data\u2011center development<\/a> deals, a specialty that has become one of the most coveted practices in the world as AI drives a ravenous demand for digital infrastructure to support it.\u00a0<\/p>\nKirkland colleagues have been known to claim the \u201cQueen of Data Centers.\u201d But her boss, Andy Calder, who leads Kirkland\u2019s global transactional practice from Houston, thinks her influence already extends beyond law firm or gender.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been really fun to see her become arguably the leading digital infrastructure lawyer in the country,\u201d Calder says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In many ways, Kalka\u2019s M&A experience parallels the growth in data center development. Her data center deals were among the first deals logged in the Corporate Deal Tracker, The Texas Lawbook\u2019s database of reported corporate transactions. \u00a0<\/p>\n
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Since 2022, she has advised on at least 14 data center deals totaling more than $100 billion for clients like BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners and KKR-owned CyrusOne. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Royalty and dentistry aside, Kalka is making her mark.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Melissa Dawn Kalka was born in Dallas in 1983. Like her two siblings before her, she graduated from Bishop Lynch, a Catholic high school in East Dallas, where her father had for years organized the school\u2019s annual golf tournament.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Her early attraction to dentistry had nothing to do with teeth. A close friend\u2019s father, a dentist, was the coach for their basketball team. Another friend\u2019s father was an oral surgeon. She was impressed by their verve.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThey seemed to be pretty active and engaged and seemed to enjoy what they did,\u201d as Kalka explains it in retrospect. Though both her parents were involved in business, young Kalka was certain she didn\u2019t want to be.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cIt turns out I was drastically wrong,\u201d she says with a wry smile.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While a student at Texas A&M, she spent 60 hours at a local clinic in College Station. The experience helped conclude her dentistry career.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember calling up my mom and saying \u2018I hate this. I don\u2019t want to do it.\u2019 I got into business classes, and I loved it. I got straight-A\u2019s and I never looked back.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Having graduated from A&M, she took a job at American National Bank, where she cranked out underwriting reports, risk profiles and syndication packages for commercial real estate. When she began to weary of stress-testing numbers on Excel spreadsheets, she found herself imagining a new path.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Her mother had worked for 30 years for her uncle\u2019s title company in East Texas. She overheard them discussing the need to hire a lawyer to help on the real estate side of the business. She was struck by the possibility of going to law school.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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She took the LSAT in December 2007 and was accepted at SMU at approximately the same moment that the investment bank Bear Stearns collapsed under the weight of the 2008 housing scandal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cTerrible timing,\u201d Kalka said. \u201cAbsolutely terrible timing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
She was only two years out of school and scared, with a mortgage in Lake Highlands and life insurance. \u201cI was a grownup,\u201d she recalls.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She called her father, hoping for help. He reminded her of a family rule: one child, one parent-paid degree.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI understand now that he was telling me to bet on myself,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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She registered for the evening program at SMU\u2019s Dedman Law School, working full-time during the day and studying at night. But the Great Recession kept deepening the odds against her wager-on-self. \u00a0<\/p>\n
She recalls that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008, a Monday\u00a0\u2014 exactly one week after her law school tuition became non-refundable.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI went to school from 6 to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday. I remember getting home and just sitting in my car and crying, thinking: What did I do? Am I even going to have a job?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Doubling down, she left American National Bank for an internship at Jones Day. And when she graduated from the Dedman in 2012, with a choice between Weil and Jones Day, she chose Jones Day, she says, because of Scott Cohen.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She recalls a recruiting lunch with Cohen during which she asked for the best way to approach an M&A practice. \u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cHe said, \u2018Come to Jones Day. Sit next door to me. I\u2019ll teach you how to do this and invest in you. You put in the work, you show up, you work hard, you try to learn. I\u2019ll teach you.\u2019 And he lived up to that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Cohen, now a partner at Egan Nelson, doesn\u2019t recall the lunch specifically, but he recalls her seamless instinct for assembling deals.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI gave her plenty of rope, and she would she basically could run a deal even when she was a young lawyer,\u201d he said. \u201cShe could pretty much do it all early on.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
But despite her real estate banking background in the nuts and bolts of an agreement, Kalka says it was Cohen who taught her to look at the humdrum duty of due diligence in its greater context: as something with a purpose that reaches beyond a simple assemblage of boilerplate parts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember that \u2018aha\u2019 moment when I finally started getting into purchase agreements and thinking: \u2018That\u2019s why this matters.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
Michael Considine, a colleague at Kirkland, met Kalka at Jones Day when he moved to Dallas from New York in 2013. Considine had been with the firm since 2005, and Kalka for barely two years. He was impressed with her level of sophistication.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile early in her career, she was operating at the same level as the senior associates in New York,\u201d he said. \u201cWe quickly started working together on some very significant matters.\u201d By 2014, barely three years into her career, Kalka was working with Considine on a $2.9 billion carveout involving Procter & Gamble and Berkshire Hathaway.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cNot only is she an exceptionally talented attorney, she\u2019s one of the hardest working partners I\u2019ve known,\u201d Considine said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Kalka left Jones Day for Winston & Strawn in 2017. A year later, Considine left Jones Day to establish a Dallas office for Kirkland. It was Considine who recommended Kalka to Andy Calder as \u201ca rising star.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
After two years at Winston, Kalka joined Kirkland in 2019. Calder says her refined skillset has been evident from the start.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMelissa is an excellent technical lawyer first and foremost,\u201d said Calder. \u201cShe is also one of the most client relationship-driven lawyers I have ever worked with; always willing to go the extra mile for her client and constantly looking for ways to improve.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cShe also works as hard as anyone on our platform,\u201d said Calder. \u201cIt\u2019s often tough to keep up with her.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
In November 2021 there was one deal that changed everything. A consortium of investment giant KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners announced a $15 billion deal to acquire and take private Dallas-based CyrusOne, a data center REIT. The deal was the largest data center transaction to date, and the consortium was advised by a Kirkland team led by Andy Calder, John Pitts and Melissa Kalka.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was that deal that marked the beginning of the current wave of data center development driven by artificial intelligence and private equity \u2014 not only in Texas but across the nation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After the deal, Kalka said, she and Calder had talked, they realized that the CyrusOne deal was the beginning of something different.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOur clients were looking at data center investments not as real estate anymore. It was a hybrid product. It was a combination between real estate and an infrastructure,\u201d Kalka said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s how people are investing in data centers. They\u2019re doing so as a hybrid product.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Both Kalka and Kirkland have blossomed together in Texas.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Since its 2014 entry into the Texas legal market, Kirkland has become, the largest and most profitable in the state, with more than 500 lawyers across three offices that generated $1.39 billion in revenue in 2025, a six-fold growth in Texas revenue since 2017.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Kalka\u2019s deals have grown with the firm. And Calder says she seems right at home.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOften the deal flow and pace of working at Kirkland can be intimidating for some lawyers. Melissa has observed the environment and then excelled,\u201d Calder said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt will be fun to see what she does over the coming years.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Texas Lawbook is an online news publication focused on business law in Texas. For a longer version of this story, visit texaslawbook.net.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kirkland & Ellis lawyer Michelle Kalka at the firm’s office at Weir’s Plaza in Dallas.\u00a0 Patrick Kleineberg\/The Texas…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":314061,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103,98981],"class_list":["post-314060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-tp-the-texas-lawbook"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314060\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}