Jane Kim is the Firm’s managing partner. She advises debtors in possession, distressed companies, and other parties, in both in-court and out-of-court situations.
Jane’s recent engagements include representing Trinitas Advantaged Agriculture Partners IV, LP and its subsidiary almond ranch operations in the Central Valley of California, and Shift Technologies, Inc., an omnichannel automobile retailer, in each of their chapter 11 cases filed in the Northern District of California. Jane also serves as bankruptcy co-counsel for Pacific Gas & Electric Company in its chapter 11 case, the largest chapter 11 filing in the Northern District of California in over a decade, which emerged from bankruptcy in July 2020 through a confirmed, largely consensual plan of reorganisation.
Before moving to California and joining Keller Benvenutti Kim in 2014, Jane practised in New York at the law firm Cleary Gottlieb for over a decade.
Jane, can you tell me about Keller Benvenutti Kim and what you do there?
Sure. We are a corporate bankruptcy and restructuring boutique law firm based in San Francisco. We just celebrated our 10th anniversary. We are 14 lawyers now. Our partners and most of our senior lawyers have years of experience in big international firms. The firm was created with the theory, which has since borne out, that smaller and mid-market companies, particularly in the Bay Area, had an underserviced need for sophisticated corporate restructuring and bankruptcy legal advice, without having to pay the high price tag that’s associated with the large firms that we came from. And that’s what we’ve been doing for ten years. We are mainly on the company side, usually advising and representing companies that are experiencing or are trying to protect against some sort of financial distress, both in and out of court.
Bankruptcy in the US has a very different connotation than bankruptcy does outside of the US, where I know a lot of the Top Ranked readers are from. So, what I would equate what we do to is insolvency proceedings around the world, whereas our insolvency proceedings are called bankruptcy here – specifically, chapter 11 bankruptcy. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the company is in a straight up liquidation or shut down scenario. There is some way, through our chapter 11 proceedings here in the US, to be able to have some kind of a continuing business, either through a sale or some kind of reorganisation and that’s what we’re really trying to achieve without having the company get run down by massive outside legal fees that they can’t afford. We can also do out-of-court restructurings and workouts.
Where do you fit into the firm?
I’m the managing partner of the firm and have been since the beginning of last year, January 1, 2023. I moved out here after having practised at Cleary Gottlieb in New York for about 12 years, in 2014. I was planning to move out to California and met my now partners, Toby Keller, and Peter Benvenutti when I took the California bar in February 2014. They had founded the firm just four months earlier, after leaving Jones Day. I joined them and became their third partner, and since then we’ve continued to grow.
Are you seeing any growth right now in terms of practice areas or industry sectors?
I’ll answer that in a couple of ways. First of all, we have a traditional corporate bankruptcy and restructuring practice, which I’ve explained, and which is my area of focus. We also have litigation capabilities, which are primarily, but not exclusively, in the bankruptcy context. We recently brought in a new litigation partner, Traci Shafroth, and we promoted a litigation partner, to expand those litigation capabilities. And then we also have a crisis management practice, led by our partner David Taylor. Often in crisis management, the work tends to be pretty interdisciplinary, with a lot of synergies and overlap with our bankruptcy and restructuring practice. So in terms of practise areas, we are expanding. We do both the litigation and the transactional side of bankruptcy and restructuring, we advise boards of companies who are experiencing some sort of crisis or financial distress, and we help those companies enter into transactions or deal with the litigation that might follow.
In terms of industries, we generally tend to be industry agnostic. We’re in San Francisco and in the Bay Area, so we’ve got a lot of tech companies. We see a lot of retail companies in distress, both in the e-commerce space and in particular the brick-and-mortar retail sector has been experiencing some difficulties over the last few years, especially due to the pandemic. It was one of the industries really hit hard, compared to other industries that ended up not experiencing so much pain.
During the pandemic we filed Chapter 11 cases for a gym fitness club chain and for a regional airline that was based in Alaska. It’s easy to see how both those sectors were heavily impacted. We see life sciences, pharma, and biotech companies having some distress, and we’ve been working with companies in those spaces as well. So, like I said, we’re industry agnostic, because the experience that we have dealing with many issues that distressed companies encounter can be applied to a lot of different industries.
Moving on from the pandemic, are you all back in the office or do you have some hybrid arrangement in place?
Our structure is completely flexible, but we really do encourage people to come into the office. One of the great things about being a partner at a small boutique firm is that you can really have a lot of say over the culture of the firm. We’re really proud of how everyone works together and how we all get along, and so I think we all liked working together and seeing each other, even during the pandemic. When we were shut down, we did daily morning Zooms, and when that got a little bit too much, we moved to weekly Zoom meetings on Monday mornings just to check in with each other, see what everybody is working on, and chat. We did that all the way through the pandemic, and we still do those Monday morning Zooms now.
The majority of us live and work in the Bay Area and try to come into the office a few days a week. I think there’s a few reasons for that. As I said, we really like working together and seeing each other, and we think that there’s a lot of value to being with each other. The second reason is for our more junior team members. I think most lawyers will agree that when you’re a junior lawyer, the way that you learn how to practise law is not by doing research and running off to your office or workspace and drafting things on your own. That’s not real lawyering, right? Not the kind of lawyering that’s fun to do anyway. The reason that we practise the way that we practise and continue to practise is because it’s fun, but you’re not going to get a chance to do that type of lawyering as a first year, right? So really the way we learn as junior lawyers is by watching and learning by osmosis and being in the same room as your senior lawyers; by getting to ask questions in the moment; having conversations with people in the hallways; getting introduced to people who are sitting on the opposite sides of you; going to the courtroom and having hallway conversations, all those things are things that you really can’t replicate by working completely remotely. So, if we’re not coming into the office, if the partners aren’t coming into the office, I think it’s a lot harder for us to ask anybody else to come in. We as the Partnership started coming into the office a few times a week and encourage others to do so too. I usually come in on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The firm usually does a weekly lunch on Tuesdays to encourage people to come in. And that’s worked out pretty well. We’ve done that for almost four years now.
How long have you been managing partner?
Since the beginning of 2023, so January 1, 2023. Until then, my partner, Toby Keller was managing partner. To his credit, he recognised that it was good for the future of the firm for me to have that role. He was thinking about what the firm will look like over the next 10 years and though it was beneficial to have me step up. It’s also been a benefit to my personal professional development to have this title.
With you as managing partner, what does a Jane Kim firm looks like? How is it different from before?
I don’t think that it necessarily looks different to how it was before, and I don’t see myself as running the firm in any kind of authoritarian way. I think the way that I look at it is our partnership is small, right? And we all get along with each other and from the very beginning we’ve always been very collaborative. And we tend not to make decisions in isolation. Decisions are made at the partnership level. When I took on the managing partner role, my goal was just to make sure that I was able to manage the firm and keep the same level of quality and work product and maintain the culture that the firm had built up until this point, through the preceding nine years, and help it and its lawyers grow.
What is the culture in the firm? How would you define it?
We’re a collaborative team-based firm. We don’t silo matters. One of the big reasons for having those weekly Zoom Monday morning meetings that we’ve maintained for the last four years is because we want to make sure that everybody knows what’s going on at the firm. Whether you have any involvement in the matter or not, you will know that there’s something going on and are able to lend your expertise if needed. So, we’re collectively a big believer in the fact that we make each other better and that having everybody involved in things makes our work better. We are greater than the sum of our parts.
I think we’re all responsible for our own work and we place a very, very high value on the quality of our work product and the quality of the advice that we give. One of the things that we’re really proud of is that even though we’ve only been around for 10 years and we’re a very small firm, we’re able to go head-to-head with some of the biggest firms in the country and not be outmatched. We don’t have a lot of bodies to throw at things, but in terms of the level of our work, the pride that we take in our work product and the legal skills we have, we think we are more than a match for the big firms. We’re extremely proud of what we do and how we present ourselves. So, you know, I think our culture is both collaborative and als a culture of excellence. I’m really proud of both of those things because I think that’s what makes us us.
A couple of the hot topics in law firm management now are diversity, equity, and inclusion and ESG. Is that true of your firm? Is that something you are concerned about?
Yes and I’m grateful that my partners recognised it too. It sends a good message to have an Asian American woman become one the firm’s name partners and the managing partner of the firm. When I became a name partner in March 2020 – so it’s been just almost four years now – when the firm’s name changed, there was a lot of really positive feedback because the bankruptcy world is not that diverse. Our firm stood out because of the Kim in the firm name, and then the same sort of thing happened when I became managing partner too: lots of positive feedback. I don’t know how many other firms there are, especially bankruptcy law firms, who can say that they’ve got an Asian American woman name partner who’s also the managing partner.
We’re definitely attuned to DE&I. I am on the DEI Committee for the American College of Bankruptcy and chair its external subcommittee. It’s a topic that we talk about a lot at the national bankruptcy organisations and national bankruptcy bar associations. I think that it’s really important, and I think my firm understands it’s really important, for people to get advice from a variety of different types of perspectives and when there are speaking engagements at conferences around the country, it’s important to hear the voices of different perspectives too.
So, we’re definitely trying to be a part of that change and make an impact. Given the size of our firm, we can have an outsized impact on what’s going on at the national level in terms of DE&I in bankruptcy law and practise.
Why did you decide to get into law?
I sort of got in by default. I was an English major in college and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to go into publishing but then realised by the summer before my senior year of college, that publishing doesn’t pay very well and it’s really competitive, notwithstanding the lack of pay. And so, I started to think about whether publishing was really something that I wanted to do or if I just liked books and that’s why I wanted to do it. I picked up a friend’s LSAT practice book and I did well on it. So, then I started to think well, is there something that I can do that’s interesting in the law? I ended up taking the LSAT, applying for law school, getting in and so I kind of lucked into it. I think that’s true of a lot of things throughout my career: there has been a lot lucking into things, right place, right people, right time.
I think about that a lot when I talk to younger lawyers or pre-law students in college. And you know, when they think ask for advice about how to plan their careers, I say to them that the fact they’re even thinking about things puts them way ahead of where I was when I was at their level! I count myself very fortunate that things landed the way that they did.
So, you are not from a legal family?
No, I am not. Although when I was thinking about what college I wanted to go to, my father went to the library and looked at some books about universities and then told me that a lot of college students go to law school out of Columbia and suggested that’s why I should go to Columbia. At the time I said I’m never going to law school then four years later, there I was.
If you didn’t find the law, what else would you have done? Despite the lack of pay and stiff competition would it have been publishing for you?
I think I might have tried to be a children’s book author. Actually, in law school, my third-year paper was a children’s book. And I think that if I ended up not doing well in law, I would have tried to finish writing that. If there’s anything that’s less certain than publishing, it’s probably trying to be a published author. Maybe one day I will finish that book, but I’m pretty glad that I’m doing what I’m doing now.
You made it through college, law school and now you’re the managing partner of a successful firm with your name on the door. With that in mind, can you give me a couple of work highlights that you are most proud of?
My partners and I were talking about what the future of the firm is going to look like. Back in 2017, 2018 we had been around for a number of years, but I was still relatively new to the Bay Area bankruptcy bar, and we were trying to figure out what the future of our firm was going to look like, and whether we should expand or merge. Then we ended up getting the engagement to be local counsel for PG&E in their Chapter 11 cases. PG&E filed in the beginning of 2019 and really took our firm and put it much more firmly on the national map. We took that visibility and were able to do a number of other cases that we’re really proud of.
I mentioned the airline and the gym chapter 11 cases earlier, those cases that we filed were really direct results of the pandemic and the various lockdowns. In both of those cases, there was so much uncertainty. We filed for the airline called Ravn in April of 2020, within a couple of weeks after the pandemic-related lockdowns happened, when there was no understanding of when things would open up again. And because it was in Alaska, time was really of the essence, because they have such a short air travel schedule – they’re so seasonal in terms of when travel can happen and if air travel is shut down in Alaska during the spring and summer, it can be devastating to the indigenous communities around the state because there’s no other way for them to be able to get groceries and mail and the like, other than by air.
We were able to complete some really critical sales in a very short amount of time. We were able to sell off the rights and terminals to other regional carriers across the state. This ended up saving most of the jobs and routes and allowed the air service to continue across the state.
With the gym chain as well, we were able to get that sold very, very quickly, preserve the brand, preserve jobs, and keep most of the clubs open which was a much better success story than what happened with a lot of the gym chains around the country at around the same time.
What are the best things about living and working in the Bay Area?
I really like the energy. When I moved out here ten years ago, I didn’t know that I wanted to be a lawyer at a small boutique firm that had just started out. I had spent my entire legal career at a very established white shoe law firm. And then coming out here, I thought I was going to going to go in-house actually. Then I joined this firm, and it was infected with the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that I think is part of what you see so much in Silicon Valley, in the Bay Area. The idea that we could have something that was our own, that we could build with our culture in the way that we wanted, to provide legal services and give really excellent advice and excellent product to our clients. I think that’s very much in line with the best type of startups that you see coming out of the Bay Area. Also, the weather here is great!
Not in San Francisco!
Well you know it gets foggy sometimes, but the weather is very rarely too hot or too cold. It’s always basically between 60 and 80 degrees every day of the year, which is not bad.
I’m inclined to agree with Mark Twain on that.
Oh the coldest winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco? I understand but I’m looking right now at clear blue skies and it’s 70 degrees.
You mentioned working in the Bay Area but what do you like best about living there?
I live just South of San Francisco in the Peninsula and then I commute up. I think the opportunities for my children are just really top notch here. You hear a lot about the high real estate costs in in the Bay Area and they are high – the cost of living is really extraordinarily high. But the diversity of people here, the types of opportunities that they’ll have by being with some of the people around here are incredible. We sometimes flirt with the idea of moving to this place or that place as it would be a lot cheaper, we could afford so much more space, but ultimately the type of education that they’re getting out here and the type of opportunities that they’re going to have more than make up for the costs. I think it’s a really special place and I’m very grateful that we’re out here.
How does it compare to living and working in New York?
I grew up in the suburbs of New York as well going to college there and working at Cleary Gottlieb. So, I lived there my whole life in New York until I moved out here. I miss New York a lot. I miss the city. I miss the convenience, the energy and how much culture there is there, you know, the theatres, the museums, everything was so accessible. I miss that a lot. But I still go out there regularly so, I’m not apart from New York totally. And I think that for my family living out here just made a whole lot more sense. One of the reasons that we moved out was because at some point our very spacious Two-bedroom apartment in the middle of Union Square in Manhattan ended up becoming not so spacious after we added a couple of people, and that was a problem. So, I am grateful for what we have now, but I would not have traded my time in New York.
I think every lawyer really should start practising in New York. You develop such good habits and such good foundations practising there. But I think the work out here is interesting and the culture is great and at this stage in my career and my life, I’m really glad that I’m here.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
I like to travel. We’re going to Japan for a couple of weeks later this month. I like to ski. One of the benefits of living out in the Bay Area is that we are less than four hours away from Tahoe, so we can drive up there whenever we want to. I also like to scuba dive. One of the best dives I did was in Hawaii, a night dive with the manta rays. They put a lamp on the bottom of the sea maybe 10 metres down and you kneel on the floor and the light attracts plankton and the plankton attracts the manta rays. And then the mantas just sort of dance, swimming around above you. It’s incredible because they look like aliens. You’re down there for like 30 minutes watching them swim all around you. And it’s silent, a silent ballet. It’s pretty incredible.