes. I'm not in the right age demographic for that. But then I sort of thought that was silly and I should give it a go, because it looked like people were really enjoying themselves. I also found that a lot of the things I did outside of work were great but not always requiring mental focus or challenging in that kind of way. I just had a sense that dance might be different than trying to go to a yoga class or meditate. I know you do that successfully, but some of us are not so good at keeping our mind from wandering. So I was really looking for something I would enjoy that might also train a different way of thinking, in addition to having the physical aspect.
Kalpana Srinivasan: I started going to classes near where I lived in West Hollywood and found that I really just loved it. It was the one segment of my day where I truly was not looking at my phone or trying to actively figure out some work issue — mostly because I was not skilled enough as a dancer to miss a few minutes. That would be very bad. I need every minute of that instruction and following every eight count, otherwise I'm going to be lost. What I discovered is that in and of itself was kind of a level of mental discipline. To be in something where I was learning new choreography every class, to really train your mind to focus singularly on something very intensely for an hour, 90 minutes — and then also of course the movement, trying to get more in touch with your own body. Sometimes when we are in roles where we're very cerebral, spending a lot of time in our mind, we forget that the ability to control what your body does is a function of your mind too. All of those things, in addition to having a great time, were really fulfilling. The added benefit is I got to meet all these super interesting people — from very different walks of life, different age groups, different backgrounds. People who want to be professional dancers and go on tour, people who are doing it recreationally like me. That was a real treat too, because I think as you get older and you're more involved in your professional life you meet people who tend to be like you. It gets harder and harder to meet people who are in different phases of their life trying to do something really different. It continues to be a big part of my non-work life, and I view it as more than just a workout — it's something I actively have been trying to get better at, take harder choreography, different kinds of choreography, so that I'm expanding and growing that way too.
Khurram Naik: Can you say more about the benefit of meeting people from different walks of life? What's a tangible impact it has on you? I can easily imagine trial lawyers benefit — you need to understand people who have to make decisions, that's good for jury work. But anything beyond that?
Kalpana Srinivasan: I think as a human, understanding other humans should be part of our mission every day. One of the things that attracted me to being in Los Angeles when I started my practice was that there are so many people here who work in areas of their life that are so distinct from what I do. There's something to be learned there. In these classes I'm interacting with people who are substantially younger than me, and that's cool too — just hearing about the things they're interested in, what they're trying to accomplish, where they came from. Yes, it is valuable as a trial lawyer to understand different types of people because you may be in front of juries in any part of the country, but I think it's more fundamental than that. As a human I don't want to be restricted to understanding only the humans who are like me, or some subgroup. That's not, I think, an enriching life. I want the benefit of meeting all these kinds of people and trying to see where they're coming from, look at things a little bit differently. We all benefit when we step outside ourselves.
Khurram Naik: It would be easy, with the wins you've had professionally, to double down on things you're good at rather than do things where you may very well not be the most skillful in the room. You're not the 20-year-old trying to make a career out of it. It seems like the odds are stacked. So it's good to put yourself in a position where you're not likely to feel the most experienced or skillful in the room.
Kalpana Srinivasan: Absolutely. I can assure you I'm not the best one in the room. But it's important to step out of yourself that way. I have a dance teacher I work with a lot, and she'll want me to be in a solo, or a small group, or be videoed. I think to myself, well look, if I can get up and argue in front of a courtroom of people, I should be able to get up and do 35 seconds of dance in front of a group of some strangers and some new friends. Pushing yourself that way has a lot of benefit. You're getting outside your mind, pushing yourself in different ways, being a little uncomfortable, figuring out what you need to work on — not just in the place that always feels safe or known to you. There are huge benefits to being a little outside your comfort zone in something you're really excited about, but not always gravitating to the thing you know you're going to do naturally.
Kalpana's case for putting yourself in rooms where you're not the most skillful person reminds me of how Tim Yoo described studying elite performers outside the law to find an edge inside it — different domain, same instinct that taking your craft seriously means apprenticing yourself to something that humbles you. Listen to my conversation with Tim Yoo.
Khurram Naik: You mentioned the decision to stay in LA. You'd expected to return to DC for work after clerking in California, and then you decided to stay. I remember from a previous conversation you framed that as a gut decision. Was the different-walks-of-life thing something you knew at the time as part of that gut decision, or something you figured out for yourself later on?
Kalpana Srinivasan: I felt something very strong in the moment, and I've had that a few times in my life and career — just a feeling. I can't necessarily put my finger on it, but it's like, this feels right. Being in this environment feels right. I'd come to LA to clerk, never lived here, had no connections, very strongly believed I was only going to spend a year here. I really tried to learn the city in what I expected to be my one year. But I just felt very at ease, and I had a sense that I would enjoy being here. If my sense was wrong, obviously we have other options and choices we can make along the way. But sometimes you can feel a pull to something that may not necessarily be logical. I didn't have any connection to this city. I hadn't summered here. I hadn't even investigated the job market for lawyers. But I had a sense this was going to be a good place for me. So it was very much driven by gut, and then later I could further rationalize it — California is a great market, of course; it's also a great place to be a plaintiff's lawyer, which is primarily what I do now; and it has a lot of opportunities for young lawyers. At the time I wasn't focused on those aspects. I just had a feeling.
Khurram Naik: What are some other gut decisions you've made?
Kalpana Srinivasan: When I was in college I was very interested in journalism. I was writing for the daily college paper and I spent a summer interning for the Associated Press in Hartford, Connecticut. It was really fun to work for a daily news service — I liked the deadlines and the demands. Hartford was an interesting place given all the different things going on there. When I was graduating, I had decisions to make about whether to focus on other options or continue to pursue journalism. The AP program at that time came with a job offer, but you had to take it wherever it was — the middle of the country, a place you knew nothing about. Frankly at the time, it was more likely you wouldn't be in a big city, you'd be somewhere else to start. So I said, I really enjoy this work, wherever it takes me I'm going to give it a go. I'm going to take whatever job they offer me. You don't get to sit around and wait for your place of choice. That was based on gut, accepting it a little bit blindly.
Kalpana Srinivasan: It turned out very fortuitously — and this is luck unrelated to my own instinctual choice — that I got placed in Washington, DC, covering city politics and city news. Very unexpected. I'd assumed I would probably be in a small town somewhere I didn't know anybody. That was a real gift. The second fortuitous thing is that our city bureau merged with the national bureau of the AP in DC. They just consolidated. That had been in the works at the time I was hired, I guess, and so they were a little bit uncertain what to do with me, because I was a new hire there to cover city news, and I got absorbed into this bigger operation of a national desk. That was truly a piece of luck. Most people spend much of their career trying to get to that national bureau position. From that platform I was able to cover all kinds of stories. Eventually I got a beat covering media policy and technology, which really spurred my interest in being more on the advocacy side than just the reporting side. I was covering policy decisions, congressional actions, then I started covering cases at the DC Circuit — challenges to the '96 Telecom Act — and it just made me start thinking about being more involved, as opposed to being an observer, which is what you are as a daily reporter. An important one, who shapes the way people understand and process the news. But that ultimately led me to apply to law school. So that was a combination of making a choice that felt right along with a very lucky hand. I met my spouse at a wedding of mutual friends. He's Irish and was living in Ireland at the time. That was a very instinctive feeling — that this was the person who potentially was going to play an important role in my life. Through a much longer journey, that played itself out as well. Definitely had that feeling that was something different than trying to map out the logistics of it.
Khurram Naik: In these different spheres in life you're willing to follow decisions without regard to how they look on paper or whether there's some analytical criteria. In the professional example what was interesting is you identified the factors you capitalized on — the luck aspect. I wonder, now that you've experienced some of this luck, whether you have a point of view on things lawyers specifically, maybe early in their career, can do to position themselves to be the beneficiary of luck. You can't control luck, but other things you can do to make an asymmetric bet.
Kalpana Srinivasan: I think as lawyers our universe of risk, depending on what you do, is not that broad. It could be for some people, but in general, if you're in a traditional private practice, the universe is limited. Sometimes there's a sense that you're going out on a limb taking some crazy risk because you picked a firm that was really small, or you decided to go to a plaintiff's shop even though everybody was pointing in the direction of a traditional big law firm defense-side practice. These are, I think, moderately not-that-risky choices, because you can probably change if it turns out not to be the best fit. But more of that is what increases the opportunity and the potential for some good old-fashioned good luck. For me, I made this decision to live in Los Angeles, and I didn't really know about Susman Godfrey at the time. I knew a little bit about it because my co-clerk was from Houston and was planning to go back to Houston, where the firm was based and had a big office. I knew somebody else who was working in our office. Our office at the time was four people. If you had asked me in law school if I wanted to go work in an office of four people, I'd say absolutely not. Social person, need more engagement, it seems risky, what if you don't like those people. But at that moment in my life I was more receptive to it. I was already making this big change to live in LA. I went to the office and it was beautiful chaos — everybody was running around, deep getting ready for trials and doing real stuff — and I thought to myself, this is something different. It feels very different from any other law firm I've ever interviewed in, summered in, or worked in. That's what I want to try. I can go somewhere bigger or different if it's not the right flavor for me. Again, these are not risks on the outer bounds, but people taking more of them, observing, looking at what might be a chance that's different — those are the things that often present the best opportunities, because you're not even thinking of them. In my case, it gave me an opportunity to be in this practice where I got to do all kinds of things as a young lawyer, and also a chance to help develop and cultivate a growing operation, our LA office. I wouldn't have had that had I gone somewhere bigger and more established in this market. You have to be willing to step outside some norms or some things that feel natural or comfortable. That's where some of these great opportunities, whether they're luck or timing, can find you.
Khurram Naik: It might be helpful to get a little more tangible. A really common scenario, particularly in California — so many firms are looking to grow here. East Coast firms, international firms. So you find lawyers considering: here's this growing office, satellite office, small office at an established brand. How do you think through that? There's a lot of upside in being on the ground floor of something growing and influencing the direction. And yet there's some risk too — law firms close down offices. How would you counsel someone at different stages of their career considering a move like that?
Kalpana Srinivasan: It's really important to understand what your role and your visibility is going to be. It's great to be at a place that has a great reputation and a brand name. Those can be really wonderful tools. But at the end of the day, if you're at a firm that has a prestigious reputation and you get no airplay, that is going to limit your ability to grow. It's not enough to say, "I'm a great litigator at such-and-such firm" if nobody has the opportunity to ever see you. The critical factor should be what your individual role is going to be. If you're an associate, are you going to get cases where you interact with clients and opposing counsel, get stand-up time? Are you going to take depos? Are you going to argue? Because ultimately those are the seeds for future business development of yourself. People see you in action, people know you as a known element. If you're a partner, are you going to be in a leadership role internally? Are you going to get the support you need to develop your business externally? The reality is, down the road clients hire firms, but they hire individuals. They hire people. If you choose to go to a firm opening a new shop because it has a great reputation, it could be a great opportunity, but you still need to understand what your individual opportunities are going to be. Saying you're a litigator at such-and-such firm is not really as impactful as saying, "I got to do these things in my career. I had the opportunity to handle this big argument. These other lawyers get to see me on the other side of their cases, and now they want to refer cases to me." So when I talk to young lawyers, whether they're coming to our firm or going elsewhere, I always say you should know what you're going to be doing. You, not what they do. Not a firm that has all these brand-name cases. What are you going to be doing? And what will you be doing as a partner, what will your compensation structure be? The reputation of the firm can be very important, but it should never supersede your understanding of your own path there.
Khurram Naik: To get really concrete — if they're interviewing, what are the kinds of questions they can ask? And as a partner, what are the kinds of questions you'd be asking to diligence that?
Kalpana Srinivasan: For an associate, first of all, I'd want to talk to as many associates as I can. When associates interview I always say, you're welcome to talk to me, but probably toward the end — the most important people you need to talk to are these associates. Ask them, what do you do every day? Tell me about your week. Tell me about your last two months. Tell me about the most interesting thing you did in the last six months. Not in a confrontational or test kind of way — that's not the recommendation for somebody interviewing for a job. But, what's a realistic expectation of what I'm going to be doing here? Getting a little more granular than "you're going to get hands-on experience." Okay, well, let's put some meat on the bone. The cases they're staffed on, but also the kinds of arguments they've gotten to do, depositions if they have, teamwork, interfacing with the client. There are going to be impressive cases, but if you're writing one section of one brief on a case, that's pretty different than being the person who gets up and argues the dispositive motion. Associates should want to see what their life would tangibly be like.
Kalpana Srinivasan: And then for partners — some of this is cultural for us. We're very transparent with our partnership and even with our associates about numbers, financials, how the firm is doing. Our partners have very clear understanding of our compensation structure. We don't have some black-box mechanism for paying people. If I was interviewing to be a partner, I'd want to know what that structure is like. I'd want it clear to me, because making an informed choice is very important. Knowing whatever system, whatever universe you end up in, that you knew about it, you knew how that happened, you knew the business of what you're signing up for. Partners and senior associates need to understand the business aspect of firm life, and their interviewing should include that piece very critically.
Khurram Naik: I want to go back to what you said about the AP — you were willing to be carted off to the middle of nowhere to do that work because you assessed the opportunity was worth it. And then in LA you were willing to join a firm that you weren't super familiar with, with a tiny office. Not a lot of people would have gone for that — you were somebody who'd just clerked, you'd have a lot of options, any number of people would have gone for certainty. So in the first case you were willing to sacrifice control over your career — we're going to live somewhere in the country. In the second phase you were willing to sacrifice certainty about what your career would look like. Today, what are you willing to sacrifice that you think your peers — experienced litigators in general — aren't?
Kalpana Srinivasan: I do still pick up and move a lot for these trials, which some people, that's not what they want out of life at a certain stage, and how you balance that with other things including responsibilities to family. But that feeling of being — and it's not just trying the case, it's the very unique feeling of being together in this environment where you're really focused on one thing, and you're working really intensely with a group of people — is a really remarkable thing. Even still, you look down the pike and you're like, oh, I'm going to be living in this place. Last year I was in Jacksonville, Florida, for the better part of two months. I was in Delaware. I was in Waukegan. You may be in all these other parts of the country. But when you're there, you're in this really special moment of having both the demand and the freedom to really focus on one thing, and to be with a group where you develop such a unique relationship and bond. I understand why that's not for everybody — it comes with its own challenges, even keeping up with the other cases and your new clients and managing all of that.
Kalpana Srinivasan: The other thing is being willing to spend the time to figure out what kinds of cases I want. I am not going to take every case. There are a lot of things I now, especially, pass on or decline because I don't think it's a good fit, even some matters that perhaps in another universe you would take. That's part of learning to be very strategic and selective about how you utilize your time and your skill. There are things I may have given up in that process that somebody else wouldn't. But one of the things I've learned over time is, you need to save room. You need to save room for those things that might arise. By nature that means turning down things some other people may not have. Especially if your practice is plaintiff-focused, you might be keeping your powder dry for something by saying no to something else that's still income-generating but is not perhaps your highest-and-best use. That's a hard skill everybody has to learn to some degree — feeling okay with saying no, declining something you could do, that you're not incapable of doing, but is perhaps not part of the long-term plan.
Kalpana's discipline around saying no to good cases to save room for the great ones echoes how Shashi Kewalramani described compounding skills across a nonlinear career — the through-line is the same gut-level willingness to forgo the obvious next step for the better one you can't fully describe yet. Listen to my conversation with Shashi Kewalramani.
Khurram Naik: On that note, in my work as a recruiter, I subscribe to a Buffett-like view — swing for the fat pitches. So I have to leave room in my schedule for those fat pitches. The tool I use is pretty straightforward: I can assign a dollar value to a placement in terms of potential comp, so I have a baseline. That's a quantifiable tool I can have in my head to quickly assess whether something's worth allocating my time to, and to save room for my other clients. In your case, when you're swinging for these fat pitches, what's the criteria you're using?
Kalpana Srinivasan: It's a combination. Obviously, cases that are significant in nature in terms of what's involved, what's at stake — those free you to do some of your most interesting work. And then things that are interesting to you, which can be pretty wide-ranging. Cases that are very intellectually demanding, sometimes in developing areas of the law. Or something that's a little bit different than what you have been working on. At any moment there are times where I get a case that might be a little more straightforward than a very complex IP or antitrust dispute, and it's really exciting to have that in your mix — to free your mind a little bit. And then there are the cases that are bet-the-company on one side or the other, which are often hard-fought but also high reward. Whether it's defending a client whose key business is on the line, or as a plaintiff pursuing an entity where your claims go to the heart of their business practice — that typically involves a lot of work, strategy, effort, and those are appealing to have as cases worth pursuing, especially when you have the right tools and platform to do it.
Khurram Naik: It sounds like some of what you're referencing when you say being strategic about how you're deploying your skills is some of it is allocating effort to really hard, high-stakes stuff, and then also some stuff that's a nice break from that, a more plausible win, just keeps the momentum going. Can you say more about how you're being strategic about your skill set?
Kalpana Srinivasan: Sometimes it's hard to know in advance, especially — we pursue every case as though we're going to try it, so we plan that way. That's part of the planning you have to undertake. You're going to take a case, you're going to have to try it. Now, you might take a case and before you're even on file you may be in a position to resolve it, or some business opportunity arises between the parties that leads to something that ends quicker than you'd planned. So there's some aspect you can't always foresee. For myself in terms of being selective, I look for things that keep me excited and fresh about the profession. There are definitely times where I've looked at my practice and docket and said, this is great, I could use a little more of X and a little less of Y. That might inform whether I take the next case somebody brings me, even though I might have in a different time period, because I already had a lot of cases in that particular area. Making sure you can be thinking about things in fresh ways and that you feel challenged and invigorated is important — really important in this job where you're spending so much time. You have to have some of that to keep you motivated. For me that might mean re-allocating the distribution of cases — okay, I've got a lot of patent cases on my docket, I have the arc of those, they're all maybe on a similar timeline, so now I want to focus on some other cases coming in. More in recent years I've found it important to be assessing what your pool of cases looks like so you can be doing your best work.
Khurram Naik: You mentioned the importance of fresh ideas. Something interesting about Susman Godfrey is that so many people are homegrown — you're homegrown, you're one of the leaders of the firm. There's a handful of firms with that approach, and it seems to me there's a trade-off in firms that grow accretively by bringing in new people. New people can add new ideas, at the cost of maybe a cohesive culture, or alignment in values and economics. So how do you institutionally keep fresh and get new ideas in?
Kalpana Srinivasan: I think that's really incumbent on the lawyers who are here to be thinking creatively. It's also an element of firm culture. Historically we've been very nimble about practice. We don't have fixed practice areas — we don't have formal practice areas at all. The firm was founded primarily to do plaintiff's antitrust and class work in the 1980s, and then there was a time when that was a more difficult road, so the firm diversified into other exciting areas. Because of the way our business is structured, there's a lot of financial incentive for partners to be really thoughtful and creative about where a new area to explore is. If you can figure that out, the firm is going to support you in it. I have partners who have developed entire practices in areas that really were largely untouched — I'm thinking especially in the class field, theories of law that hadn't really been pursued. They have a big motivation to do that. We do have some institutional clients, but unlike a lot of firms, having institutional clients isn't our only aim. You may be somebody whose individual practice doesn't include a lot of institutional clients, so you have to figure out where your work is coming from. Particularly as plaintiffs' counsel, a lot of your cases may be one-off for a particular client — their need is that one moment in which they have a very high-profile dispute to bring, but they may not have ongoing litigation of the size that's worth us being involved in. So we've always been forced to be creative about how to think about work, and to be very aware of where the trends are in the law. Steve Sussman really impressed upon us to be thinking about that, and not to get hung up — because we don't have fixed practice area structures — if there are moments where antitrust law has waxed and waned as the right place for plaintiffs to be, we need to pay attention. It's ingrained in the culture. We're not bringing in groups or lawyers by acquisition, but we have our own demands to be thinking constantly about what new areas are viable for litigation. We have a partnership that's really thoughtful and creative and willing to take appropriate risk to give it a shot in new areas. When it's ingrained in your culture you don't need to search outside for it — but you do need to be thinking all the time as an institution about how to keep that going.
Khurram Naik: If there's one thing you think other firms — primarily plaintiff or primarily defense — should emulate from Susman, what would it be?
Kalpana Srinivasan: We evaluate cases very carefully, and we do so because a lot of times we're taking risk in those cases — whether it's contingent, whether it's some bonus upside. We try to structure fee arrangements even in defense cases that might include some component of a success fee, or that reflect the aims of the client. More firms should be doing that. Should put some skin in the game. It makes their clients feel really good that their law firm has an incentive to try to get the result they want, and it forces you to figure out what your client wants. You might have a client that wants to battle to the end of the earth, or a client that says, look, I really want this resolved in six months, and if I can get it resolved this way in six months on these terms, that's a win for me. You need to know that. Part of this exercise of trying to come up with bespoke fee arrangements is it forces you to figure that out early on with your client. What matters to you? What's a win in your column? So part one is trying to align yourself closely with your client's aims and come up with some fee structure that reflects that, so they know you're trying to achieve what they're asking you to. The second piece is really learning how to bet cases — to think about them in a business sense, what you're investing in them to achieve the results. Because of our contingent route, we track all the time. You understand the merits, you analyze liability, but you're also thinking about damages, you're also thinking about how eventually this case could or could not be monetized. Folding that business analysis into your legal analysis is important for you and for the client to understand what the ultimate path to recovery might be.
Khurram Naik: A lot of alignment of incentives in a very beneficial way. I really like the concept of sitting down and thinking hard about what success even looks like, because clients can take for granted that they haven't sat down and thought that through. So is there either a plaintiff or defense firm that you admire and an idea you'd like to incorporate from them at your firm?
Kalpana Srinivasan: A couple. You had Moez Kaba on your podcast recently, so I'll certainly give a shout-out to Hueston Hennigan. What they're doing rolling from big trial to big trial on both sides — defense and plaintiff — I think their agility is really, really impressive. Their trial results speak for themselves, but they're managing to do that without being a massive law firm. They're grown and have a great size, but they're demonstrating that agility, the ability to move from big case to big case at a very, very high level. That is a very special skill, and one a lot of law firms don't have. They're either very big and they have people setting up every case and a few people who come in to try certain cases, or they're not really prepared to go to trial at all and they litigate and then potentially have somebody parachute in. What Hueston Hennigan is doing is great to see — that there are firms that can have that as their model. On the plaintiff side there are so many firms we work with as co-counsel on various cases, and I'm always interested in their intake process — how they're evaluating cases. I learn something kind of every time, because they all have different ways of figuring out how to approach a good case. Anything we can do to sharpen that skill is time well spent. I've seen some firms bring in non-lawyers — their own internal economics expert, somebody who can do some expert-type analysis for them internally pre-litigation — and that's an interesting way to dig in differently, so you're better understanding the risks and issues in the case.
Kalpana's read on Hueston Hennigan's agility — moving from big trial to big trial on both sides without scaling into a massive firm — sits alongside how Rakesh Kilaru described "trial by subtraction" for high-stakes cases. Different firms, same conviction that what makes a trial firm great is what it deliberately leaves out. Listen to my conversation with Rakesh Kilaru.
Khurram Naik: Is the firm bigger than you expected when you first joined?
Kalpana Srinivasan: I wouldn't say so. The growth over my almost 20 years here has been pretty steady. The firm has certainly grown from its roots, but we're 40-plus years into the firm's history and we're still about 160 lawyers — partners and associates. Because of our structure of associates coming to the firm, working their way through the track, and becoming partners, our partnership ranks have grown quite a bit in the past couple of years. But the growth is breeding abundance — it's not creating issues over limited resources, because these new partners bring with them the ability to support these massive cases we're taking on. Some are bringing new work into the firm themselves. Our revenue generation is really spread out across lawyers from different vintages, and we are very non-hierarchical. If you have somebody come in as a first, second, third-year partner, their revenue is treated equally with mine or somebody who's been at the firm longer than me. So the firm has grown, but because of our structure that growth has been very natural and organic — not with some mission to reach a certain target. The way our firm operates has proven out to be supporting itself and then some. Last year was our most profitable year ever. That'll continue to be the paradigm — thoughtful organic growth. But measured growth is needed because we are continuing to take on some very, very large matters that need support to do them the way we want to do them.
Khurram Naik: Is there anything different about litigating cases now — economies of scale, where you're able to do things you couldn't previously?
Kalpana Srinivasan: I think so. Some of the cases the litigation market 20 or 30 years ago could take on — a massive class action with a certain number of people, a certain number of hours — some of that's changed because litigation has become more protracted. There are more issues, more discovery, and the volume of discovery has obviously grown with the advent of e-discovery. If we're in a plaintiff's case up against a large corporate defendant, we know even on our obligations to meet our proof we're going to have a lot to do. That's different than when you were maybe doing a contingent case in the 1980s or '90s. The scale is different and needed to properly put together the case. We don't view any cases as being too big to take on. We want to be prepared for any matter. Having the flexibility — some cases come to us, or some firms do a very nice job litigating and working up a case but for whatever reason it's not the right fit for them to try it, so they come to us close to trial time and we need to have the ability to have people ready to parachute in.
Khurram Naik: On firm administration — I asked a number of people who know you or admire you what they know or admire about you, and something Paul Greywall said is he's really impressed with your ability to first-chair really big trials and run this firm at the same time. He said that is a rare thing. Some people only do one or the other, even the best. So what's the secret?
Kalpana Srinivasan: The secret is finding more space in the day. Being organized about how you balance the different obligations and demands. I do think actually being a very active practicing litigator, being in trial, helps me as a leader of a firm that does the very thing I'm out there doing. Part of what you're resolving in management is often what is the future of our business — and being on the ground floor where I'm out litigating and working with lawyers and being in the courtroom, I have a much better ability to think those issues through with my partners than if I was solely administrating. Some of the issues my partners might bring to me about how they resolve a conflict, or an area they're trying to get into, or a challenge in a case — I'm much better equipped to deal with them because I understand what they're trying to accomplish. On the practical side, I try to be very organized about how my time is spent, and to find pockets — okay, now I'm going to focus on getting through some of the firm-related work, this is the time I'm going to go back to my case matters. I have a co-managing partner, which is really vital, especially if one of us is in trial — that's when you want your focus to be as singular as it can be. Having somebody else to focus on the firm issues during that time is very important. I believe I have a better ability to figure out and address firm issues and have the trust of my partners because I'm doing what they're doing. I'm out in the trenches, and when they come to me with an issue I'm trying to problem-solve for them because I know why it matters to them. That's really helpful in our firm, as opposed to somebody who may no longer be practicing and for whom those issues may not be so palpable anymore.
Khurram Naik: Any benefits the other direction — trial practice benefiting from also administering?
Kalpana Srinivasan: Absolutely. The operational side of what I get to do is really fun and challenging on its own. It's different — there are different people issues involved. You can import some of those lessons into how you run your trial team. In your leadership role at the firm, I'm trying to be a good ear for a very wide group of people — not just lawyers but also staff — who have different issues or sometimes want a different ear about things. They have direct access to me. Likewise, when you're working with the trial team, remind yourself you're working with everybody on the team. You want to be available to them too. Some of those interpersonal skills that are so critical to management have a very important role to play in building a successful trial team. My teams know how to work with me, know how I'm available, know how I work. I try to be really open about that. I put together a little list of tips or things about working with me that I think the younger lawyers on the team should know — I am more likely to read briefs early in the morning than late at night, so that helps you in your planning. I do tend to read a lot of things on Saturday morning. I'm not going to rush to get something to you at 9 or 10 or 11 at night unless we really have to, because I know I'm much better off getting it to where it needs to be and to you early in the morning. Just as a manager tries to give clarity, I've tried to do that increasingly with my trial teams so they know what I'm thinking. It shouldn't be mysterious for them.
Khurram Naik: What surprised you about being co-managing partner once you were in the role?
Kalpana Srinivasan: Part of what you're doing as a leader is being a leader in some of the softer senses of the word that are not always about decision-making. People often utilize you and my co-managing partner as a sounding board for ideas, or to get our feeling about something they're thinking about. These aren't issues we have to decide. To some aspect you are also a moral leader. You are the person people want to get feedback from, or want to make sure you're on board with something they're considering even before they venture ahead and put it before the executive committee. Some of that is a testament to our institution and how close-knit it remains even as we've grown. Partners come to the managing partners and say, hey, I'm thinking about doing this, what do you think — or I'd like to pick your brain about an idea, or I'd like your views on how to deal with a situation. Some of it is more technical — what's the firm policy on this. But a lot is wanting to have a resource that is your leadership, your guidance for how you should be proceeding. I probably didn't appreciate how much of that still is part of the culture — that partners want to know that what they're going to do has the support, has been thought through, has the endorsement of leadership.
Khurram Naik: It sounds like Steve Susman emphasized judgment — pay attention to where trends are going, think about it before thinking the firm. And likewise as lawyers thinking about new theories to litigate cases under. There's a very forward-thinking aspect to the firm. But I'm struck that a lot of your references to the firm use the word "history" a lot, or you refer to Steve Susman and his approaches. I find an interesting balance between an almost reverential approach to its history and this growth. How do you think about those two?
Kalpana Srinivasan: I think there's an interesting connection between them. It's allowed the growth and the future planning to be tethered to something. As opposed to, okay, we now have 100 partners, and they're all on their own doing whatever they want and whatever is lucrative for them — which could be one world you end up in when a firm grows. We still have a partnership that's very rooted and committed to one another. That has remained even at our current size, and I really think that's because of the history of the firm and the way a lot of these partners grew up together in a firm that was developing and growing. I see a big part of my role in leadership having come into it after the founding partners are no longer in leadership and another long-standing managing partner had stepped down. This is part of a transition to the next future wave of lawyers and leadership at the firm, and it's really critical that even going into that future you have some grounding in the past. Otherwise you have people out there trying to figure out what to do for themselves without any sense of commitment to the firm itself. We don't have that, and I credit it to a very strong history and identity as to who we are. Our partnership is very active and engaged in so many aspects of the firm. We don't have full-time administrative partners, but we have so many people who are very giving of their time. We're figuring out how to channel that, pass down the important lessons we learned in the firm's history, and also how to tweak those as we grow. So many of our principles are still rooted in what Steve and the firm founders created — including our very rigorous process for looking at and evaluating cases, and a lot of the transparent aspects of our culture. We try really hard to hold on to that even as we grow, and figure out how it needs to be adapted in appropriate ways.
Khurram Naik: In another conversation you mentioned that one of Steve Susman's little trial approach techniques was, when it comes to depositions, not holding the number of hours you have as a goal — like, I have to hit seven hours, whatever it is. Why not one hour? Why not no hours? Why don't we just cross at trial? What are one or two things from Steve or others you trained with that have made the biggest impact on you? In my case I externed in law school for then-Chief Judge of the Northern District of Illinois, Jim Holderman. Before he was on the bench he was a trial lawyer, an AUSA. He loved trial work, and he was a big proponent of — and would point out the advocates who did this — believing that even on a routine status hearing, there's always some option to advocate for your client skillfully without overstepping anything. There's always some way to subtly advocate. That little approach has permeated my career since then. Even now as a recruiter, if I'm having a communication with a recruiting team at a firm, I always find some way to advocate for my client. Simple but powerful. What about for you?
Kalpana Srinivasan: A few things. One I said about a week or two ago at the ABA conference when we were talking about trying monopolization cases. It's one of Steve's favorite quotes: there's no such thing as a bad witness, only a badly prepared witness. He really instilled in the firm and in the training how to prepare a witness for deposition or for trial, and had a very skillful way of thinking about how you do that. It was not about just inundating them with a bunch of documents with their name on it, or leaving them to fend for themselves. Really, really prepping them — getting them to understand what their role is, what they're there to accomplish, depending on whether you're in a deposition or trial. How to get them to sound confident and comfortable. How to do prep sessions that are meaningful, give them useful feedback. The other piece is he used to talk about how when you're actually in the moment in a deposition, if you're defending a witness, your work should already be done. You have prepped that person so well that, sure, you can lodge your objections, but you're not there to protect them from questions — they're ready for the questions. I always think about that. Especially for trial, I've developed my own method for prepping witnesses that's derivative of that idea. Working backwards from what you need to get the witness comfortable with — themselves, their testimony, understanding their role, what they're there to accomplish at a very conceptual level — and then drilling down into specifics. It is on you to get that person ready. If they're a critical witness, you need to spend a lot of time. It's not something you can do with a day of prep beforehand, especially for your critical trial witnesses. You need to know those people. You need to know how they think, how they operate, what their weaknesses are not just as a witness but as a person.
Kalpana Srinivasan: I've had cases where, knowing there might be a witness who needed a lot of attention, I just learned how important it was to start that process early — getting to know and understand them at a deep level. So when you're prepping them you know how they learn. For example, some witnesses are really not great auditory learners. You can sit there and talk them through things and they're not going to process it. You need to be in a room with them, you need to be writing on a whiteboard, because they need to see it. But how would you know what type of learner they are if you haven't already spent the time getting to know them?
Kalpana Srinivasan: The other example sounds basic, but I have this memory of Steve at a trial not too long before his passing, just being in a room with two boxes of the hottest documents in the case, sitting down and going through them one by one. He was a big believer in having a very well-curated evergreen list of hot documents, which we keep in our cases from day one. We have hot docs, then we refine them, add to them, remove documents. At any point in a case we have a reference set that really encapsulates the most important issues, along with a chronology of events. You need to pay attention to them throughout the course of the case so that when you need them they are in good condition. Certainly by the time you get to trial you know those documents. You can come in and sit down with a couple of boxes of the hottest documents that are really going to tell the story for the jury. You can put 10,000 documents in your exhibit list, but your case is likely going to come down to some universe, and you want to know that universe backwards and forwards. I have a distinct memory of seeing him on his own in a conference room going through those hot documents by himself, prepping for something. There's just no substitute for it. You can't shortchange it.
Khurram Naik: What are ways in which your approach to trial differs from Steve Sussman's approach to trying cases?
Kalpana Srinivasan: Steve was very collaborative in trials and instilled the idea that everybody gets a role at trial. We still maintain that philosophy. With that great opportunity and great responsibility can sometimes come — especially for our younger lawyers, and having been one myself — some stress. You're putting on or examining an important witness at trial and you've never done that before. I've tried to make sure we are building in more steps along the way in the process, so that when that time comes the younger lawyer is equipped, we feel comfortable, they feel comfortable, we've given them the resources they need to succeed. So building in a little more on the front end. That idea that everybody on the team does something — definitely a Steve concept — but now that our cases and teams might be a little bigger, we just need to make sure everybody's comfortable with that opportunity too.
Khurram Naik: Do you have a favorite phase of a case?
Kalpana Srinivasan: That phase right before trial when you're narrowing everything down is really amazing — you're forced to crystallize the ideas. The slog of discovery is challenging. In our current civil litigation environment, there are days where there can be a lot of unnecessary fighting, which we are strongly discouraged from doing, but you can't control all of that in discovery disputes. That moment when you're really forced to answer the simple question of what is this case about, in a very succinct way — and what you need to do to be able to open, to make sure you've hit the high points, to string together the best testimony and documents — that moment close to trial is for me my favorite time.
Khurram Naik: Favorite part of trial?
Kalpana Srinivasan: Opening is my favorite. Closing is fun too, in part because there's a lot you're doing based on what happened at trial, so you need to be spontaneous and quick on your feet. But opening — you're setting the tenor for the trial and the relationship with the jury. The mood in the room can often be dictated by how the opening begins. It's not evidence, and it's early in the case, so it may not be what solely impacts the jurors' view of the case, but it sets the mood. Are the jurors going to be upset for your client? Are they wanting to vindicate your client? Sympathizing with your client? Are they here to learn? Are they here to be emotionally involved? What is the moment in the mood you're trying to set? Figuring out how to communicate that is for me the part of the case I really enjoy. Maybe the most creative or artistic part of the case. There's nothing else like that in litigation — everything else, discovery, is so factual: here's this rule, here's this. Opening allows you to be in control of the narrative — and to figure out how you want to tell that narrative, not just what it is, and what you want the narrative to evoke. You know what the story is on either side, but what is the feeling you want the jury to walk away with? Is it indignation? Is it that they understand the dispute is just two businesses fighting over nothing? You want them to have a feeling that's going to frame their view of the case.
Khurram Naik: Trials often involve surprises. What's a time you were really surprised by something, and how did you handle it?
Kalpana Srinivasan: I have been in trials where the witness has recanted prior testimony — and I don't mean, "oh, I said that at my depo but things change," some soft-pedaling of a prior answer. I mean full-blown: yes, I said that under oath, that was wrong, that didn't happen. Sometimes you almost have to remind yourself, take a moment and let it sink in for you and for everybody around you. You want to be sure the fact-finder appreciates what a big deal it is that this has just happened. You're used to trying to get through your questions in the time, but sometimes it's just taking that moment. That's often the most powerful thing. The rest of your questions may not really have any value after that, now that you've had somebody basically admit that their testimony is not trustworthy. As much as civil litigation is filled with prep and people have been deposed and they kind of know what their script is going to be, there are still moments of actual surprise. It's so important to be present enough to be able to respond to that — or not respond, and give everybody the moment to appreciate it.
Khurram Naik: Was there a time something was adverse or challenging that you had to deal with?
Kalpana Srinivasan: I had a situation with an expert who maybe didn't have a lot of testifying experience — was a seasoned industry expert, very well accomplished in their field, just not used to testifying. When faced with questioning, suddenly the lights are on, they're in the center of the room, the attention is on them, and they really struggled with holding onto their opinions, which they felt very passionately about based on their own independent industry knowledge. Being in the litigation spotlight is a different thing. That is why the prep is so critical. For people on the expert side who don't have a lot of litigation testifying experience, it can be a little bit of a shock to the system to be in that moment. I've had experts who really struggled to hold onto their opinions even though they believed them, because they were getting a little bit confused or weren't used to the manner in which they were being questioned. Most of all being observed by a judge or jury or arbitrator — suddenly they kind of lost themselves a little bit. In those moments you have to be prepared to bring them back to basic principles, basic concepts. Why are they there? Help re-ground them. Going back to something I mentioned, that's where knowing them as a person can be really valuable. Maybe you come back on redirect to an anecdote or an area relatable to them, just to bring it down a little bit, help them reframe and regroup so they can block out the stress they feel being in that space and refocus on their opinions. That can happen to any witness — getting a little freaked out being under the microscope — even the very best prepped ones. But you need to know enough how to bring them back around.
Khurram Naik: Something I'm thinking about is how much you, more than other trial lawyers I've spoken with or had on here, are really thinking about how people are different and how an individual needs to be adapted to. I think you've also thought that of yourself — in giving context for how you work to your team, you're thinking about how you're different than other people. You seem very attuned to individuality. Even when I'm asking about how you work, you often talk institutionally about a firm, but the lens you're breaking it down with is often the individual. I wonder if you've noticed that in yourself.
Kalpana Srinivasan: I probably am more self-aware of it now than I was as a younger lawyer. First of all, it's my nature to be a people-oriented person. I tend to think of things from the ground up rather than top-down. When I was a journalist or reporter, one of the things I loved was talking to people and figuring out the story by starting at the bottom rather than, okay, we know this policy initiative was implemented, let's work up to that. But how did it affect people? Let's start there. That's just how I process things. It's also what's given me a lot of freedom and courage — or whatever the right word is — to do things and not self-select out of things where you may be different from the people in the room, or you may have a different way of approaching the issue. To not talk yourself out of it before you've even started. Accepting that there are individual aspects to yourself and those around you — that we are individuals that are going to be different — has been very important for me to feel comfort that I'm going to do things in a way that feels comfortable to me. There may be things I look at and say, I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do it that way. And that's okay, and it's appropriate, and it's great for our profession too.
Kalpana Srinivasan: Even how you operate as a trial lawyer — there are things some of my colleagues or co-counsel do beautifully in the courtroom that don't sit well on me, so I don't do them. Getting more comfortable with the way you approach what you do and that it may be different has been very important for me. As for the institution, I do look at things from the ground up. It's important to understand things at a person level, even if ultimately some of the problems you're trying to solve are at the institution level.
Khurram Naik: This might foreshadow how you approach business development. We talked about how you allocate time between administration and trial work, but BD is another dimension I'd be interested to hear on a weekly or monthly time horizon. Maybe starting big picture: these seem to be the three big buckets. How do you stretch your time across them?
Kalpana Srinivasan: It's changed on the BD front over time — and that's especially relevant for younger lawyers out there, because how you approach BD changes when you're starting out. I really like to do what could be considered BD or networking activities that also involve things I'm interested in. I find I gravitate toward those, I like doing them, and I also get the benefit of meeting people and networking. What I find not as comfortable for me are the very forced BD situations — trying to broker meetings, have a lunch with somebody, a dinner with somebody I don't know. Like a full meal — for me, not that I haven't done it, but it's not my go-to. I much prefer to do something where people have an opportunity to see a little bit about me rather than hear about me. I speak a fair bit at conferences and on panels and I enjoy it. I get benefit out of it. I learn every time I do a panel both from the other people on the panel and the subject matter. It gives an opportunity for others — counsel who might be referring cases, in-house lawyers — to see me doing something, speak about an area I'm working in, see me in action, even though I'm not up there trying a case. Rather than just meeting them and giving them an elevator pitch, which I don't find enjoyable or productive. I'd rather them see something about me in my element. Not necessarily in the courtroom, although I've gotten a lot of work from people who have been my co-counsel or opposing counsel.
Kalpana Srinivasan: I've historically been involved in various organizations and on boards — things I was interested in or felt were important, including various iterations of work on the South Asian bar locally and nationally. Now I don't have any official role there, so I just like to come see the amazing legions of new young South Asian lawyers, which fills me with great joy. Those are things that are fun for me to do. If I go to a conference like that I'm mostly there to catch up with old friends. It has the added benefit that people get to know you and your practice, and may also be referring cases along the way. I've found the most productive BD to be something ancillary to doing something I enjoy or that is a learning opportunity — not just out there doing cold networking for its own sake, which can be daunting for a lot of people and feel unnatural. Some people love it and excel at it. For me, having it be a component of something else feels much more my speed.
Khurram Naik: A lot of what you talked about that's so interesting is your potential clients or peers seeing you in action. It's like, what would it be like to hire you — it is you being in action in some form. Is there some way you think about how to allocate how much time to BD on a monthly horizon? Panels aren't exactly something you can schedule, but how do you generally think about how much energy and time to dedicate?
Kalpana Srinivasan: I'd reframe it a little. For me, BD includes vetting potential cases — because I spend a big chunk of time doing that. That's our lifeblood, looking at new matters. I get contacted all the time about potential cases, and you want to give people guidance. If you're not interested, you don't want to keep them hanging. If you are, you need time to do diligence, especially if we're looking to share risk. So I'd keep that in the rubric of BD. Today I get a lot of inquiries from people reaching out to me directly or because they read something I worked on. They want to meet and talk about a potential matter. The vetting and intake work is a pretty substantial chunk of my time, because there's often time sensitivity — they have a case they want to bring or they're about to bring, they're looking to hire counsel quickly, they may want you to put together materials, they may be looking to us to give them an answer on whether we would do it on a contingency or risk basis. In a given week it could be a quarter of my time looking at potential new matters and doing diligence — a quarter to a third, maybe more in a given time frame. I consider that under the umbrella of BD now. When I was a younger lawyer — that's probably why I'd draw the distinction — you have to be more intentional about how you devote time to BD if you're not just getting calls to look at potential cases. It may not be enough to do a panel here and there. So how do you deepen your involvement? For me I'd pick something where I could be on a board with a task force or project that allowed me to work with people a little more closely. Sometimes it's not always expanding the scope — it's about deepening the contacts and relationships you have. Young lawyers who have co-clerks and law school classmates already have relationships, and sometimes you forget that going and spending time with them is time extremely well spent. There's always a lot of press about expanding your network horizontally, but a lot of times you have those contacts and you need to vertically drill them, make them closer. Young lawyers on cases who had an okay relationship with their opposing counsel in a past case — those are great opportunities for referrals and BD. Reach out to somebody you were on the other side of, get to know them, or a co-counsel, even when the case is over. There's a lot of missed opportunity there to take the relationships you already have and really drill down. It's less daunting than to say, oh, I should walk into some big ABA meeting and shake a thousand hands. That's far less productive. I was more focused on those depth-building relationships when I was a younger lawyer, as a form of BD.
Khurram Naik: On the topic of networks, I'm certainly a fan of going deeper, and there's also a benefit to going broader. On panels — what's underrated when it comes to networking is things at scale. I think a lot of lawyers don't think enough about the internet as a thing that allows you to create scale, and intimacy is very important too. Those two things go hand in hand. I have a podcast, I have a newsletter for South Asian lawyers, and that allows me to operate at scale. So when I have opportunities to be at a conference — I'm going to be in Houston in a couple weeks for the South Asian Bar Association gala — I'm putting myself in a position where I can make the most out of in-person quality time. It's this kind of barbell — very broad on one end and very deep on the other. Panels are a great spot to be in, because you're operating at scale with a group of people who are going to be there. So I'm a big proponent of doing something at scale to the extent possible. That's kind of my hammer — everything I see as a nail, and that's my hammer. Do you have a hammer? Is there something for yourself professionally that you think pervades — like my career can be facilitated, as a recruiter I couldn't operate without this network. Is there something the same way in your career — this is the asset I'm compounding?
Kalpana Srinivasan: You mean more as a strategy for career development as opposed to internal development of yourself? If you can have the opportunity for a platform — to be on a podcast, to write articles — those are great things. Some lawyers even have the opportunity to be in trials where the trial or argument is recorded. That goes to a very simple mantra: show, don't tell. If you can show somebody something, it is immensely valuable, because it says so much without you having to say it in a way that — somebody might say, "okay, well, thanks, glad you told me you're great. How do I know?" Those kinds of platforms for me — you may have lawyers who really have gotten to see you, and a lot of my cases come from referring lawyers, but is there a way you can showcase that even more to your clients? Whether it be an argument they can come sit in on, or a recording of some appellate argument — a lot of people now have those from their appellate arguments. Even inviting potential clients to come see you in a hearing. One of the benefits of Zoom hearings is that you can have a much bigger audience than you did before. It sounds so simple and straightforward, but sometimes we spend a lot of time talking around the thing — and we are the thing. How can you give your clients and potential referring lawyers more opportunities to see you, because you are the thing you're trying to explain and talk about and market. Sometimes the best way is just to give them more access to you doing what you do.
Khurram Naik: Love that. On a year time horizon, what are you most excited about with your career?
Kalpana Srinivasan: In the last couple of years I've had a different breadth to the kinds of cases — high-profile, bet-the-company-type cases, but of a wide variety, on both sides of the v. Last year was that kind of year for me. I had a very significant plaintiff-side trade secret and breach of confidential information case, and then I ended up defending an $11 billion merger from government challenge. The opportunity to do these different types of matters on both sides was very invigorating. I'd like to continue to have that flexibility — to handle matters that require great litigators to get them to the finish line, but also some strategic considerations about what the party is trying to achieve, what your client wants the outcome to be, and perhaps utilizing some of my skills to get there that are beyond litigation. Thinking about strategy and how to interface with different people in different aspects of the broader litigation realm — whether it's dealing with your fact-finder or dealing with the government and negotiating a consent order. All of that requires not just a very solid understanding of litigation dynamics — because that gives you the ability to figure those issues out — but also thinking creatively about how to get to a solution that's going to be viewed as a win for your client. That challenge for me is what I really enjoy.
Khurram Naik: And then what is something you're doing that's a stretch for yourself and out of your comfort zone — that you're excited about but a little daunted by?
Kalpana Srinivasan: More defense work. I've done plenty of it over the course of my career and I've tried defense cases, but it's good to not be pigeonholed as any one thing. I am, and I do identify my practice as primarily on the plaintiff's side, but it's important to be viewed first and foremost as somebody who handles significant matters and complex issues and tries to get them solved, whatever side that's on. Getting the opportunity to do more complex defense work is something I'd like to do and be thought of for, because it makes you a better lawyer to do both at a very high level. More generally, that's where I view my career now — coming in and helping clients in their thorny issues, whatever those may be, whether it's somebody stealing their IP or defending against claims that a company feels aren't right or where they need to mitigate risk. I'd like to spend time making sure I'm finding those really interesting, challenging cases on the other side of the v too.
Khurram Naik: That was going to be my last question, but you said something so interesting. You said it's good for you to take on defense cases. A reaction someone could have is — why couldn't you just focus on plaintiff? Why can't everyone think of Kalpana as synonymous with plaintiff cases, so you're the obvious go-to person? You talked about the benefit of marketing by showing what you can do — isn't that just showing you can do it? It's a no-brainer for me to call Kalpana because she's so good at plaintiff's cases. Whereas if I have to also think about her for defense cases, it's just less obvious. But you framed it as inherently good for you to get more rounded as a lawyer. So what I'm considering is — potentially there's a trade-off between being the go-to person for plaintiff cases and the obvious choice there, and potentially, I don't know if she's the obvious person for this kind of case. But it'd be worth it to you because you feel you'd be a more skilled lawyer and inherently enjoy your work more. Did I get that right?
Kalpana Srinivasan: A combination of things. It's like training any tool — if you train it the same way every time, that tool is going to be sharp. But if you then force the tool to be trained in a different way, it's going to be even more agile and have flexibility to respond to different things. That's part of what you're doing at a certain level. You can understand how to put together the plaintiff's case and really excel at it, and you should, and you should be very good at learning something on a deep level. But the challenge of being able to see the other perspective is beneficial to both sides. You make sure you've had a plaintiff's lawyer to know what the defendant's going to do. I frankly think that when I've been in big significant defense matters, the lawyers on the other side believe I'm credible about what I say, because I know what they're doing and I know where their weaknesses are very clearly, because I've been there too. It's about training and sharpening that skill set. At a personal level it's about being able to utilize some of these skills that traverse subject matter, traverse sides of the v, traverse clients. It's really about the strategy and solution finding. The more opportunities you have to do that — that's a part that's really exciting for me.
Khurram Naik: We talked about this before. When I was a patent litigator I focused on pharmaceutical patent litigation, and so much of it was on the generic side of some brand work, but mostly generic side. So, one side of the v. And patent litigation has its rules, and Hatch-Waxman litigation has its own rules — it's very regimented, there's minimal motion practice. It's nice that things are very structured, there's clarity about the path ahead, at the cost of, like you say, the versatility of being a litigator. It's all bench trials, I'm not doing jury trials. It's all one side of the v, not the other. There's no motion practice. As a junior litigator I recognized the trade-off of all the things I wasn't getting, but it was nice when I was new to the field to feel like I could get some mastery early on. Then as I progressed I realized the cost that was mounting of only having that one kind of experience. Something we talked about before is the part of patent litigation I just really did not enjoy was expert work. I just didn't enjoy it. I dreaded working an expert report and all the paragraph cites. I felt a lot of pressure to push through on it, but then I realized you won't really progress when you do that. Now as a legal recruiter, when there are challenging circumstances, I notice I'm excited about a challenge. If there's a difficult negotiation, a difficult ask to make, I'm excited to do it. To me, that's such a measure of your satisfaction with your work. There are a lot of lawyers who just aren't sure of the path they're on, and I'm trying to be a useful tool for helping lawyers figure out what they really like to do. It ties to some of what you were saying really early on — understanding your unique set of circumstances. So I guess, what advice do you have for lawyers — this is such a persistent thing in our field, not knowing what you really should be doing? It took me some tinkering for sure. How do you help lawyers think about what their true contribution is and where they should be directing themselves so they're really hitting resonance?
Kalpana Srinivasan: First, the tinkering, the journey — let's not undervalue that as a person. What is the journey you are on in your life? If you already knew the answers to everything, including what your ultimate calling is, we'd short-circuit a lot of our growing pains and personal growth along the way. It's absolutely the case that a lot of people come into the legal profession feeling like, I should have all the answers, I should know the path I'm on, and if I don't — if the path doesn't look familiar to me, if I don't think I'm going to be able to follow the footsteps of everybody I see in that path, or I don't look like people who are at the top echelons of this path wherever it leads — then I should go ahead and get off right now. We see that statistically in terms of lawyers who fall out of the profession, especially among certain groups, underrepresented groups, after being in practice for five or six years. It's really important to embrace that it is a journey to get to where you want professionally and to feel fulfilled. There can be a lot of different dimensions — is there a subject matter you're interested in, or it turns out you're not, or maybe you are and over time you decide you want to do something else? That's natural. That's not somebody making bad choices — it's recognizing that part of their fulfillment lies in having an understanding of different things or doing something new to keep them interested. To be willing to take some steps to explore.
Kalpana Srinivasan: As you mentioned, you might find some parts of the law to be laborious or demanding, and that may be true to some degree in whatever you do. But you should be able to identify things that give you some sense of fulfillment at all parts of your career, whether it's a big thing or a small thing. If you can't, that's when you need to be tweaking and redefining the work you're doing. The other thing is freeing yourself a little from the idea that if you don't fit into a particular mold you're not cut out for the profession, or not cut out for that path. The path is not so rigid. It can look that way when you're starting out, but the reality is people make different choices, take different turns. There are many different modes to success, personal and professional. You really have to free yourself from this idea that if this doesn't look natural to me, or I don't see myself being like that person who's very successful at what they do — that's fine. You're going to find your own way to get there. You just need to be very comfortable with the idea that you may not have a perfect model of every aspect of what you want to be. Totally fine. You're going to pick and choose. You look to somebody and say, well, I really admire that. Or I hope to replicate the kind of work they've done. But in other aspects of my professional life I'd like something more like that. The idea that there's some singular way to get there is not true, and it's a false myth — but it's a dangerous one, because I do think it leads a lot of people to feel like, gosh, if I can't do it that way, I just shouldn't be in this profession at all.
Kalpana Srinivasan: So a couple of themes. One — tinkering is a beautiful thing. It's part of what allows us to really explore ourselves, and people, lawyers, especially young lawyers, should feel more freedom to try that, to try the thing that might be a little risky or a little off the beaten path, and to know it might turn out to be very rewarding or it might turn out to have been the wrong choice — wrong meaning a fixably wrong choice. You can go somewhere else. These things are not set in stone. The second is that the arc of your career is hopefully really long. The fact that you spent a couple of years doing something and then realized it wasn't exactly what you want to be doing — okay, that's part of figuring out where you're going. If you have a long career, it's really a blip in the timeline. It can be hard to see that when you're in it. It feels like you're making choices you shouldn't, or you've given up precious time. But it's a small sliver of what you're going to be doing in your career. And finally — to have that sense of self-worth and self-confidence that it's okay to figure out how to do things in a way you may not have seen done before. You don't have to be caught up thinking of yourself as a trailblazer or having to be a pioneer out in the woods. It's not that dramatic. There are definitely models for ways to do bits and pieces of it. It's more having the confidence in yourself that you're going to find the elements that are right for you and lift from them, and build a path that's natural for you. Don't be put off by the legal profession if you think you're going to struggle in some aspect of it because it doesn't fit exactly right with the way you operate. Make it bend and mold to you, rather than the other way around.
Khurram Naik: Excellent points, and on the topic of show, don't tell — you've modeled that, so really appreciate the completeness of that. This was wonderful, Kalpana. I'm so glad we did this. I learned a ton here. Just a really awesome conversation.
Kalpana Srinivasan: Thank you so much, Khurram. I appreciate you putting in so much time. Great getting to talk to you too. Thanks.